In a move that just underlines how deeply bizarre the relationship has become between Arne Duncan, King of All Schools, and the previously-sovereign states, Arne today pulled the rug out from under Washington state, sending them tumbling toward a bureaucratic limbo that...well, at the very least, will be interesting.
The Dear John letter is trim and bureaucratic. I'll offer a translation into Plain English.
Graph 1: I got your formal request for yet another extension. In good standardized test style, I will recycle your prompt into my topic sentence. Thank you for playing. Thank you for sucking up by telling me how great our work was in helping your kids.
Graph 2: "As you know," your waiver was based on your willingness to follow our instructions. You have failed to do so, so now your "flexibility" (which is our favored code word for waiver) is at an end. I'll throw in the word "regret" because I hear frowny emoticons are inappropriate for official letters.
Graph 3: One of the promises you made (just like all the other boys and girls in class) was to evaluate your teachers and principals based on the Common Core tests (no, of course he didn't use those words-- he used the whole CCR standards etc etc-- I'm translating). It was going to be sweet, with "robust, timely, and meaningful feedback" (which is what I'm pretty sure nobody anywhere using the fed-required system is getting). And he said this: "Including student learning growth as a significant factor among the
multiple measures used to determine performance levels is important as
an objective measure to differentiate among teachers and principals who
have made significantly different contributions to student learning
growth and closing achievement gaps." And wow-- that's completely unsubstantiated, but there's federal stuff on the stationary so it must be trues!
Graph 4: I'm going to recap the timeline now. Not sure why-- we all know what happened and when-- but I guess I need it for the record. Anyway, you double-pinky swore on this date and then promised again on another date and now you're obviously not going to get it done in time. Also "I recognize that requiring the use of statewide assessments to measure
student learning growth requires a legislative change, and that Governor
Inslee and your office worked diligently to obtain that change. I
thank you for your leadership and courage in those efforts." So, I recognize you got hammered politically. I'm not mad at you-- just your stupid doody-head legislators who don't seem to understand that I am their boss. Thanks for trying. Heckuva job, Dorny.
Graph 5: Thanks for trying, but you failed, so it sucks to be you. This will cost you money. But hey-- if you ever get some political heft behind you again, feel free to re-apply for flexibility.
Graph 6: In a masterpiece of bureaucratic understatement, Duncan opens this graph with- I appreciate that transitioning back to NCLB is not desirable, and will not be simple. Attached is a list of all the laws you are now breaking as of next fall. Asst Secretary Deborah Delisle has the thankless task of taking your phone calls begging for help with damage control, because whenever you call, I'm going to be "out of the office."
Graph 7: "Thank you again for your leadership and your efforts to keep the
commitments Washington made in its ESEA flexibility request. Thank you,
as well, for your continued focus on enhancing education for all of
Washington’s children." See ya. Wouldn't wanna be ya!
So, to quickly recap. Washington got to ignore its violation of federal NCLB laws if they agreed to install Duncan's own untried, untested, unproven, unsubstantiated but very specific prescriptions about how to use CCSS tests to evaluate teachers and principals. Which, when you take a step back and look at it, is really ballsy! And now, having once arbitrarily extended his deadline, Duncan has arbitrarily decided not to, and so--snap--just like that, the law that Congress passed is now in effect again! It's like magic! I don't know if this is how laws are made, but I suspect it's a good way to make libertarians.
This can only get better, because it reminds me of a story about some laws and how they work. I will tell you that story in the next paragraph, if you want to skip it.
Years ago, I was president of a striking union in PA. At the time, the law said the school year must be finished by a specific date, and therefor the strike could not go past a certain date. Both we and the administration were unsure of exactly which date that might be, so we called Harrsiburg to find out. And what we found out was that although this law was on the books, nobody knew how it would be enforced, or who would be responsible for enforcing it. We literally could not find a single person in Harrisburg who would take responsibility for what the law meant or what would happen to the teachers and district if we somehow broke it. And that, boys and girls, is how laws work some times.
I have to say this again, because we already know it, but this little event puts it back out in plain sight. Duncan doesn't just believe that CCSS test-based measures of teachers and principals are a good idea. He doesn't just deny every stone on the mountain made out of evidence that he's wrong. He has given CCSS test-based measurement the full weight of federal law.
So what will happen to Washington, and who will do it? Or will the legislators freak out and panic, installing Arne's junk science system at the 11th hour to win back his Kingly affection? You can bet a few other states will be watching (as Rick Hess notes in his fine commentary today, Washington's probably not the only state not living up to the letter of their waiver)-- how much do they need to fear a hissy fit from the King of All Schools?
Thursday, April 24, 2014
In Pursuit of Failure
Let's say I'm devoted to finding the Loch Ness Monster, and I am determined to find scientific proof. So I order up a host of sciency devices to search the loch, and I set out to test them. My test-- any device that finds the monster is certified accurate, and any device that does not is rejected and faulty.
I will measure the device's scientific accuracy by measuring it against my pre-existing belief. This is a type of science called Not Actually Science, and it is an integral part of much Reformy Teacher Evaluation.
James Shuls, Director of Education Policy at the Show-Me Institute (a maket-based solution group out of Missouri and not, sadly, a school for strippers), appeared this week in Jay P. Greene's blog (no relation afaik) reminding us of TNTP's "report" on the Lake Woebegone effect (so we've got the intersection here of three Reformy flavors).
Shuls follows a familiar path. We know that there are a bunch of sucky teachers out there. We just do. Everybody has a sucky teacher story, and Shuls also says that there is objective data to prove it, though he doesn't say what that data is, but we know it's accurate and scientific data because it confirms what we already know in our gut. So, science.
We know these teachers exist. Therefor any evaluation system that does not find heaps of bad teachers cluttering up the landscape must be a bad system. This line of reasoning was echoed this week by She Who Must Not Be Named on twitter, where a conversation with Jack Schneider spilled over. Feel free to skip the following rant.
(Because, for some reason, EdWeek has launched a new feature called Beyond the Rhetoric which features dialogue between Schneider and the Kim Kardashian of Education Reformy Stuff, and while I actually welcome the concept of the column, I am sad to see That Woman getting yet another platform from which to make word noises. Could they not have found a legitimate voice for the Reformy Status Quo? I mean, I wish the woman no ill will. I know there are people who would like to see her flesh gnawed off by angry weasels, but I'm basically a kind-hearted person. But I am baffled at how this woman can be repeatedly treated like a legitimate voice in the ed world when the only successful thing she has done is start a highly lucrative astroturf business. Sigh.)
Anyway, She tosses in the factoid that 1/2 of studied school districts didn't dismiss any teachers during the pre-tenure period. This, again, is offered as proof that the system is broken because it didn't find the Loch Ness Monster.
Now let me clear-- I think bad teachers are undoubtedly more plentiful than Loch Ness Monsters (and smaller). I've even offered my own revised eval system. I agree that the traditional teacher eval system could have used some work (the new systems, by contrast, are generally more useless than evaluation by tea leaves).
What I don't understand is this emphasis on Badness and Failure. This is the same focus that got us Jack Welch and stack ranking, widely considered "the worst thing about working at Microsoft" until Microsoft management decided they agreed and, like everyone else in the private sector, stopped doing it. This type of evaluation starts, even before a manager has met his team, with the assumption of a bell-ish curve-- at MS, out of every ten employees, the assumption was that two were great, seven were okay, and one was fire-ably sub-par.
Imagine doing that with a classroom of students. Imagine saying, "Whoever gets the lowest score on this gets an F, even if the score is a 98%."
Oh, wait. We do that, as in John White announcing before the New York test is even given, that 70% of students will fail it. And then-- voila-- they did!
It's a little scary that the Reformy Status Quo model is built around an absolute gut-based certainty that The Trouble With Education is that schools are full of terrible teachers who are lying to their gritless idiot pupils, and what we really need to do is shake up public schools by rooting out all these slackers and dopes, just drag them out into the light and publicly shame them for their inadequacy.
It's a lot scary that some of us seem to already know, based on our scientific guts, just how much failure we should be finding, and we're just going to keep tweaking systems until they show us the level of failure we expect to find.
For Shuls and free-market types, that means giving eval systems real teeth.
If school leaders actually had the authority and proper incentives to make positive pay or firing decisions based on teacher performance, we might start seeing some teacher evaluation systems that reflect reality.
Note again the assumption that we already know the "real" failure level-- we just need to get the evaluation system to reflect that. Shuls thinks the problem might be wimpy admins and weak consequences. If we threatened teachers with real damage, then we'd get somewhere.
For Education's Sarah Palin, the problem is people. VAM and other methods of including Test scores appeal to them because the test score won't be distracted by things like the teacher's personality or style or, you know, humanny stuff. The Test, these folks are sure, will reveal the students and teachers that are stinking up the joint, and it will be there in cold, hard numbers that can't be changed or softened or escaped. And they are numbers, so you know they're True.
The pursuit of the Loch Ness Failure Monster is a win-win for Purveyors of Reformy Nonsense. If a school appears to be staffed with good, capable teachers, that's proof that they are actually failing because if they had a real eval system, it would reveal all the failing teachers. And if the eval system does reveal failing teachers, well, hey, look at all the failing teachers. Not only is failure an option; it's a requirement.
I will measure the device's scientific accuracy by measuring it against my pre-existing belief. This is a type of science called Not Actually Science, and it is an integral part of much Reformy Teacher Evaluation.
James Shuls, Director of Education Policy at the Show-Me Institute (a maket-based solution group out of Missouri and not, sadly, a school for strippers), appeared this week in Jay P. Greene's blog (no relation afaik) reminding us of TNTP's "report" on the Lake Woebegone effect (so we've got the intersection here of three Reformy flavors).
Shuls follows a familiar path. We know that there are a bunch of sucky teachers out there. We just do. Everybody has a sucky teacher story, and Shuls also says that there is objective data to prove it, though he doesn't say what that data is, but we know it's accurate and scientific data because it confirms what we already know in our gut. So, science.
We know these teachers exist. Therefor any evaluation system that does not find heaps of bad teachers cluttering up the landscape must be a bad system. This line of reasoning was echoed this week by She Who Must Not Be Named on twitter, where a conversation with Jack Schneider spilled over. Feel free to skip the following rant.
(Because, for some reason, EdWeek has launched a new feature called Beyond the Rhetoric which features dialogue between Schneider and the Kim Kardashian of Education Reformy Stuff, and while I actually welcome the concept of the column, I am sad to see That Woman getting yet another platform from which to make word noises. Could they not have found a legitimate voice for the Reformy Status Quo? I mean, I wish the woman no ill will. I know there are people who would like to see her flesh gnawed off by angry weasels, but I'm basically a kind-hearted person. But I am baffled at how this woman can be repeatedly treated like a legitimate voice in the ed world when the only successful thing she has done is start a highly lucrative astroturf business. Sigh.)
Anyway, She tosses in the factoid that 1/2 of studied school districts didn't dismiss any teachers during the pre-tenure period. This, again, is offered as proof that the system is broken because it didn't find the Loch Ness Monster.
Now let me clear-- I think bad teachers are undoubtedly more plentiful than Loch Ness Monsters (and smaller). I've even offered my own revised eval system. I agree that the traditional teacher eval system could have used some work (the new systems, by contrast, are generally more useless than evaluation by tea leaves).
What I don't understand is this emphasis on Badness and Failure. This is the same focus that got us Jack Welch and stack ranking, widely considered "the worst thing about working at Microsoft" until Microsoft management decided they agreed and, like everyone else in the private sector, stopped doing it. This type of evaluation starts, even before a manager has met his team, with the assumption of a bell-ish curve-- at MS, out of every ten employees, the assumption was that two were great, seven were okay, and one was fire-ably sub-par.
Imagine doing that with a classroom of students. Imagine saying, "Whoever gets the lowest score on this gets an F, even if the score is a 98%."
Oh, wait. We do that, as in John White announcing before the New York test is even given, that 70% of students will fail it. And then-- voila-- they did!
It's a little scary that the Reformy Status Quo model is built around an absolute gut-based certainty that The Trouble With Education is that schools are full of terrible teachers who are lying to their gritless idiot pupils, and what we really need to do is shake up public schools by rooting out all these slackers and dopes, just drag them out into the light and publicly shame them for their inadequacy.
It's a lot scary that some of us seem to already know, based on our scientific guts, just how much failure we should be finding, and we're just going to keep tweaking systems until they show us the level of failure we expect to find.
For Shuls and free-market types, that means giving eval systems real teeth.
If school leaders actually had the authority and proper incentives to make positive pay or firing decisions based on teacher performance, we might start seeing some teacher evaluation systems that reflect reality.
Note again the assumption that we already know the "real" failure level-- we just need to get the evaluation system to reflect that. Shuls thinks the problem might be wimpy admins and weak consequences. If we threatened teachers with real damage, then we'd get somewhere.
For Education's Sarah Palin, the problem is people. VAM and other methods of including Test scores appeal to them because the test score won't be distracted by things like the teacher's personality or style or, you know, humanny stuff. The Test, these folks are sure, will reveal the students and teachers that are stinking up the joint, and it will be there in cold, hard numbers that can't be changed or softened or escaped. And they are numbers, so you know they're True.
The pursuit of the Loch Ness Failure Monster is a win-win for Purveyors of Reformy Nonsense. If a school appears to be staffed with good, capable teachers, that's proof that they are actually failing because if they had a real eval system, it would reveal all the failing teachers. And if the eval system does reveal failing teachers, well, hey, look at all the failing teachers. Not only is failure an option; it's a requirement.
The Opposite of Grit
My sister and her family recently returned from a visit to Thomas Edison's laboratory (because when engineery types head to greater NYC, that's their idea of a cool stop), and they took many pictures. The place is amazing-- all this space cleaned and arranged and perfectly fitted out for investigating and experimenting and engineering much of the modern world.
It was not, I thought, the kind of place where you needed lots of grit to work.
As much as we value the quality of grit, of perseverance, of resilience, have you noticed that what we mostly do on the road to success is eliminate the need for it?
Bill Gates did not say to his folks, "Hey, I'm working on something here that I think may be important, so to help me, I would like you to cut me off without a cent, throw me out of the house, and force me to get a job at Piggly Wiggly that will barely support a one-room run-down apartment let alone enough food to keep me conscious. Because to get this done, I really need to stimulate my grit glands."
I have never read about a CEO saying, "I want the smallest, most cramped office in the building. And no administrative assistants-- I'll answer my own phone. And no paid lunches-- I'll pack and sandwich. And do the same for all our executives! And cut all our salaries to 6% of current levels. We'll never achieve greatness if we don't have to have grit!!"
From sports stars to medical personnel to high-priced lawyers, we work hard to create a smooth supportive work environment, to get rid of any obstacles in their path to success. Nor do many privileged parents give their children an allowance of $1.00 a week and make them live in the tool shed so that they'll develop grit.
If we really believe that grit is the loam that grows excellence, we have a funny way of showing it. The more important the job, the more carefully we insulate it from the need for grit. Instead, a true marker of success and status in our culture is the degree to which one does not need grit.
So what does it say about members of the Cult of Grit that they want our students to live as if they're failures?
A clip circulated recently of Neil deGrasse Tyson responding to a question about why women seemed genetically unsuited to be scientists. He talked about his own path to science and the tremendous institutional and cultural obstacles he faced ("Wouldn't you rather play basketball?"). He talked about the toughness and devotion it took him to become so successful (he didn't use the word "grit" but he might as well have), and about looking behind him to see young black men following the path into science-- and seeing none.
How many gifted black and female scientists do we NOT have today because of the extra giant heaping helping of grit they would need to follow that path?
It's not that I don't think grit is valuable. I do. Resilience and perseverance are useful for everything from dealing with career setbacks to handling a child who always wants to cry and eat at 2 AM.
But here's the thing. Life provides plenty of need for grit all on its own. It's not necessary to provide more on purpose. And the need for grit doesn't help get things done, doesn't help people succeed. It may call on their strength, but it doesn't create it. We know that. We understand it.
When we want someone to succeed, we do as much as we can to remove the need for grit.
Do we not want our students to succeed?
It's true you don't build muscle by lifting a 3 ounce weight, but you don't build anything trying to bench press a truck, either. We really don't have to worry about making things too easy for a six-year-old. Life is never all that easy for a child-- you're physically tiny and generally powerless over your own world. And people who idealize the teen years as idyllic and happy and easy are dopes; I've been around teenagers for four decades and you couldn't print enough money in a year to pay me to be sixteen again. Trust me-- if we want students to need grit, the universe has that covered already.
But if we want them to succeed, we can stop the nonsense about fostering grit and deliberately making life more difficult for our children. Challenge, yes. Grit, no. Instead, let's try support and kindness and building them up. Let's take care of our children, and let the grit take care of itself.
It was not, I thought, the kind of place where you needed lots of grit to work.
As much as we value the quality of grit, of perseverance, of resilience, have you noticed that what we mostly do on the road to success is eliminate the need for it?
Bill Gates did not say to his folks, "Hey, I'm working on something here that I think may be important, so to help me, I would like you to cut me off without a cent, throw me out of the house, and force me to get a job at Piggly Wiggly that will barely support a one-room run-down apartment let alone enough food to keep me conscious. Because to get this done, I really need to stimulate my grit glands."
I have never read about a CEO saying, "I want the smallest, most cramped office in the building. And no administrative assistants-- I'll answer my own phone. And no paid lunches-- I'll pack and sandwich. And do the same for all our executives! And cut all our salaries to 6% of current levels. We'll never achieve greatness if we don't have to have grit!!"
From sports stars to medical personnel to high-priced lawyers, we work hard to create a smooth supportive work environment, to get rid of any obstacles in their path to success. Nor do many privileged parents give their children an allowance of $1.00 a week and make them live in the tool shed so that they'll develop grit.
If we really believe that grit is the loam that grows excellence, we have a funny way of showing it. The more important the job, the more carefully we insulate it from the need for grit. Instead, a true marker of success and status in our culture is the degree to which one does not need grit.
So what does it say about members of the Cult of Grit that they want our students to live as if they're failures?
A clip circulated recently of Neil deGrasse Tyson responding to a question about why women seemed genetically unsuited to be scientists. He talked about his own path to science and the tremendous institutional and cultural obstacles he faced ("Wouldn't you rather play basketball?"). He talked about the toughness and devotion it took him to become so successful (he didn't use the word "grit" but he might as well have), and about looking behind him to see young black men following the path into science-- and seeing none.
How many gifted black and female scientists do we NOT have today because of the extra giant heaping helping of grit they would need to follow that path?
It's not that I don't think grit is valuable. I do. Resilience and perseverance are useful for everything from dealing with career setbacks to handling a child who always wants to cry and eat at 2 AM.
But here's the thing. Life provides plenty of need for grit all on its own. It's not necessary to provide more on purpose. And the need for grit doesn't help get things done, doesn't help people succeed. It may call on their strength, but it doesn't create it. We know that. We understand it.
When we want someone to succeed, we do as much as we can to remove the need for grit.
Do we not want our students to succeed?
It's true you don't build muscle by lifting a 3 ounce weight, but you don't build anything trying to bench press a truck, either. We really don't have to worry about making things too easy for a six-year-old. Life is never all that easy for a child-- you're physically tiny and generally powerless over your own world. And people who idealize the teen years as idyllic and happy and easy are dopes; I've been around teenagers for four decades and you couldn't print enough money in a year to pay me to be sixteen again. Trust me-- if we want students to need grit, the universe has that covered already.
But if we want them to succeed, we can stop the nonsense about fostering grit and deliberately making life more difficult for our children. Challenge, yes. Grit, no. Instead, let's try support and kindness and building them up. Let's take care of our children, and let the grit take care of itself.
Wednesday, April 23, 2014
PARCC Is Certifiably Ready
When the folks at PARCC say that their tests will help determine if your child is college and career ready, that's not just rhetoric. As of October 2012 (revised February, 2013), PARCC is ready to officially certify your student, and I've been looking at the document that shows how this will work. If you're wondering what "college ready" means to the PARCC folks, here's the explanation.
The meaning of the CCR determination is one bureaucratic Godzilla of a sentence:
A student who is determined to be College and Career Ready through performance on the PARCC high school assessments is one who has demonstrated the academic knowledge, skills and practices in ELA/literacy or mathematics necessary to enter directly into and succeed in entry-level, credit-bearing courses in those content areas in programs leading to a credential or degree which may be aligned to the student's career aspirations, from two- and four-year public institutions of higher learning.
The document goes on to note that academic knowledge and skills are not the only factors in college and career readiness; persistence, motivation and time management are also important. PARCC notes this so that we can understand that their estimation of a student's CCR score cannot be 100% accurate.
Benefit of Earning a PARCC College- and Career-Ready Determination
There appears to be just one. One of PARCC's "primary objectives" is to have PARCC-certified students from having to take placement tests when entering college. Well, only placement tests related to possible remediation. PARCC certification is not meant to "inform postsecondary admission decisions."
Criteria Used To Make College- and Career-Ready Determination
Students will need to score a Level 4 on ELA/literacy, Algebra II or Mathematics III.
Determining and Validating College- and Career-Ready Threshold Scores
PARCC is going to establish a standard-setting process for establishing cut scores.There will be five performance levels; Level 4 will be the college-ready score. No mention here if career-ready will be a different level. But there will be a "standard-setting event" (which hits me sort of like "extinction level event") in the summer of 2015-- right after the first round of PARCCs are given.
The 2015 standard-palooza will "result in identification of the threshold scores for all PARCC performance levels" and will use all sorts of info including the judgment of K-12 and higher ed "professionals," so that could be anybody from custodians to test corporation executives. Here's the statement that will be used to "inform tha judgments of the panelists and to conduct validation studies of the efficacy" of PARCC certification in the future.
Students who earn a PARC College-and Career-Ready Determination by performing at level 4 in mathematics and enroll in College Algebra, Introductory College Statistics, and technical courses requiring an equivalent level of mathematics have approximately a 0.75 probability of earning college credit by attaining at least a grade of C or its equivalent in those courses.
The 0.75 probability of earning a C was chosen because
1) A C is generally what you need to earn the credit
2) After a lot of discussion, the committee decided that 0.75 was high enough to be high, but no so high that it would be too high. So, science.
3) It accounts for those non-measurable features. In other words, there's a 0.25 probability that your other-wise smart student will flunk out of college because he's a slacker.
Performance Level Descriptors
The next section of the paper deals with the specifics of the levels. This takes a good nine pages of the text, and some of it is boring, and some of it is ugly in an illuminating way.
The leveling is basically illuminated by the use of adjectives. Seriously. Level 5 is "distinguished command." Level 4 is "strong command." Level 3 is "moderate command." Level 2 is "partial command," and Level 1 is "minimal command." There follows "general content claims" and this where the bright ugly light shines. A Level 5 for ELA/literacy means demonstration of the following:
*Full comprehension of a range of complex literary and informational texts by drawing relevant evidences from texts to construct effective arguments and analyses
*Use of context to effectively determine the meaning of words and phrases
* Highly effective writing when using and analyzing sources, with comprehensive development of the claim, topic, and/or narrative elements by using clear and convincing reasoning, details, text-based evidence, and/or description; the development and organization are consistently appropriate to the task, purpose, and audience
*Highly effective command of the conventions of standard English consistent with effectively edited writing
*Highly effective ability to build and present knowledge through integration, comparison, and synthesis of complex ideas.
I've taken the liberty of bolding every point at which PARCC certification involves a subjective judgment, points at which the test is going to present something as objective or scientific when it is in fact open to debate. How big a range? How full of what sort of comprehension? Relevant according to whom?
And don't even start me on "effective"? Effective to whom? Effective according to what effect? How the heck does someone who is neither the audience nor the author gauge the effectiveness of a piece of writing? I bet the author of this PARCC bulletin thinks it is written in a highly effective manner, and yet I find that it fails completely to effectively convince me of anything.
This is why presenting the PARCC (or any other standardized test) as an objective measure is a crock; at all critical junctures, the test will be based on its designers' personal beliefs about what is effective, what is clear, what is appropriate, and what details are correctly chosen.
And as an English teacher, I'm going to note that this certification that Pat McStudent is ready to skip a college Intro to English course says nothing at all about what literature Pat is or is not familiar with.
So this is what states are being sold as "college readiness," and this is what PARCC CEO Laura McGiffert Slover says marks the end of test prep. One more reason that everybody needs to jump off the PARCC train ASAP-- because it is in fact certifiable.
The meaning of the CCR determination is one bureaucratic Godzilla of a sentence:
A student who is determined to be College and Career Ready through performance on the PARCC high school assessments is one who has demonstrated the academic knowledge, skills and practices in ELA/literacy or mathematics necessary to enter directly into and succeed in entry-level, credit-bearing courses in those content areas in programs leading to a credential or degree which may be aligned to the student's career aspirations, from two- and four-year public institutions of higher learning.
The document goes on to note that academic knowledge and skills are not the only factors in college and career readiness; persistence, motivation and time management are also important. PARCC notes this so that we can understand that their estimation of a student's CCR score cannot be 100% accurate.
Benefit of Earning a PARCC College- and Career-Ready Determination
There appears to be just one. One of PARCC's "primary objectives" is to have PARCC-certified students from having to take placement tests when entering college. Well, only placement tests related to possible remediation. PARCC certification is not meant to "inform postsecondary admission decisions."
Criteria Used To Make College- and Career-Ready Determination
Students will need to score a Level 4 on ELA/literacy, Algebra II or Mathematics III.
Determining and Validating College- and Career-Ready Threshold Scores
PARCC is going to establish a standard-setting process for establishing cut scores.There will be five performance levels; Level 4 will be the college-ready score. No mention here if career-ready will be a different level. But there will be a "standard-setting event" (which hits me sort of like "extinction level event") in the summer of 2015-- right after the first round of PARCCs are given.
The 2015 standard-palooza will "result in identification of the threshold scores for all PARCC performance levels" and will use all sorts of info including the judgment of K-12 and higher ed "professionals," so that could be anybody from custodians to test corporation executives. Here's the statement that will be used to "inform tha judgments of the panelists and to conduct validation studies of the efficacy" of PARCC certification in the future.
Students who earn a College-and Career-Ready Determination by performing at level 4 in ELA/literacy and enroll in College English Composition, Literature, and technical courses requiring college- level reading and writing have approximately a 0.75 probability of earning college credit by attaining at least a grade of C or its equivalent in those courses.
Students who earn a PARC College-and Career-Ready Determination by performing at level 4 in mathematics and enroll in College Algebra, Introductory College Statistics, and technical courses requiring an equivalent level of mathematics have approximately a 0.75 probability of earning college credit by attaining at least a grade of C or its equivalent in those courses.
The 0.75 probability of earning a C was chosen because
1) A C is generally what you need to earn the credit
2) After a lot of discussion, the committee decided that 0.75 was high enough to be high, but no so high that it would be too high. So, science.
3) It accounts for those non-measurable features. In other words, there's a 0.25 probability that your other-wise smart student will flunk out of college because he's a slacker.
Performance Level Descriptors
The next section of the paper deals with the specifics of the levels. This takes a good nine pages of the text, and some of it is boring, and some of it is ugly in an illuminating way.
The leveling is basically illuminated by the use of adjectives. Seriously. Level 5 is "distinguished command." Level 4 is "strong command." Level 3 is "moderate command." Level 2 is "partial command," and Level 1 is "minimal command." There follows "general content claims" and this where the bright ugly light shines. A Level 5 for ELA/literacy means demonstration of the following:
*Full comprehension of a range of complex literary and informational texts by drawing relevant evidences from texts to construct effective arguments and analyses
*Use of context to effectively determine the meaning of words and phrases
* Highly effective writing when using and analyzing sources, with comprehensive development of the claim, topic, and/or narrative elements by using clear and convincing reasoning, details, text-based evidence, and/or description; the development and organization are consistently appropriate to the task, purpose, and audience
*Highly effective command of the conventions of standard English consistent with effectively edited writing
*Highly effective ability to build and present knowledge through integration, comparison, and synthesis of complex ideas.
I've taken the liberty of bolding every point at which PARCC certification involves a subjective judgment, points at which the test is going to present something as objective or scientific when it is in fact open to debate. How big a range? How full of what sort of comprehension? Relevant according to whom?
And don't even start me on "effective"? Effective to whom? Effective according to what effect? How the heck does someone who is neither the audience nor the author gauge the effectiveness of a piece of writing? I bet the author of this PARCC bulletin thinks it is written in a highly effective manner, and yet I find that it fails completely to effectively convince me of anything.
This is why presenting the PARCC (or any other standardized test) as an objective measure is a crock; at all critical junctures, the test will be based on its designers' personal beliefs about what is effective, what is clear, what is appropriate, and what details are correctly chosen.
And as an English teacher, I'm going to note that this certification that Pat McStudent is ready to skip a college Intro to English course says nothing at all about what literature Pat is or is not familiar with.
So this is what states are being sold as "college readiness," and this is what PARCC CEO Laura McGiffert Slover says marks the end of test prep. One more reason that everybody needs to jump off the PARCC train ASAP-- because it is in fact certifiable.
PARCC Discovers Unicorn Farm!
Over at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, PARCC CEO Laura McGiffert Slover has breathlessly announced the discovery of a special farm where unicorns dance and sing and give rides to little winged cherubs while singing sonnets in Latin.
Okay, not really, but I would have found that more credible than Slover's actual announcement, which is that PARCC heralds the end of test prep.
PARCC states are creating tests worth taking, made up of texts worth reading and problems worth solving. They are designed to give teachers information and tools they can use to customize teaching and learning for each student, and give students test questions and tasks that are meaningful –the kind that great teachers routinely ask students.
This kind of ad copy creates an existential dilemma for me. Should I accept that Slover actually believes this stuff, and thereby conclude that the head of one of the largest testing companies in the nation is so woefully ignorant of how standardized tests actually work? Or should I conclude that Slover is so astonishingly cynical that she can shovel out baldfaced bovine fecal matter and expect the public to eat it up like caviar?
She of course tosses in "as a former teacher," but looking at her bio, it's hard to tell when. Slover was a board member in DC during the Rhee era, a honcho at Achieve, and sat on the committee that wrote the CCSS math standards. Slover is a fine example of a person who has figured out how to make the revolving doors of corporate government work for her. She wrote the rules with Achieve and the CCSS; now she's cashing in with PARCC.
None of that really matters as long she's willing to write such dumb things. Let's look.
The PARCC assessments mark the end of “test prep.” Good instruction will be the only way to truly prepare students for the assessments. Memorization, drill and test-taking strategies will no longer siphon time from instruction.
My existential dilemma is compounded here, because I find it hard to believe that anybody could be either that stupid or that big a liar. But let's pretend for a moment that somewhere, somehow, there is a person who could actually seriously consider the above statement.
All standardized tests are susceptible to, and therefor encouraging of, test prep. All of them. Always. Forever.
The whole guiding principle of a standardized test-- particularly one that is designed to be administered by computer AND to generate crunchable large-scale data-- is to force students to choose from a certain portion of the broad world of possible responses to any problem. As Slover writes, "Results will also finally make student performance comparable across states..." The person who is writing the question-- the live breathing subjective human being-- will embed certain values in that question and the only acceptable answer to it.
Let's pretend that the problem is to find a way to get from my house here in Western PA to downtown Cleveland. Let's go to the Arcade, because I like the Arcade.
Every parameter I put on a correct answer represents a value judgment. Did I say you have to get there within three hours? That means you have to travel by car, and you can't go by way of Pittsburgh. Should you travel through Amish country, or use an Interstate? Did you end up at the right place-- because if you don't know Cleveland, you probably don't know what I mean by the Arcade. Of course, if you know Cleveland well, you know there are several arcades and I might be asking a trick question.
It doesn't matter how sophisticated or simple the problem is. The problem has nothing to do with test prep. It's the solution. As long as your test model involves saying, "Out of all the possible solutions, we are only considering these four, and out of these four only one is correct," then your test is preppable. I can study what kinds of answers the testmakers like. I can study what kind of false answers they favor.
Standardized tests always reflect the values of the test makers. Learning to reflect and mimic those values is what test prep is all about.
Standardized tests are also eternally preppable because they are such hugely artificial tasks. For my "drive to Cleveland" problem, the most authentic task would be to actually drive to Cleveland. But we can't do that, so we are going to create an artificial task that, the test-makers believe/hope, will measure the same skills and knowledge.
Except that it won't. It never does. I will end up with a test question that involves choosing between four maps, or identifying landmarks that I would see on the way, or doing some other in-authentic act that is not exactly like driving to Cleveland at all. And all of that requires tests prep; my best chauffeur may be a terrible map reader.
We already know that the New Test Regime likes items that purport to rank high on the Webb Depth of Knowledge scale, which means we'll see lots of "Here are two things. Make a connection between them," or as the test preppers will say, "Spot the connection that they want you to find between these two selections."
This is what all standardized testing comes down to. "They" want you to come up with a particular answer. The Tests measure one skill-- can you figure out what "they" want you to say, and then say it? Because the PARCC doesn't change that fact of testing life in the slightest, it can be test-prepped. Because the PARCC is tied to such high stakes, teachers will do test prep for it.
Let me frame it another way. Any test you can train an uneducated minimum wage temp to score is a test that can be gamed, and any test that can be gamed is a test that students can be coached to take. So, test prep.
When I want to assess my students' understanding beyond basic recall and simple skills, I use some sort of open-ended assessment. If I want them, say, to compare and contrast two works of literature, I typically assign a paper, and there is no answer key. There is no prescribed format or organization. It is not the student's job to present the answer I want in the format that I want it. It's my job to take the student's essay on terms set by the student, and then to assess if she managed to successfully make her point to me. But key to this process is that it be student centered-- not teacher centered and certainly not test centered. If I want to know if the student really understands, really sees, really has something to say and can say it, there is no other way.
I can't bring myself to slog through Slover's baloney about how teachers are providing valuable feedback and the tests are being created by a coalition of thousands of educationny folks. Also, blah blah blah the test results for questions you will never see for the students you had last year will really help you with your instruction. How does her keyboard not simply melt in shame? But Slover's Big Finish underlines the fundamental problem at the heart of the PARCC test.
So, yes, the numbers matter, but what really matters is that these students—and a million others participating in the field tests, their teachers and administrators, and the PARCC states that are developing and field testing the new assessments—are making history.
Got that? What's really important here is that the students and teachers across the country are doing something great for PARCC.
Tests like the PARCC do not serve students or teachers. Students and teachers serve the PARCC. The only kind of assessment that can be prepared only with good instruction are those assessments that are student-centered. Not only can you do test prep for any standardized test, but that will always be the best way to get better results.
Okay, not really, but I would have found that more credible than Slover's actual announcement, which is that PARCC heralds the end of test prep.
PARCC states are creating tests worth taking, made up of texts worth reading and problems worth solving. They are designed to give teachers information and tools they can use to customize teaching and learning for each student, and give students test questions and tasks that are meaningful –the kind that great teachers routinely ask students.
This kind of ad copy creates an existential dilemma for me. Should I accept that Slover actually believes this stuff, and thereby conclude that the head of one of the largest testing companies in the nation is so woefully ignorant of how standardized tests actually work? Or should I conclude that Slover is so astonishingly cynical that she can shovel out baldfaced bovine fecal matter and expect the public to eat it up like caviar?
She of course tosses in "as a former teacher," but looking at her bio, it's hard to tell when. Slover was a board member in DC during the Rhee era, a honcho at Achieve, and sat on the committee that wrote the CCSS math standards. Slover is a fine example of a person who has figured out how to make the revolving doors of corporate government work for her. She wrote the rules with Achieve and the CCSS; now she's cashing in with PARCC.
None of that really matters as long she's willing to write such dumb things. Let's look.
The PARCC assessments mark the end of “test prep.” Good instruction will be the only way to truly prepare students for the assessments. Memorization, drill and test-taking strategies will no longer siphon time from instruction.
My existential dilemma is compounded here, because I find it hard to believe that anybody could be either that stupid or that big a liar. But let's pretend for a moment that somewhere, somehow, there is a person who could actually seriously consider the above statement.
All standardized tests are susceptible to, and therefor encouraging of, test prep. All of them. Always. Forever.
The whole guiding principle of a standardized test-- particularly one that is designed to be administered by computer AND to generate crunchable large-scale data-- is to force students to choose from a certain portion of the broad world of possible responses to any problem. As Slover writes, "Results will also finally make student performance comparable across states..." The person who is writing the question-- the live breathing subjective human being-- will embed certain values in that question and the only acceptable answer to it.
Let's pretend that the problem is to find a way to get from my house here in Western PA to downtown Cleveland. Let's go to the Arcade, because I like the Arcade.
Every parameter I put on a correct answer represents a value judgment. Did I say you have to get there within three hours? That means you have to travel by car, and you can't go by way of Pittsburgh. Should you travel through Amish country, or use an Interstate? Did you end up at the right place-- because if you don't know Cleveland, you probably don't know what I mean by the Arcade. Of course, if you know Cleveland well, you know there are several arcades and I might be asking a trick question.
It doesn't matter how sophisticated or simple the problem is. The problem has nothing to do with test prep. It's the solution. As long as your test model involves saying, "Out of all the possible solutions, we are only considering these four, and out of these four only one is correct," then your test is preppable. I can study what kinds of answers the testmakers like. I can study what kind of false answers they favor.
Standardized tests always reflect the values of the test makers. Learning to reflect and mimic those values is what test prep is all about.
Standardized tests are also eternally preppable because they are such hugely artificial tasks. For my "drive to Cleveland" problem, the most authentic task would be to actually drive to Cleveland. But we can't do that, so we are going to create an artificial task that, the test-makers believe/hope, will measure the same skills and knowledge.
Except that it won't. It never does. I will end up with a test question that involves choosing between four maps, or identifying landmarks that I would see on the way, or doing some other in-authentic act that is not exactly like driving to Cleveland at all. And all of that requires tests prep; my best chauffeur may be a terrible map reader.
We already know that the New Test Regime likes items that purport to rank high on the Webb Depth of Knowledge scale, which means we'll see lots of "Here are two things. Make a connection between them," or as the test preppers will say, "Spot the connection that they want you to find between these two selections."
This is what all standardized testing comes down to. "They" want you to come up with a particular answer. The Tests measure one skill-- can you figure out what "they" want you to say, and then say it? Because the PARCC doesn't change that fact of testing life in the slightest, it can be test-prepped. Because the PARCC is tied to such high stakes, teachers will do test prep for it.
Let me frame it another way. Any test you can train an uneducated minimum wage temp to score is a test that can be gamed, and any test that can be gamed is a test that students can be coached to take. So, test prep.
When I want to assess my students' understanding beyond basic recall and simple skills, I use some sort of open-ended assessment. If I want them, say, to compare and contrast two works of literature, I typically assign a paper, and there is no answer key. There is no prescribed format or organization. It is not the student's job to present the answer I want in the format that I want it. It's my job to take the student's essay on terms set by the student, and then to assess if she managed to successfully make her point to me. But key to this process is that it be student centered-- not teacher centered and certainly not test centered. If I want to know if the student really understands, really sees, really has something to say and can say it, there is no other way.
I can't bring myself to slog through Slover's baloney about how teachers are providing valuable feedback and the tests are being created by a coalition of thousands of educationny folks. Also, blah blah blah the test results for questions you will never see for the students you had last year will really help you with your instruction. How does her keyboard not simply melt in shame? But Slover's Big Finish underlines the fundamental problem at the heart of the PARCC test.
So, yes, the numbers matter, but what really matters is that these students—and a million others participating in the field tests, their teachers and administrators, and the PARCC states that are developing and field testing the new assessments—are making history.
Got that? What's really important here is that the students and teachers across the country are doing something great for PARCC.
Tests like the PARCC do not serve students or teachers. Students and teachers serve the PARCC. The only kind of assessment that can be prepared only with good instruction are those assessments that are student-centered. Not only can you do test prep for any standardized test, but that will always be the best way to get better results.
Tuesday, April 22, 2014
Trials of the Traveling Student
What about the students who move?
It's a question often raised in support of the CCSS, or just national standards in general. Don't we need national standards so that students who move won't be thrown for a loop when they change schools, even across state lines? I'm unconvinced by this argument.
I'll admit up front that, as both my regular readers know, I am not a believer in national standards at all. But let me try to walk you through my unconvincedness in the face of the traveling student.
How many are there?
This seems to be a point of some debate. Several readers have directed me to a study cited here which suggests a whopping 15-20% students moved within the previous year. That's a fairly fuzzy number, and the previous year in question is 2003. It also doesn't address the nature of the moves-- across town? across state? across country? The study is interesting in that it points out that outside of a small smattering of military families, the traveling students come from families that are migrant workers, homeless, or poor. Reminds me of decades ago when a poor student explained his families regular moves as seasonal-- cold weather months in apartments that included utilities, warm-weather months in places that did not (with the clear implication that rent was not always paid).
The more commonly cited percentage is 1.7% of 5-17 year olds move across state lines. The source for that number is this chart from the US Census Bureau, so it's probably mostly somewhat accurate-ish. In all fairness, I should note that this works out to 915,328 students, which is not an insignificant number. We also can add to that 2.2% moving within the state, and 9.4% moving within the county. Students moving in from abroad is .5%, or one third the number moving across state lines. I note that number because one of the question the issue raise is why do interstate movements merit imposition of national standards, but international do not. Is it a matter of principal, or is there somewhere between .5% and 1.7% a cutoff line under which the number of student adjustment issues doesn't merit consideration.
One of the pieces of information that no set of information seems to address is the when. Are we talking about students who change schools between school years? Experience and anecdotal info suggests not-- that many of these traveling students travel during the course of the school year itself. I promise to care about this point further down the page.
The Devil in the Detail
I am not unsympathetic to the problems that come with moving to a new school. It's just that I don't think a national scope and sequence necessarily helps, and certainly doesn't help to a degree that justifies the effects on the education of the 98.3% of non-interstate students. To manage this kind of consistency within even a state, a single district, or single building, requires certain adjustments that may be neither feasible nor worthwhile.
I'm going to stick with English, which in many ways is more difficult than math because the study of math has its own built in sequencing to an extent that the study of English does not. Let's consider for our hypotheticals, two old mainstays of 9th grade English across the country-- Romeo and Juliet and Great Expectations.
Track Mobility
Should there be ease of mobility between tracks? A low-level group might study R&J with the goal of simply knowing the plot and characters and being able to discuss the play as it relates to modern social patterns. They might even use one of the many modern-language parallel texts to help them deal with the Scary Shakespeare Words problem. On the other hand, a high level class would likely have many additional goals, including delving into the Shakespearean language, writing more academic formal papers.
Students who, in the process of switching schools, also switch tracks will find this difficult. Are their adjustment problems a consideration, or do we write that off as another matter entirely?
Chaining Opportunity
I have a class that is primarily females, so as we study R&J, we veer off extensively into the role of women in Elizabethan society and in the world of the play. One day in discussion several students introduce the topic of women's frustrations over the lack of control they have over their own destiny, and start to use that to inform their own ideas about interpreting characters such as Lady Capulet and the Nurse as well as Juliet herself. As a particularly canny educator (or a fair-to-middlin' one having a good day), I see an opportunity here to bank and set up discussion points for the female characters of Great Expectations.
Should I shut all of that down because it will be unfair and confusing for the hypothetical student who might be moving into my classroom sometime between now and the beginning of Great Expectations?
Should I generally avoid anything "extra," or in a math class should I avoid moving ahead swiftly just because we can, because that will give us material coverage that we are not supposed to have, putting my students too far ahead of the hypothetical transfer student who might be arriving any day now from a school that didn't get that extra material?
It's the same conversation we had for NCLB-- is there really any way to keep students on the same page that doesn't invove holding back those who are ready to zip on ahead?
Eating Dust
On the other end of the scale, we have the slower students. Do I say to them at the end of six weeks, "I know we're only at the end of Act III, and I'm proud of you for hammering this out and making sense of it, and I know that some of you are now really into this and want to see how it all turns out. But according to the Big Master Schedule, we are done with Romeo & Juliet now. So our test on the entire play will be this Friday. Good luck."
Different Strokes
Chris just came into my class from a school where the English teacher approaches R&J strictly from a performance standpoint, but all of my instruction and building activities have been geared toward textual analysis. So while Chris knows the characters and the plot, Chris is not really prepared for any of the sorts of activities that we are doing. Is that Chris's problem, or the educational system's?
Look, I Wasn't Trying To Get This Picky. I Just Think That Every Kid in the Country Ought To Get the Same X, Y and Z.
It's fair to say that all of the above was simply getting excessively picky about the issues of student mobility. But my point is that it's impossible not to get that level of picky, even if your intent is pretty simple.
Let's say that your national standard says that every 9th grade class covers the same list of material (including R&J and GE). That seems simple. But remember-- some not-inconsiderable percentage of the raveling students travel during the school year. So if your school covers R&J in the fall and my class does it in the spring, a student who switches from your school to mine gets R&J twice. A student who switches from mine to yours gets R&J none times.
So a list isn't good enough. To accomplish the goal of making life easier for the traveling student, we have to prescribe not only a list of content, but a schedule for it as well. So by decree, October is now R&J month across America. Except that now we're back to the question of faster and slower classes.
AND that's proscribing content, but we might all use the same content to teach entirely different competencies, so we'd better proscribe exactly what skills will be taught with the content.
And before you know it, in order to make life better for 1.7% of all students, we have written a very specific national curriculum-- not standards, but curriculum. Except that writing a federal curriculum is illegal. But nothing less than a national curriculum is going to accomplish the goal you're after. Anything less will keep us right there in the land of When You Switch To a New School You Have To Deal With Them Covering Different Material in Different Ways.
National Curriculum
Can't be done. It's not just illegal; it's large scale educational malpractice that would destroy any semblance of usefulness of US public education as well as violating some of our most sacred national values.
Or, to be brief, I think it's a bad idea.
What Do You Want, Anyway?
Part of what makes this goal so elusive is that it's so fuzzy. What do you want every freshman in America to know about Romeo and Juliet? Do you want them to recognize that it's a play by some Shakespeare fella? Do you want them to be able to quote passages? Do you want them to recognize key plot points? Do you want them to be able to argue the relative merits of Leonard Whiting and Leonardo DiCaprio? Do you want them to be able to write iambic pentameter? Do you want them to know how it's related to West Side Story? Do you want them to be able to discuss the use of blood and heat as recurring images in the play? Do you want them to know who Queen Mab was? Do you want them to have a theory about where Benvolio disappeared to? Do you want them to be able to explain what the play said to them about their own conception of young love? Do you want them to know all the dirty parts? Do you want them to be able to discuss the various uses of dramatic irony? Do you want them to use the play to discuss the ickiness of sex with thirteen-year-old girls? Do you want them to know that "wherefor" means "why," not "where"?
And once you've selected from the iceberg of ideas and competencies that the last paragraph shows only the tip of, do you want them to display absolute command, bare competence, or passing familiarity with the idea you've tagged.
When you say "I want every class to have covered some of the same basics," what exactly do you mean?
So.....?
When people move, their situation changes. They live in different surroundings. They cope with different weather. They adjust to different local fashion trends. They learn to understand different accents. They learn to eat new regional foods, and they do without the food they used to enjoy. They learn different traffic patterns. They learn about different sports teams.
They learn to do all this because different places are different. (And this is what we've come to in current education debate-- the point where simple tautologies pass for controversial statements).
Different places are different. That's not a flaw. It's a virtue. Yes, it can create challenges for the traveling students but
A) different places are different and
B) your proposed solution isn't really a solution
It's a question often raised in support of the CCSS, or just national standards in general. Don't we need national standards so that students who move won't be thrown for a loop when they change schools, even across state lines? I'm unconvinced by this argument.
I'll admit up front that, as both my regular readers know, I am not a believer in national standards at all. But let me try to walk you through my unconvincedness in the face of the traveling student.
How many are there?
This seems to be a point of some debate. Several readers have directed me to a study cited here which suggests a whopping 15-20% students moved within the previous year. That's a fairly fuzzy number, and the previous year in question is 2003. It also doesn't address the nature of the moves-- across town? across state? across country? The study is interesting in that it points out that outside of a small smattering of military families, the traveling students come from families that are migrant workers, homeless, or poor. Reminds me of decades ago when a poor student explained his families regular moves as seasonal-- cold weather months in apartments that included utilities, warm-weather months in places that did not (with the clear implication that rent was not always paid).
The more commonly cited percentage is 1.7% of 5-17 year olds move across state lines. The source for that number is this chart from the US Census Bureau, so it's probably mostly somewhat accurate-ish. In all fairness, I should note that this works out to 915,328 students, which is not an insignificant number. We also can add to that 2.2% moving within the state, and 9.4% moving within the county. Students moving in from abroad is .5%, or one third the number moving across state lines. I note that number because one of the question the issue raise is why do interstate movements merit imposition of national standards, but international do not. Is it a matter of principal, or is there somewhere between .5% and 1.7% a cutoff line under which the number of student adjustment issues doesn't merit consideration.
One of the pieces of information that no set of information seems to address is the when. Are we talking about students who change schools between school years? Experience and anecdotal info suggests not-- that many of these traveling students travel during the course of the school year itself. I promise to care about this point further down the page.
The Devil in the Detail
I am not unsympathetic to the problems that come with moving to a new school. It's just that I don't think a national scope and sequence necessarily helps, and certainly doesn't help to a degree that justifies the effects on the education of the 98.3% of non-interstate students. To manage this kind of consistency within even a state, a single district, or single building, requires certain adjustments that may be neither feasible nor worthwhile.
I'm going to stick with English, which in many ways is more difficult than math because the study of math has its own built in sequencing to an extent that the study of English does not. Let's consider for our hypotheticals, two old mainstays of 9th grade English across the country-- Romeo and Juliet and Great Expectations.
Track Mobility
Should there be ease of mobility between tracks? A low-level group might study R&J with the goal of simply knowing the plot and characters and being able to discuss the play as it relates to modern social patterns. They might even use one of the many modern-language parallel texts to help them deal with the Scary Shakespeare Words problem. On the other hand, a high level class would likely have many additional goals, including delving into the Shakespearean language, writing more academic formal papers.
Students who, in the process of switching schools, also switch tracks will find this difficult. Are their adjustment problems a consideration, or do we write that off as another matter entirely?
Chaining Opportunity
I have a class that is primarily females, so as we study R&J, we veer off extensively into the role of women in Elizabethan society and in the world of the play. One day in discussion several students introduce the topic of women's frustrations over the lack of control they have over their own destiny, and start to use that to inform their own ideas about interpreting characters such as Lady Capulet and the Nurse as well as Juliet herself. As a particularly canny educator (or a fair-to-middlin' one having a good day), I see an opportunity here to bank and set up discussion points for the female characters of Great Expectations.
Should I shut all of that down because it will be unfair and confusing for the hypothetical student who might be moving into my classroom sometime between now and the beginning of Great Expectations?
Should I generally avoid anything "extra," or in a math class should I avoid moving ahead swiftly just because we can, because that will give us material coverage that we are not supposed to have, putting my students too far ahead of the hypothetical transfer student who might be arriving any day now from a school that didn't get that extra material?
It's the same conversation we had for NCLB-- is there really any way to keep students on the same page that doesn't invove holding back those who are ready to zip on ahead?
Eating Dust
On the other end of the scale, we have the slower students. Do I say to them at the end of six weeks, "I know we're only at the end of Act III, and I'm proud of you for hammering this out and making sense of it, and I know that some of you are now really into this and want to see how it all turns out. But according to the Big Master Schedule, we are done with Romeo & Juliet now. So our test on the entire play will be this Friday. Good luck."
Different Strokes
Chris just came into my class from a school where the English teacher approaches R&J strictly from a performance standpoint, but all of my instruction and building activities have been geared toward textual analysis. So while Chris knows the characters and the plot, Chris is not really prepared for any of the sorts of activities that we are doing. Is that Chris's problem, or the educational system's?
Look, I Wasn't Trying To Get This Picky. I Just Think That Every Kid in the Country Ought To Get the Same X, Y and Z.
It's fair to say that all of the above was simply getting excessively picky about the issues of student mobility. But my point is that it's impossible not to get that level of picky, even if your intent is pretty simple.
Let's say that your national standard says that every 9th grade class covers the same list of material (including R&J and GE). That seems simple. But remember-- some not-inconsiderable percentage of the raveling students travel during the school year. So if your school covers R&J in the fall and my class does it in the spring, a student who switches from your school to mine gets R&J twice. A student who switches from mine to yours gets R&J none times.
So a list isn't good enough. To accomplish the goal of making life easier for the traveling student, we have to prescribe not only a list of content, but a schedule for it as well. So by decree, October is now R&J month across America. Except that now we're back to the question of faster and slower classes.
AND that's proscribing content, but we might all use the same content to teach entirely different competencies, so we'd better proscribe exactly what skills will be taught with the content.
And before you know it, in order to make life better for 1.7% of all students, we have written a very specific national curriculum-- not standards, but curriculum. Except that writing a federal curriculum is illegal. But nothing less than a national curriculum is going to accomplish the goal you're after. Anything less will keep us right there in the land of When You Switch To a New School You Have To Deal With Them Covering Different Material in Different Ways.
National Curriculum
Can't be done. It's not just illegal; it's large scale educational malpractice that would destroy any semblance of usefulness of US public education as well as violating some of our most sacred national values.
Or, to be brief, I think it's a bad idea.
What Do You Want, Anyway?
Part of what makes this goal so elusive is that it's so fuzzy. What do you want every freshman in America to know about Romeo and Juliet? Do you want them to recognize that it's a play by some Shakespeare fella? Do you want them to be able to quote passages? Do you want them to recognize key plot points? Do you want them to be able to argue the relative merits of Leonard Whiting and Leonardo DiCaprio? Do you want them to be able to write iambic pentameter? Do you want them to know how it's related to West Side Story? Do you want them to be able to discuss the use of blood and heat as recurring images in the play? Do you want them to know who Queen Mab was? Do you want them to have a theory about where Benvolio disappeared to? Do you want them to be able to explain what the play said to them about their own conception of young love? Do you want them to know all the dirty parts? Do you want them to be able to discuss the various uses of dramatic irony? Do you want them to use the play to discuss the ickiness of sex with thirteen-year-old girls? Do you want them to know that "wherefor" means "why," not "where"?
And once you've selected from the iceberg of ideas and competencies that the last paragraph shows only the tip of, do you want them to display absolute command, bare competence, or passing familiarity with the idea you've tagged.
When you say "I want every class to have covered some of the same basics," what exactly do you mean?
So.....?
When people move, their situation changes. They live in different surroundings. They cope with different weather. They adjust to different local fashion trends. They learn to understand different accents. They learn to eat new regional foods, and they do without the food they used to enjoy. They learn different traffic patterns. They learn about different sports teams.
They learn to do all this because different places are different. (And this is what we've come to in current education debate-- the point where simple tautologies pass for controversial statements).
Different places are different. That's not a flaw. It's a virtue. Yes, it can create challenges for the traveling students but
A) different places are different and
B) your proposed solution isn't really a solution
Monday, April 21, 2014
Why Should I Study This, Anyway?
Never once during a football game so athletes stop chasing the ball, lie down on their backs, and compete to bench press the most weight. And yet all those football players spend hour after hour in the weight room.
You probably aren't going to marry that woman you're dating right now, so what's the point in trying to learn how to talk to her or how to work out the finer points of your relationship. Why bother to learn what you do or don't require in a relationship if this one is just going to end? Just wait until you meet the woman you're actually going to marry.
When I was younger, I knew with absolute certainty that I would work in a darkroom when I grew up. So I ignored every aspect of education that didn't deal directly with working with film and photographic paper and processing with chemicals, because what else could I possibly need to know. How could that end badly?
If you are going to be a concert flautist, you should avoid any musical training not related to playing a flute. Why learn to read piano music, or anything on bass clef? Why listen to any music ever except music played by flautists?
Looking back on the previous NFL season, we can see that any games not involving the Seahawks or the Broncos were a waste of time, because only those two teams played for the championship. We should have saved money and time and not played any of the other games.
Paintings by guys like Van Gogh and Monet and Da Vinci are dumb because the canvas is too thin and fragile to keep the cold out of a house, and too small to make any kind of useful structure. You can't build a house out of them, so what good are they?
These are all my replies to the multiple variations on that same stupid meme-- the one that says something like "School is dumb because it taught me that stupid Pythagorean theorum and I ain't never used it. So dumb, school."
You know what's dumb? Judging educational content strictly on utilitarian values.
You know what's dumb? Thinking that you can use a rear-view mirror to steer a forward-traveling path.
You know what's dumb? Thinking that preparation for the future involves practicing the exact literal tasks you will do and not developing skills and muscles that will help with multiple tasks.
You know who I've never met? The person who says, "Yes, my life would have been so great, if only I had known less. But having too much education just ruined everything."
You probably aren't going to marry that woman you're dating right now, so what's the point in trying to learn how to talk to her or how to work out the finer points of your relationship. Why bother to learn what you do or don't require in a relationship if this one is just going to end? Just wait until you meet the woman you're actually going to marry.
When I was younger, I knew with absolute certainty that I would work in a darkroom when I grew up. So I ignored every aspect of education that didn't deal directly with working with film and photographic paper and processing with chemicals, because what else could I possibly need to know. How could that end badly?
If you are going to be a concert flautist, you should avoid any musical training not related to playing a flute. Why learn to read piano music, or anything on bass clef? Why listen to any music ever except music played by flautists?
Looking back on the previous NFL season, we can see that any games not involving the Seahawks or the Broncos were a waste of time, because only those two teams played for the championship. We should have saved money and time and not played any of the other games.
Paintings by guys like Van Gogh and Monet and Da Vinci are dumb because the canvas is too thin and fragile to keep the cold out of a house, and too small to make any kind of useful structure. You can't build a house out of them, so what good are they?
These are all my replies to the multiple variations on that same stupid meme-- the one that says something like "School is dumb because it taught me that stupid Pythagorean theorum and I ain't never used it. So dumb, school."
You know what's dumb? Judging educational content strictly on utilitarian values.
You know what's dumb? Thinking that you can use a rear-view mirror to steer a forward-traveling path.
You know what's dumb? Thinking that preparation for the future involves practicing the exact literal tasks you will do and not developing skills and muscles that will help with multiple tasks.
You know who I've never met? The person who says, "Yes, my life would have been so great, if only I had known less. But having too much education just ruined everything."
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