On Thursday, Cami Anderson was supposed to speak at the American Enterprise Institute. Things did not go quite as planned. How they did go is, well, open to interpretation. We now present, "Rashomon at AEI"
One angry voice.
Bob Braun, hard-hitting journalist and defender of public education in New Jersey, recounted the events in his blog post "Cami Anderson: A National Embarassment."
Anderson, already an embarrassment to herself and the state of New
Jersey, never did speak, at least not publicly. She canceled her PUBLIC
speech. Why? Because a busload of 40 students, parents, and other
community residents showed up to hear what she had to say and, perhaps,
to ask her a few questions. They had to go to Washington because Cami
Anderson won’t talk to them in Newark. Won’t attend public board
meetings. Hasn’t since January. The Hermit Queen of Newark.
So those 40 people who yesterday followed her to Washington literally scared her speechless, poor dear.
The Newark folks had registered to the event (all accounts agree pretty much on that point). But one of Anderson's aids spotted familiar crankypants faces and told AEI event organizers that barbarians were already inside the gates. Security did not evict them, but the "event" was moved, and somebody decided that a good way to roust the Jerseyites would be to turn out the lights in the room, which led to some angry chanting.
Braun notes the irony of a think tank devoted to freedom, open debate, and individual liberty deciding that some people needed to be forcibly barred from this particular conversation.
A historical voice
Over at the Washington Post, Lyndsey Layton covered both the non-event and the background of anger and contentiousness that preceded it. The people of Newark have been agitated about the state-selected school boss who has become their school tsar, to rule their schools and ignore their voices as she sees fit. Anderson claims it's a small fringe group, but somehow a new mayor of Newark was elected as an agent of that small fringe, which suggests they are correct when they say they're not a finge at all.
An aggrieved voice
Rick Hess of the AEI has a somewhat different take on the events. As with Braun, his point of view is loaded right up front in the title: "Cami Anderson and the Forces of Unreason."
Hess points out the irony that this event was the end result of Anderson's exception-taking to a Hess piece earlier this year that was indirectly critical of Newarks non-achievements. He was giving her a platform on which to discuss the many great things she's accomplished that nobody has heard about. (And she still got the platform-- just as a closed room videoed infomercial)
The event was to be an examination of Newark and the lessons it
holds--not a celebration of Anderson's effort. As per usual, the session
was to include a presentation by Anderson on her "One Newark" strategy,
and then more than an hour of conversation and questions. Is Newark's
strategy the right one? Is it working? That's what discussions like this
are for. Should the governor control Newark's schools? Is Anderson the
right person to be superintendent? Good questions, all. Well worth
discussing and debating in the nation's capital.
But Hess is taken aback. He's surprised and disappointed. He's not yet clutching his pearls, but he does have them at the ready. AEI, he says, has hosted a wide variety of speakers from many sides of the education debates. He counts Randi Weingarten and Dennis van Roekel among the "different" (non-reformster) speakers, and by my count the reformster to resistance ratio runs about 4:1, but his point that AEI is not just playing echo chamber is still a fair-ish one.
Anyway, in all those speakers he has never encountered "a group so dead-set on trying to stop someone from simply being heard as this coterie from Newark." (I really, really love that he calls them a "coterie.") He is upset that they aren't called out more for being so vicious, but he is especially bothered by their hypocrisy. How can they demand to be heard while stifling the speech of others? And not even get ripped for it in the press?
Rick Hess is a smart guy. I often refer to him as one of my favorite writers that I usually disagree with. But I think he's missed a point or two here.
The Hypocrisy defense.
This is always a lousy defense, no matter which side is using it. The situation is usually something like this-- I punch you in the face, and you holler, "Hey, man! It's totally wrong to punch someone in the face!" But I keep punching. When you finally punch me back, I call "Hypocrite." It has two benefits. One is that it keeps the conversation away from discussing whether or not I'm punching you in the face and whether or not that's bad behavior. The other is that you can only win the hypocrisy argument by letting me punch you in the face without ever hitting back.
"Hey, you're being hypocritical" is often a rough translation of "No fair! You promised you weren't going to fight back!"
Voice and volume
Now, I think it's probably true that the Newark folks may have been a bit unruly. And if they weren't to start with, the videos on youtube suggest that they certainly got feisty once they realized that the elusive Anderson had slipped through their fingers again. And the accounts I've read from Newark suggest there has been a whole lot of raised-voice angry hollerization going on in NJ.
But instead of looking at this kind of hollering as a moral failing or a breach of etiquette (one simply doesn't holler at a think tank luncheon), let's look at it for what it really is-- the demonstration of a simple principle. I learned it years ago running committees, and confirmed it in many situations since then. It's a simple two-part principle of voice and volume.
1) People want to be heard.
2) If they do not believe they are being heard when they speak, they will keep raising their volume until they believe they are being heard.
I can't begin to count the number of difficult situations that I've seen defused by one side actually stopping and listening to the other. I can't begin to count the number of difficult situations I've seen made worse by one side trying to deal with dissent by silencing it.
It's Basic Leadership 101. You cannot get rid of disagreement by silencing its voice. I don't mean you shouldn't, as in a moral imperative (though I believe it is one)-- I mean you can't, as in it just doesn't work. People want to be heard. If they can't be heard when they speak, they will keep raising their volume, even to the point of rude and untoward behavior at proper thinky tank luncheons.
Yes, there's always a small percentage of folks who think being heard
must mean being agreed with. But listening isolates them as a small
fringe group takes the wind out of their sails. Pro tip: trying to combine not listening with characterizing them as a fringe group doesn't do you a bit of good.
Cami Anderson and her crew have provided an ongoing masters class in how to get all of this dead wrong. They have tried to rule by edict. Anderson has taken Not Listening all the way to Not Even Being In Same Room With People She Refuses To Listen To. And the enlistment of Tom Moran and the Star-Ledger has further reduced the ways in which opponents of Anderson can be heard. The increasingly loud, shrill, occasionally vicious, exceedingly impolite ratcheting up of her opponents' volume is an absolutely predictable result of Anderson's incompetence as a leader. It's not just that her policies are demonstrably failures, but her unwillingness to even make a five-cent politicians fake pretense of hearing any opposing voices. She is not the first nor the last leader to try to implement bad policies, but not all of them manage to do such a terrible job as managers that people are willing to take a day out of their lives to travel all the way to DC on the off chance that they might be able to force said incompetent leader to listen to them.
Well, I could go on. But if you want the full context of how the AEI non-event is further evidence that Anderson should be out of a job, read this post from Jersey Jazzman.
Volume and Power
I want to make one other observation about this raised volume thing. It's almost always a class and/or power thing.
When people with money and power feel they aren't being heard, they also raise the volume. But because they have money and power, they can raise the volume by spending $12 million to set up slick websites, or establishing "advocacy groups" to push their agenda out through their connections, or having polite luncheon dates. If Bill Gates thinks people aren't really hearing what he has to say about education, he gets out his checkbook or makes some phone calls. If Anderson and Hess feel that they aren't going to be heard, they retire to the studio in another room to record a professional-looking video to distribute through their internet channels; meanwhile, the folks they left behind are stuck recording their chants on cell-phone videos on the hope someone might pick them up on youtube.
Ordinary folks like the citizens of Newark don't have the rich and powerful options. They can't drop a few million dollars on an ad campaign or make some quick calls to highly-placed people of power and influence. When people without money, power or status want to raise the volume to be heard, they don't have any options except literally raising the volume and getting loud and unruly and even obnoxious. And then we can cue the complaints about their tone and rudeness and general misbehavior. Why they can't just be quiet and polite and unheard? Goodness!
The fact is, civil discourse is great-- if you have money and power and connections to back it up. Wouldn't it be interesting to go back in time to, say, that meeting between David Coleman and Gene Wilhoit and Bill Gates, and to say, "Gentlemen, you may pursue your dreams of an educational overhaul of this nation. But you must do it on a budget of $1.95, and you can't call any of your powerful friends to help you out. All you can use is a free blog and talking to people you can convince to listen to you."
"Let's all calm down and try to speak nicely," are the words of the people with power. "Listen to me RIGHT NOW DAMMIT," are the words of the powerless, unheard, and frustrated.
There is a solution
I learned this ages ago. If you don't want people to scream at you, do not try to overpower them, shout them down, or force them to shut up.
Listen to them.
The formula is not, "If he calms down, I will listen to him." Or, as I used to tell my children, the only person you can control is yourself. So make yourself do the listening. Then the calm will come.
Am I saying that this dynamic resolves all individuals of responsibility for how they conduct themselves? No, it does not. In a perfect world, people should be polite and respectful most of the time. But in the immortal words of the philosopher Dr. Phil, you teach others how to treat you. And if you teach people that approaching you quietly and respectfully will get them ignored, you can't be surprised that they learn the lesson that being quiet and respectful and civil is a waste of their time. When it comes to these interactions, you can teach them whatever lesson you wish.
Look at Massachusetts. The fight over linking teacher licenses to evaluations was only going to get uglier and uglier. But then a funny thing happened-- the commissioner listened to what people were saying. Now, not so much ugliness.
Of course, Massachusetts highlights one of the tricky parts of Really Listening. Sometimes when you Really Listen, you discover that you really do need to really change your plan. At the very least, it may require you to explain yourself more clearly than you have.
You can have civil discourse and reasoned debate. But you have to go first. And you have to listen. And you also have to accept, if you're dealing with a horrific festering mess like Newark, that you are going to have to listen to huuuuuuge amounts of fairly angry stuff, because all the things that you've been refusing to listen to all this time have not gone away-- they've gone into a big escrow account and now they are going to come out with interest. You don't get to say, "Can't we start fresh? You forget all the times you didn't have a say, and I'll forget all the times I didn't let you have one, and we'll start even."
The only way to cut to the chase in a place like Newark is to fire Anderson and replace her with someone who spends her first weeks in office taking meetings, listening, and publicly disowning Anderson's work.
The first rule of civil discourse and debate and free speech is you have to extend the opportunity to everybody. What would have happened, I wonder, if AEI had said, "Tell you what. Let Cami speak, and then when she's done, we will give you the podium, and the only rules is that everybody has to let everybody else have their say" instead of "Security, get these hooligans out of here."
But in the US education landscape, we have far too many places where reformsters have decided that the route to success is to just stop listening to large chunks of the population. This is a recipe for disaster, and if wannabe leaders keep pursuing it, a few dozen cranky paid registrants at a thinky tank luncheon will be the very least of their problems.
Saturday, November 15, 2014
Great News from MA
ICYMI, it's nice to report some good news--
You may recall that the commonwealth of Massachusetts was considering linking teachers' licensure to evaluations. They were going to up the eval ante by saying that a teacher who received two bad evaluations will be booted-- not just out of a job, but out of the profession.
Well-- that's not happening.
That news broke at the end of October, and the Massachusetts Teachers Association leapt immediately into action. They flooded the commissioner's office with a reported 45,000 emails, spoke at town hall meetings, and made plans for further vocal action.
Yesterday the commissioner announced that the department was "rescinding the draft options that link licensure to educator evaluation." Commissioner Mitchell Chester was remarkably not at all coy about it, either. In the letter and in interview, he's said basically, "Yeah, we got a shitstorm of feedback on this, all negative, so we're backing off." He also oddly noted that he agreed with the negative feedback, so someday we may have to delve into the mystery of how this proposal ever ended up on the table in the first place (did somebody do a cut and paste from their ALEC newsletter without reading carefully?)
When I originally wrote about this, I noted it was worth paying attention to nationally because, if successful, it could be a cancer that might spread.
But now, we can just hope that this kind of vocal, positive, powerful, definitive action by teachers in the face of anti-teacher and anti-education government action spread. The MTA and their leaders are to be applauded for taking an unequivocal stand and not just making a bad deal on this in return for a place at the table.
You may recall that the commonwealth of Massachusetts was considering linking teachers' licensure to evaluations. They were going to up the eval ante by saying that a teacher who received two bad evaluations will be booted-- not just out of a job, but out of the profession.
Well-- that's not happening.
That news broke at the end of October, and the Massachusetts Teachers Association leapt immediately into action. They flooded the commissioner's office with a reported 45,000 emails, spoke at town hall meetings, and made plans for further vocal action.
Yesterday the commissioner announced that the department was "rescinding the draft options that link licensure to educator evaluation." Commissioner Mitchell Chester was remarkably not at all coy about it, either. In the letter and in interview, he's said basically, "Yeah, we got a shitstorm of feedback on this, all negative, so we're backing off." He also oddly noted that he agreed with the negative feedback, so someday we may have to delve into the mystery of how this proposal ever ended up on the table in the first place (did somebody do a cut and paste from their ALEC newsletter without reading carefully?)
When I originally wrote about this, I noted it was worth paying attention to nationally because, if successful, it could be a cancer that might spread.
But now, we can just hope that this kind of vocal, positive, powerful, definitive action by teachers in the face of anti-teacher and anti-education government action spread. The MTA and their leaders are to be applauded for taking an unequivocal stand and not just making a bad deal on this in return for a place at the table.
Friday, November 14, 2014
Will Wolf's PA Love Charters?
I'm going to hold my breath just a bit longer.
Public education boosters were pretty happy to see Tom Corbett shown the door on election day. But it still remains to be seen whether Tom Wolf is a Fresh New Direction or simply the Lesser of Two Evils. Today, folks are examining his first appointments for his new administration to see if they can guess which way the wind is blowing.
Wolf has been a successful businessman, helming the company that his family has run for decades in York, PA. But for public education advocates, York is also the site of one more attempt by charter privateers to create a happy new NOLA-style playground. This is where it becomes difficult to determine exactly which players are connected.
It was Corbett who budget-slashed York schools into charter vulnerability, and Corbett who appointed a Takeover Tsar (Chief Recovery Officer). But Corbett's choice was David Meckley, and that's where things ultimately became sticky for Wolf.
There has not been a great deal of journalism covering these next parts-- most of what you find leads back to the work of Colleen Kennedy, who is either out there in a conspiracy crackpot way or an intrepid crusading journalist way. I lean toward the latter, but time is indeed going to tell whether she got this right or not.
Meckley and Wolf are, according to Kennedy, friends. Both are connected to the York County Community Foundation, whose vision is to be "a catalyst for strategic philanthropy and a driver of community improvement." In 2013, the group issued a report calling for the 100% charterization of York schools. They also take credit for having pushed Corbett to appoint Meckley as Tsar. Michael Newsome, the CFO of Wolf's company served on that board, as did Kim Bracey, mayor of York and longtime Wolf booster. Wolf has been a member of the board, including serving as achirman, but nobody is saying that he served on the 2013 charter-plugging board.
By August, with his eye on the governor's mansion, Wolf was disavowing the charterization, and he said so right in York. Reported the York Daily Record--
"I don't think it delivers as well on the promise that we all make to say, 'Listen, we're not opting out here. We're actually going to try to make sure the kids in the city of York get a great education.' That's a responsibility we all share," Wolf said.
Whether Wolf was just revealing what he always had thought, having an epiphany, or engaging in some political rebranding is still not clear. And listen-- York is small city (about 43K population) and if you're from a small city or town, you know that everybody is connected to everybody one way or another. I have lived most of my life in my town of roughly 7,000 souls, and by charting my connections you can prove that I am tied into the Tea Party, crazy hippie liberals, angry libertarians, welfare bums, and corporate stooges (as well as all political parties). So I get that it's easy to play this connect-the-dots game and come up wrong. Wolf's Democratic primary opponents tried to tie him to a racist killer and to a scam artist and just ended up proving that Wolf was the kind of guy who stuck by old friends even when it was politically inexpedient to do so. You can read Kennedy's more thorough argument and decide for yourself if Wolf passes the smell test on education..
You may want to decide quickly. On Thursday, Wolf announced some of his transition team. It includes BFF Mayor Kim Bracey as a vice-chair, and John A. Frey as chair. Frey is the president of Drexel University, which has made its reformy mark with a program offering a MS in Education Improvement and Transformation. Their television program interviewed Diane Ravitch in 2007, but one of their adjuncts (Katharine Beals) reviewed Death and Life of the American School System and found Ravitch "unconvincing." And Drexel has been involved in some "partnerships" with the Philly Public [sic] School system; so they have some chartery smell on them. Thin connections, again, but the Drexel connection has set off alarm bells for some folks.
Wolf tapped some former aides from "Smilin' Ed" Rendell, former Democratic governor who was no friend to public education or the teachers who work there. Probably Wolf's most interesting choice so far is Kathleen McGinty, one of his opponents from the Democratic primary.
Will Wolf be good for education? Hard to say. Off the top of your head, can you think of any Democrats who ran as pro-public education and turned out to be mostly interested in tearing it down? Senators? Governors? A President? In Pennsylvania, we're a little ahead of this learning curve, thanks to the aforementioned Ed Rendell.
So maybe Wolf will turn out to be great for public education, or maybe we're just going to see more charter shenanigans. It's still too early to call, and I'm not going to breathe easy just yet.
Ohio Schools: Cuts and Unfunding Mandates and Petitions
The Ohio State Board of Education has had quite the week. After quietly starting the process of slashing state requirements for elementary specials, they got a quick lesson in social media-- this post alone blew up to 12K views in just a few days.
For the most complete coverage of the actual cuts and changes, I recommend this post over at Plunderbund, a site that specializes in Ohio School Stuff. I think the analyses there of the larger problem is spot on as well.
The cutting or requirements for elementary schools to hire a full complement of arts, phys ed, counseling, nurse, librarian, support staff is not about some perverse desire to diminish education for Ohio's children. It's about trying to give local districts the tools to help manage the damaging funding cuts that the state has inflicted on them. This approach not coincidentally has the effect of forcing local school districts to be the bad guys, because they would be the ones to say, "We're getting rid of the art teacher."
The people of Ohio have a month to raise a fuss. They can send emails, letters, and sign petitions like this one at change.org, and they should. But they should also get on the phone to the state capital and make some noise about state funding of education.
Look at it this way. If local districts were fully funded, it would barely matter that the state BOE cut the requirement to hire certain elementary staff. Local districts would simply shrug and say, "Well, why the heck would we want to cut those things" and life would go on.
A. J. Wagner, the board member who led the walkout earlier this week, reportedly reached out to protestors by letter, saying essentially that he wanted to remove the pressure of unfunded mandates from local districts, an could anybody see a way to do that. Well, there are two ways to fix an unfunded mandate problem. You can either get rid the mandate (as the board proposes) or you can keep the mandate and actually fund it! That would be my message to pass along to Wagner (not that he can fix that, but it would be a message for him to pass on to the legislature).
The pressure is not coming from some burning urge to diminish the educational lives of children. The pressure is coming from an inability to pay for everything that the school district should be providing because the governor's administration has pursued a program of starving the beast. I can't pretend to know what is in Kasich's heart, but I do know that if you don't provide public schools with the money to do a good job, and they then start to crack and fail under the funding pressure, it's a lot easier to make your case that failing public schools need to be rescued by Noble Charter Operators.
So keeping the pressure on, the noise loud, and the fight going is worthwhile. But it's also worthwhile to keep an eye on the problem behind the problem.
For the most complete coverage of the actual cuts and changes, I recommend this post over at Plunderbund, a site that specializes in Ohio School Stuff. I think the analyses there of the larger problem is spot on as well.
The cutting or requirements for elementary schools to hire a full complement of arts, phys ed, counseling, nurse, librarian, support staff is not about some perverse desire to diminish education for Ohio's children. It's about trying to give local districts the tools to help manage the damaging funding cuts that the state has inflicted on them. This approach not coincidentally has the effect of forcing local school districts to be the bad guys, because they would be the ones to say, "We're getting rid of the art teacher."
The people of Ohio have a month to raise a fuss. They can send emails, letters, and sign petitions like this one at change.org, and they should. But they should also get on the phone to the state capital and make some noise about state funding of education.
Look at it this way. If local districts were fully funded, it would barely matter that the state BOE cut the requirement to hire certain elementary staff. Local districts would simply shrug and say, "Well, why the heck would we want to cut those things" and life would go on.
A. J. Wagner, the board member who led the walkout earlier this week, reportedly reached out to protestors by letter, saying essentially that he wanted to remove the pressure of unfunded mandates from local districts, an could anybody see a way to do that. Well, there are two ways to fix an unfunded mandate problem. You can either get rid the mandate (as the board proposes) or you can keep the mandate and actually fund it! That would be my message to pass along to Wagner (not that he can fix that, but it would be a message for him to pass on to the legislature).
The pressure is not coming from some burning urge to diminish the educational lives of children. The pressure is coming from an inability to pay for everything that the school district should be providing because the governor's administration has pursued a program of starving the beast. I can't pretend to know what is in Kasich's heart, but I do know that if you don't provide public schools with the money to do a good job, and they then start to crack and fail under the funding pressure, it's a lot easier to make your case that failing public schools need to be rescued by Noble Charter Operators.
So keeping the pressure on, the noise loud, and the fight going is worthwhile. But it's also worthwhile to keep an eye on the problem behind the problem.
Thursday, November 13, 2014
TNTP Actually Has an Interesting Idea
Hold onto your hats, because I am about to mostly agree with something on the TNTP website. And not even in my usual snotty sophomoric sarcastic "agree" way. It's not that I love them any more than I ever did-- TNTP is one of my least loved reformster group because of their relentless devotion to tearing down job protections, pay and professionalism for teachers. No group has more relentlessly argued for all the different ways in which teaching can be turned into something less than a profession.
But I'm a big believer that you have to judge ideas on merit and not on the source. So I'm now going to tell you all about something I think Dan Weisberg at TNTP got right. I'll put my caveat at the end.
In his recent blog post "Not a One-Size-Fits-All Profession" Weisberg argues for a new model of how teaching could work. And he's not wrong.
Teaching has remained a profession in which people are expected to hit the ground running on Day One. As Weisberg correctly argues, doctors and lawyers don't do anything remotely like this. Both start at the bottom of a career ladder and work their way up to full responsibility for the whole job.
I have often imagined a school that works essentially like a teaching hospital (a real one, not one like the hospital in Grey's Anatomy) where practitioners gradually take on increased responsibility under the tutelage and guidance of masters in the craft. It would help teachers grow and develop into great teachers.
Great teachers do much more than engage students during class time. They are great lesson planners; they are experts at identifying challenging content for their students; they analyze data to understand student progress; they know how to design assessments that reveal whether students have mastered material; they are adept at keeping families informed and invested in their children’s education; they use lessons from developmental psychology to establish personal connections with even the most challenging students; and on and on.
Right now we expect teachers to do from the beginning with nothing under their belt but student teaching (Weisberg implies that only some teachers have that experience. I've heard this hint from so many reformsters that I'm starting to wonder-- are there programs other than TFA that don't include student teaching??). Weisberg proposes another way.
Imagine a school where the teacher’s responsibility is exactly what we think it should be: ensuring that all students get what they need to succeed. And instead of having to do everything themselves to make that happen, like other professionals, they manage a team: a lesson planner, a curator of content, a parent engagement specialist, a data analyst, an assessment designer, a special ed compliance specialist, maybe even a homework grader. Such a structure would serve multiple purposes. First, it would allow teachers to focus on their core responsibility. Teachers could spend the bulk of their time formulating and executing instructional strategies designed to meet individual student needs, while delegating tasks like completing paperwork or planning individual lessons that may not be as critical.
There are several things I like about this. The chance to develop teachers in the field. The support for classroom teachers (do you know what I could do with an extra fifteen-twenty minutes of not fetching copies every day). The enhanced team environment. And Weisberg is probably correct about enhanced status-- what do other respected professionals have that teachers do not? Answer: people who work for them.
Now, I do have some problems with Weisberg's model. He likes the idea that this would open up the career path to folks from all sorts of backgrounds; I worry that this would be another way to de-professionalize the profession. In fact, I worry that the entire model could be used not as a career ladder with the equivalent of physician interns and residents, but rather a single professional working through a staff of cheaper, more-easily-replaced para-professionals. Without a proper investment in money and support, that can easily degenerate into that doctor's office where you used to see four physicians, but now it's one physician who rarely sees you, supported by two physicians assistants (who are different people each time you go because they keep getting overworked and burned out).
Weisberg's response to the cost issue is also off the mark.
The threshold questions are about cost. Won’t hiring all these specialists break the bank? Not necessarily. These are entry-level positions with entry-level pay, not designed as long-term positions.
That assumes that entry-level pay would be lower than beginning teacher pay, but that pay is pretty entry-levelly already. In fact, one of the huge problems of the intern-resident-etc career ladders for doctors is that by the time they've climbed it, they're hugely in debt. The lower rungs of the ladder don't pay enough to live on. That's a huge problem.
And here comes the teacher-busting TNTP that I know and loathe:
And with such a support team and smart use of technology, individual teachers should be able to work with many more students than they can right now without any help.
Do I think Weisberg's basic model could be a good way to redesign the profession? I actually do-- if, and only if, the money was put into it to do it right. Using it to cut costs, or setting it up and subjecting it to Death by a Thousand Budget Cuts, would get us a system worse than the one we have. So I doubt that it could ever really happen. Put another way, if we right now had the dedication of money, resources and support that would be needed to make Weisberg's ladder system actually work, we could work wonders with the system currently in place.
Neither Weisberg nor I are the first to think of this model, and yet it has never been implemented in a big way in any school system, and that tells us something. But it's still an interesting idea.
But I'm a big believer that you have to judge ideas on merit and not on the source. So I'm now going to tell you all about something I think Dan Weisberg at TNTP got right. I'll put my caveat at the end.
In his recent blog post "Not a One-Size-Fits-All Profession" Weisberg argues for a new model of how teaching could work. And he's not wrong.
Teaching has remained a profession in which people are expected to hit the ground running on Day One. As Weisberg correctly argues, doctors and lawyers don't do anything remotely like this. Both start at the bottom of a career ladder and work their way up to full responsibility for the whole job.
I have often imagined a school that works essentially like a teaching hospital (a real one, not one like the hospital in Grey's Anatomy) where practitioners gradually take on increased responsibility under the tutelage and guidance of masters in the craft. It would help teachers grow and develop into great teachers.
Great teachers do much more than engage students during class time. They are great lesson planners; they are experts at identifying challenging content for their students; they analyze data to understand student progress; they know how to design assessments that reveal whether students have mastered material; they are adept at keeping families informed and invested in their children’s education; they use lessons from developmental psychology to establish personal connections with even the most challenging students; and on and on.
Right now we expect teachers to do from the beginning with nothing under their belt but student teaching (Weisberg implies that only some teachers have that experience. I've heard this hint from so many reformsters that I'm starting to wonder-- are there programs other than TFA that don't include student teaching??). Weisberg proposes another way.
Imagine a school where the teacher’s responsibility is exactly what we think it should be: ensuring that all students get what they need to succeed. And instead of having to do everything themselves to make that happen, like other professionals, they manage a team: a lesson planner, a curator of content, a parent engagement specialist, a data analyst, an assessment designer, a special ed compliance specialist, maybe even a homework grader. Such a structure would serve multiple purposes. First, it would allow teachers to focus on their core responsibility. Teachers could spend the bulk of their time formulating and executing instructional strategies designed to meet individual student needs, while delegating tasks like completing paperwork or planning individual lessons that may not be as critical.
There are several things I like about this. The chance to develop teachers in the field. The support for classroom teachers (do you know what I could do with an extra fifteen-twenty minutes of not fetching copies every day). The enhanced team environment. And Weisberg is probably correct about enhanced status-- what do other respected professionals have that teachers do not? Answer: people who work for them.
Now, I do have some problems with Weisberg's model. He likes the idea that this would open up the career path to folks from all sorts of backgrounds; I worry that this would be another way to de-professionalize the profession. In fact, I worry that the entire model could be used not as a career ladder with the equivalent of physician interns and residents, but rather a single professional working through a staff of cheaper, more-easily-replaced para-professionals. Without a proper investment in money and support, that can easily degenerate into that doctor's office where you used to see four physicians, but now it's one physician who rarely sees you, supported by two physicians assistants (who are different people each time you go because they keep getting overworked and burned out).
Weisberg's response to the cost issue is also off the mark.
The threshold questions are about cost. Won’t hiring all these specialists break the bank? Not necessarily. These are entry-level positions with entry-level pay, not designed as long-term positions.
That assumes that entry-level pay would be lower than beginning teacher pay, but that pay is pretty entry-levelly already. In fact, one of the huge problems of the intern-resident-etc career ladders for doctors is that by the time they've climbed it, they're hugely in debt. The lower rungs of the ladder don't pay enough to live on. That's a huge problem.
And here comes the teacher-busting TNTP that I know and loathe:
And with such a support team and smart use of technology, individual teachers should be able to work with many more students than they can right now without any help.
Do I think Weisberg's basic model could be a good way to redesign the profession? I actually do-- if, and only if, the money was put into it to do it right. Using it to cut costs, or setting it up and subjecting it to Death by a Thousand Budget Cuts, would get us a system worse than the one we have. So I doubt that it could ever really happen. Put another way, if we right now had the dedication of money, resources and support that would be needed to make Weisberg's ladder system actually work, we could work wonders with the system currently in place.
Neither Weisberg nor I are the first to think of this model, and yet it has never been implemented in a big way in any school system, and that tells us something. But it's still an interesting idea.
AFT: Still Supporting the False Narrative
In its press release about the awarding of two grants for the purpose of fiddling with Common Core while the schoolhouse burns, AFT manages to capture in one paragraph much of what irritates me about the Big Unions' response to the Core.
"These grants are about giving educators some seed money to take their ideas about educational standards and convert them into practice. Many educators support higher standards but are concerned about particular aspects, especially the Common Core standards' poor implementation and their developmental appropriateness, particularly in the early grades," said AFT President Randi Weingarten. "We wanted to give the people closest to children a chance to do something different, as long as we were all focused on how to help students secure the critical-thinking and problem-solving skills that the Common Core standards are supposed to be about."
1) "seed money to take their ideas about educational standards and convert them into practice"
In other words, do our jobs. Like we do every day. Only now, somehow, in the brave new CCSS world, we need grant money and the permission that goes with it to do it. And this is apparently a new thing? Because I'm pretty sure that educators were busily doing this, and doing it well, before the Core came along and teachers were told they had to drop what they were doing and get aligned to thefederal state standards.
2) "Many educators support higher standards but are concerned about particular aspects, especially the Common Core standards' poor implementation..."
I see what you did there. You treated "higher standards" and "Common Core" as if they were synonyms. Of course, we know from no less an authority that the Fordham Institute that in many states the Core are not higher standards at all. Personally, I'd argue that they aren't higher standards than much of anything, nor do we have a lick of research to back up the claim that they are.
3) "their developmental appropriateness"
Well, yes. But let's not just lump that in with rollout problems, or pretend that it doesn't call into question the whole "higher standards" thing. When you ask a fish to fly and it says it can't, the appropriate response is not, "Oh, well I'm sorry that you can't handle something so much better than swimming." (Also, you are completely overlooking the miracle of a talking fish).
The implication here, as in many places, is that developmental inappropriateness is a function of asking children to do things that are too awesome for them. It hints that somehow they're tiny little minds just aren't up to it, that they are still suffering from some sort of deficit. That's not it. What it really means is that you have designed a task that is wrong for that person. The tiny person is not at fault. You are. And that's not because you just raised the standards too high. It's because you made a stupid request.
4) "We wanted to give the people closest to children a chance to do something different"
Different from what? Because we were all trying to do different things before folks came along with the one size fits all Common Core.
5) "as long as we were all focused on how to help students secure the critical-thinking and problem-solving skills that the Common Core standards are supposed to be about."
Is that what the Core are supposed to be about? Are you seriously suggesting that we need the Core to incorporate critical thinking and problem solving in classrooms? An organization that represents a nation of teachers is implicitly agreeing here with the idea that teachers never really did know how to do their jobs until the Blessed Core came to rescue us.
That's the narrative, the one that I don't much care for. Once upon a time, America's schools were struggling and failing because teachers just didn't know how to teach any more. So some wise men devised a set of higher standards that would teach students how to read and write and think like never before. Now, with standards this ambitious, some bumps and hiccups could be expected, but those were just implementation issues and not in any way indicative of fundamental flaws in the Core.
It continues to irritate me no end that the two major unions accept and promote a narrative predicated on the idea that their own members are lost, clueless, maybe lazy, possibly incompetent, but definitely in need of someone (like maybe rich and powerful amateurs) to come show them the way. I can tolerate that story from the amateurs. But union leaders should know better. Union leaders may need to play some politics- I accept that. But I don't accept union leaders hanging their heads and saying, "Yeah, our guys really don't know what they're doing. They need help."
So the grant idea? Throwing around money is always swell, but the fact that it's attached to that same old narrative reduces the swellness considerably.
"These grants are about giving educators some seed money to take their ideas about educational standards and convert them into practice. Many educators support higher standards but are concerned about particular aspects, especially the Common Core standards' poor implementation and their developmental appropriateness, particularly in the early grades," said AFT President Randi Weingarten. "We wanted to give the people closest to children a chance to do something different, as long as we were all focused on how to help students secure the critical-thinking and problem-solving skills that the Common Core standards are supposed to be about."
1) "seed money to take their ideas about educational standards and convert them into practice"
In other words, do our jobs. Like we do every day. Only now, somehow, in the brave new CCSS world, we need grant money and the permission that goes with it to do it. And this is apparently a new thing? Because I'm pretty sure that educators were busily doing this, and doing it well, before the Core came along and teachers were told they had to drop what they were doing and get aligned to the
2) "Many educators support higher standards but are concerned about particular aspects, especially the Common Core standards' poor implementation..."
I see what you did there. You treated "higher standards" and "Common Core" as if they were synonyms. Of course, we know from no less an authority that the Fordham Institute that in many states the Core are not higher standards at all. Personally, I'd argue that they aren't higher standards than much of anything, nor do we have a lick of research to back up the claim that they are.
3) "their developmental appropriateness"
Well, yes. But let's not just lump that in with rollout problems, or pretend that it doesn't call into question the whole "higher standards" thing. When you ask a fish to fly and it says it can't, the appropriate response is not, "Oh, well I'm sorry that you can't handle something so much better than swimming." (Also, you are completely overlooking the miracle of a talking fish).
The implication here, as in many places, is that developmental inappropriateness is a function of asking children to do things that are too awesome for them. It hints that somehow they're tiny little minds just aren't up to it, that they are still suffering from some sort of deficit. That's not it. What it really means is that you have designed a task that is wrong for that person. The tiny person is not at fault. You are. And that's not because you just raised the standards too high. It's because you made a stupid request.
4) "We wanted to give the people closest to children a chance to do something different"
Different from what? Because we were all trying to do different things before folks came along with the one size fits all Common Core.
5) "as long as we were all focused on how to help students secure the critical-thinking and problem-solving skills that the Common Core standards are supposed to be about."
Is that what the Core are supposed to be about? Are you seriously suggesting that we need the Core to incorporate critical thinking and problem solving in classrooms? An organization that represents a nation of teachers is implicitly agreeing here with the idea that teachers never really did know how to do their jobs until the Blessed Core came to rescue us.
That's the narrative, the one that I don't much care for. Once upon a time, America's schools were struggling and failing because teachers just didn't know how to teach any more. So some wise men devised a set of higher standards that would teach students how to read and write and think like never before. Now, with standards this ambitious, some bumps and hiccups could be expected, but those were just implementation issues and not in any way indicative of fundamental flaws in the Core.
It continues to irritate me no end that the two major unions accept and promote a narrative predicated on the idea that their own members are lost, clueless, maybe lazy, possibly incompetent, but definitely in need of someone (like maybe rich and powerful amateurs) to come show them the way. I can tolerate that story from the amateurs. But union leaders should know better. Union leaders may need to play some politics- I accept that. But I don't accept union leaders hanging their heads and saying, "Yeah, our guys really don't know what they're doing. They need help."
So the grant idea? Throwing around money is always swell, but the fact that it's attached to that same old narrative reduces the swellness considerably.
NCTQ: It's So Easy
The National Council on Teacher Quality is one of the leaders in the production of education-related nonsense that is somehow taken seriously. The offices of NCTQ may not produce much of anything that provides real substance, but somewhere in that cushy suite there must be the best turd-polishing machine ever built.
NCTQ has published a new "report" that "seeks" to "answer" two questions:
Are teacher candidates graded too easily, misleading them about their readiness to teach? Are teacher preparation programs providing sufficiently rigorous training, or does the approach to training drive higher grades?
And when I say "seeks to answer," what I mean is "tries to cobble together support for the answer they've already settled on." There is no indication anywhere that NCTQ actually wondered what the answers to these questions might be. No, it appears that they set out to prove that teacher candidates are graded too easily as they meander through their rigorless teacher programs.
Who are these guys?
Does the NCTQ moniker seem familiar? That's because these are the guys who evaluated everyone's education program and ran it as a big story in US News (motto "When it comes to sales, lists are better than news"). That evaluation list caused a lot of stir. A lot.
Funny story. I interviewed a college president from a local school who was steamed about that list in part because it slammed them for the low quality of a teacher program that they don't even have. Turns out a lot of people had problems with NCTQ methodology, which involved not actually talking to anybody at the schools, but collecting information less detailed than what you can get from your high school guidance counselor. You can read a cranky critique here and a more scholarly one here. Bottom line-- they get great media penetration with a report that has less substance than my hair.
NCTQ has tried to blunt some of the criticism with moves like adding a Teacher Advisory Group composed of Real Live Teachers. Also, NCTQ uses very pretty graphics in soothing colors.
The new report-- Easy A's (they even italicize the title, like a book title, because it's more hefty and important than a mere "article title")-- is billed as "the latest latest installment of the National Council on Teacher Quality’s Teacher Prep Review, a decade-old initiative examining the quality of the preparation of new teachers in the United States." This is supposed to be part of their "growing body of work designed to ensure that teacher preparation programs live up to the awesome responsibility they assume." For the moment, let's look at the "findings" in this "report."
And the bottom line is...
They studied about 500 schools; these schools are collectively responsible for about half the teacher degrees granted. Two "findings" here.
First, they find the majority of institutions studied (58%) grading standards are lower than for students in other majors on the same campus.
Second, they find a strong link "between high grades and a lack of rigorous coursework, with the primary cause being assignments that fail to develop the critical skills and knowledge every new teacher needs."
Wow!!
I know! My mind boggles at the huge amount of research involved here. This must have required an extensive study of each of the 500 institutions studied. I mean, we're talking about comparing the rigor of assignments in both education and non-education courses, so researchers must have had to dig through tens of thousands of college course assignments in addition to an extensive study of the grading standards of thousands of professors to be able to make these comparisons.
And then to do all the research and number crunching needed to establish a correlation between the rigor of assignments and grades achieved-- this would be a more complicated model than VAM, to tease out all those data,
Also, it's worth noting that NCTQ knows what critical skills and knowledge all new teachers need, which must have been a huge research project all by itself. I do hope they publish that one soon, because if we had such a list, it would certainly revolutionize teacher evaluation and training. In fact, if they've done all this research and know all these answers, why aren't they just traveling from college to college and saying, "Here-- this is what our proven research shows you should be teaching teacher trainees."
Never mind.
Apparently the minds at NCTQ boggled at that research challenge as well. So let's look at what they actually did.
For the first point-- the idea that teacher grads are the recipients of departmental grade inflation-- NCTQ looked at commencement brochures. They checked commencement brochures to see a) who graduated from a teaching program and b) who had an honors grad designation based on GPA.
It is not clear how many years are spanned. There were 500-ish schools studied, and footnotes in an appendix indicate that a total of 436 commencement brochures were discarded for insufficient data. Yet the executive summary says that 44% of all teacher grads in all 509 schools earned honors, while only 30% of all graduating students did. And in 214 schools, there's no real difference, and in 62 schools, teachers had fewer honors grads. How did they get such precise numbers? That is not explained.
There's some more detailed breakdown of methodologies of teasing the data, but that's the data they accumulated from graduation brochures, and the whole argument boils down to "Barely more teachers graduate with honors than do other majors." Oddly enough, this does not lead NCTQ to conclude, "Good news, America! Teachers are actually smarter than the average college grad." I guess it comes down to how you interpret the data. That you collected from graduation brochures.
But what about that lack of rigor?
Having somehow concluded that teacher programs are hotbeds of easy grades, NCTQ turns to the question of who let the rigor out. Once again, their methodology is itself as rigorous as a bowl of noodles left to boil for twelve hours.
Multiple theories as to why students in education majors might appear to excel so often were also examined (e.g., clinical coursework that lends itself to high grades, too many arts and crafts assignments, too much group work, particularly egregious grade inflation, better quality instruction, more female students who tend to get higher grades, opportunities to revise work, and higher caliber students), but none appears to explain these findings as directly as the nature of the assignments.
First of all, interesting list of theories there. Second of all-- "none appears to explain"?? How did you judge that appearance, exactly. Did we just put each theory on a post-it note, stick it to the wall, stand back and hold up our thumbs and squint to see which one looked likely? Because usually the way you reject theories in research is with research.
The Big NCTQ Thumb came to rest on "criterion-referenced" and "criterion-deficient" assignments. We'll come back to that in a moment-- it deserves its own subheading. Just one more note about te methodology here.
NCTQ got their hands on syllabi for 1,161 courses, "not just on teacher education but across an array of majors." Except-- wait. We're looking at 509 schools, so 1,161 works out to a hair over two courses per school, including schools with multiple education programs. Oh, no-- never mind. Here it is in the appendix-- we're only going to do this in depth analysis for seven schools. Plus at thirty-three other schools, we will look at just the education programs. Oh, and on this chart it shows that of the seven in-depth schools, we'll look at only teacher programs in two. So, "wide array" means six other majors at five of the 509 schools.
And yes-- the data comes from course syllabi. At seven schools. Not the course, professors, students-- just the syllabi. So our first assumption will be that these syllabi with their lists of course assignments will tell us everything we need to know about how rigorous the coursework is.
Creating the right hatchet for the job
"Criterion-referenced" is a thing, and it basically means an objective test. "Criterion-deficient," on the other hand, will actually win you a game of googlewhacking because apparently nobody uses the term except NCTQ. "Criterion deficiency" is a real thing, used it seems mostly in the non-teaching world to describe a test that fails to assess an important criterion (e.g. you want a secretary who can word process, but the job evaluation doesn't check for word processing). I bring this up only because now I have a great fancy word for discussing high stakes standardized tests-- they suffer from citerion deficiency.
But back to our story.
NCTQ cross-reference course syllabi with grade records posted publicly by registrars and open records requests (Schools DO that?! Seven years ago I wasn't allowed to know the grades of my own children for whom I was paying bills because of privacy laws!) NCTQ "applauds the commitment to transparency" of those schools willing to complete ignore student privacy concerns.
NCTQ looked at 7,500 assignments and ranked them as either CR or CD (that's my abbreviation--if they can be lazy researchers, I can be a lazy typist). Here are the criteria used to tell the difference:
An assignment is considered criterion-referenced when it is focused on a clearly circumscribed body of knowledge and the assignment is limited so that the instructor can compare students’ work on the same assignment.
Qualities that indicate an assignment is criterion-referenced include
* a limited scope
* evaluation based on objective criteria;
* students’ work products similar enough to allow comparison.
Qualities that indicate an assignment is criterion-deficient include
* an unlimited or very broad scope
* evaluation based on subjective criteria
* students’ work products that differ too much to be compared.
NCTQ provides a sample of each. A CR lesson would be one in which the student is to apply a specific tool to critique videotaped (quaint) lessons. This is good because everyone uses the same tool for the same lessons so that the instructor knows exactly what is going on. A CD assignment would be to teach something-- anything-- to the class using information from the chapter. This is bad because everybody teaches something different, uses different specific parts of the chapter, and teaches in different ways. This would be bad because there would be too many differences the instructor would be unable to determine who is best at the teaching of stuff.
How is this distinction a useless one? Let me count the ways.
1) It assumes that the purpose of an assignment is to allow comparison of one student to another. This would be different from, say, using assignment as a way to develop and synthesize learning, or to mark the growth and development of the individual student.
2) It assumes that all good teachers look exactly the same and can be directly compared. It imagines that difference is a Bad Thing that never intrudes in a proper classroom. This is bananas.
3) It assumes that the best assignments are close-ended assignments that have only one possible outcome. Even reformsters steeped in Depth of Knowledge and Rigorology tout the value of open-ended response tasks with a variety of correct answers without demanding that the many correct responses be ranked in order of most correct.
4) It appears to place the highest value on objective testing. If that is true for my teacher training, is it not true for my practice? In other words, is NCTQ suggesting that the best assessments for me to use with my students are true-false and multiple choice tests rather than any sort of project-based assessment. Because, no.
5) It assumes that all students in the future teacher's future classroom will also be one size fits all. When I ask my students to prepare oral presentations, should I require that they all do reports on Abraham Lincoln so that they can be more easily and accurately compared?
6) It discounts the truth that part of being a professional is being ready and able to exercise subjective judgment in an objective manner. In other words, free from personal prejudice, but open to the ways that the individual student's personality, skills, and history play into the work at hand (without excusing crappy work).
7) They are trying to make this distinction based on assignments listed in syllabi.
There's more
I did look for the appendix evaluating how well five weeks will prepare you for teaching if you come from a super-duper university, but that was one aspect of teacher training ease NCTQ did not address.
There are other appendices, examining ideas such as Why High Grades Are Bad (including, but not limited to, if grades are divorced from learning, would-be employers will find grades less useful). But I'm not going to plow through them because at the end of the day, this is a report in which some people collected some graduation brochures and course syllabi and close read their way to an indictment of all college teacher training programs.
It is not that these questions are without merit. Particularly nowadays, as teacher programs are increasingly desperate to hold onto enough paying customers to keep the ivy covered lights on, teacher training programs are undoubtedly under increasing pressure to manufacture success for their students, one way or another. Nor is it unheard of for co-operating teachers to look at student teachers and think, "Who the hell let this hapless kid get this far, and who the hell is going to actually give him a teaching certificate?"
The question of how well training programs are preparing teachers for real jobs in the real world ought to be asked and discussed regularly (more colleges and universities might consider the radical notion of consulting actual teachers on the matter). And as more reformster foolishness infects college ed departments, the problem of Useless Training only becomes worse. So this is absolutely a matter that needs to be examined and discussed, but the method should be something more rigorous than collecting some commencement brochures and course syllabi and sitting in an office making ill-supported guesses about what these random slips of paper mean.
And yet I feel in my bones that soon enough I'll be reading main stream media accounts of the important "findings" of this significant "research." Talk about your easy A.
NCTQ has published a new "report" that "seeks" to "answer" two questions:
Are teacher candidates graded too easily, misleading them about their readiness to teach? Are teacher preparation programs providing sufficiently rigorous training, or does the approach to training drive higher grades?
And when I say "seeks to answer," what I mean is "tries to cobble together support for the answer they've already settled on." There is no indication anywhere that NCTQ actually wondered what the answers to these questions might be. No, it appears that they set out to prove that teacher candidates are graded too easily as they meander through their rigorless teacher programs.
Who are these guys?
Does the NCTQ moniker seem familiar? That's because these are the guys who evaluated everyone's education program and ran it as a big story in US News (motto "When it comes to sales, lists are better than news"). That evaluation list caused a lot of stir. A lot.
Funny story. I interviewed a college president from a local school who was steamed about that list in part because it slammed them for the low quality of a teacher program that they don't even have. Turns out a lot of people had problems with NCTQ methodology, which involved not actually talking to anybody at the schools, but collecting information less detailed than what you can get from your high school guidance counselor. You can read a cranky critique here and a more scholarly one here. Bottom line-- they get great media penetration with a report that has less substance than my hair.
NCTQ has tried to blunt some of the criticism with moves like adding a Teacher Advisory Group composed of Real Live Teachers. Also, NCTQ uses very pretty graphics in soothing colors.
The new report-- Easy A's (they even italicize the title, like a book title, because it's more hefty and important than a mere "article title")-- is billed as "the latest latest installment of the National Council on Teacher Quality’s Teacher Prep Review, a decade-old initiative examining the quality of the preparation of new teachers in the United States." This is supposed to be part of their "growing body of work designed to ensure that teacher preparation programs live up to the awesome responsibility they assume." For the moment, let's look at the "findings" in this "report."
And the bottom line is...
They studied about 500 schools; these schools are collectively responsible for about half the teacher degrees granted. Two "findings" here.
First, they find the majority of institutions studied (58%) grading standards are lower than for students in other majors on the same campus.
Second, they find a strong link "between high grades and a lack of rigorous coursework, with the primary cause being assignments that fail to develop the critical skills and knowledge every new teacher needs."
Wow!!
I know! My mind boggles at the huge amount of research involved here. This must have required an extensive study of each of the 500 institutions studied. I mean, we're talking about comparing the rigor of assignments in both education and non-education courses, so researchers must have had to dig through tens of thousands of college course assignments in addition to an extensive study of the grading standards of thousands of professors to be able to make these comparisons.
And then to do all the research and number crunching needed to establish a correlation between the rigor of assignments and grades achieved-- this would be a more complicated model than VAM, to tease out all those data,
Also, it's worth noting that NCTQ knows what critical skills and knowledge all new teachers need, which must have been a huge research project all by itself. I do hope they publish that one soon, because if we had such a list, it would certainly revolutionize teacher evaluation and training. In fact, if they've done all this research and know all these answers, why aren't they just traveling from college to college and saying, "Here-- this is what our proven research shows you should be teaching teacher trainees."
Never mind.
Apparently the minds at NCTQ boggled at that research challenge as well. So let's look at what they actually did.
For the first point-- the idea that teacher grads are the recipients of departmental grade inflation-- NCTQ looked at commencement brochures. They checked commencement brochures to see a) who graduated from a teaching program and b) who had an honors grad designation based on GPA.
It is not clear how many years are spanned. There were 500-ish schools studied, and footnotes in an appendix indicate that a total of 436 commencement brochures were discarded for insufficient data. Yet the executive summary says that 44% of all teacher grads in all 509 schools earned honors, while only 30% of all graduating students did. And in 214 schools, there's no real difference, and in 62 schools, teachers had fewer honors grads. How did they get such precise numbers? That is not explained.
There's some more detailed breakdown of methodologies of teasing the data, but that's the data they accumulated from graduation brochures, and the whole argument boils down to "Barely more teachers graduate with honors than do other majors." Oddly enough, this does not lead NCTQ to conclude, "Good news, America! Teachers are actually smarter than the average college grad." I guess it comes down to how you interpret the data. That you collected from graduation brochures.
But what about that lack of rigor?
Having somehow concluded that teacher programs are hotbeds of easy grades, NCTQ turns to the question of who let the rigor out. Once again, their methodology is itself as rigorous as a bowl of noodles left to boil for twelve hours.
Multiple theories as to why students in education majors might appear to excel so often were also examined (e.g., clinical coursework that lends itself to high grades, too many arts and crafts assignments, too much group work, particularly egregious grade inflation, better quality instruction, more female students who tend to get higher grades, opportunities to revise work, and higher caliber students), but none appears to explain these findings as directly as the nature of the assignments.
First of all, interesting list of theories there. Second of all-- "none appears to explain"?? How did you judge that appearance, exactly. Did we just put each theory on a post-it note, stick it to the wall, stand back and hold up our thumbs and squint to see which one looked likely? Because usually the way you reject theories in research is with research.
The Big NCTQ Thumb came to rest on "criterion-referenced" and "criterion-deficient" assignments. We'll come back to that in a moment-- it deserves its own subheading. Just one more note about te methodology here.
NCTQ got their hands on syllabi for 1,161 courses, "not just on teacher education but across an array of majors." Except-- wait. We're looking at 509 schools, so 1,161 works out to a hair over two courses per school, including schools with multiple education programs. Oh, no-- never mind. Here it is in the appendix-- we're only going to do this in depth analysis for seven schools. Plus at thirty-three other schools, we will look at just the education programs. Oh, and on this chart it shows that of the seven in-depth schools, we'll look at only teacher programs in two. So, "wide array" means six other majors at five of the 509 schools.
And yes-- the data comes from course syllabi. At seven schools. Not the course, professors, students-- just the syllabi. So our first assumption will be that these syllabi with their lists of course assignments will tell us everything we need to know about how rigorous the coursework is.
Creating the right hatchet for the job
"Criterion-referenced" is a thing, and it basically means an objective test. "Criterion-deficient," on the other hand, will actually win you a game of googlewhacking because apparently nobody uses the term except NCTQ. "Criterion deficiency" is a real thing, used it seems mostly in the non-teaching world to describe a test that fails to assess an important criterion (e.g. you want a secretary who can word process, but the job evaluation doesn't check for word processing). I bring this up only because now I have a great fancy word for discussing high stakes standardized tests-- they suffer from citerion deficiency.
But back to our story.
NCTQ cross-reference course syllabi with grade records posted publicly by registrars and open records requests (Schools DO that?! Seven years ago I wasn't allowed to know the grades of my own children for whom I was paying bills because of privacy laws!) NCTQ "applauds the commitment to transparency" of those schools willing to complete ignore student privacy concerns.
NCTQ looked at 7,500 assignments and ranked them as either CR or CD (that's my abbreviation--if they can be lazy researchers, I can be a lazy typist). Here are the criteria used to tell the difference:
An assignment is considered criterion-referenced when it is focused on a clearly circumscribed body of knowledge and the assignment is limited so that the instructor can compare students’ work on the same assignment.
Qualities that indicate an assignment is criterion-referenced include
* a limited scope
* evaluation based on objective criteria;
* students’ work products similar enough to allow comparison.
Qualities that indicate an assignment is criterion-deficient include
* an unlimited or very broad scope
* evaluation based on subjective criteria
* students’ work products that differ too much to be compared.
NCTQ provides a sample of each. A CR lesson would be one in which the student is to apply a specific tool to critique videotaped (quaint) lessons. This is good because everyone uses the same tool for the same lessons so that the instructor knows exactly what is going on. A CD assignment would be to teach something-- anything-- to the class using information from the chapter. This is bad because everybody teaches something different, uses different specific parts of the chapter, and teaches in different ways. This would be bad because there would be too many differences the instructor would be unable to determine who is best at the teaching of stuff.
How is this distinction a useless one? Let me count the ways.
1) It assumes that the purpose of an assignment is to allow comparison of one student to another. This would be different from, say, using assignment as a way to develop and synthesize learning, or to mark the growth and development of the individual student.
2) It assumes that all good teachers look exactly the same and can be directly compared. It imagines that difference is a Bad Thing that never intrudes in a proper classroom. This is bananas.
3) It assumes that the best assignments are close-ended assignments that have only one possible outcome. Even reformsters steeped in Depth of Knowledge and Rigorology tout the value of open-ended response tasks with a variety of correct answers without demanding that the many correct responses be ranked in order of most correct.
4) It appears to place the highest value on objective testing. If that is true for my teacher training, is it not true for my practice? In other words, is NCTQ suggesting that the best assessments for me to use with my students are true-false and multiple choice tests rather than any sort of project-based assessment. Because, no.
5) It assumes that all students in the future teacher's future classroom will also be one size fits all. When I ask my students to prepare oral presentations, should I require that they all do reports on Abraham Lincoln so that they can be more easily and accurately compared?
6) It discounts the truth that part of being a professional is being ready and able to exercise subjective judgment in an objective manner. In other words, free from personal prejudice, but open to the ways that the individual student's personality, skills, and history play into the work at hand (without excusing crappy work).
7) They are trying to make this distinction based on assignments listed in syllabi.
There's more
I did look for the appendix evaluating how well five weeks will prepare you for teaching if you come from a super-duper university, but that was one aspect of teacher training ease NCTQ did not address.
There are other appendices, examining ideas such as Why High Grades Are Bad (including, but not limited to, if grades are divorced from learning, would-be employers will find grades less useful). But I'm not going to plow through them because at the end of the day, this is a report in which some people collected some graduation brochures and course syllabi and close read their way to an indictment of all college teacher training programs.
It is not that these questions are without merit. Particularly nowadays, as teacher programs are increasingly desperate to hold onto enough paying customers to keep the ivy covered lights on, teacher training programs are undoubtedly under increasing pressure to manufacture success for their students, one way or another. Nor is it unheard of for co-operating teachers to look at student teachers and think, "Who the hell let this hapless kid get this far, and who the hell is going to actually give him a teaching certificate?"
The question of how well training programs are preparing teachers for real jobs in the real world ought to be asked and discussed regularly (more colleges and universities might consider the radical notion of consulting actual teachers on the matter). And as more reformster foolishness infects college ed departments, the problem of Useless Training only becomes worse. So this is absolutely a matter that needs to be examined and discussed, but the method should be something more rigorous than collecting some commencement brochures and course syllabi and sitting in an office making ill-supported guesses about what these random slips of paper mean.
And yet I feel in my bones that soon enough I'll be reading main stream media accounts of the important "findings" of this significant "research." Talk about your easy A.
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