It is Teacher Appreciation Week, though you could be forgiven for not having noticed. It's the perfect time for all of us to stop and say a few words about the teachers who made a difference for us, whose work we respect, and whose lives in the classroom (and beyond) inspire us. Here are some of mine:
Susie and I went to high school together. She eventually returned to this area as a music teacher, a job she did with energy and panache; then, she was stricken with cancer. And she still did the job with energy and panache.She beat the cancer, and then it came back. She was determined to teach and to work and to live with just as much energy and determination as she could. At one low point in chemo, she would direct choir and then, after the period was over, go back behind the building and throw up. She didn't want to alarm her students, but she also wanted them to see her live right up until the end. She was a great choral director, but she was a beautiful and spirited human being, and her willingness to be open and available to her students right up until her death allowed her to be a huge gift to them.
Mike was my high school English teacher. His passion for the work and the reading and the writing and just everything about the class showed me that teaching could be-- should be-- just plain fun. Whether he was performing a story as all the characters or demanding that we get involved in the discussion, he showed me how energizing teaching could be.
Janet was my eighth grade teacher. She was the queen of the project, and it was in her class that I discovered the great secret of English teachers-- math teachers have to teach math, and phys ed teachers have to teach phys ed, and science teachers have to teach science, but in an English classroom everything is fair game. We wrote and performed plays and we did art projects and we did pretty much anything that she would come up with. I learned that there was sooooo much more to English than just reading and writing.
Jack ran a classroom where it was a good thing to be smart. That may seem obvious, but you know how it is-- in high school, having brains is not always the path to social success. But in Jack's class, it was good to know the answer, and it was a plus if you were smart enough to keep up with his nimble, sharp mind. In Jack's class I learned that the best way to learn new words was to hear them and use them. He wasn't cruel, and he didn't leave the slower students in the dust, but in his class, it was cool to be on top of things, to know answers.
From Tony, I learned patience. Tony could carefully and slowly explain anything, and if a student didn't get it, he would explain it again. And again. And again. And I watched him explain well past the point where I would have had a hard time keeping the judgment out of my voice. But Tony explained that everybody had to get there in their own way at their own time. I landed my first full time job when Tony hit the lottery and retired to sit on the back porch of his mobile home, drink beer and read great books. (Tony gave me my first copy of A Confederacy of Dunces)
Penny knew more about teaching at the beginning of her first year than I knew at the end of my tenth. And she had a natural gift for putting students at ease-- before her classes presented oral reports, they would sing the Brady Bunch theme song as loud as they could. I have no idea why that works, but it does. Once a nine weeks, Penny would take a Penny Paper Day and stay home, grading papers for 16 straight hours. Penny could never become comfortable with the compromise between what she knew she should be assigning in perfect world and what she had time to do in this world, and she left the profession. So my last lesson from her was that you have to make choices if you don't want to burn out.
Ed was my high school band director. He was the most ego-free band director I've ever met. He told us a million times that it was our band, not his, and we had better take responsibility for it. Most of what I know about fostering student leadership and ownership I learned in the high school trombone section. I also learned from Ed another type of success-- his big successes were not just the students who became professional musicians or music teachers, but those of us who kept playing our whole lives. I'm not a musician, but my life would suck without music. I got that from Ed-- not all our students have to follow in our footsteps to have had their lives enriched by what we teach them.
Those are just some of the biggies. Here's my challenge to you-- I have told every one of these people how they were important to me over the past several decades. You should do the same. Drop a note, send a card, stop and say hi to one of the teachers that made a difference in your life.
It is hard to talk about Teacher Appreciation Week without sounding self serving, but we all owe a huge debt to the teachers who made a difference in our lives. If we're going to live out what we value, we need to tell them so. Take some time this week.
Tuesday, May 6, 2014
Monday, May 5, 2014
It's That Week Again
What week is it? Well, of course, it's "Stop Telling Me That It's All Arne Duncan's Fault And President Obama Would Totally Have Our Back If Not For His Evil Advisers" Week.
For thirty years, the PTA has celebrated this week as Teacher Appreciation Week, or as they say "Since 1984, National PTA has designated the first week in May as a special time to honor the men and women who lend their passion and skills to educating our children." It's a nice gesture, and it comes at a time of year when teachers are feeling all the feelings. Stress over testing season. Anxiety over trying to get as much education as possible into the few days left. Riding the tiger as students experience a huge burst of springtime energy. Sadness over soon saying goodbye to the small people in whom we've invested all this year. Knowing that someone has noticed you pouring your heart out into the classroom is nice; knowing they appreciate it is even nicer.
Meanwhile, in DC, President Obama has this to say:
At the heart of who we are as Americans is the simple but profound idea that no matter who you are, what you look like, or where you come from, if you work hard and meet your responsibilities, you can succeed. Our Nation can only realize this idea through the guarantee of a world-class education for every child. During National Charter Schools Week, we pay tribute to the role our Nation's public charter schools play in advancing opportunity, and we salute the parents, educators, community leaders, policymakers, and philanthropists who gave rise to the charter school sector.
The first week of every May under the Obama administration has been dedicated to celebrating Charter Schools, institutions that apparently achieve awesomeness without the benefit of actual teachers ("educator," as all educators know is a weasel word used to lump not-actually-teachers in with actual teachers, who are generally called "teachers").
This ironic train wreck of symbolism has been noted before (every year of the Obama administration, in fact) and is being noted this year, and while I try not to be redundant here, there are some things that just need to be noted a lot.
It's not that charter schools are innately anti-teacher or anti-public school. There are some absolutely awesome charters out there, doing great work for students and making teachers salivate at the prospect of working there. Charters done right can be an enormous boost to educational excellence in a community.
But what the current administration has fostered is not charter schools devoted to excellence, but charter schools as investment opportunities, and most ironic for our purposes today, charter schools that lead the nation in innovative ways to crush teaching as a profession. The modern charter makes money by cutting payroll costs ruthlessly, reducing teachers to at-will temps who can be easily churned and burned.
In short, the modern charter school is one of the most teacher-hostile environments for the modern-day school teacher.
The President could have made his obeisance to the charter school bosses any other week of the year (given the gift he's provided of federal pressure on states to raise charter caps, Christmas would have made sense), and that would have been enough of a slap in the face to our nation's public school teachers. But to use The Salute To Charters Week to upstage Teacher Appreciation Week is going the extra mile to slap every public school teacher in the face. I look forward to the administration's Labor Day Salute To Corporate Leaders and Job Creators!
For thirty years, the PTA has celebrated this week as Teacher Appreciation Week, or as they say "Since 1984, National PTA has designated the first week in May as a special time to honor the men and women who lend their passion and skills to educating our children." It's a nice gesture, and it comes at a time of year when teachers are feeling all the feelings. Stress over testing season. Anxiety over trying to get as much education as possible into the few days left. Riding the tiger as students experience a huge burst of springtime energy. Sadness over soon saying goodbye to the small people in whom we've invested all this year. Knowing that someone has noticed you pouring your heart out into the classroom is nice; knowing they appreciate it is even nicer.
Meanwhile, in DC, President Obama has this to say:
At the heart of who we are as Americans is the simple but profound idea that no matter who you are, what you look like, or where you come from, if you work hard and meet your responsibilities, you can succeed. Our Nation can only realize this idea through the guarantee of a world-class education for every child. During National Charter Schools Week, we pay tribute to the role our Nation's public charter schools play in advancing opportunity, and we salute the parents, educators, community leaders, policymakers, and philanthropists who gave rise to the charter school sector.
The first week of every May under the Obama administration has been dedicated to celebrating Charter Schools, institutions that apparently achieve awesomeness without the benefit of actual teachers ("educator," as all educators know is a weasel word used to lump not-actually-teachers in with actual teachers, who are generally called "teachers").
This ironic train wreck of symbolism has been noted before (every year of the Obama administration, in fact) and is being noted this year, and while I try not to be redundant here, there are some things that just need to be noted a lot.
It's not that charter schools are innately anti-teacher or anti-public school. There are some absolutely awesome charters out there, doing great work for students and making teachers salivate at the prospect of working there. Charters done right can be an enormous boost to educational excellence in a community.
But what the current administration has fostered is not charter schools devoted to excellence, but charter schools as investment opportunities, and most ironic for our purposes today, charter schools that lead the nation in innovative ways to crush teaching as a profession. The modern charter makes money by cutting payroll costs ruthlessly, reducing teachers to at-will temps who can be easily churned and burned.
In short, the modern charter school is one of the most teacher-hostile environments for the modern-day school teacher.
The President could have made his obeisance to the charter school bosses any other week of the year (given the gift he's provided of federal pressure on states to raise charter caps, Christmas would have made sense), and that would have been enough of a slap in the face to our nation's public school teachers. But to use The Salute To Charters Week to upstage Teacher Appreciation Week is going the extra mile to slap every public school teacher in the face. I look forward to the administration's Labor Day Salute To Corporate Leaders and Job Creators!
Defending the Core in OK
Sherry Labyer is superintendent of Duncan Public Schools out in Oklahoma. She has occasionally taken issue with Reformsters in her state, particularly over the use of letter grades for schools. But she loves her some Common Core, and as Oklahoma has wrangled over the future of CCSS (several bills have been floated to repeal, leash, hamstring and otherwise interfere with the Core), Ms. Labyer penned an op-ed (full image at the bottom of the page).
Her piece is just one more example of the kind of thinking that leads folks to support the Core. Let's take a look.
She opens with the historical perspective, highlighting years of preparation, training and investment in launching OK into the CCSS era. Like many CCSS supporters, she has her favorite parts: "Critical thinking and problem solving is one of the major shifts in Common Core." Oklahoma's old PASS standards were, in her words, like "asking our students to memorize Jeopardy facts," which is an evocative image except that I don't think people win on Jeopardy by memorizing every possible fact that might come up. In fact, Jeopardy answers often require a little sideways twist of cross-filing information with pattern recognition and wit. I think Jeopardy questions are closer to what CCSS fans imagine is their perfect goal.
"We must teach them how to think and help them to become innovators instead of just doers." Instead of just doers? That is a new one for me. Exactly why is being a "doer" a bad thing? Do we not like people who "get things done"? Is there not a special place in the American heart for people who "get things done" with creativity and ingenuity?
Labyer would like to clear up some confusion about the standards. See, local districts still have control; the standards only tell them what exactly what skills the students need to acquire. The Labyer tries her hand at the curriculum/standards distinction, and let me make confession here-- there was a time when I saw these as very separate items as well, but the more CCSS supporters explain the difference, the less certain I am of the distinction between the two.
Labyer fails hard. "A standard is a statement that describes what a student should be able to do at a certain point in his/her educational career. Curriculum is the scope and sequence of skills that are to be learned in a particular subject at a particular grade level." So let's say that the task at hand is to walk from the corner of 9th and Liberty Streets to the corner of 12th and Liberty at noon. Standards would look like this: At 12:01, you should be walking across 9th Street. At 12:06, you should be standing at the corner of 10th and Liberty. At 12:11 you should be standing at the corner of 11th and Liberty. At 12:16, you should be standing at the corner of 12th and Liberty. But curriculum would be the scope and sequence of how you would meet all those standards, which would-- I don't know. Have different verbs? I swear, reading about Common Core is just making me stupider on this particular subject.
Labyer moves on to the old baloney about fewer standards that are more complex and deep. She notes that we no longer live in a "fill in the blank" world and not for the first time I wonder if I teach in some sort of pedagogical paradise because who the heck teaches like it's a fill-in-the-blank world except of course everybody trying to get their students ready for The Big Standardized Test (which few of us think of as real teaching so, my point).
Nor can I, for the life of me, find the deep complex critical thinking part of the standards. If you see Labyer, please ask her for me to give an example of specific standard and explain how that standard is either deep or related to critical thinking.
The bottom line is: the standards are good, they are complex, we already have them, resources have been spent preparing for them, current assignments are aligned to them, and Oklahoma educators have been involved in their development.
This is a list of unsupported assertions and our big up and coming CCSS Talking Point (replacing the previous "Let's Not Lose Momentum" point) which is "Hey, we've already spent a bunch of money on this!" You can also think of this as the "Throw good money after bad" or "Waist deep in the Big Muddy." When you're doing a dumb thing, doing it harder is a lousy solution. And of course, Oklahoma teachers did not help develop so much as a comma of the Common Core.
She offers a parting nod to college and career readiness, because that's the whole purpose of education-- vocational training and nothing else. Tell me, Ms. Labyer, will young women whose goal is to become a housewife be allowed to drop out of school?
This is the same old tired stuff, without a shred of evidence offered to support the various assertions about Common Core.Labyer is trying to talk people out of dumping the Core in OK. I hope she is unsuccessful.
Her piece is just one more example of the kind of thinking that leads folks to support the Core. Let's take a look.
She opens with the historical perspective, highlighting years of preparation, training and investment in launching OK into the CCSS era. Like many CCSS supporters, she has her favorite parts: "Critical thinking and problem solving is one of the major shifts in Common Core." Oklahoma's old PASS standards were, in her words, like "asking our students to memorize Jeopardy facts," which is an evocative image except that I don't think people win on Jeopardy by memorizing every possible fact that might come up. In fact, Jeopardy answers often require a little sideways twist of cross-filing information with pattern recognition and wit. I think Jeopardy questions are closer to what CCSS fans imagine is their perfect goal.
"We must teach them how to think and help them to become innovators instead of just doers." Instead of just doers? That is a new one for me. Exactly why is being a "doer" a bad thing? Do we not like people who "get things done"? Is there not a special place in the American heart for people who "get things done" with creativity and ingenuity?
Labyer would like to clear up some confusion about the standards. See, local districts still have control; the standards only tell them what exactly what skills the students need to acquire. The Labyer tries her hand at the curriculum/standards distinction, and let me make confession here-- there was a time when I saw these as very separate items as well, but the more CCSS supporters explain the difference, the less certain I am of the distinction between the two.
Labyer fails hard. "A standard is a statement that describes what a student should be able to do at a certain point in his/her educational career. Curriculum is the scope and sequence of skills that are to be learned in a particular subject at a particular grade level." So let's say that the task at hand is to walk from the corner of 9th and Liberty Streets to the corner of 12th and Liberty at noon. Standards would look like this: At 12:01, you should be walking across 9th Street. At 12:06, you should be standing at the corner of 10th and Liberty. At 12:11 you should be standing at the corner of 11th and Liberty. At 12:16, you should be standing at the corner of 12th and Liberty. But curriculum would be the scope and sequence of how you would meet all those standards, which would-- I don't know. Have different verbs? I swear, reading about Common Core is just making me stupider on this particular subject.
Labyer moves on to the old baloney about fewer standards that are more complex and deep. She notes that we no longer live in a "fill in the blank" world and not for the first time I wonder if I teach in some sort of pedagogical paradise because who the heck teaches like it's a fill-in-the-blank world except of course everybody trying to get their students ready for The Big Standardized Test (which few of us think of as real teaching so, my point).
Nor can I, for the life of me, find the deep complex critical thinking part of the standards. If you see Labyer, please ask her for me to give an example of specific standard and explain how that standard is either deep or related to critical thinking.
The bottom line is: the standards are good, they are complex, we already have them, resources have been spent preparing for them, current assignments are aligned to them, and Oklahoma educators have been involved in their development.
This is a list of unsupported assertions and our big up and coming CCSS Talking Point (replacing the previous "Let's Not Lose Momentum" point) which is "Hey, we've already spent a bunch of money on this!" You can also think of this as the "Throw good money after bad" or "Waist deep in the Big Muddy." When you're doing a dumb thing, doing it harder is a lousy solution. And of course, Oklahoma teachers did not help develop so much as a comma of the Common Core.
She offers a parting nod to college and career readiness, because that's the whole purpose of education-- vocational training and nothing else. Tell me, Ms. Labyer, will young women whose goal is to become a housewife be allowed to drop out of school?
This is the same old tired stuff, without a shred of evidence offered to support the various assertions about Common Core.Labyer is trying to talk people out of dumping the Core in OK. I hope she is unsuccessful.
An Educated Person
"Don't you think there are things that every educated person should know?"
I hear this fairly often, generally in response to my stated disinterest in having Common Core standards in particular and national education standards ever in general. It's an eye-opening question for me , because even just a few years ago, I'm pretty sure I would have answered yes. But the current toxic educational status quo and its foundation of Making People Prove They Know Things has forced me to really examine my thoughts in this area.
The issue breaks down into three parts for me.
I. The List
In the English teacher biz, we wrestle with The Canon all the time, and that master list is always a work in progress. If you're old enough, you can remember the struggle surrounding the recognition that we might want to expand beyond the traditional list of Dead White Guys, but there have been many mini-arguments over the years, none of which have been conclusively settled.
But that's content. What about skills? Well, we agree on reading-writing-speaking-listening in principle, but in English-land there's ongoing debate about the usefulness of knowing grammar, and the process of writing (which was only "discovered" in the last forty years or so) is still metamorphosing. And in most places, the speaking-listening piece is a haphazard Rube Goldberg stapled to the airborne seat of our pedagogical pants.
And that's just my field. Multiply that by every other discipline. Factor in all the parents and taxpayers who believe that What Kids Should Learn is roughly the same as What We Studied Back In My Day.
But I do believe there are things students should learn, don't I? I mean, how else do I make decisions about what I should teach (because in my district, I make many of those decisions myself)?
Turns out, when I think about it, what I really have is a list of Things I think It Would Benefit a Person To Know.
I think any person would be better off knowing some Shakespeare. I think every person would benefit from being able to express him/her-self as clearly as possible in writing and speaking. I think there's a giant cargo-ship-load of literature that has important and useful things to say to various people at various points in their journey through life.
But this is a fuzzy, individual thing. Think of it as food, the intellectual equivalent of food. Are there foods that everybody would benefit from eating? Wellll.... I would really enjoy a steak, but my wife the vegan would not. And given my physical condition, it might not be the best choice for me. On the other hand, if I haven't had any protein in a while, it might be great. And a salad might be nice, unless I already had a salad today, because eating a lot of salad has some unpleasant consequences for me. Oh, and I do enjoy a lobster, which is fairly healthy, unless I'm have to eat while I'm traveling-- lobster makes very bad road food in the car. You see our problem. We can agree that everybody should eat. I'm not sure we can pick a menu and declare that every single human being would benefit from eating exactly that food at exactly the same time.
Ditto for The List. I mean, I think everybody should learn stuff. Personally, I'm a generalist, so I think everybody would benefit from learning everything from Hamlet to quantum physics. But then, I know some people who have made the world a better place by being hard core specialists who know nothing about anything outside their field.
So if you ask me, can I name a list of skills and knowledge areas that every single solitary American must learn, I start to have trouble. Every mechanic, welder, astronaut, teacher, concert flautist, librarian, physicist, neurosurgeon, truck driver, airplane pilot, grocery clerk, elephant trainer, beer brewer, housewife, househusband, politician, dog catcher, cobbler, retail manager, tailor, dentist-- what exactly does every single one of those people have to know?
II. And Why?
Let's pretend there is a list. What is it for?
Do we want people to be more productive workers? Do we want them to be more responsible parents? Do we want them to be kinder, more decent human beings? Do we want them to be better citizens?
Then why aren't we trying to teach them those things?
One of the most bizarre disconnects in the current toxic ed status quo is the imaginary connections between disconnected things. We have to get students to score better on standardized tests, because that's how we'll become the economically dominant Earth nation. Ignoring for a moment the value of either of those goals, what the heck do they have to do with each other?
Reformsters are constantly telling us that we must drive to Cleveland because that's the only way we'll make it to St. Louis. If you want to drive to St. Louis, first, let's discuss whether we really want to go to St. Louis or not and next, if we agree, let's map a path to St. Louis, not Cleveland.
III. Enforcement
So even if I have my tiny list of things I think absolutely every person must learn, the small irreduceable list of content and skills that every educate person should know, I have another hurdle to climb.
Do I think the full force of law and government should stand behind forcing people to learn those things?
Should the federal and state governments say, "We think you should learn these things, and we will put the full weight of law behind that requirement. You will not be allowed to proceed with your life unless you satisfy us that you have learned the stuff on this list."
What is X such that I would stand in front of a diploma line and say, "Since you have not proven to me that you know X, I will not let you have a diploma."
"Don't you think there are things that every educated person should know?" seems like such a fair and simple question, but by the time I've come up with a short list of skills and knowledge for every single solitary human being, and then filtered it through the question of what deserves to have the full force of federal law behind it, my list is very short and extremely general.
Maybe you think that makes me one of those loose teachers who lets his students slop by with whatever half-assed work they feel like doing. You will have to take my word for it-- my students would find that assessment of my teaching pretty hilarious.
But The List approach is, in fact, List-centered, and I'm well-anchored to an approach to teaching that is student-centered. It is, I have become convinced, the only way to teach. We cannot be rules-centered or standards-centered or test-centered or teacher-centered or list-centered, even though we need to include and consider all of those elements. How to weigh and balance and evaluate all these elements? The answer has been, and continues to be, right in front of us. We balance all the elements of education by centering on the student. As long as we keep our focus on the students' needs, strengths, weaknesses, stage of development, hopes, dreams, obstacles, aspirations-- as long as we stay focused on all that, we'll be good.
What does every educated person need? Every educated person needs-- and deserves-- an education that is built around the student. Everything else must be open to discussion.
I hear this fairly often, generally in response to my stated disinterest in having Common Core standards in particular and national education standards ever in general. It's an eye-opening question for me , because even just a few years ago, I'm pretty sure I would have answered yes. But the current toxic educational status quo and its foundation of Making People Prove They Know Things has forced me to really examine my thoughts in this area.
The issue breaks down into three parts for me.
I. The List
In the English teacher biz, we wrestle with The Canon all the time, and that master list is always a work in progress. If you're old enough, you can remember the struggle surrounding the recognition that we might want to expand beyond the traditional list of Dead White Guys, but there have been many mini-arguments over the years, none of which have been conclusively settled.
But that's content. What about skills? Well, we agree on reading-writing-speaking-listening in principle, but in English-land there's ongoing debate about the usefulness of knowing grammar, and the process of writing (which was only "discovered" in the last forty years or so) is still metamorphosing. And in most places, the speaking-listening piece is a haphazard Rube Goldberg stapled to the airborne seat of our pedagogical pants.
And that's just my field. Multiply that by every other discipline. Factor in all the parents and taxpayers who believe that What Kids Should Learn is roughly the same as What We Studied Back In My Day.
But I do believe there are things students should learn, don't I? I mean, how else do I make decisions about what I should teach (because in my district, I make many of those decisions myself)?
Turns out, when I think about it, what I really have is a list of Things I think It Would Benefit a Person To Know.
I think any person would be better off knowing some Shakespeare. I think every person would benefit from being able to express him/her-self as clearly as possible in writing and speaking. I think there's a giant cargo-ship-load of literature that has important and useful things to say to various people at various points in their journey through life.
But this is a fuzzy, individual thing. Think of it as food, the intellectual equivalent of food. Are there foods that everybody would benefit from eating? Wellll.... I would really enjoy a steak, but my wife the vegan would not. And given my physical condition, it might not be the best choice for me. On the other hand, if I haven't had any protein in a while, it might be great. And a salad might be nice, unless I already had a salad today, because eating a lot of salad has some unpleasant consequences for me. Oh, and I do enjoy a lobster, which is fairly healthy, unless I'm have to eat while I'm traveling-- lobster makes very bad road food in the car. You see our problem. We can agree that everybody should eat. I'm not sure we can pick a menu and declare that every single human being would benefit from eating exactly that food at exactly the same time.
Ditto for The List. I mean, I think everybody should learn stuff. Personally, I'm a generalist, so I think everybody would benefit from learning everything from Hamlet to quantum physics. But then, I know some people who have made the world a better place by being hard core specialists who know nothing about anything outside their field.
So if you ask me, can I name a list of skills and knowledge areas that every single solitary American must learn, I start to have trouble. Every mechanic, welder, astronaut, teacher, concert flautist, librarian, physicist, neurosurgeon, truck driver, airplane pilot, grocery clerk, elephant trainer, beer brewer, housewife, househusband, politician, dog catcher, cobbler, retail manager, tailor, dentist-- what exactly does every single one of those people have to know?
II. And Why?
Let's pretend there is a list. What is it for?
Do we want people to be more productive workers? Do we want them to be more responsible parents? Do we want them to be kinder, more decent human beings? Do we want them to be better citizens?
Then why aren't we trying to teach them those things?
One of the most bizarre disconnects in the current toxic ed status quo is the imaginary connections between disconnected things. We have to get students to score better on standardized tests, because that's how we'll become the economically dominant Earth nation. Ignoring for a moment the value of either of those goals, what the heck do they have to do with each other?
Reformsters are constantly telling us that we must drive to Cleveland because that's the only way we'll make it to St. Louis. If you want to drive to St. Louis, first, let's discuss whether we really want to go to St. Louis or not and next, if we agree, let's map a path to St. Louis, not Cleveland.
III. Enforcement
So even if I have my tiny list of things I think absolutely every person must learn, the small irreduceable list of content and skills that every educate person should know, I have another hurdle to climb.
Do I think the full force of law and government should stand behind forcing people to learn those things?
Should the federal and state governments say, "We think you should learn these things, and we will put the full weight of law behind that requirement. You will not be allowed to proceed with your life unless you satisfy us that you have learned the stuff on this list."
What is X such that I would stand in front of a diploma line and say, "Since you have not proven to me that you know X, I will not let you have a diploma."
"Don't you think there are things that every educated person should know?" seems like such a fair and simple question, but by the time I've come up with a short list of skills and knowledge for every single solitary human being, and then filtered it through the question of what deserves to have the full force of federal law behind it, my list is very short and extremely general.
Maybe you think that makes me one of those loose teachers who lets his students slop by with whatever half-assed work they feel like doing. You will have to take my word for it-- my students would find that assessment of my teaching pretty hilarious.
But The List approach is, in fact, List-centered, and I'm well-anchored to an approach to teaching that is student-centered. It is, I have become convinced, the only way to teach. We cannot be rules-centered or standards-centered or test-centered or teacher-centered or list-centered, even though we need to include and consider all of those elements. How to weigh and balance and evaluate all these elements? The answer has been, and continues to be, right in front of us. We balance all the elements of education by centering on the student. As long as we keep our focus on the students' needs, strengths, weaknesses, stage of development, hopes, dreams, obstacles, aspirations-- as long as we stay focused on all that, we'll be good.
What does every educated person need? Every educated person needs-- and deserves-- an education that is built around the student. Everything else must be open to discussion.
Sunday, May 4, 2014
NY Explains Worst VAM Ever
A reader pointed me at an extraordinary piece of educational in-house PR from our good friends at engageNY*, the uber-reformy wing of the NYSED.It's extraordinary because, if accurate, it explains clearly and simply exactly how VAM-style evaluation can be made even worse.
Carol Newman-Sharkey linked me to this short informational video. You know it's going to be fun, because it's stylish cell animation (I'm a sucker for traditional art forms), and it actually turns out to be quite easy to understand, which makes it that much more terrible.
The video wants to explain New York's student growth measurement to teachers. It starts by reminding us of a True Thing-- that the system where we were judged on a student's single context-free score absolutely sucked. You remember those days under NCLB, where we all worried about receiving students whose limitations guaranteed that they would never have a sufficiently high score.
I mean, let's be honest-- when we started to hear about the idea of a growth model, a model that gave us credit for "growing" a student's ability instead of simply marking his level, most of us were pretty okay. Oh, but the devil in those damned details. We wanted more sensible measures of our work. Instead, we got VAM.
Here's how the video explains NY's system.
We look at Pat's score this year, and we compare it to Pat's score last year. Then we look at those pair of scores, and we compare the improvement only to other apples-- to other students who are just like Pat. That means students who got the same score last year, and who have the same characteristics on NYSED's list of characteristics.
Once we've set up the group of similar apples, it's just straight percentiles. If Pat scored better than 90 students in Pat's group, Pat's SGI is 90. And then we average all the SGIs in Pat's class to get a number for Pat's teacher. Actually, engageNY seriously muddies the water here by saying that Pat's score is 90% even though it's not actually a percent of anything. Of course, if I had created a system this dumb, I'd want to keep it hidden behind a big muddy cloud, too.
There are two stupid things happening here.
Stupid Thing #1.
Somewhere in some office in Ny is an official whose job it is to determine what makes students "similar." The video references learning disability, English language learner, and socio-economic background.
If we knew exactly which characteristics influenced student learning in exactly what way across all learners, would we not be using that information to create a perfect education system? If we could say, "Yes, this much poverty causes this much difficulty with learning exactly these skills," would we not be able to correct for this in regular teaching?
This phenomenon deserves its own post, but the short version is this: We keep building dumb systems on an assumption of a particular piece of knowledge where, if we actually HAD that knowledge, we would be using it for something other than the dumb system. If we really knew exactly how certain factors effect all student learning in pretty much the same way, the last thing we'd use the knowledge for is this dumb evaluation system.
Furthermore (what a great word-- you can just hear the high dudgeon in my voice), such a system of mapping student similarities is based only on solid-state steady characteristics. It factors in "Chris has poor parents" but not "Chris didn't get to eat for twenty-four hours before The Test" and certainly not "Something made Chris really upset on Test Day."
The assumption that we can map similar students by mapping all the pertinent factors that affect their education is a dumb assumption, but it is the same dumb assumption that lies at the core of ordinary VAM foolishness. To make SGI stand out, we need another brain-impaired cherry to put on top of the nincomboobulous sundae.
Stupid Thing #2
Do you know what percentiles are when you use them like this? Stack ranking.
Stack ranking 's most notable quality is that it requires winners and losers. You might think that teaching a classroom so effectively every single student grew and learned and excelled would be a Good Thing, but in New York, you would be wrong. In New York State, if 100 "similar" students find a cure for cancer, the student whose cure works most slowly has an Student Growth ranking of zero. If you teach 100 "similar" six year olds to read and write best-selling novels, the six year old whose novel comes in lowest on the NYT best-sellers list earns a student growth score of zero. Stack Ranking by percentile creates undeserving losers.
To be fair, it also creates undeserving winners. If 100 "similar" students all fail to learn anything from, say, the sort of canned and scripted curriculum favored by engagaNY, the student who displays test mastery of the greatest amount of the least amount will still by ranked 99%.
I suspect that engageNY will claim that these issues will be evened out by using student data from all across the state. I suspect my response would be, "What?! Where the students live is not one of the factors that makes them similar?"
The video is not new, so perhaps my work here is moot. Cooler NY heads have already said, "Yeah, that's messed up. Let's rewrite this and do better." Course, the video is still live on their website, so maybe not. I kind of wonder what John Q. Parent would think about this cartoon if he saw it.
(Incidentally, wikipedia doesn't have an entry for engageny. Perhaps some enterprising NY teacher could lend a hand.)
Carol Newman-Sharkey linked me to this short informational video. You know it's going to be fun, because it's stylish cell animation (I'm a sucker for traditional art forms), and it actually turns out to be quite easy to understand, which makes it that much more terrible.
The video wants to explain New York's student growth measurement to teachers. It starts by reminding us of a True Thing-- that the system where we were judged on a student's single context-free score absolutely sucked. You remember those days under NCLB, where we all worried about receiving students whose limitations guaranteed that they would never have a sufficiently high score.
I mean, let's be honest-- when we started to hear about the idea of a growth model, a model that gave us credit for "growing" a student's ability instead of simply marking his level, most of us were pretty okay. Oh, but the devil in those damned details. We wanted more sensible measures of our work. Instead, we got VAM.
Here's how the video explains NY's system.
We look at Pat's score this year, and we compare it to Pat's score last year. Then we look at those pair of scores, and we compare the improvement only to other apples-- to other students who are just like Pat. That means students who got the same score last year, and who have the same characteristics on NYSED's list of characteristics.
Once we've set up the group of similar apples, it's just straight percentiles. If Pat scored better than 90 students in Pat's group, Pat's SGI is 90. And then we average all the SGIs in Pat's class to get a number for Pat's teacher. Actually, engageNY seriously muddies the water here by saying that Pat's score is 90% even though it's not actually a percent of anything. Of course, if I had created a system this dumb, I'd want to keep it hidden behind a big muddy cloud, too.
There are two stupid things happening here.
Stupid Thing #1.
Somewhere in some office in Ny is an official whose job it is to determine what makes students "similar." The video references learning disability, English language learner, and socio-economic background.
If we knew exactly which characteristics influenced student learning in exactly what way across all learners, would we not be using that information to create a perfect education system? If we could say, "Yes, this much poverty causes this much difficulty with learning exactly these skills," would we not be able to correct for this in regular teaching?
This phenomenon deserves its own post, but the short version is this: We keep building dumb systems on an assumption of a particular piece of knowledge where, if we actually HAD that knowledge, we would be using it for something other than the dumb system. If we really knew exactly how certain factors effect all student learning in pretty much the same way, the last thing we'd use the knowledge for is this dumb evaluation system.
Furthermore (what a great word-- you can just hear the high dudgeon in my voice), such a system of mapping student similarities is based only on solid-state steady characteristics. It factors in "Chris has poor parents" but not "Chris didn't get to eat for twenty-four hours before The Test" and certainly not "Something made Chris really upset on Test Day."
The assumption that we can map similar students by mapping all the pertinent factors that affect their education is a dumb assumption, but it is the same dumb assumption that lies at the core of ordinary VAM foolishness. To make SGI stand out, we need another brain-impaired cherry to put on top of the nincomboobulous sundae.
Stupid Thing #2
Do you know what percentiles are when you use them like this? Stack ranking.
Stack ranking 's most notable quality is that it requires winners and losers. You might think that teaching a classroom so effectively every single student grew and learned and excelled would be a Good Thing, but in New York, you would be wrong. In New York State, if 100 "similar" students find a cure for cancer, the student whose cure works most slowly has an Student Growth ranking of zero. If you teach 100 "similar" six year olds to read and write best-selling novels, the six year old whose novel comes in lowest on the NYT best-sellers list earns a student growth score of zero. Stack Ranking by percentile creates undeserving losers.
To be fair, it also creates undeserving winners. If 100 "similar" students all fail to learn anything from, say, the sort of canned and scripted curriculum favored by engagaNY, the student who displays test mastery of the greatest amount of the least amount will still by ranked 99%.
I suspect that engageNY will claim that these issues will be evened out by using student data from all across the state. I suspect my response would be, "What?! Where the students live is not one of the factors that makes them similar?"
The video is not new, so perhaps my work here is moot. Cooler NY heads have already said, "Yeah, that's messed up. Let's rewrite this and do better." Course, the video is still live on their website, so maybe not. I kind of wonder what John Q. Parent would think about this cartoon if he saw it.
(Incidentally, wikipedia doesn't have an entry for engageny. Perhaps some enterprising NY teacher could lend a hand.)
A Real Race
My wife is a runner. I love my wife. That's why I woke up this morning at 4:45 in a Pittsburgh hotel.
We did this last year, but last year she ran the full marathon; this year she's a first-year first-grade teacher who lacks the time to train, to put in the 147 hours of prep required for six-year-olds, and to occasionally hang out with me. So this year she ran the half marathon instead.
I've been to many races to cheer and hold a coat, but the Pittsburgh Marathon is about the realest race I attend. And since some folks really like a race as a metaphor for the ed biz, I thought it was worth noting some of what I saw.
The marathon allows lots of different people to race in different ways. One of the most exciting moments comes before the runners start, because ahead of them are the "wheelchair" racers. These folks use recumbent hand-pedaled three-wheelers, and they get to go first because they move like bats out of hell. They take on the course with their own equipment and their own separate set of rules.
The marathon also includes a blind runner or two. These guys run with a partner, a sighted runner tethered to them wrist-to-wrist.
Don't they all run the same course? Well, no, they don't. The full marathoners and half marathoners start together, but along the way the fulls turn left and the halfs turn right and they each take their own route to the finish line, depending on what sort of challenge they have set for themselves.
Pace is wildly variable as well. At the front of the pack are people who run at speeds I don't even like to think about. But at the back of the pack are runners who will take half the day to finish. The city opens the streets up again behind the six hour pace, but runners are free to continue if they wish (just watch out for traffic) and as we left the city today, there were two determined runners still loping slowly up the sidewalk. It seemed clear that they would finish on their own terms, whatever time it took.
The race has roughly 30,000 entrants. You might think that this means there are 29,999 losers, but that doesn't seem to be how it works. True, there can be some tight competition-- this year's men's winner of the half-marathon won by two seconds. But every runner runs for reasons of his/her own. (You can look at all the reasons on twitter under #runfor.) And that means every runner has his or her own definition of success. My wife wanted to break two hours. My friend the choir director wanted to 1) finish and 2) not die. They were both successful and both came home feeling entirely winner-like. Because at this real race, your own definition of your own success, based on your own understanding of your own strengths, weaknesses and goals, is the only definition of success that matters.
So a racing metaphor like Race to the Top seems like it would be pretty clear cut-- everybody completes the same task on the same path to the same destination, and those racers are easily sorted into winners and losers, because to race means to subject yourself to the strict judgment of an outside authority. Simple and clean, cut and dried, macaroni and cheese, right? (Sorry-- rule of threes demanded something).
But when you're actually there, it turns out to be not so simple at all. For some it is the order in which they cross that finish line. Others race against themselves. For some it's just the journey, a rambling trip across bridge and river, through neighborhood after neighborhood, surrounded by music and beauty, cheered by friends and strangers-- the finish line is one of the least important parts of the race. The runners select the challenge they feel best fit to meet, train, practice, make the modifications they need to make, and enjoy an achievement of their own making-- and their own measuring.
I've written elsewhere that a race is a terrible metaphor for education. It's possible that I was wrong.
We did this last year, but last year she ran the full marathon; this year she's a first-year first-grade teacher who lacks the time to train, to put in the 147 hours of prep required for six-year-olds, and to occasionally hang out with me. So this year she ran the half marathon instead.
I've been to many races to cheer and hold a coat, but the Pittsburgh Marathon is about the realest race I attend. And since some folks really like a race as a metaphor for the ed biz, I thought it was worth noting some of what I saw.
The marathon allows lots of different people to race in different ways. One of the most exciting moments comes before the runners start, because ahead of them are the "wheelchair" racers. These folks use recumbent hand-pedaled three-wheelers, and they get to go first because they move like bats out of hell. They take on the course with their own equipment and their own separate set of rules.
The marathon also includes a blind runner or two. These guys run with a partner, a sighted runner tethered to them wrist-to-wrist.
Don't they all run the same course? Well, no, they don't. The full marathoners and half marathoners start together, but along the way the fulls turn left and the halfs turn right and they each take their own route to the finish line, depending on what sort of challenge they have set for themselves.
Pace is wildly variable as well. At the front of the pack are people who run at speeds I don't even like to think about. But at the back of the pack are runners who will take half the day to finish. The city opens the streets up again behind the six hour pace, but runners are free to continue if they wish (just watch out for traffic) and as we left the city today, there were two determined runners still loping slowly up the sidewalk. It seemed clear that they would finish on their own terms, whatever time it took.
The race has roughly 30,000 entrants. You might think that this means there are 29,999 losers, but that doesn't seem to be how it works. True, there can be some tight competition-- this year's men's winner of the half-marathon won by two seconds. But every runner runs for reasons of his/her own. (You can look at all the reasons on twitter under #runfor.) And that means every runner has his or her own definition of success. My wife wanted to break two hours. My friend the choir director wanted to 1) finish and 2) not die. They were both successful and both came home feeling entirely winner-like. Because at this real race, your own definition of your own success, based on your own understanding of your own strengths, weaknesses and goals, is the only definition of success that matters.
So a racing metaphor like Race to the Top seems like it would be pretty clear cut-- everybody completes the same task on the same path to the same destination, and those racers are easily sorted into winners and losers, because to race means to subject yourself to the strict judgment of an outside authority. Simple and clean, cut and dried, macaroni and cheese, right? (Sorry-- rule of threes demanded something).
But when you're actually there, it turns out to be not so simple at all. For some it is the order in which they cross that finish line. Others race against themselves. For some it's just the journey, a rambling trip across bridge and river, through neighborhood after neighborhood, surrounded by music and beauty, cheered by friends and strangers-- the finish line is one of the least important parts of the race. The runners select the challenge they feel best fit to meet, train, practice, make the modifications they need to make, and enjoy an achievement of their own making-- and their own measuring.
I've written elsewhere that a race is a terrible metaphor for education. It's possible that I was wrong.
Saturday, May 3, 2014
Not One Size Fits All
I often criticize the core (and other standards-- while I know some decent, intelligent people like the idea of some sort of national standards, I do not) by calling it a "one size fits all" solution.But I'm wrong.
It's a handy shorthand phrase-- just four words and everybody knows what you mean. But it's not precisely correct.
"One size fits all" imagines a world where tailors make suits in just one size. People come put on the suit-- the suit is too small or too large or not correctly shaped for them. So the tailor says, "Oh well, you'll just have to make do," and we have a world of people walking around in misshapen ill-fitting suits.
But that's not what's going on.
Imagine instead a world where the tailors only make suits in one size. One tall man comes in to try on the suit, and it's too short for him. "We will fix that," says the tailor, who pulls out a saw and cuts six inches out of the middle of the man's legs. Another man comes in who is, well, fluffy. The suit is tight. "You," says the tailor sternly, "you must go sit in the basement. You may not have a job or go out into the world until you fit in that suit." Another man comes in and he's too short. The tailor calls up the police, gives the man's address, and sends the police to arrest his mother for giving birth to a too-short man.
Education under a CCSS regime is not "one size fits all." It's "all must fit one size." It's not "We'll ty this on for size and if it doesn't fit, it sucks to be you." It's "You must fit this, or there will be consequences. You will be punished for not fitting what we made for you."
What is sold as "individualization" is not an offer to re-tailor the suit to fit, but a series of protocol for teaching tall customers how to slouch and fluffy customers to suck in their gut. Personalized education programs are not about adjusting the one size at all.
The CCSS is the worst kind of regime, the kind that views individual strengths and weaknesses and interests and skills as a problem to be fixed. We are not centered on the needs of the students; we are supposed to make the students serve the system, the standards, the test. We will not measure the success of education by how well it meets the students' needs; we'll now measure education by how well it makes the students adjust to the needs of the system.
"One size fits all" would actually be an improvement. What the CCSS regime offers is far worse.
It's a handy shorthand phrase-- just four words and everybody knows what you mean. But it's not precisely correct.
"One size fits all" imagines a world where tailors make suits in just one size. People come put on the suit-- the suit is too small or too large or not correctly shaped for them. So the tailor says, "Oh well, you'll just have to make do," and we have a world of people walking around in misshapen ill-fitting suits.
But that's not what's going on.
Imagine instead a world where the tailors only make suits in one size. One tall man comes in to try on the suit, and it's too short for him. "We will fix that," says the tailor, who pulls out a saw and cuts six inches out of the middle of the man's legs. Another man comes in who is, well, fluffy. The suit is tight. "You," says the tailor sternly, "you must go sit in the basement. You may not have a job or go out into the world until you fit in that suit." Another man comes in and he's too short. The tailor calls up the police, gives the man's address, and sends the police to arrest his mother for giving birth to a too-short man.
Education under a CCSS regime is not "one size fits all." It's "all must fit one size." It's not "We'll ty this on for size and if it doesn't fit, it sucks to be you." It's "You must fit this, or there will be consequences. You will be punished for not fitting what we made for you."
What is sold as "individualization" is not an offer to re-tailor the suit to fit, but a series of protocol for teaching tall customers how to slouch and fluffy customers to suck in their gut. Personalized education programs are not about adjusting the one size at all.
The CCSS is the worst kind of regime, the kind that views individual strengths and weaknesses and interests and skills as a problem to be fixed. We are not centered on the needs of the students; we are supposed to make the students serve the system, the standards, the test. We will not measure the success of education by how well it meets the students' needs; we'll now measure education by how well it makes the students adjust to the needs of the system.
"One size fits all" would actually be an improvement. What the CCSS regime offers is far worse.
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