Andy Smarick has continued his series of meditations on how modern education reform and classic conservatism have fallen out of alignment. It's a thoughtful series and worth exploring, but I found his latest particularly striking.
In "Ed reform's blind spot: Catholic schools and social capital" Smarick considers once more the question of what conservatives should want to preserve, and he focuses particularly on social capital.
Social capital describes the “benefits that flow from the trust, reciprocity, information, and cooperation associated with social networks.”
When people are connected, they (and even those outside the network)
gain, thanks to sharing, interdependence, joint learning, collective
action, solidarity, and more.
In case you're not a link-follower, I'll note that the first link leads to Bowling Alone, one of the more indispensable examinations of social connections in our world. Kudos for that reference.
Smarick uses the concept of social capital mostly to talk about Catholic schools, and how they exert a positive influence on neighborhoods stricken by poverty. That reminds me of John Hopkins' longitudinal study in Baltimore; the headline on that study was that family and money are destiny, but it also suggests that neighborhood (not entirely disconnected form the other two) is destiny as well.
But it also resonates for me in the context of my own corner of the world. In fact, I think that in small town and rural areas like mine, the social capital aspect of the schools may be the aspect that folks value most.
I live in an area where High School of Origin is still considered important information about grown adults. It's an area where school sports are a Big Deal, a source of identity and community pride. I live in a county where four separate school districts serve a shrinking student population. My own district and the closest neighbor system now serve fewer students together than my own district held by itself just twenty years ago. We now share sports teams, marching bands, and school play programs. But nobody thinks a merger is going to happen any time soon, and I could explain that by saying that the residents, particularly in the smaller district, do not want to sacrifice the generations of social capital they have invested in their schools.
Districts also find, over and over, that a simple appeal to economic reality, however harsh, rarely moves residents and taxpayers to shut down a school. My district, like many others, has had to essentially confront the question: "How much is this social capital worth to you in cold, hard tax dollars?" The answer repeatedly turns out to be, "A great deal."
Smarick is correct to note that many reformsters have completely disregarded social capital invested in local schools, as well as the real world benefits that come from it. Reformsters and privatizers might do well to consider the issue of how little social capital (which takes considerable time to gather) is invested in shiny new charters, particularly those charters which are not tied to any particular neighborhood.
I've noted before that I find it strange for conservatives to chime in with the idea that students should not be "trapped" by their zip codes or neighborhoods. There is a strength and value and wealth of social capital that comes from having a school rooted in a particular place. It should not be lightly discarded. Heritage, history, community, connection-- these sorts of things have value. "Social capital" and the research that measures its effect just put a scientific face on a human value that many people already recognized.
Social capital doesn't just have implications for Cathoilic schools, but for public schools. It has implications for staffing as well-- longevity matters, and builds more capital.
Smarick wraps up with a striking and apt image:
Those who cleared old, messy “swamps” to make room for modern
development severely damaged ecosystems. Those who cleared old, eyesore
“slums” to make room for shiny, new public housing high-rises severely
damaged communities.
This is education reform as nature conservation, focusing not on what they want to plow under, but on what should be preserved and saved. I think plenty of folks understand that urge to conserve instinctively, and I think social capital represents a huge investment that people have been loathe to sacrifice just for a few untested and allegedly magic beans. Reformsters often come across as the guys with the big bulldozers who want to pave the swamp, get rid of the noisy birds, kill off the annoying animals, and replace the plants with longlasting perfect plastic flowers. Reformsters seem to think of themselves as men of vision, but there is a whole world of value that they seem to be blind to.
Wednesday, October 8, 2014
SAT: Going Nowhere Fast
The latest news from the College Board folks has been widely published since being released (see here and here). The lede in most cases is that SAT performance is flat, followed by breathless concern that not enough students are taking advantage of opportunities to be college and career ready (which seems to mean, generally, that they aren't consuming enough of the College Board product line).
Three thoughts here:
One. What other corporation in America does such a good job spinning its marketing reports as legitimate news?
Seriously. If Ford has a drop in sales, they don't manage to get writers across America to wax rhapsodic about the state of automotive transportation, or decry the gap that leaves so many people without a vehicle. And they certainly don't get writers to talk about Ford as if it were the only company producing cars.
But somehow every time the College Board makes another bid for more market share, it's treated as a referendum on the State of American Education. I'll give David Coleman this-- he and his people sure know how to sell shit.
Two. Do you mean to tell me that after the years of Common Core high stakes corporate education reformster baloney, SAT scores haven't gone up??!! Are you saying that a product which markets itself as the premiere arbiter of college readiness says that our students are no more college ready than they used to be? You mean to say that Common Core didn't fix everything??!! I'm shocked. Shocked!!
It's particularly notable that coverage has studiously avoided mentioning that David Coleman, College Board Head Honcho, is also David Coleman, Common Core Architect. In fine government-revolving-door style he has positioned himself to profit from his own regulatory work, and yet, nothing has budged. Both the test results and the SAT market share are stuck.
Three. Corporate baloney. Cyndie Schmeiser, College Board chief of assessment, declares the low performance level "a critically low level" that cannot be tolerated. The whole release this time ties together all the College Board products, with reports on the PSAT and AP classes.
Why put it all together? Nick Anderson at the Washington Post suggests that the College Board is trying to transfer some of the sheen of their better-performing products onto the flailing and failing SAT, which is now the nation's number TWO college entrance exam (though you would not know that from any of the "coverage" we're seeing).
This fits the CB overall plan, which has featured ideas like using PSATs to generate AP "recommendations" sent directly to parents to try to create some market pressure. Coleman repeats his mantra that we don't need more tests-- we need more opportunities. And by "opportunities" we mean "opportunities to give the College Board money."
It reminds me that David Coleman's College Board career is an odd second act, his previous work writ small. Pretend to be trying to launch a movement rooted in social justice and educational opportunity when you're really just a corporate marketer, shilling for a product and a profit.
Three thoughts here:
One. What other corporation in America does such a good job spinning its marketing reports as legitimate news?
Seriously. If Ford has a drop in sales, they don't manage to get writers across America to wax rhapsodic about the state of automotive transportation, or decry the gap that leaves so many people without a vehicle. And they certainly don't get writers to talk about Ford as if it were the only company producing cars.
But somehow every time the College Board makes another bid for more market share, it's treated as a referendum on the State of American Education. I'll give David Coleman this-- he and his people sure know how to sell shit.
Two. Do you mean to tell me that after the years of Common Core high stakes corporate education reformster baloney, SAT scores haven't gone up??!! Are you saying that a product which markets itself as the premiere arbiter of college readiness says that our students are no more college ready than they used to be? You mean to say that Common Core didn't fix everything??!! I'm shocked. Shocked!!
It's particularly notable that coverage has studiously avoided mentioning that David Coleman, College Board Head Honcho, is also David Coleman, Common Core Architect. In fine government-revolving-door style he has positioned himself to profit from his own regulatory work, and yet, nothing has budged. Both the test results and the SAT market share are stuck.
Three. Corporate baloney. Cyndie Schmeiser, College Board chief of assessment, declares the low performance level "a critically low level" that cannot be tolerated. The whole release this time ties together all the College Board products, with reports on the PSAT and AP classes.
Why put it all together? Nick Anderson at the Washington Post suggests that the College Board is trying to transfer some of the sheen of their better-performing products onto the flailing and failing SAT, which is now the nation's number TWO college entrance exam (though you would not know that from any of the "coverage" we're seeing).
This fits the CB overall plan, which has featured ideas like using PSATs to generate AP "recommendations" sent directly to parents to try to create some market pressure. Coleman repeats his mantra that we don't need more tests-- we need more opportunities. And by "opportunities" we mean "opportunities to give the College Board money."
It reminds me that David Coleman's College Board career is an odd second act, his previous work writ small. Pretend to be trying to launch a movement rooted in social justice and educational opportunity when you're really just a corporate marketer, shilling for a product and a profit.
Tuesday, October 7, 2014
High Stakes Demand Perfection
Over at Parenting the Core, we find yet another tale pf a Pearson screw-up.
It is not a huge screw-up. It's not even an incomprehensible screw-up. It's just one answer for one problem in one math assignment. But Sarah Blaine correctly notes all the reasons it matters.
If this had been The Big Test instead of a small assignment, the parent would never have seen the wrong answer. The teacher would never have had a chance to correct the wrong answer. And nobody would have a chance to fix the results of the wrong answer.
High stakes demand perfection. If a series of questions is going to decide a child's educational future, that series of questions had better be perfectly designed and flawlessly scored. If Pearson wants to exert this kind of control over all the students in the marketplace, they need a policy of Zero Defects for every one of their testing products.
If they cannot achieve perfection, I'm not going to ding them for that because, as far as I know, they are human beings. But if they cannot perfection, then they must have transparency. There must be a means for teachers and parents and students to check their work, to say, "This answer that just shunted my child into a nightmare world of retesting and remediation is incorrect."
If you want to play for high stakes, you have to be playing on a playing field that is not only level, but immaculately groomed and free from all dips and lumps and gopher holes.
The irony here is that while students and teachers and parents are testing for high stakes, Pearson is not working for high stakes at all. They will continue to make mistakes and it won't cost them a thing.
So I get Blaine's annoyance. The mistake on her daughter's work is small, and I wouldn't want to live in a world where a company and its employees are crushed over a small simple error. But the mistake is just one more example of how Pearson handles its business. And I also do not want to live in a world where students and teachers must have their fate resting in the hands of a company that doesn't know how to handle its business.
It is not a huge screw-up. It's not even an incomprehensible screw-up. It's just one answer for one problem in one math assignment. But Sarah Blaine correctly notes all the reasons it matters.
If this had been The Big Test instead of a small assignment, the parent would never have seen the wrong answer. The teacher would never have had a chance to correct the wrong answer. And nobody would have a chance to fix the results of the wrong answer.
High stakes demand perfection. If a series of questions is going to decide a child's educational future, that series of questions had better be perfectly designed and flawlessly scored. If Pearson wants to exert this kind of control over all the students in the marketplace, they need a policy of Zero Defects for every one of their testing products.
If they cannot achieve perfection, I'm not going to ding them for that because, as far as I know, they are human beings. But if they cannot perfection, then they must have transparency. There must be a means for teachers and parents and students to check their work, to say, "This answer that just shunted my child into a nightmare world of retesting and remediation is incorrect."
If you want to play for high stakes, you have to be playing on a playing field that is not only level, but immaculately groomed and free from all dips and lumps and gopher holes.
The irony here is that while students and teachers and parents are testing for high stakes, Pearson is not working for high stakes at all. They will continue to make mistakes and it won't cost them a thing.
So I get Blaine's annoyance. The mistake on her daughter's work is small, and I wouldn't want to live in a world where a company and its employees are crushed over a small simple error. But the mistake is just one more example of how Pearson handles its business. And I also do not want to live in a world where students and teachers must have their fate resting in the hands of a company that doesn't know how to handle its business.
Charters Want More Money
Charter fans have long argued that charter schools can be more economically efficient and consequently spend less taxpayer dollar for greater effect.
Despite the modern charter habit of burning and churning staff to keep personnel down and shedding any students who would be more costly to educate, charters are still not likely to deliver on their financial promise. But that really doesn't matter, because the promise of tax savings with charter schools was just the bait-- and here comes the switch.
In both New York and DC, charter schools are suing for more money. The New York lawsuit has been filed by a coalition of charter schools using some charter parents for cover. Their claim is that they are systematically underfunded, thereby denying charter students their constitutional right to "sound basic education." The DC lawsuit follows a similar tack.
The feds are positioning themselves to back the charters on these suits, once again using the administration's reasoning that education is a civil rights issue, and therefor the Office for Civil Rights gets to throw its weight around. A 37-page letter from that office dated October 1st lays out the case for suing districts that have not provided sufficient resources to schools. The DC lawsuit appeared this summer, and the New York suit in mid-September-- draw what conclusion from that you like. The OCR letter is painful in its detail; the mockable line is the one that covers adequate lighting as a suitworthy issue. But as Mike Petrilli noted over at Fordham's blog, this letter sends a pretty clear signal about which way the federal wind is blowing-- the feds want to make sure that all schools, including (especially?) charters, are getting a full slice of pie.
So here comes the switch. We pitched charter schools as more economical, more efficient, lower-cost alternatives. Now that we've got them up and running, we want more money. This is simply a continuation of the policy goal, adored and nurtured from corporate boardrooms to federal offices-- the policy goal of shoving public schools aside and replacing them with charter schools. I don't imagine that public schools will ever be completely done away with, because the charters will need some place to send the students that they refuse to educate, but those public schools will be stripped of resources and filled with the students that nobody wants.
It is really one of the oldest business tricks in the book, used by everyone from John D. Rockefeller to Jeff Bezos-- undercut your competition, and once you've bled them dry, boost your price as much as the market will bear. Charters just refine the technique by having federal and state government serve as the vampiric mechanism by which the competition is sucked dry.
Why shouldn't charters be as fully funded as public schools (yes, yes, yes, I know-- charters are public schools on days they want to be)?
1) They sold us on expanding their reach with the pitch that they didn't need to be as fully funded.
2) They aren't doing a public school's job. They aren't serving the same populations, and they long since stopped pretending that they were offering some sort of unique services. I've laid out the conditions under which I support charters-- if they want to meet those standards, I'll support them.
Despite the modern charter habit of burning and churning staff to keep personnel down and shedding any students who would be more costly to educate, charters are still not likely to deliver on their financial promise. But that really doesn't matter, because the promise of tax savings with charter schools was just the bait-- and here comes the switch.
In both New York and DC, charter schools are suing for more money. The New York lawsuit has been filed by a coalition of charter schools using some charter parents for cover. Their claim is that they are systematically underfunded, thereby denying charter students their constitutional right to "sound basic education." The DC lawsuit follows a similar tack.
The feds are positioning themselves to back the charters on these suits, once again using the administration's reasoning that education is a civil rights issue, and therefor the Office for Civil Rights gets to throw its weight around. A 37-page letter from that office dated October 1st lays out the case for suing districts that have not provided sufficient resources to schools. The DC lawsuit appeared this summer, and the New York suit in mid-September-- draw what conclusion from that you like. The OCR letter is painful in its detail; the mockable line is the one that covers adequate lighting as a suitworthy issue. But as Mike Petrilli noted over at Fordham's blog, this letter sends a pretty clear signal about which way the federal wind is blowing-- the feds want to make sure that all schools, including (especially?) charters, are getting a full slice of pie.
So here comes the switch. We pitched charter schools as more economical, more efficient, lower-cost alternatives. Now that we've got them up and running, we want more money. This is simply a continuation of the policy goal, adored and nurtured from corporate boardrooms to federal offices-- the policy goal of shoving public schools aside and replacing them with charter schools. I don't imagine that public schools will ever be completely done away with, because the charters will need some place to send the students that they refuse to educate, but those public schools will be stripped of resources and filled with the students that nobody wants.
It is really one of the oldest business tricks in the book, used by everyone from John D. Rockefeller to Jeff Bezos-- undercut your competition, and once you've bled them dry, boost your price as much as the market will bear. Charters just refine the technique by having federal and state government serve as the vampiric mechanism by which the competition is sucked dry.
Why shouldn't charters be as fully funded as public schools (yes, yes, yes, I know-- charters are public schools on days they want to be)?
1) They sold us on expanding their reach with the pitch that they didn't need to be as fully funded.
2) They aren't doing a public school's job. They aren't serving the same populations, and they long since stopped pretending that they were offering some sort of unique services. I've laid out the conditions under which I support charters-- if they want to meet those standards, I'll support them.
Monday, October 6, 2014
Network for Public Education Makes History Saturday
This coming Saturday, the Network for Public Education will present an event this coming Saturday that represents a new sort of end run around money, power and media. PUBLIC Education Nation (October 11), is an answer to events such as NBC's Education Nation, the biggest, slickest, most nausea-inducing infomercial for reformsters one could ever hope to see.
It's one of the great challenges we face. How do people who don't have the ear of the media, who don't have twelve million dollars to set up an agitprop website, who make their living doing something other than pushing a political agenda-- how do those people get their message heard?
The answer is-- on the internet.
On Saturday, starting at noon, there will be a live event in the auditorium of the Brooklyn New School, featuring four panels:
Testing and the Common Core: New York Principal of the Year Carol Burris will lead a discussion with educators Takeima Bunche-Smith, Rosa Rivera-McCutchen and Alan Aja.
Support Our Schools, Don’t Close Them: Chicago teacher Xian Barrett will moderate a panel featuring education professor Yohuru Williams, Hiram Rivera of the Philadelphia Student Union, and a representative of the Newark Student Union.
Charter Schools: North Carolina writer and activist Jeff Bryant will host a discussion that will include New Orleans parent activist Karran Harper Royal, New York teacher and blogger Gary Rubinstein, and Connecticut writer and activist Wendy Lecker.
Authentic Reform Success Stories: The fourth panel will be led by Network for Public Education executive director Robin Hiller and will include New York teacher and activist Brian Jones, and author of Beyond the Education Wars: Evidence That Collaboration Builds Effective Schools, Greg Anrig.
Diane Ravitch and Jitu Brown, In Conversation: The event will finish off with a conversation between leading community activist Jitu Brown and Diane Ravitch, who will talk about where we are in building a movement for real improvement in our schools.
There are some great names here, and subjects well worth discussing. There is clearly an agenda for solutions, not just complaining about reformster baloney.
Anybody connected to the internet can watch a live stream of the event. And if you would like to help with the costs, you can follow this link to the NPE website and contribute by way of paypal. So make your contribution, mark your calendar, check your internet hookup, and plan to be part of a historic and informative event. It is possible to be heard, to connect, and to get the word out, even if NBC isn't interested in doing it.
Should We Treat Teachers Like Software Engineers?
At TechCrunch, David Liu suggests the answer is "Yes."
That's kind of wacky, because Liu is the COO at Knewton, a data crunching wing of Pearson and previously notorious for imagining that data overlords could tell you what to have for breakfast on testing days. But Liu is a global data cruncher, and he wants to bring some of that globalism to the discussion.
Liu starts out with a perfunctory nod to one year's worth of PISA scores to suggest that it seems the US is falling behind (pro tip-- when charting "trends," more than one data point is useful). He recently spent some time in Korea and Japan, and that got him to thinking. He notes that those nations have super-duper PISA scores, and so he concludes, "Maybe we should only give PISA tests to our best students."
Ha ha. No, just kidding. He's going a whole other direction here.
It’s obvious that Korea and Japan both value education enormously. But so does the United States. We regard education as a basic human right.
Do we? Do we really? Is that why we have billionaire industrialists saying they can't stand to watch underfunded schools another second, so they're going to pay more taxes to help properly fund them? Or is that why we have hedge fund managers and their friends getting into the school biz in order t9o make a bundle of loot, and facilitating their marketing by booting out students who are too difficult or costly to teach? But hey-- let's move on.
So why is there a great test result discrepancy?
Some say it’s cultural. In America, we prize exceptionalism; in Korea and Japan, the focus is on raising the mean. Others point to socioeconomic inequality; schools can’t fix poverty. American K-12 education is controlled at the local level, making it difficult to implement programs widely. We’re paralyzed by politicized debates over standards, testing, and budgets.
We've heard that last one from technocrats before-- democracy is messy and slow and that's by and large because we let everybody have a voice when clearly some people just don't deserve to have a voice. In which case Korea would look pretty good to them (particularly the Northern one, although South Korea is a rather crappy place for teachers as well). Liu skips over the possibility that the testing instrument is a lousy, or that not everybody tests the same population. Instead, he lands on this:
But I think there’s something more important at play here: the way we treat teachers. In Korea and Japan, teachers are revered and paid accordingly. Top students aspire to the profession.
And then this...
In Korea and Japan, teachers are paid in accordance with their stature in society.A 2012 study found a correlation between higher teacher pay and improved student outcomes. Korea and Japan were at the top of the spectrum for both.
The study in question deserves its own dissection, but we can sail right past that to the larger question-- how can a guy who is the flipping COO of a major data corporation NOT know the difference between correlation and causation. I invite him to check out this awesome website, where we learn, among other things, that there is a correlation between people who die falling into swimming pools and the number of movies Nicolas Cage appeared in.
I mean, I am just a teacher, but it seems fairly clear to me that if a culture really values education, they spend a lot of money on it, including teacher salary money.
But do not give up on Liu yet, because he actually has some more useful observations in his article.
He gets points for the oft-noted but worth-repeating observation that teachers in the US, Japan and Korea work about the same number of hours, but that Japanese and Korean teachers spend far fewer of those hours in a classroom, whereas in the US, our default assumption is a teacher who's not in front of a classroom is slacking off, and we should get teachers in front of students as close to 100% of the time as we can get.
Liu argues for career paths for teachers, particularly creating roles for master teachers to mentor and lead. This was always a good idea, back before reformsters grabbed onto it as a way to cut staffing costs. Liu may or may not be imagining the reformster version of master teaching, but he definitely missed the memo on Burn and Churn. Several of his arguments come down to "good for retention."
The first step is providing teachers with the support they need: competitive compensation, growth opportunities, well-equipped schools, and enough time. Today, almost half of American teachersleave the classroom within their first five years of teaching. No industry can endure that kind of turnover and not suffer from it.
He doesn't really need to argue for software engineer style rock star status. All he's really saying is, "Treat teachers like valuable high-skills, hard-to-replace employees." Who ever expected that there would come a time when that simple piece of business common sense would be a radical idea?
That's kind of wacky, because Liu is the COO at Knewton, a data crunching wing of Pearson and previously notorious for imagining that data overlords could tell you what to have for breakfast on testing days. But Liu is a global data cruncher, and he wants to bring some of that globalism to the discussion.
Liu starts out with a perfunctory nod to one year's worth of PISA scores to suggest that it seems the US is falling behind (pro tip-- when charting "trends," more than one data point is useful). He recently spent some time in Korea and Japan, and that got him to thinking. He notes that those nations have super-duper PISA scores, and so he concludes, "Maybe we should only give PISA tests to our best students."
Ha ha. No, just kidding. He's going a whole other direction here.
It’s obvious that Korea and Japan both value education enormously. But so does the United States. We regard education as a basic human right.
Do we? Do we really? Is that why we have billionaire industrialists saying they can't stand to watch underfunded schools another second, so they're going to pay more taxes to help properly fund them? Or is that why we have hedge fund managers and their friends getting into the school biz in order t9o make a bundle of loot, and facilitating their marketing by booting out students who are too difficult or costly to teach? But hey-- let's move on.
So why is there a great test result discrepancy?
Some say it’s cultural. In America, we prize exceptionalism; in Korea and Japan, the focus is on raising the mean. Others point to socioeconomic inequality; schools can’t fix poverty. American K-12 education is controlled at the local level, making it difficult to implement programs widely. We’re paralyzed by politicized debates over standards, testing, and budgets.
We've heard that last one from technocrats before-- democracy is messy and slow and that's by and large because we let everybody have a voice when clearly some people just don't deserve to have a voice. In which case Korea would look pretty good to them (particularly the Northern one, although South Korea is a rather crappy place for teachers as well). Liu skips over the possibility that the testing instrument is a lousy, or that not everybody tests the same population. Instead, he lands on this:
But I think there’s something more important at play here: the way we treat teachers. In Korea and Japan, teachers are revered and paid accordingly. Top students aspire to the profession.
And then this...
In Korea and Japan, teachers are paid in accordance with their stature in society.A 2012 study found a correlation between higher teacher pay and improved student outcomes. Korea and Japan were at the top of the spectrum for both.
The study in question deserves its own dissection, but we can sail right past that to the larger question-- how can a guy who is the flipping COO of a major data corporation NOT know the difference between correlation and causation. I invite him to check out this awesome website, where we learn, among other things, that there is a correlation between people who die falling into swimming pools and the number of movies Nicolas Cage appeared in.
I mean, I am just a teacher, but it seems fairly clear to me that if a culture really values education, they spend a lot of money on it, including teacher salary money.
But do not give up on Liu yet, because he actually has some more useful observations in his article.
He gets points for the oft-noted but worth-repeating observation that teachers in the US, Japan and Korea work about the same number of hours, but that Japanese and Korean teachers spend far fewer of those hours in a classroom, whereas in the US, our default assumption is a teacher who's not in front of a classroom is slacking off, and we should get teachers in front of students as close to 100% of the time as we can get.
Liu argues for career paths for teachers, particularly creating roles for master teachers to mentor and lead. This was always a good idea, back before reformsters grabbed onto it as a way to cut staffing costs. Liu may or may not be imagining the reformster version of master teaching, but he definitely missed the memo on Burn and Churn. Several of his arguments come down to "good for retention."
The first step is providing teachers with the support they need: competitive compensation, growth opportunities, well-equipped schools, and enough time. Today, almost half of American teachersleave the classroom within their first five years of teaching. No industry can endure that kind of turnover and not suffer from it.
He doesn't really need to argue for software engineer style rock star status. All he's really saying is, "Treat teachers like valuable high-skills, hard-to-replace employees." Who ever expected that there would come a time when that simple piece of business common sense would be a radical idea?
Depth of Knowledge? You'll Need Hip Boots.
Have you met Webb's Depth of Knowledge in all its reformy goodness. I just spent a couple of blood pressure-elevating hours with it. Here's the scoop.
In Pennsylvania, our state department of education has Intermediate Units which are basically regional offices for the department. The IU's do some useful work, but they are also the mechanism by which the state pumps the Kool-Aid of the Week out into local districts.
Today my district hosted a pair of IU ladies today (IU reps are typically people who tried classroom teaching on for size and decided to move on to other things). As a courtesy, I'll refer to them as Bert and Ernie, because one was shorter are chirpier and the other has a taller frame and a lower voice. I've actually sat through DOK training before, but this was a bit clearer and direct (but not in a good way).
Why bother with DOK?
Bert and Ernie cleared this up right away. Here's what was written on one of the first slides in the presentation:
It's not fair to students if the first time they see a Depth of Knowledge 2 or 3 question is on a state test (PSSA or Keystone).
In other words, DOK is test prep.
Ernie showed us a pie chart breaking down the share of DOK 2 and 3 questions. She asked how we thought the state will assess DOK 4 questions? Someone went with the obvious "on the test" answer, and Ernie said no, that since DOK 4 questions take time, the Test "unfortunately" could not do that.
There was never any other reason. Bert and Ernie did not even attempt to pretend to make a case that attending to DOK would help students in life, aid their understand, or even improve their learning. This is test prep.
Where did it come from?
Webb (it's a person, not a piece of jargon) developed his DOK stuff in some sort of conjunction with CCSSO. Ernie read out what the initials stand for and then said without a trace of irony, as God is my witness, "They sound like real important people, so we should trust them." She did not mention their connection to the Common Core which, given the huge amount of CCSS love that was going to be thrown around, seems like an odd oversight. The presenters did show us a graphic reminding us that standards, curriculum, and assessments are tied together like the great circle of life. So there's that.
How does it work?
This turned out to be the Great White Whale of the morning. We watched two videos from the Teacher Channel that showed well-managed dog and pony shows in classrooms. Bert noted that she really liked how the students didn't react to or for the camera. You know how you get that? By having them spend lots of time in front of the cameras, say, rehearsing their stuff over and over.
The first grade class was pretty impressive, but it also only had ten children in it. One of my colleagues asked if the techniques can be used in classes with more than ten students (aka, classes in the real world) and that opened up an interesting side note. The duo noted that the key here is routine and expectations, and that you need to spend the first few weeks of school hammering in your classroom routines so that you could manage more work. One teacher in the crowd noted that this would be easier if all teachers had the same expectations (apparently we were all afraid to use the word "rules") and Ernie allowed as how having set expectations and routines from K through the upper grades would make all of this work much better. "Wouldn't it be lovely?" she said.
Because when you've got a system that doesn't work very well with real, live children, the solution is to regiment the children and put them in lockstep. If the system and the childron don't mesh well-- change the children.
Increasing rigor!
You might have thought this section would come with a definition of that illusive magical quality, but no. We still can't really explain what it is, but we know that we can increase rigor by ramping up content or task or both.
We had some examples, but that brought up another unsolved mystery of the day. "Explain where you live" (DOK 1) ramped its way up to "Explain why your city is better than these other cities" (DOK 3). One of my colleagues observed that this was not only a change in rigor, but a complete change of the task and content at hand. Bert hemmed and hawed and did that little I Will Talk To You Later But For Right Now Let's Agree To Ignore Your Point dance, and no answer ever appeared.
So if you are designing a lesson, "List the names of the planets" might be a DOK 1 question, but a good DOK 3 question for that same lesson might be "Compare and contrast Shakespeare's treatment of female characters in three of his tragedies."
Audience participation
Bert and Ernie lost most of the crowd pretty early on, and by the time we arrived at the audience participation portion (two hours later), the audience seemed to have largely checked out. This would have been an interesting time for them to demonstrate how to handle a class when your plan is bombing and your class is disengaged and checked out, but they went with Pretending Everything Is Going Swell.
The audience participation section highlighted just how squishy Depth of Knowledge is. Bert and Ernie consigned all vocabulary-related activities to Level 1, because "you know the definition or you don't." That's fairly representative of how test creators seem to think, but it is such a stunted version of language use, the mind reels. Yes, words have definitions. But there's a reason that centuries of poetry and song lyric that all basically mean, "I would like to have the sex with you," have impressed women far more than simply saying "I would like to have the sex with you."
There's a lot of this in DOK, a lot of just blithely saying, "Well, this is what was going on in the person's brain when they did this, so this is the level we'll assign this task."
DOK's big weakness
DOK is not total crap. There are some ideas in there that can lead to some useful thinking about thinking. And if you set it side by side with the venerable Bloom's, it can get your brain working in the same way that Bloom's used to.
But like all test prep activities, DOK does not set out to teach students any useful habits of mind. It is not intended to educate; it is intended to train students to respond to certain sorts of tasks in a particular manner. This is not about education and learning; this is about training and compliance. It's a useful window into the minds of the people who are writing test items for the Big Test, if you're concerned about your students' test scores. If you're interested in education, this may not be the best use of your morning.
In Pennsylvania, our state department of education has Intermediate Units which are basically regional offices for the department. The IU's do some useful work, but they are also the mechanism by which the state pumps the Kool-Aid of the Week out into local districts.
Today my district hosted a pair of IU ladies today (IU reps are typically people who tried classroom teaching on for size and decided to move on to other things). As a courtesy, I'll refer to them as Bert and Ernie, because one was shorter are chirpier and the other has a taller frame and a lower voice. I've actually sat through DOK training before, but this was a bit clearer and direct (but not in a good way).
Why bother with DOK?
Bert and Ernie cleared this up right away. Here's what was written on one of the first slides in the presentation:
It's not fair to students if the first time they see a Depth of Knowledge 2 or 3 question is on a state test (PSSA or Keystone).
In other words, DOK is test prep.
Ernie showed us a pie chart breaking down the share of DOK 2 and 3 questions. She asked how we thought the state will assess DOK 4 questions? Someone went with the obvious "on the test" answer, and Ernie said no, that since DOK 4 questions take time, the Test "unfortunately" could not do that.
There was never any other reason. Bert and Ernie did not even attempt to pretend to make a case that attending to DOK would help students in life, aid their understand, or even improve their learning. This is test prep.
Where did it come from?
Webb (it's a person, not a piece of jargon) developed his DOK stuff in some sort of conjunction with CCSSO. Ernie read out what the initials stand for and then said without a trace of irony, as God is my witness, "They sound like real important people, so we should trust them." She did not mention their connection to the Common Core which, given the huge amount of CCSS love that was going to be thrown around, seems like an odd oversight. The presenters did show us a graphic reminding us that standards, curriculum, and assessments are tied together like the great circle of life. So there's that.
How does it work?
This turned out to be the Great White Whale of the morning. We watched two videos from the Teacher Channel that showed well-managed dog and pony shows in classrooms. Bert noted that she really liked how the students didn't react to or for the camera. You know how you get that? By having them spend lots of time in front of the cameras, say, rehearsing their stuff over and over.
The first grade class was pretty impressive, but it also only had ten children in it. One of my colleagues asked if the techniques can be used in classes with more than ten students (aka, classes in the real world) and that opened up an interesting side note. The duo noted that the key here is routine and expectations, and that you need to spend the first few weeks of school hammering in your classroom routines so that you could manage more work. One teacher in the crowd noted that this would be easier if all teachers had the same expectations (apparently we were all afraid to use the word "rules") and Ernie allowed as how having set expectations and routines from K through the upper grades would make all of this work much better. "Wouldn't it be lovely?" she said.
Because when you've got a system that doesn't work very well with real, live children, the solution is to regiment the children and put them in lockstep. If the system and the childron don't mesh well-- change the children.
Increasing rigor!
You might have thought this section would come with a definition of that illusive magical quality, but no. We still can't really explain what it is, but we know that we can increase rigor by ramping up content or task or both.
We had some examples, but that brought up another unsolved mystery of the day. "Explain where you live" (DOK 1) ramped its way up to "Explain why your city is better than these other cities" (DOK 3). One of my colleagues observed that this was not only a change in rigor, but a complete change of the task and content at hand. Bert hemmed and hawed and did that little I Will Talk To You Later But For Right Now Let's Agree To Ignore Your Point dance, and no answer ever appeared.
So if you are designing a lesson, "List the names of the planets" might be a DOK 1 question, but a good DOK 3 question for that same lesson might be "Compare and contrast Shakespeare's treatment of female characters in three of his tragedies."
Audience participation
Bert and Ernie lost most of the crowd pretty early on, and by the time we arrived at the audience participation portion (two hours later), the audience seemed to have largely checked out. This would have been an interesting time for them to demonstrate how to handle a class when your plan is bombing and your class is disengaged and checked out, but they went with Pretending Everything Is Going Swell.
The audience participation section highlighted just how squishy Depth of Knowledge is. Bert and Ernie consigned all vocabulary-related activities to Level 1, because "you know the definition or you don't." That's fairly representative of how test creators seem to think, but it is such a stunted version of language use, the mind reels. Yes, words have definitions. But there's a reason that centuries of poetry and song lyric that all basically mean, "I would like to have the sex with you," have impressed women far more than simply saying "I would like to have the sex with you."
There's a lot of this in DOK, a lot of just blithely saying, "Well, this is what was going on in the person's brain when they did this, so this is the level we'll assign this task."
DOK's big weakness
DOK is not total crap. There are some ideas in there that can lead to some useful thinking about thinking. And if you set it side by side with the venerable Bloom's, it can get your brain working in the same way that Bloom's used to.
But like all test prep activities, DOK does not set out to teach students any useful habits of mind. It is not intended to educate; it is intended to train students to respond to certain sorts of tasks in a particular manner. This is not about education and learning; this is about training and compliance. It's a useful window into the minds of the people who are writing test items for the Big Test, if you're concerned about your students' test scores. If you're interested in education, this may not be the best use of your morning.
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