In an America stuffed with charter schools, how would I make a pitch for a public school?
I don't mean how would I argue the ins and outs and dollars and cents of policy decisions. I don't mean how would I, for instance, try to talk the GOP out of turning ESEA into the Charter and Privatization Act of 2015. I'm not talking the big idea macro-scale argument about the place of modern charters in education.
How would I look a parent in the eye and make my pitch for them to choose public school over a charter? Well, I haven't polished this up into a slick video or fileted it down to billboard-ready copy yet, but here's the basic outline of what I would say.
Here's why you should send your child to your public school.
Stability.
I will promise you that at the end of this year, at the end of next year, at the end of your child's educational career, even if that's thirteen years from now, this school system will still be here. You will never arrive at our doors and find them suddenly locked. You will never spend a single part of your year scrambling to find a new school to take your child in. As long as your child is school age, we will be here for her. You will never have to discover that we have decided to stop teaching your child because we can't make enough money doing it.
Shared expertise.
Our teaching staff has over a thousand years of collective teaching experience. You may think that those thousand years don't matter if your child is in a classroom with a second-year teacher, but they do, because that second-year teacher will be able to share in the other 998 years' worth of experience any time she needs to.
Our staff will also share the experience of teaching your child. Your child's classroom teacher will be able to consult with every other teacher who works with, or has ever worked with, your child. We do not routinely turn over large portions of our staff, nor do we depend on a stable of green young teachers.
Commitment.
We are committed to educating your child. Only in the most extraordinary circumstances will we expel him, and we will never "counsel him out." We will never require a minimum performance from him just to stay in our school.
Ownership.
Our public school is owned and operated by the voters and taxpayers of this community, your friends, neighbors, and co-workers. The charter school is not. This public school is overseen by an elected board of individuals who live here and who must answer to voters. The charter school is not. When you have a complaint, a concern, an issue that you want to direct attention to, the people who run this school must have regular public meetings at which you must be able to air your concerns. The charter is a business, run by people who don't ever have to let you into their board room.
How we spend your money.
We have no expenses that are not related to educating your child. We will never spend less on your child so that we can pay our CEO more. We will never cut programs for your child so that we can buy a nicer summer home or a bigger boat. And we buy in bulk, so we can buy more resources, more programs, more variety, more choices under one roof. Nobody here is trying to make money from your child's education; we are simply trying to provide the best education we can, as directed by the elected representatives of the voters and taxpayers of this district.
And if you don't believe us, you are free to examine our financial records any time you wish. We will never hide them from you.
The public school difference.
I know that you must consider the best interests of your child. I also know that not every public school system does a perfect job of delivering on each of these promises. But as you are considering that charter school alternative, ask the charter school folks these questions:
Will you promise me that this school will still be here the day my child graduates?
Will you promise me that my child will be taught by the same group of highly experienced teachers throughout my child's school career?
Will you allow me to see your financial statements any time I wish?
Will you commit to holding all meetings of your leaders and operators in public, with ample opportunity for members of the public to speak out?
Will you promise me that no matter what, you will never turn my child away from this school?
My suggestion to you? Find a place that will say yes to all of those, because without a foundation of stability, transparency, and commitment to your child, any other promises mean nothing. They are like getting a marriage proposal from a man who says, "I will be the greatest husband ever, but I do reserve the right to skip town any time that I feel like it." The charter school promise is not really a promise at all. If our pubic school promises seem smaller and less grand, it's because we know that whatever we promise, we'll have to stick around to deliver.
That would be my pitch. I know there are public schools that would have to step up their game to live up to that pitch, and they should start stepping today. I know that state and federal government have put obstacles in the way of living up to those promises, and that in some urban areas, much has been done to take the "public" out of public education. I know that the sales pitch would have to be tweaked by locality.
Most of all, I know that this sales pitch doesn't address the actual quality of education. But we have to start with the foundation, and the foundation (which we have previously taken for granted) is an institution dedicated to being a permanent provider, operated by and responsive to the community, and committed to meeting the needs of every student within its community. That foundation must be in place in order for a structure of quality education must be built.
Tuesday, January 6, 2015
Monday, January 5, 2015
Poverty Matters (Ep. 2,364,339)
Over at Education Next, Matthew P. Steinberg and Lauren Sartain went poking through data from Chicago's EITP teacher evaluation pilot. They worked through some interesting data-- and then leaped to a rather...um, odd... conclusion in answer to the question, "Does Better Observation Make Better Teachers?"
Steinberg and Sartain lead with some boilerplate about teachers being the most important factor in a classroom blah blah blah teacher eval systems broken blah blah blah TNTP found that systems weren't getting enough bad teachers fired blah blah blah rise of VAM controversial. Having prepared the field, we are now ready to operate.
The Excellence in Teaching Project was piloted in Chicago in 2008, one of many to turn Danielson into a household name. It was the result of a team-up beginning in 2006 between the school system (under CEO Arne Duncan) and the teachers union, a partnership that fell apart just before launch over disagreement about how to use the resulting ratings (you will be shocked to learn that the district wanted to use results for accountability stuff like tenure decisions).
That's all fertile stuff, but I'm going to skip over it because I have my eye on something else. Likewise, I'm going to skip over the nuts and bolts of implementation and the observation model itself. Short form (as those of us now living with a similar model now know) was rather than drive by and throw some numbers on a sheet, the observations required detailed data and some form of feedback to show the teacher what to change.
What's important to me today is that they generated data for observations from 2005-06 through 2010-11, and they crunched that together with student standardized test results. They monkeyed around with those numbers and then draped a lovely sheet of fancy language over it, but basically they are answering the question, "Does this observation model get test scores to go up?"
Now, let me pause to acknowledge that this whole research is fraught with Dumb Parts. Most especially, it wants to pretend that a couple of standardized tests that cover two subjects constitutes a measure of student achievement. But we can set that aside for a moment. The EITP system was designed to add "instructional coach" to the principal's job description, so that they would provide "targeted instructional guidance."
The first Big Result was that EITP raised reading scores by a statistically significant amount, but it did not do the same for math. The next Big Result was that it only made a difference in the first year (that effect they explain rather simply as "after the first year, CSP dropped support and nobody ever again got the kind of training the first-year cohort did).
But that's not the Really Big News. Take a look at the chart
Yes, the higher the level of poverty, the less effect the new teacher training-via-observation system worked. Or, in the authors' words:
Our results indicate that while the pilot evaluation system led to large short-term, positive effects on school reading performance, these effects were concentrated in schools that, on average, served higher-achieving and less-disadvantaged students. For high-poverty schools, the effect of the pilot is basically zero.
What could possibly explain such a thing? Could it be that high-poverty students face more obstacles than a simple tweaking of teaching techniques could overcome? Is it possible that all that noise about poverty being a serious obstacle to the efficacy of traditional techniques is actually true? Or that students living in poverty have more trouble dealing with pointless standardized tests? Could it be that poverty really is a big part of the explanation for why students in certain schools don't achieve at the same level as more comfortable, less-poor students?
Nope. That's not it at all.
We suspect that this finding is the result of the unequal allocation of principals and teachers across schools as well as additional demands placed on teachers and principals in more disadvantaged schools, which may impede their abilities to implement these types of reforms. For example, if higher-quality principals and teachers are concentrated in higher-achieving, lower-poverty schools, it should not be surprising that a program that relies on high-quality principals and teachers has larger effects in these schools.
Staring this data directly in the eye, Steinberg and Sartain conclude that high-poverty schools have crappier teachers and "less-able" principals.
In the absence of any data to support a theory of qualitative difference between teachers in poor schools compared to teachers in not-poor schools, Steinberg and Sartain conclude that the level of success in the program has nothing to do with poverty, but is all the fault of teachers and administrators.
Even though the data points to poverty as the big flashing neon sign of "Hey, here it is!" Steinberg and Sartain walk right past the blinking brightness to select again the teachers and principals as the cause. This is not so much mis-reading data as simply ignoring it. I'm not sure why they bothered with the big long article. They could have just typed, one more time, "Poor students do worse on standardized tests, therefor we conclude that the only possible explanation is that all the bad teachers in the world teach in high-poverty schools." Also, I've noticed that whenever a building is on fire, there are firefighters there with big red trucks, so if you never want your building to burn down, keep firefighters and big red trucks away.
Steinberg and Sartain lead with some boilerplate about teachers being the most important factor in a classroom blah blah blah teacher eval systems broken blah blah blah TNTP found that systems weren't getting enough bad teachers fired blah blah blah rise of VAM controversial. Having prepared the field, we are now ready to operate.
The Excellence in Teaching Project was piloted in Chicago in 2008, one of many to turn Danielson into a household name. It was the result of a team-up beginning in 2006 between the school system (under CEO Arne Duncan) and the teachers union, a partnership that fell apart just before launch over disagreement about how to use the resulting ratings (you will be shocked to learn that the district wanted to use results for accountability stuff like tenure decisions).
That's all fertile stuff, but I'm going to skip over it because I have my eye on something else. Likewise, I'm going to skip over the nuts and bolts of implementation and the observation model itself. Short form (as those of us now living with a similar model now know) was rather than drive by and throw some numbers on a sheet, the observations required detailed data and some form of feedback to show the teacher what to change.
What's important to me today is that they generated data for observations from 2005-06 through 2010-11, and they crunched that together with student standardized test results. They monkeyed around with those numbers and then draped a lovely sheet of fancy language over it, but basically they are answering the question, "Does this observation model get test scores to go up?"
Now, let me pause to acknowledge that this whole research is fraught with Dumb Parts. Most especially, it wants to pretend that a couple of standardized tests that cover two subjects constitutes a measure of student achievement. But we can set that aside for a moment. The EITP system was designed to add "instructional coach" to the principal's job description, so that they would provide "targeted instructional guidance."
The first Big Result was that EITP raised reading scores by a statistically significant amount, but it did not do the same for math. The next Big Result was that it only made a difference in the first year (that effect they explain rather simply as "after the first year, CSP dropped support and nobody ever again got the kind of training the first-year cohort did).
But that's not the Really Big News. Take a look at the chart
Yes, the higher the level of poverty, the less effect the new teacher training-via-observation system worked. Or, in the authors' words:
Our results indicate that while the pilot evaluation system led to large short-term, positive effects on school reading performance, these effects were concentrated in schools that, on average, served higher-achieving and less-disadvantaged students. For high-poverty schools, the effect of the pilot is basically zero.
What could possibly explain such a thing? Could it be that high-poverty students face more obstacles than a simple tweaking of teaching techniques could overcome? Is it possible that all that noise about poverty being a serious obstacle to the efficacy of traditional techniques is actually true? Or that students living in poverty have more trouble dealing with pointless standardized tests? Could it be that poverty really is a big part of the explanation for why students in certain schools don't achieve at the same level as more comfortable, less-poor students?
Nope. That's not it at all.
We suspect that this finding is the result of the unequal allocation of principals and teachers across schools as well as additional demands placed on teachers and principals in more disadvantaged schools, which may impede their abilities to implement these types of reforms. For example, if higher-quality principals and teachers are concentrated in higher-achieving, lower-poverty schools, it should not be surprising that a program that relies on high-quality principals and teachers has larger effects in these schools.
Staring this data directly in the eye, Steinberg and Sartain conclude that high-poverty schools have crappier teachers and "less-able" principals.
In the absence of any data to support a theory of qualitative difference between teachers in poor schools compared to teachers in not-poor schools, Steinberg and Sartain conclude that the level of success in the program has nothing to do with poverty, but is all the fault of teachers and administrators.
Even though the data points to poverty as the big flashing neon sign of "Hey, here it is!" Steinberg and Sartain walk right past the blinking brightness to select again the teachers and principals as the cause. This is not so much mis-reading data as simply ignoring it. I'm not sure why they bothered with the big long article. They could have just typed, one more time, "Poor students do worse on standardized tests, therefor we conclude that the only possible explanation is that all the bad teachers in the world teach in high-poverty schools." Also, I've noticed that whenever a building is on fire, there are firefighters there with big red trucks, so if you never want your building to burn down, keep firefighters and big red trucks away.
Womb to Workplace Pipeline Under Construction
In the education field, we've been talking about the government's interest in a Cradle-to-Career, Womb-to-Workplace, Conception-to-Cadaver pipeline for some time. But if you keep your focus on what the Department of Education is up to, you may have missed the news that the Department of Labor is already well into the construction of the Not Yet Teething to Not Still Breathing database.
It's called the Workforce Data Quality Initiative, and you can read about the basics right here.
This was a series of grants given to various folks as part of a "collaborative partnership" between the Departments of Labor and Education. Here are the main objectives of the WDQI:
1) Use every piece of workforce data imaginable, from Unemployment Insurance wage records to training programs for veterans and those with disabilities to adult literacy programs.
2) Fix it so workforce data can be matched up with education data "to ultimately create longitudinal data systems with individual-level information beginning with pre-kindergarten through post-secondary schooling all the way through entry and sustained participation in the workforce and employment services system."
3) Get more data. more!
4) Analyze the performance education and training programs.
5) Provide easy to understand "information" so that consumers can choose training and education programs.
Oh, and there's one other "output" expected from the Diapers-to-Dust database.
Additionally, WQDI grantees are expected to use this data analysis to create materials on state workforce performance to share with workforce system stakeholders and the public.
So when a corporation needs some drones to enhance their labor pool, they will be able to just check the Fetus-to-Fertilizer data pool and order up whatever it is they want.
So if you are dealing with people who think all this talk of a Big Brothery Huggies-to-Depends pipeline is crazy talk, just have them take a look at this website. But don't look for aything happening in the news about it. The fourth round of grants was announced last June; this is already well under way. Your seat on the Onesies-to-Donesies railroad is probably already labeled, tagged, and reserved for you.
It's called the Workforce Data Quality Initiative, and you can read about the basics right here.
This was a series of grants given to various folks as part of a "collaborative partnership" between the Departments of Labor and Education. Here are the main objectives of the WDQI:
1) Use every piece of workforce data imaginable, from Unemployment Insurance wage records to training programs for veterans and those with disabilities to adult literacy programs.
2) Fix it so workforce data can be matched up with education data "to ultimately create longitudinal data systems with individual-level information beginning with pre-kindergarten through post-secondary schooling all the way through entry and sustained participation in the workforce and employment services system."
3) Get more data. more!
4) Analyze the performance education and training programs.
5) Provide easy to understand "information" so that consumers can choose training and education programs.
Oh, and there's one other "output" expected from the Diapers-to-Dust database.
Additionally, WQDI grantees are expected to use this data analysis to create materials on state workforce performance to share with workforce system stakeholders and the public.
So when a corporation needs some drones to enhance their labor pool, they will be able to just check the Fetus-to-Fertilizer data pool and order up whatever it is they want.
So if you are dealing with people who think all this talk of a Big Brothery Huggies-to-Depends pipeline is crazy talk, just have them take a look at this website. But don't look for aything happening in the news about it. The fourth round of grants was announced last June; this is already well under way. Your seat on the Onesies-to-Donesies railroad is probably already labeled, tagged, and reserved for you.
Speak Up Now for Teacher Prep Programs
The holidays are over, life is back to normal(ish), and your classroom has hit that post-holiday stride. It is time to finally make your voice heard on the subject of teacher preparation programs.
As you've likely heard, the USED would like to start evaluating all colleges, but they would particularly like to evaluate teacher preparation programs. And they have some exceptionally dreadful ideas about how to do it.
Under proposed § 612.4(b)(1), beginning in April, 2019 and annually thereafter, each State would be required to report how it has made meaningful differentiations of teacher preparation program performance using at least four performance levels: “low-performing,” “at-risk,” “effective,” and “exceptional” that are based on the indicators in proposed § 612.5 including, in significant part, employment outcomes for high-need schools and student learning outcomes.
And just to be clear, here's a quick summary from 612.5
Under proposed § 612.5, in determining the performance of each teacher preparation program, each State (except for insular areas identified in proposed § 612.5(c)) would need to use student learning outcomes, employment outcomes, survey outcomes, and the program characteristics described above as its indicators of academic content knowledge and teaching skills of the program's new teachers or recent graduates. In addition, the State could use other indicators of its choosing, provided the State uses a consistent approach for all of its teacher preparation programs and these other indicators are predictive of a teacher's effect on student performance.
Yes, we are proposing to evaluate teacher prep programs based on the VAM scores of their graduates. Despite the fact that compelling evidence and arguments keep piling up to suggest that VAM is not a valid measure of teacher effectiveness, we're going to take it a step further and create a great chain of fuzzy thinking to assert that when Little Pat gets a bad grade on the PARCC, that is ultimately the fault of the college that granted Little Pat's teacher a degree.
Yes, it's bizarre and stupid. But that has been noted at length throughout the bloggosphere plenty. Right now is not the time to complain about it on your facebook page.
Now is the time to speak up to the USED.
The comment period for this document ends on February 2. All you have to do is go to the site, click on the link for submitting a formal comment, and do so. This is a rare instance in which speaking up to the people in power is as easy as using the same device you're using to read there words.
Will they pay any attention? Who knows. I'm not inclined to think so, but how can I sit silently when I've been given such a simple opportunity for speaking up? Maybe the damn thing will be adopted anyway, but when that day comes, I don't want to be sitting here saying that I never spoke up except to huff and puff on my blog.
I just gave you a two-paragraph link so you can't miss it. If you're not sure what to say, here are some points to bring up-
The National Association of Secondary School Principals has stated its intention to adopt a document stating clearly that they believe that VAM has no use as an evaluation tool for teachers.
The American Statistical Association has stated clearly that test-based measures are a poor tool for measuring teacher effectiveness.
A peer-reviewed study published by the American Education Research Association and funded by the Gates Foundation determined that “Value-Added Performance Measures Do Not Reflect the Content or Quality of Teachers’ Instruction.”
You can scan the posts of the blog Vamboozled, the best one-stop shop for VAM debunking on the internet for other material. Or you can simply ask a college education department can possibly be held accountable for the test scores of K-12 students.
But write something. It's not very often that we get to speak our minds to the Department of Education, and we can't accuse them ignoring us if we never speak in the first place.
As you've likely heard, the USED would like to start evaluating all colleges, but they would particularly like to evaluate teacher preparation programs. And they have some exceptionally dreadful ideas about how to do it.
Under proposed § 612.4(b)(1), beginning in April, 2019 and annually thereafter, each State would be required to report how it has made meaningful differentiations of teacher preparation program performance using at least four performance levels: “low-performing,” “at-risk,” “effective,” and “exceptional” that are based on the indicators in proposed § 612.5 including, in significant part, employment outcomes for high-need schools and student learning outcomes.
And just to be clear, here's a quick summary from 612.5
Under proposed § 612.5, in determining the performance of each teacher preparation program, each State (except for insular areas identified in proposed § 612.5(c)) would need to use student learning outcomes, employment outcomes, survey outcomes, and the program characteristics described above as its indicators of academic content knowledge and teaching skills of the program's new teachers or recent graduates. In addition, the State could use other indicators of its choosing, provided the State uses a consistent approach for all of its teacher preparation programs and these other indicators are predictive of a teacher's effect on student performance.
Yes, we are proposing to evaluate teacher prep programs based on the VAM scores of their graduates. Despite the fact that compelling evidence and arguments keep piling up to suggest that VAM is not a valid measure of teacher effectiveness, we're going to take it a step further and create a great chain of fuzzy thinking to assert that when Little Pat gets a bad grade on the PARCC, that is ultimately the fault of the college that granted Little Pat's teacher a degree.
Yes, it's bizarre and stupid. But that has been noted at length throughout the bloggosphere plenty. Right now is not the time to complain about it on your facebook page.
Now is the time to speak up to the USED.
The comment period for this document ends on February 2. All you have to do is go to the site, click on the link for submitting a formal comment, and do so. This is a rare instance in which speaking up to the people in power is as easy as using the same device you're using to read there words.
Will they pay any attention? Who knows. I'm not inclined to think so, but how can I sit silently when I've been given such a simple opportunity for speaking up? Maybe the damn thing will be adopted anyway, but when that day comes, I don't want to be sitting here saying that I never spoke up except to huff and puff on my blog.
I just gave you a two-paragraph link so you can't miss it. If you're not sure what to say, here are some points to bring up-
The National Association of Secondary School Principals has stated its intention to adopt a document stating clearly that they believe that VAM has no use as an evaluation tool for teachers.
The American Statistical Association has stated clearly that test-based measures are a poor tool for measuring teacher effectiveness.
A peer-reviewed study published by the American Education Research Association and funded by the Gates Foundation determined that “Value-Added Performance Measures Do Not Reflect the Content or Quality of Teachers’ Instruction.”
You can scan the posts of the blog Vamboozled, the best one-stop shop for VAM debunking on the internet for other material. Or you can simply ask a college education department can possibly be held accountable for the test scores of K-12 students.
But write something. It's not very often that we get to speak our minds to the Department of Education, and we can't accuse them ignoring us if we never speak in the first place.
Sunday, January 4, 2015
What Doesn't Kill You...
Shake it off. Toughen up. Pain is weakness leaving the body. At times as a culture we seem to almost fetishize suffering . In education, that belief in the redemptive power of suffering has found its way into the Cult of Grit. At its best, the field of grittology is a recognition of the need to help children learn to rebound, adapt, recover, weather the storm. At its worst, the field of grittology is an excuse to make no attempt to make life better for children. Instead of taking them an umbrella, standing with them in the storm, or bringing them inside, we sit warm and comfy on the couch and say, "Well, it's good for them. Shows what they're made of. Builds character. Pass the remote."
A recent Washington Post has a moving and honest take on the issue of childhood suffering from Virgie Townsend, a senior editor at the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials.
Townsend opens with a memory of a teen in a writing workshop who wrote about her own abuse and rebuffed expressions of "Sorry you had to live that" with "Don't be. It made me who I am."
I also grew up with violence, terrified of a parent who was verbally and physically abusive, and drove drunk with me and my siblings in the backseat. Sometimes this parent would threaten to choke me with a dog collar or would fire off shotgun rounds overhead for the fun of seeing the rest of the family cower. I am glad my classmate found a way to cope with her past, but I can’t be grateful for mine.
I would have been better off without that dog collar, without those years of fear. After such episodes, I was so exhausted that I couldn’t concentrate on my homework. I repeatedly failed state math exams. My immune system was weak. As a child, I had frequent, unexplained fevers, which baffled my pediatrician and led him to test me for cancer.
Townsend goes on to catalog the other effects-- difficulty making friends, constant worry that saying or doing the wrong thing might trigger anger and disgust in any other person.
My first thought is simply how awful that must be. I have had students who were victims of abuse that I knew about, but reading this account reminds me that some abuse victims in my classroom present with other problems that do not obviously scream "abuse victim." About my fifth or sixth thought is that there are folks out there who think that part of the solution to Student Townsend's problems is to fire the math teacher who couldn't get the test scores up.
It’s human nature to believe that our difficulties carry extra meaning, that they are not in vain. Although suffering is undesirable, it’s supposed to help us grow. We want our pain to make sense, to somehow be edifying. In the words of Friedrich Nietzsche and Kelly Clarkson: What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.
Townsend goes on to catalog, from the Puritans through Teddy Roosevelt through Helen Keller through Oprah, how we love the story of redeeming and clarifying suffering. I would add that it's worth noticing that one of the first things people do in these stories of growth and strength is they stop suffering. It's not like cake. Nobody (well, almost nobody) says, "Wow. That was so good, I think I'll have some more." Suffering in these stories is so good for the hero, and yet the progression, the path, is to move away from it as swiftly as possible. So I'm going to call our attitude confused, at best.
Townsend notes that we all benefit from "life's healthy and normal challenges." But researchers have found that "traumatic incidents often have long-term negative consequences." Childhood abuse or trauma can result in toxic stress-- stress that is literally poison to the body. "In work published in 2012, Harvard researchers found that people who had been mistreated as children had, on average, a 6 percent loss in volume in their hippocampi, a part of the brain involved with learning and memory. Toxic stress also damages the prefrontal cortex, which is linked to social behavior and decision-making, and the cardiovascular and immune systems."
Research suggests that childhood trauma increases the risk of cancer, heart disease, mental health issues and (surprise) poor school performance. "A 2009 study in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine reported that people who had six or more adverse childhood experiences died, on average, 20 years sooner than those who had none."
The classic story of redemption and strength has also been found to be helpful to children, but only when paired with the support of stable adults. Simply invoking grit or Kelly Clarkson is not enough.
The message is clear. Childhood trauma stacks the deck against the children who suffer through it. Invoking grit or repeatedly firing the teachers who can't work miracles won't help. Repeatedly churning school staff so that school itself is a crazy chaotic place won't help. In fact, shuffling those children off to school while saying, "Well, the schools should fix that" is not enough.
"What doesn't kill you makes you stronger," is pretty close to "What are you complaining about? You're not dead, yet." It is absolutely true that life comes with difficulty and challenge and hurt and hardship and that people whose goal is to encase their child in a problem-free cocoon are making their own sort of terrible mistake (that's a column for another day). But that's kind of the point-- life comes with plenty of difficulty all on its own. We don't need to be callous about that, and we certainly don't need to add to it, and we certainly shouldn't abandon our smallest, weakest brothers and sisters to suffering on their own because we figure that will be good for them.
A recent Washington Post has a moving and honest take on the issue of childhood suffering from Virgie Townsend, a senior editor at the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials.
Townsend opens with a memory of a teen in a writing workshop who wrote about her own abuse and rebuffed expressions of "Sorry you had to live that" with "Don't be. It made me who I am."
I also grew up with violence, terrified of a parent who was verbally and physically abusive, and drove drunk with me and my siblings in the backseat. Sometimes this parent would threaten to choke me with a dog collar or would fire off shotgun rounds overhead for the fun of seeing the rest of the family cower. I am glad my classmate found a way to cope with her past, but I can’t be grateful for mine.
I would have been better off without that dog collar, without those years of fear. After such episodes, I was so exhausted that I couldn’t concentrate on my homework. I repeatedly failed state math exams. My immune system was weak. As a child, I had frequent, unexplained fevers, which baffled my pediatrician and led him to test me for cancer.
Townsend goes on to catalog the other effects-- difficulty making friends, constant worry that saying or doing the wrong thing might trigger anger and disgust in any other person.
My first thought is simply how awful that must be. I have had students who were victims of abuse that I knew about, but reading this account reminds me that some abuse victims in my classroom present with other problems that do not obviously scream "abuse victim." About my fifth or sixth thought is that there are folks out there who think that part of the solution to Student Townsend's problems is to fire the math teacher who couldn't get the test scores up.
It’s human nature to believe that our difficulties carry extra meaning, that they are not in vain. Although suffering is undesirable, it’s supposed to help us grow. We want our pain to make sense, to somehow be edifying. In the words of Friedrich Nietzsche and Kelly Clarkson: What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.
Townsend goes on to catalog, from the Puritans through Teddy Roosevelt through Helen Keller through Oprah, how we love the story of redeeming and clarifying suffering. I would add that it's worth noticing that one of the first things people do in these stories of growth and strength is they stop suffering. It's not like cake. Nobody (well, almost nobody) says, "Wow. That was so good, I think I'll have some more." Suffering in these stories is so good for the hero, and yet the progression, the path, is to move away from it as swiftly as possible. So I'm going to call our attitude confused, at best.
Townsend notes that we all benefit from "life's healthy and normal challenges." But researchers have found that "traumatic incidents often have long-term negative consequences." Childhood abuse or trauma can result in toxic stress-- stress that is literally poison to the body. "In work published in 2012, Harvard researchers found that people who had been mistreated as children had, on average, a 6 percent loss in volume in their hippocampi, a part of the brain involved with learning and memory. Toxic stress also damages the prefrontal cortex, which is linked to social behavior and decision-making, and the cardiovascular and immune systems."
Research suggests that childhood trauma increases the risk of cancer, heart disease, mental health issues and (surprise) poor school performance. "A 2009 study in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine reported that people who had six or more adverse childhood experiences died, on average, 20 years sooner than those who had none."
The classic story of redemption and strength has also been found to be helpful to children, but only when paired with the support of stable adults. Simply invoking grit or Kelly Clarkson is not enough.
The message is clear. Childhood trauma stacks the deck against the children who suffer through it. Invoking grit or repeatedly firing the teachers who can't work miracles won't help. Repeatedly churning school staff so that school itself is a crazy chaotic place won't help. In fact, shuffling those children off to school while saying, "Well, the schools should fix that" is not enough.
"What doesn't kill you makes you stronger," is pretty close to "What are you complaining about? You're not dead, yet." It is absolutely true that life comes with difficulty and challenge and hurt and hardship and that people whose goal is to encase their child in a problem-free cocoon are making their own sort of terrible mistake (that's a column for another day). But that's kind of the point-- life comes with plenty of difficulty all on its own. We don't need to be callous about that, and we certainly don't need to add to it, and we certainly shouldn't abandon our smallest, weakest brothers and sisters to suffering on their own because we figure that will be good for them.
Gates vs. Teachers in Pittsburgh
Chris Potter has a great piece of journalism in this morning's Pittsburgh Post Gazette covering the amped-up anti-teacher advocacy in the burgh. Mostly what I have to say is, "Go read it." But there are just a couple of moments in the article that I want to highlight.
Pittsburgh schools had previously won accolades and some Gates money by committing to a model for data-based teacher improvement created by the district and the teachers together. That's a story of its own for another day.
But one of the players in the Pittsburgh ed scene is A+ Schools, whose major project was an annual report laying out all the data for the city's schools. But in the last few years, they've decided "not just to report on conditions, but to reshape them." And they've retooled their strategic plan to say they will advocate for certain positions on school reform. They've pulled a couple of pages from the standard reformy handbook, with a big serving of Teacher Thunderdome (let's stack-rank teachers and when layoffs come, use stack rankings to make the call) with a side order of achievement gap rhetoric.
The article looks at the A+ "shift" toward advocacy, and it considers the possibility of a Gates factor in the shift-- about the time A+ was becoming more reformy, Gates was handing them a cool million. This may be a chicken-egg problem, but pursuing it pulls an interesting quote from a Gates spokesperson:
Mr. Brown, of the Gates Foundation, agreed that once evaluations are created, “a lot of folks will have questions” if they aren’t used in personnel decisions. “Our perspective was, ‘You said you’d use this information to [ensure kids had] access to the best educators.’"
So, the whole point of teacher evaluation is to rank teachers and the whole point of ranking teachers is to fire the ones at the bottom of the stack.
Mr. Brown added that Gates makes grants to “thought partners” like A+ Schools to ensure education remains in the public eye.
Also, Jessie Ramey of Yinzercation makes it into the article with this on-point quote:
“When you are talking about evaluating teachers,” Ms. Ramey added, “you’re really inflicting more testing on students,” which disrupts learning, and whose results are “highly dependent on poverty.”
The one aspect of this approach that Potter misses is the Thunderdome ideal-- a system that stack ranks teachers and makes employment decisions based on those rankings pits teachers against each other in a battle to the professional death. It makes student and class assignments critical to a teacher's future, and it turns offering a helping hand to a colleague a matter of professional self-destruction. This is why Microsoft ultimately abandoned stack ranking-- it creates an ugly anti-collegial culture. It's no way to run a school.
Potter also looks at the state capital, where unions are spending big money, but where we also find A+ huddled up with StudentsFirst and PennCAN (just in case you had any doubts about A+'s "neutrality").
The article is well worth your attention. Read and share!
Pittsburgh schools had previously won accolades and some Gates money by committing to a model for data-based teacher improvement created by the district and the teachers together. That's a story of its own for another day.
But one of the players in the Pittsburgh ed scene is A+ Schools, whose major project was an annual report laying out all the data for the city's schools. But in the last few years, they've decided "not just to report on conditions, but to reshape them." And they've retooled their strategic plan to say they will advocate for certain positions on school reform. They've pulled a couple of pages from the standard reformy handbook, with a big serving of Teacher Thunderdome (let's stack-rank teachers and when layoffs come, use stack rankings to make the call) with a side order of achievement gap rhetoric.
The article looks at the A+ "shift" toward advocacy, and it considers the possibility of a Gates factor in the shift-- about the time A+ was becoming more reformy, Gates was handing them a cool million. This may be a chicken-egg problem, but pursuing it pulls an interesting quote from a Gates spokesperson:
Mr. Brown, of the Gates Foundation, agreed that once evaluations are created, “a lot of folks will have questions” if they aren’t used in personnel decisions. “Our perspective was, ‘You said you’d use this information to [ensure kids had] access to the best educators.’"
So, the whole point of teacher evaluation is to rank teachers and the whole point of ranking teachers is to fire the ones at the bottom of the stack.
Mr. Brown added that Gates makes grants to “thought partners” like A+ Schools to ensure education remains in the public eye.
Also, Jessie Ramey of Yinzercation makes it into the article with this on-point quote:
“When you are talking about evaluating teachers,” Ms. Ramey added, “you’re really inflicting more testing on students,” which disrupts learning, and whose results are “highly dependent on poverty.”
The one aspect of this approach that Potter misses is the Thunderdome ideal-- a system that stack ranks teachers and makes employment decisions based on those rankings pits teachers against each other in a battle to the professional death. It makes student and class assignments critical to a teacher's future, and it turns offering a helping hand to a colleague a matter of professional self-destruction. This is why Microsoft ultimately abandoned stack ranking-- it creates an ugly anti-collegial culture. It's no way to run a school.
Potter also looks at the state capital, where unions are spending big money, but where we also find A+ huddled up with StudentsFirst and PennCAN (just in case you had any doubts about A+'s "neutrality").
The article is well worth your attention. Read and share!
Saturday, January 3, 2015
Six Recommendations for Responsibility
Anthony Cody's Living in Dialogue should be on your bookmark list. In addition to Cody's own valuable voice, the blog provides a great assortment of voices from the education world.
Last month he included a piece with a rather twisty pedigree. Last year NEA entered into a project with VIVA Idea Exchange (I'm supposed to put a little TM with that, which gives you your first hint about these folks). VIVA is linked to New Voice Strategies, a PR opinion-pushing firm that Dennis Van Roekel (blessedly-former NEA president) used and which hired Paul Toner once Massachusetts teachers had booted him out of his union president job. Reportedly, 900 teacher comments were solicited, then boiled down to the final product.
A result of that project was presented at Living in Dialogue, prompting considerable discussion both at LID and at Diane Ravitch's blog. There's considerable debate about how hard VIVA pushed for certain inclusions in the final product and how "pure" the process remained. I thought I'd just go ahead and see if I thought the results were any good. Here are the six recommendations regarding accountability:
1) Shift away from blame, toward shared responsibility.
This requires moving away from models that hold any ONE stakeholder as solely responsible for a student’s learning, and moving to a model acknowledging that teachers, families, students, and policymakers share responsibility for how well students learn.
Interesting list of stakeholders, as it includes politicians but misses taxpayers, voters, and members of the community. I'm not just nitpicking-- I consider that a glaring omission. But beyond that, I would certainly support any model that didn't involve intoning that teachers are the single biggest factor in student learning, so let's spank them real hard. I would welcome moving away from the ridiculous reasoning that if 50% of a state's students are not proficient, the only possible explanation is that 50% of the state's teachers are bad teachers.
So, basic idea is good. Specific iteration needs work.
2) Educate the whole child
Good lord, yes. Reformsters have insisted that the parts of the child that they believe they can measure are the only parts that matter. Educating the whole child has not always been one of public education's Best Things, but we have never moved further away as a matter of deliberate policy than we have right now. If teachers are going to do their whole job, accountability freaks will have to accept that not all parts of a teacher's job performance can be measured easily, or even a all.
3) Top down funding without top down control.
This is unicorn farming. The federal government simply doesn't play this game; all federal money comes with strings attached. And the writers have sandwiched a whole lot of stuff in this particular bullet point that smells of horn polish.
Educators in every state need to develop education standards, benchmarks, and assessments in all content area due to an increasingly mobile and transient student population – without dictating a specific curriculum.
First, no. No, they don't. I know reasonable people believe in the inevitable necessity of national standards of one sort or another. I do not. And while I would be extraordinarily hard to budge on this point, I have never seen a single solitary piece of evidence that national standards have any educational value at all. None. Not a bit. So don't keep saying that to me like it's self-evident, because it's not, nor has anyone provided any evidence yet.
Second, you cannot fix your (imaginary) transient student problem with anything except a national curriculum.
They also have a wish list of three unlikely items and one good one. The three unlikely ones include a constitutional amendment requiring states "to direct necessary funds toward public education." Who's going to decide what "necessary" means? Their wish list also calls for a combination of lawmaking and lawsuiting to establish education as a civil right and supplement limited state money with limitless federal money. So, the feds won't exert top down control, except when they do.
The fourth item is full testing transparency-- what the tests cost in money and time and scoring and everything else. That would be peachy.
4) Teacher autonomy and professionalism
Recognize educators as professionals who care about the growth of students, the climate of schools, and the state of education in today’s world, and allow them the autonomy afforded to such professionals. Given the impact of teachers on student achievement, it is imperative that teachers be treated as trained professionals who know their students, their students needs, and how best to deliver instruction in the most appropriate way. Allowing teachers to determine best practices will result in removing scripted, one-size-fits-all lessons that often emerge from upper-level decision-making, ignoring the human element. Classroom teachers know how to assess, monitor, and adjust, and if allowed to use their professional judgment with their own students, schools will witness student growth.
Well, yes. That sounds about right, other than "given the impact of teachers on student impact" is just reinforcing the accountability myth that bad test scores can be best explained by bad teachers.
The second paragraph, unfortunately, is way too mealy-mouthed. Teachers should be valued. Their voices and opinions should be considered. Teachers should be free to offer comments and criticism without fear of retaliation (you know--we could offer them some sort of job protection that we could call "tenure").
Sorry to unload on this particular article, but I am tired of teachers and reformsters putting forth as their best ideal a world where teachers are "considered" and "listened to." I'd love those things. But as long as we're staking out unicorn farms, I'd like a world where the state licensing board for teachers and teacher education programs is composed entirely of working teachers. I'd like a world where no major decision about a school building can be made without the approval vote of the teaching staff. I would like a world where nobody is allowed to hold a major education oversight position, like charter school operator or state ed commissioner or secretary of education, without at least ten years of teaching experience in a public school. That's my unicorn farm, and it includes a hell of a lot more than teachers just being listened to politely by all the non-teachers who have the actual power over the world of education.
And don't tell me they were just being realistic when they were writing this. They drop-kicked realism easily enough one item ago when the feds were going to hand out free money with no strings and the states were going to approve a Constitutional amendment. If the writers' biggest dream was to be listened to, they need to dream bigger.
5) Emerge from evaluation to support
Now here are some big dreams. Scrap every stitch of the current system, they say, and replace it with teachers providing an end-of-year report. No evaluations linked to merit pay, licensure, punitive crap, nothing, nada.
I can hear the public (some of whom I've been hanging out with over vacation)-- "So bad teachers will just write their own job performance review?" And I have to agree with them.
Look, if we want everyone to extend trust and respect to teachers based on our professionalism and ability, then we need to extend that same courtesy to our principals. Their proposed self-evaluation certainly has a place in a larger picture, but it wont stand by itself. More than simple honesty, it requires a self-awareness that even some really great teachers lack. I cannot imagine a functioning evaluation system that does not include principal obeservation.
I agree that the goal of such a system needs to be support, not punishment. That's good for the profession, good for the teacher, and good for the school system.
However, test scores have no place in teacher evaluation. You can send the principal to my classroom every day; I won't mind a bit and you'll probably learn a lot about how I do my job. But looking at my students' test scores won't tell you a damn thing about how well I teach.
6) One size does not fit all.
Students arrive with their own unique strengths, aptitudes, interests, and life experiences. Education begins with recognizing who our students are as persons and facilitating the development of their gifts.
Yeah, that's about right. And this, too:
Education must extend beyond a narrow academic focus to include a broad range of human developmental goals and values. In order to educate the whole child, we need to support student growth through individualized guidance programs, electives that nurture aptitudes and extra-curricular activities that develop social skills. This can only happen in a safe and democratic environment. Schools and school districts must communicate to students that they are accepted, valued, and needed just as they are, regardless of their academic achievements.
It's a good finish for this proposed list that-- well, it came from somewhere, somehow. It's kind of sort of about responsibility and accountability, though beyond the teachers-grade-themselves idea, it's not exactly loaded with actionable material. It's an interesting exercise in I-don't-know-what, because I can't imagine any reformster being convinced by it, and I'm not sure (beyond a few choice pull quotes) what PR usefulness VIVA will glean. Apparently there's another group working on turning it into another sort of document, so we can look forward to that.
Last month he included a piece with a rather twisty pedigree. Last year NEA entered into a project with VIVA Idea Exchange (I'm supposed to put a little TM with that, which gives you your first hint about these folks). VIVA is linked to New Voice Strategies, a PR opinion-pushing firm that Dennis Van Roekel (blessedly-former NEA president) used and which hired Paul Toner once Massachusetts teachers had booted him out of his union president job. Reportedly, 900 teacher comments were solicited, then boiled down to the final product.
A result of that project was presented at Living in Dialogue, prompting considerable discussion both at LID and at Diane Ravitch's blog. There's considerable debate about how hard VIVA pushed for certain inclusions in the final product and how "pure" the process remained. I thought I'd just go ahead and see if I thought the results were any good. Here are the six recommendations regarding accountability:
1) Shift away from blame, toward shared responsibility.
This requires moving away from models that hold any ONE stakeholder as solely responsible for a student’s learning, and moving to a model acknowledging that teachers, families, students, and policymakers share responsibility for how well students learn.
Interesting list of stakeholders, as it includes politicians but misses taxpayers, voters, and members of the community. I'm not just nitpicking-- I consider that a glaring omission. But beyond that, I would certainly support any model that didn't involve intoning that teachers are the single biggest factor in student learning, so let's spank them real hard. I would welcome moving away from the ridiculous reasoning that if 50% of a state's students are not proficient, the only possible explanation is that 50% of the state's teachers are bad teachers.
So, basic idea is good. Specific iteration needs work.
2) Educate the whole child
Good lord, yes. Reformsters have insisted that the parts of the child that they believe they can measure are the only parts that matter. Educating the whole child has not always been one of public education's Best Things, but we have never moved further away as a matter of deliberate policy than we have right now. If teachers are going to do their whole job, accountability freaks will have to accept that not all parts of a teacher's job performance can be measured easily, or even a all.
3) Top down funding without top down control.
This is unicorn farming. The federal government simply doesn't play this game; all federal money comes with strings attached. And the writers have sandwiched a whole lot of stuff in this particular bullet point that smells of horn polish.
Educators in every state need to develop education standards, benchmarks, and assessments in all content area due to an increasingly mobile and transient student population – without dictating a specific curriculum.
First, no. No, they don't. I know reasonable people believe in the inevitable necessity of national standards of one sort or another. I do not. And while I would be extraordinarily hard to budge on this point, I have never seen a single solitary piece of evidence that national standards have any educational value at all. None. Not a bit. So don't keep saying that to me like it's self-evident, because it's not, nor has anyone provided any evidence yet.
Second, you cannot fix your (imaginary) transient student problem with anything except a national curriculum.
They also have a wish list of three unlikely items and one good one. The three unlikely ones include a constitutional amendment requiring states "to direct necessary funds toward public education." Who's going to decide what "necessary" means? Their wish list also calls for a combination of lawmaking and lawsuiting to establish education as a civil right and supplement limited state money with limitless federal money. So, the feds won't exert top down control, except when they do.
The fourth item is full testing transparency-- what the tests cost in money and time and scoring and everything else. That would be peachy.
4) Teacher autonomy and professionalism
Recognize educators as professionals who care about the growth of students, the climate of schools, and the state of education in today’s world, and allow them the autonomy afforded to such professionals. Given the impact of teachers on student achievement, it is imperative that teachers be treated as trained professionals who know their students, their students needs, and how best to deliver instruction in the most appropriate way. Allowing teachers to determine best practices will result in removing scripted, one-size-fits-all lessons that often emerge from upper-level decision-making, ignoring the human element. Classroom teachers know how to assess, monitor, and adjust, and if allowed to use their professional judgment with their own students, schools will witness student growth.
Well, yes. That sounds about right, other than "given the impact of teachers on student impact" is just reinforcing the accountability myth that bad test scores can be best explained by bad teachers.
The second paragraph, unfortunately, is way too mealy-mouthed. Teachers should be valued. Their voices and opinions should be considered. Teachers should be free to offer comments and criticism without fear of retaliation (you know--we could offer them some sort of job protection that we could call "tenure").
Sorry to unload on this particular article, but I am tired of teachers and reformsters putting forth as their best ideal a world where teachers are "considered" and "listened to." I'd love those things. But as long as we're staking out unicorn farms, I'd like a world where the state licensing board for teachers and teacher education programs is composed entirely of working teachers. I'd like a world where no major decision about a school building can be made without the approval vote of the teaching staff. I would like a world where nobody is allowed to hold a major education oversight position, like charter school operator or state ed commissioner or secretary of education, without at least ten years of teaching experience in a public school. That's my unicorn farm, and it includes a hell of a lot more than teachers just being listened to politely by all the non-teachers who have the actual power over the world of education.
And don't tell me they were just being realistic when they were writing this. They drop-kicked realism easily enough one item ago when the feds were going to hand out free money with no strings and the states were going to approve a Constitutional amendment. If the writers' biggest dream was to be listened to, they need to dream bigger.
5) Emerge from evaluation to support
Now here are some big dreams. Scrap every stitch of the current system, they say, and replace it with teachers providing an end-of-year report. No evaluations linked to merit pay, licensure, punitive crap, nothing, nada.
I can hear the public (some of whom I've been hanging out with over vacation)-- "So bad teachers will just write their own job performance review?" And I have to agree with them.
Look, if we want everyone to extend trust and respect to teachers based on our professionalism and ability, then we need to extend that same courtesy to our principals. Their proposed self-evaluation certainly has a place in a larger picture, but it wont stand by itself. More than simple honesty, it requires a self-awareness that even some really great teachers lack. I cannot imagine a functioning evaluation system that does not include principal obeservation.
I agree that the goal of such a system needs to be support, not punishment. That's good for the profession, good for the teacher, and good for the school system.
However, test scores have no place in teacher evaluation. You can send the principal to my classroom every day; I won't mind a bit and you'll probably learn a lot about how I do my job. But looking at my students' test scores won't tell you a damn thing about how well I teach.
6) One size does not fit all.
Students arrive with their own unique strengths, aptitudes, interests, and life experiences. Education begins with recognizing who our students are as persons and facilitating the development of their gifts.
Yeah, that's about right. And this, too:
Education must extend beyond a narrow academic focus to include a broad range of human developmental goals and values. In order to educate the whole child, we need to support student growth through individualized guidance programs, electives that nurture aptitudes and extra-curricular activities that develop social skills. This can only happen in a safe and democratic environment. Schools and school districts must communicate to students that they are accepted, valued, and needed just as they are, regardless of their academic achievements.
It's a good finish for this proposed list that-- well, it came from somewhere, somehow. It's kind of sort of about responsibility and accountability, though beyond the teachers-grade-themselves idea, it's not exactly loaded with actionable material. It's an interesting exercise in I-don't-know-what, because I can't imagine any reformster being convinced by it, and I'm not sure (beyond a few choice pull quotes) what PR usefulness VIVA will glean. Apparently there's another group working on turning it into another sort of document, so we can look forward to that.
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