Paul Thomas is one of my favorite bloggers. He's one of the most erudite, scholarly writers in the edubloggoverse (plus, I share his affection for classic comic books), and he has a perspective that I deeply appreciate and with which I usually agree, even if I have to do some thinking to get there.
But yesterday he put up a post that I think, ultimately, I have to disagree with.
In A Call for Social Media Solidarity: “This Is Our House”, Thomas argues for solidarity and a refusal to engage in the ed debates with people who do not belong in "our house."
Over about two years of blogging at my own site and engaging regularly
on Twitter and other social media platforms, I have gradually adopted a
stance that I do not truck with those who are disproportionately dominating the field of and public discourse about education.
His argument is simple:
Each time we invoke their names, their flawed ideas, or their policies, we are joining the tables they have set.
...
Therefore, I am now asking that educators, scholars, and public
education advocates who are active on social media (blogging, Tweeting,
etc.) to make an effort to dedicate a day, a week, a month, or as I have
done, a policy to creating our own educators’ “white out” on social
media—establishing our place for our voices as a model against the mainstream media dedicated to those with authority (elections, appointments, wealth) but without credibility.
Don’t spend blogs rejecting their public claims and education policy.
Don’t engage them on Twitter, or “@” them into a Twitter exchange.
Now, to a certain extent, I absolutely get this. If you think the Kardashians are taking up too much air in the culture, then stop paying attention to them, stop talking about them, stop clicking on stories about them. When you treat people as if they belong at the table, that reinforces their presence at the table. Thomas correctly that this sort of leverage has been used to bring us to a place where many folks treat evolution and creationism as if they represent a simple difference of opinion between two valid and equal points of view.
When the cries for renewed and improved "conversation" between differing sides of the ed debates went out last fall, I pointed out that a legitimate question to ask of some of these folks is, "Why are you even in this discussion?" It is as if a stranger wandered into my classroom and interrupted my class to start offering pedagogical tips like "Wear a brighter colored shirt and comb your hair differently," and instead of having him escorted out, I started talking to him like he had a legitimate cause to start the conversation.
So I've been increasingly mindful of the space that I give to some of the reformster crowd. I started calling the former DC chancellor She Who Will Not Be Named because to even put her name one more time on the internet increases her perceived heft and importance when she is simply a miracle of somehow gathering power and influence without a single, solitary success in her field of alleged expertise. And I never link to Peter Cunningham's reformster-shilling PR website because I'll be damned if I'm going to drive even one more click's worth of web traffic there.
But will I continue to engage certain reformsters directly? Will I continue to respond directly to pieces that appear by arguing, refuting, and wrestling with the points they make? Will I continue to engage? I think I have to. I think many of us have to. Here's why:
Not all reformsters are jerks
I accept as a truth that the world includes many people who disagree with me, but who hold onto their beliefs for reasons just as sincere and decent as my own. I need to talk to those people, and they need to talk to me. It is not always easy to sort those people out from the rest, but I do believe it's worth the effort. I've had some good conversations with reformsters that started with "Here's why I think you're wrong."
It's true that there are reformsters who are self-serving profiteering power-hungry hubris-swollen jerks. But for them it's sometimes useful to remember...
Mockery can be a useful means of deflation
An over-inflated giant balloon of foolishness can be impressive-- until someone gets out a pin. Letting something sit out there looking all impressive and awesome can be a mistake, because not everyone sees that it's all just air.
This is not just our house
This debate is happening in the public sphere. It's happening in front of everybody, and a large part of the audience is still not sure exactly what to believe. In the public sphere, silence is often equated with assent. For the first six months or so, the general public thought the whole Common Core thing must be going okay because they didn't hear anything about it except the press release material that was used to flood the media.
For instance, people heard and believed that the Common Core were written by teachers. Only because that claim was challenged and debunked again and again and again, directly and pointedly, reformsters simply retired it, and it is no longer part of what "everybody knows" about Common Core.
The fight is here
I share Thomas's frustration. We shouldn't have to waste our time arguing teaching methods with people who haven't got a clue what the hell they're talking about. They should be getting no more attention than a airline pilot who walks into the middle of court proceedings and starts telling the judge how to run the trial.
But they are rich and powerful and they have made it happen. We shouldn't be in this fight, but we are. Sometimes you don't choose the fight; the fight just chooses you and your only choice is to fight or get beat up (sometimes you do both). Thomas also says
Symbolic messages matter, and the strongest message we can send about those who shall not be named is exactly that: erase them from the spaces they have dominated without deserving that space.
I don't think that's a viable choice. I don't believe it is in our power to erase them from those spaces, in particular because so many of those spaces are spaces that they own and control. I am concerned that in attempting to erase them and refusing to engage them, what we would really do is surrender the field to them, to leave their voices ringing out without any sort of answer or debate.
I absolutely agree that we should not be having to fight these people, that while every American deserves a voice in the public sphere, it does not follow that really rich and powerful Americans should get to set the agenda for any sector of the country that they take an interest in. The whole business really is a Kafka-esque version of the Emperor's New Clothes. They do not deserve that space.
But they are here, they are fighting, they are powerful, and every small inch of the field that we have reclaimed has come through directly engaging, debating, dialoguing, and I don't see how we can stop.
All that said, I think there are parts of Thomas's point worth holding on to.
We need to be careful when engaging reformsters that we are not elevating people or points of view that don't deserve to be elevated. Watch what you link to. Be careful of whose voice you're amplifying, accidentally or otherwise.
Argue ideas more than people. It really doesn't advance any cause to "prove" that Arne Duncan is an evil doodyhead. This is not always easy-- much of the reformster agenda has been shaped by their personal character-- but to lapse into angry character assault is not useful.
It is not enough to stand against something. We have to stand for something as well. We must keep articulating what we want to see, not just what we don't want to see.
And-- he does give us the option of only following his request for a day or a week. It could serve as an occasional focus and cleansing activity.
Longtime readers of this blog will note that I apparently just hit the Do As I Say, Not As I Do button. It's true-- some of what i know i should do, I don't always do. So while I disagree with much of what Thomas has written here, I respect him for writing it, and will keep it in mind while trying to maintain my own bloggy balance.
Wednesday, January 7, 2015
The Backwards School
One of my regrets as a parent is that I did not advocate more strongly for my son when he was in kindergarten. We had several go-rounds about his behavior, and the problem boiled down to this-- in the morning, before the official start of school, she wanted to have peace and quiet to get her materials organized for the day, and so these five-year-olds were expected to come in from the bus and sit quietly at their desks waiting for the start bell to ring. It would have been almost comical except that this power struggle got every day off to a lousy start, and in the end the biggest lesson my son took away from kindergarten was that school was awful and that he was a bad boy. His mother and I pushed back, but I should have pushed back much harder. I had some funny ideas about professional respect between fellow teachers in the district. I don't have those ideas any more.
The classroom was backwards. In that classroom, the students were there to meet the needs of the teacher, not the other way around.
This was almost twenty-five years ago, and there was no school reform agenda to blame it on. Unfortunately, we have always had classrooms, schools, even entire districts that get turned around backwards. We start with a list of things that we need the students to do for us, instead of an honest inquiry into what the students need us to do for them.
The newest ed reform wave did not create this issue, and it's not the first time we've faced it. Public schools in America have always struggled with a balance between what students need in order to become educated adults and the imperative to mold each child into a round peg to fit into society's round holes.
But the newest ed reform wave has done its best to hardwire backwards schooling into the system. The emphasis on testing and test scores means that schools and teachers need students to make the right numbers. Reformsters talk about personalizing or individualizing education, but what they mean is calibrating the one-size-fits-all program to get students to cough up the desired numbers. They will tell students what "success" means, and they will tell the student when he's met that goal; what he needs or wants is nothing more than an obstacle to be overcome in the process of getting him to produce the proper numbers.
I believe that some reformsters, some high stakes testing boosters, actually believe that their approach addresses the very issues I'm talking about. They are wrong. When you say to a teacher, "This kid better get an 85% on this test or you're in big trouble," the teacher is not going to be motivated to listen to the student or look at the student's needs and desires as anything other than an obstacle to getting that score out of that student. The testing mandate is a sure way of pushing that teacher to finally say, "Look! What you want and feel and need don't matter. Just shut up, sit down, and get these questions right!"
The testing mandate turns every student into the real-life equivalent of a videogame boss that the teacher must defeat in order to get a good score. The teacher need only understand the boss well enough to defeat it.
In some urban and charter schools, the backwards schooling extends to every aspect of the student. Not only do we need him to produce the right numbers, but we require him to behave "properly," to line up, to speak. These schools will tell him how to to dress, how to speak, how to sit, how to walk through the halls-- and there will be no excuses when he fails to produce what is demanded of him. And when he fails to produce, that failure is not seen as the school's failure to meet him where he is or adapt to who he is as a human being; instead, it will be seen as his failure to be the person the school demands. In fact, if he's from a particular neighborhood, his failure to meet the school's demands may be seen as defiance, a willful noon-compliance that means he must be stamped down harder, branded as a troublemaker, moved from the school track to the prison track.
When a school system tightens up, it results in the miraculous "discovery" of "defective" students. after all, if my state-approved teaching program is being properly implemented by the classroom content delivery specialist and Chris is still getting poor grades, then Chris must be defective. Have a specialist check Chris for learning disabilities. And if five-year-old Pat is won't sit still in the endurance-development exercises necessary to prepare for the Big Test, perhaps Pat had better be checked for ADHD so we can administer the proper drugs.
I am not advocating that we hand students the keys to the building and let them set up a land of Do As You Please. But when a school stops listening to students, it loses its way. When we pay attention to students, it can throw off carefully sculpted lesson plans and create momentary confusion and even (gasp) lead to situations where we are the Absolute Rulers in our own classrooms. Tough noogies.
Listening to our students, listening to what they need and want, giving them the chance to grow into the people that they, through aspiration, inclination or accident, are going to be-- that's all Job One.
Our students are not here to serve us. They are not here to take tests for us, to make our jobs easy for us, to be the kind of compliant people we would find most convenient to work with. They are not obstacles to our success (regardless of what regulations and evaluations tell us). They are our purpose for being here.
The classroom was backwards. In that classroom, the students were there to meet the needs of the teacher, not the other way around.
This was almost twenty-five years ago, and there was no school reform agenda to blame it on. Unfortunately, we have always had classrooms, schools, even entire districts that get turned around backwards. We start with a list of things that we need the students to do for us, instead of an honest inquiry into what the students need us to do for them.
The newest ed reform wave did not create this issue, and it's not the first time we've faced it. Public schools in America have always struggled with a balance between what students need in order to become educated adults and the imperative to mold each child into a round peg to fit into society's round holes.
But the newest ed reform wave has done its best to hardwire backwards schooling into the system. The emphasis on testing and test scores means that schools and teachers need students to make the right numbers. Reformsters talk about personalizing or individualizing education, but what they mean is calibrating the one-size-fits-all program to get students to cough up the desired numbers. They will tell students what "success" means, and they will tell the student when he's met that goal; what he needs or wants is nothing more than an obstacle to be overcome in the process of getting him to produce the proper numbers.
I believe that some reformsters, some high stakes testing boosters, actually believe that their approach addresses the very issues I'm talking about. They are wrong. When you say to a teacher, "This kid better get an 85% on this test or you're in big trouble," the teacher is not going to be motivated to listen to the student or look at the student's needs and desires as anything other than an obstacle to getting that score out of that student. The testing mandate is a sure way of pushing that teacher to finally say, "Look! What you want and feel and need don't matter. Just shut up, sit down, and get these questions right!"
The testing mandate turns every student into the real-life equivalent of a videogame boss that the teacher must defeat in order to get a good score. The teacher need only understand the boss well enough to defeat it.
In some urban and charter schools, the backwards schooling extends to every aspect of the student. Not only do we need him to produce the right numbers, but we require him to behave "properly," to line up, to speak. These schools will tell him how to to dress, how to speak, how to sit, how to walk through the halls-- and there will be no excuses when he fails to produce what is demanded of him. And when he fails to produce, that failure is not seen as the school's failure to meet him where he is or adapt to who he is as a human being; instead, it will be seen as his failure to be the person the school demands. In fact, if he's from a particular neighborhood, his failure to meet the school's demands may be seen as defiance, a willful noon-compliance that means he must be stamped down harder, branded as a troublemaker, moved from the school track to the prison track.
When a school system tightens up, it results in the miraculous "discovery" of "defective" students. after all, if my state-approved teaching program is being properly implemented by the classroom content delivery specialist and Chris is still getting poor grades, then Chris must be defective. Have a specialist check Chris for learning disabilities. And if five-year-old Pat is won't sit still in the endurance-development exercises necessary to prepare for the Big Test, perhaps Pat had better be checked for ADHD so we can administer the proper drugs.
I am not advocating that we hand students the keys to the building and let them set up a land of Do As You Please. But when a school stops listening to students, it loses its way. When we pay attention to students, it can throw off carefully sculpted lesson plans and create momentary confusion and even (gasp) lead to situations where we are the Absolute Rulers in our own classrooms. Tough noogies.
Listening to our students, listening to what they need and want, giving them the chance to grow into the people that they, through aspiration, inclination or accident, are going to be-- that's all Job One.
Our students are not here to serve us. They are not here to take tests for us, to make our jobs easy for us, to be the kind of compliant people we would find most convenient to work with. They are not obstacles to our success (regardless of what regulations and evaluations tell us). They are our purpose for being here.
Tuesday, January 6, 2015
My Public School Sales Pitch
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.
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.
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.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)