This point came up in passing a few days ago when I was reviewing some writing by Mark Garrison,
but it is worth hammering home all by itself.
We have been told repeatedly that we need to take the Big Standardized Tests so that we can hold schools accountable and tell whether our teachers are succeeding or not. "Of course we need accountability systems," the policy makers say. "Don't you want to know how well we're doing?"
And then we rank schools and teachers and students. But ranking is not measuring.
Would you rather be operated on by a top-ranking surgeon or one who was the bottom of his class? What if the former is the top graduate of Bob's Backyard School of Surgical Stuff and the latter is the bottom of Harvard Medical School? Would you like homework help from the dumbest person in MENSA or the smartest person in a 6th grade remedial class? And does that prompt you to ask what we even mean by "dumb" or "smart"?
"But hey," you may reply. "If I'm going to rank people by a particular quality, I have to measure that quality, don't I?"
Of course not. You can find the tallest student in a classroom without measuring any of them. You can find the heaviest box of rocks by using a scale that doesn't ever tell you how much they weigh. Ranking requires no actual measurement at all.
Not only that, but when we are forced to measure, ranking encourages us to do it badly. Many qualities or characteristics would best be described or measured with a many-dimensional matrix with a dozen different axes. But to rank-- we have to reduce complex multidimensional measurement to something that can be measured with a single-edged stick.
Who is most attractive-- Jon Hamm, Ryan Gosling, or George Clooney? It's an impossible question because it involves so many factors, from hair style to age to wry wit vs. full-on silliness all piled on top of, "Attractive to whom, exactly?" We can reduce all of those factors and measure each one independently, and that might create some sort of qualitative measure of attractiveness, but it would be so complicated that we'd have to chart it on some sort of multi-matrix omni-dimensional graphy thing, and THAT would make it impossible to rank the three gentlemen. No, in order to rank them we would either have to settle on some single measurement that we use as a proxy for all the rest, or some bastard offspring created by mashing all the measures together. This results in a ranking that doesn't reflect any kind of real measurement of anything, ultimately both meaningless and unconvincing (the ladies of the George Clooney fan club will not change allegiance because some data-driven list contradicts what they already know in their hearts).
In fact, when we create the bastardized mashup measurement, we're really creating a completely new quality. We can call it the Handsomeness Quotient, but we might as well call Shmerglishness.
So let's go back to "smart," a word that is both as universally used and as thoroughly vague as "good" or "stuff." Smartitude is a complex of factors, some of which exist not as qualities but as relationships between the smart-holder and the immediate environment (I'm pretty smart in a library, average under a car hood, and stupid on a basketball court). Measuring smart is complicated and difficult and multi-dimensional.
But then in the ed biz we're going to fold that quality into a broader domain that we'll call "student achievement" and now we are talking about describing the constellation of skills and abilities and aptitudes and knowledge for an individual human being, and to rank requires to use a single-axis shmerglishness number.
We could go on and on about the many examples of how complex systems cannot be reduced to simple measures, but I want to go back and underline that main idea--
Ranking is not measuring. In fact, ranking often works directly against measuring. As long as our accountability systems focus on ranking students, teachers, and schools, they will not tell us how well the education system is actually working.
Monday, January 11, 2016
DFER: Trust Clinton To Betray Unions
In his semi-regular email to supporters, allies, and hate-readers, Whitney Tilson led one item with this subheading:
Hillary (and Bill) have a long history of breaking with the teachers’ unions, which bodes well:
Tilson is a leading light of DFER (Democrats for Education Reform), a group of faux Democrat, hedge fundy, union-hating, privateering reformsters. These are exactly the people who love Clinton when she's getting all Wall Street warm and corporate cozy, but who become alarmed when she starts talking crazy, like suggesting that charter schools don't actually serve all students.
But in his email, Tilson wants to re-assure everyone that Clinton can be counted on to break with unions just as soon as she's elected. Here are his historical supports:
…after Bill got elected governor four years later, many of his early boosters from labor felt betrayed. Specifically, the teachers unions were infuriated over the couple’s advocacy of an education reform proposal that mandated teacher testing. The National Education Association and its Arkansas affiliate worked against the Clintons after they backed the measure in 1983.
— Hillary’s first significant public role was heading an education commission for Bill, a precursor to her role as health care czar in his first term. The efforts she supported were heartily endorsed by the business community, including a dark-money nonprofit group funded by WalMart founder Sam Walton. (Tom and Matea Gold explored this in part one of their story on the Clinton money machine yesterday, which you can read here.)
— Hillary was booed by teachers when she showed up at education forums as Arkansas First Lady to pitch her proposal. “I believe the governor’s teacher testing bill has done inestimable damage to the Arkansas teaching profession and to the image of this state,” Peggy Nabors, the president of the Arkansas Education Assn, wrote in a 1983 letter to her members. She called it “a radical departure from what educators or the makers of standardized test themselves believe is appropriate or fair.” She added that the proposal “represents the final indignity” and closed by urging teachers to “make a contribution to political candidates who will support a more progressive education program.”
Lots of folks have suggested that Clinton can be trusted just about as far as you can throw the giant pile of money that Wall Street and corporate interests have invested in her. And I am one of them-- from where I sit, Clinton isn't any better for education than Jeb! unless you prefer to be smiled at while you're being gutted.
But it certainly tells us something about where we are and who she is that a group like DFER is out there re-assuring the money men that Clinton can be trusted to "break with" the teachers' unions, as if that's a basis for endorsing her. God, but 2016 is going to be a long year in politics.
Hillary (and Bill) have a long history of breaking with the teachers’ unions, which bodes well:
Tilson is a leading light of DFER (Democrats for Education Reform), a group of faux Democrat, hedge fundy, union-hating, privateering reformsters. These are exactly the people who love Clinton when she's getting all Wall Street warm and corporate cozy, but who become alarmed when she starts talking crazy, like suggesting that charter schools don't actually serve all students.
But in his email, Tilson wants to re-assure everyone that Clinton can be counted on to break with unions just as soon as she's elected. Here are his historical supports:
…after Bill got elected governor four years later, many of his early boosters from labor felt betrayed. Specifically, the teachers unions were infuriated over the couple’s advocacy of an education reform proposal that mandated teacher testing. The National Education Association and its Arkansas affiliate worked against the Clintons after they backed the measure in 1983.
— Hillary’s first significant public role was heading an education commission for Bill, a precursor to her role as health care czar in his first term. The efforts she supported were heartily endorsed by the business community, including a dark-money nonprofit group funded by WalMart founder Sam Walton. (Tom and Matea Gold explored this in part one of their story on the Clinton money machine yesterday, which you can read here.)
— Hillary was booed by teachers when she showed up at education forums as Arkansas First Lady to pitch her proposal. “I believe the governor’s teacher testing bill has done inestimable damage to the Arkansas teaching profession and to the image of this state,” Peggy Nabors, the president of the Arkansas Education Assn, wrote in a 1983 letter to her members. She called it “a radical departure from what educators or the makers of standardized test themselves believe is appropriate or fair.” She added that the proposal “represents the final indignity” and closed by urging teachers to “make a contribution to political candidates who will support a more progressive education program.”
Lots of folks have suggested that Clinton can be trusted just about as far as you can throw the giant pile of money that Wall Street and corporate interests have invested in her. And I am one of them-- from where I sit, Clinton isn't any better for education than Jeb! unless you prefer to be smiled at while you're being gutted.
But it certainly tells us something about where we are and who she is that a group like DFER is out there re-assuring the money men that Clinton can be trusted to "break with" the teachers' unions, as if that's a basis for endorsing her. God, but 2016 is going to be a long year in politics.
Sunday, January 10, 2016
ICYMI: Edu-reading from the week
This isn't everything there is to read out there, but it's a damn fine sampling of worthwhile stuff.
PA Budget or Hell Freezing Over-- Which Will Come First
Pennsylvania may become the first state to ever lap itself in the budget process. Okay, this is actually just me, writing in this case for NEA's Education Votes website not because I've suddenly developed a love for NEA's political choices, but because I support any attempt by NEA to A) join the late twentieth century and B) include a variety of voices. For the record, they don't pay me, so I still do not qualify as a full-fledged union stooge.
An Open Letter to Janelle Monae : TFA's cultural appropriation
It is hard not to love someone who writes under the name Walter Crunkite. This open letter (to one of the more awesome and underappreciated artists out there) does a great job of addressing the problems of TFA.
Detroit Schools Plan Shows Lack of faith in Democracy
The Detroit Free Press gets exactly to the heart of what is so wrong with the sort of school takeover that so many urban systems are seeing.
Return to Teachers' Village (Part IV)
Begun back in December, Jersey Jazzman has been unrolling an impressive and well-researched look at New Jersey's plan to create its own little educational oasis, and why it all went South. This installment puts a cap on the story, as well as including links to the first three installments.
An Open Letter to Darrell Earley
It would have been easy to miss this gem tucked away in facebook. Here's a teacher's response to one more boneheaded state official.
The Joyful Illiterate Kindergartners of Finland
Not a new piece, and references many pieces that are also not new, but the perspective of an American teacher in Finland makes this special.
All I Really Need To Know I (Should Have) Learned in Kindergarten
You may remember Emily Kaplan as the Boston-area teacher who wrote a guest post here that gave a gut-wrenching look inside a No Excuses school. She's back this week at Edushyster (connecting those two near-neighbors will stand as one of my more useful accomplishments) with another must read post about pushing young kids too hard.
Reformy Myth Busting: 2016 Edition
Jersey Jazzman again, swatting down some of the currently-favored reformster talking points.
Gaslighting and Turnaround Schools
You've probably caught this must-read piece from must-read bloggist Peg with Pen, but on the off-chance you missed it, here is a brave, bold take-- from inside a turnaround school-- at how deliberately crazy-making the process is.
PA Budget or Hell Freezing Over-- Which Will Come First
Pennsylvania may become the first state to ever lap itself in the budget process. Okay, this is actually just me, writing in this case for NEA's Education Votes website not because I've suddenly developed a love for NEA's political choices, but because I support any attempt by NEA to A) join the late twentieth century and B) include a variety of voices. For the record, they don't pay me, so I still do not qualify as a full-fledged union stooge.
An Open Letter to Janelle Monae : TFA's cultural appropriation
It is hard not to love someone who writes under the name Walter Crunkite. This open letter (to one of the more awesome and underappreciated artists out there) does a great job of addressing the problems of TFA.
Detroit Schools Plan Shows Lack of faith in Democracy
The Detroit Free Press gets exactly to the heart of what is so wrong with the sort of school takeover that so many urban systems are seeing.
Return to Teachers' Village (Part IV)
Begun back in December, Jersey Jazzman has been unrolling an impressive and well-researched look at New Jersey's plan to create its own little educational oasis, and why it all went South. This installment puts a cap on the story, as well as including links to the first three installments.
An Open Letter to Darrell Earley
It would have been easy to miss this gem tucked away in facebook. Here's a teacher's response to one more boneheaded state official.
The Joyful Illiterate Kindergartners of Finland
Not a new piece, and references many pieces that are also not new, but the perspective of an American teacher in Finland makes this special.
All I Really Need To Know I (Should Have) Learned in Kindergarten
You may remember Emily Kaplan as the Boston-area teacher who wrote a guest post here that gave a gut-wrenching look inside a No Excuses school. She's back this week at Edushyster (connecting those two near-neighbors will stand as one of my more useful accomplishments) with another must read post about pushing young kids too hard.
Reformy Myth Busting: 2016 Edition
Jersey Jazzman again, swatting down some of the currently-favored reformster talking points.
Gaslighting and Turnaround Schools
You've probably caught this must-read piece from must-read bloggist Peg with Pen, but on the off-chance you missed it, here is a brave, bold take-- from inside a turnaround school-- at how deliberately crazy-making the process is.
NC: Covering Charter Butts
This week, reporter Ann Doss Helms of the Charlotte Observer and Lynn Bonner of the News & Observer both offered accounts of a striking example of 'how the sausage is made" and how public officials make sure that the sausage carries a nice chartery taste.
Wednesday was the day to present the state department of public instruction's report on charter schools to the State Board of Education. They were supposed to accept the report on Thursday, but Lt. Governor Dan Forest had a problem. Per Bonner:
Lt. Gov. Dan Forest argued that the report, intended for the legislature and full of data on charter school enrollment, demographics and costs, was too negative.
“The report, to me, did not have a lot of positive things to say,” he said.
And just in case you're thinking maybe Forest is just concerned that charters aren't getting the job done and he wants to shape them up and that's what he's responding to...
Once the board issues reports, Forest said, “that is the fuel the media uses for the next year to criticize whatever we’re doing.”
And so Forest sent the report back to the drawing board, even though the deadline for acceptance of the report is January 15. Forest said that he would "run interference" with the legislature if anyone complained about the missed deadline. Helms offered her own analysis:
I was among the reporters present. The brief discussion struck me as an unusually blunt demand to make data more politically palatable.
Will you be surprised to learn that Forest is a big-time fan of the charter industry? His General Counsel and Policy Director, Steven Walker, who sits on NC's Charter School Advisory Board and was presented the Charter School Champion Award last summer from the Charter School Initiative of North Carolina.
What did Forest not like about the report? Well, as it turns out, since the report was submitted to a public meeting, a copy (what I guess we must now consider the rough draft) is online for the reading. Let's take a look! The report has three main sections, and I'm sure Forest is over-reacting. Surely this report will create a rosy picture of charter life in North Carolina!
Current State of Charter Schools in NC
Once the previous cap of 100 charters was removed back in 2011, the charter gold rush has been on, though more charter requests have been denied than approved. Currently there are 187 charters operating in NC.
The report notes that charters can draw from any geographic location, and while they are encouraged to reflect the racial and ethnic composition of their location, "There is no mechanism by which schools can guarantee racial and ethnic balance, however, nor is there an official consequence for not achieving it."
That might explain why charters in NC are more white and less Hispanic than public schools. Charters student populations are 57% white, compared to 49% for public schools. Public schools are 16% Hispanic, while charters are 8%. Black population is about the same. This statistic is problematic for all those charter fans who insist that charter opponents are trying to deny Black families a choice for a better life.
But the report digs beyond these raw statistics and finds that, well, things are actually worse. The report finds that individual charters are highly segregated, and that the trend over time has been for fewer and fewer non-white students to make it into charters. Public schools have remained a pretty evenly segregated mix over that same time. They refer here to a working paper by Helen Ladd, Charles Clotfelter and John Holbein of Duke University, tracking the growing "segmentation" of charters in NC. That paper is pretty striking read, and it provides this pair of charts to bluntly illustrate the problem:
North Carolina charters have also consistently served fewer economically disadvantaged students. The numbers fluctuate over three years, but the ratio remains consistent-- public school Ed population has been at 50, 61, and 55 percent of student population. In charters, it has been 40, 37, and 36. And once again, it's worse than it looks, because that's an average, and looking closer reveals that a third of NC charters keep their ED student numbers below 20% (and half of those are below 10%).
The news about "exceptional children" is a little more complicated and nuanced, but for the most part, charters are on the same page as public schools.
How do these schools perform? North Carolina is one of those states that now gives its schools grades. The public school grades are distributed in a pretty bell-curvy manner, but charters are more spread out to the A/B and D/F end of the scale than public schools.
Charters do generally perform better than their home LEA, though about a third can't be compared to their home LEA. These data seem incomplete in many ways-- for instance, what about a comparison to the home LEA of the students, rather than that of the building. The data could mean that NC charters are producing amazing results, or that they are creaming top students, or students from more upscale neighborhoods are attending a charter in the poor part of town.
Inadequate charters? There are such things. When the cap was lifted, legislators also created a definition of a crappy charter that included low academic performance (aka "test scores"). In 2012, one charter ran afoul of this. For 2012-2013, the state moved the goalposts so that test results wouldn't count against charters. In 2014-2015, sixteen charters got warning letters for academic suckiness. They could be in trouble. Maybe.
Pre-cap-lifting, 57 charters closed, including 14 that never opened. 35 of those closures were because of financial problems. Since the cap was lifted, 13 charters have closed
Impact of Charter Schools on the Public School System
Charters currently pull $366 million in funding. The report notes that while in theory this is simply money redirected from public schools, since charters also pull in former home or private school students, they are actually adding to the state student population, and since the state doesn't increase school funding proportional to student numbers, this is actually a net loss. In other words, when Pat stops home-schooling or attending Lilywhite Private Academy, Pat's Regular Public High School loses money-- even though Pat never attended RPHS in the first place.
This is actually a financial wrinkle I've not seen brought up often. I'm doubting that charter supporters are happy to see it turn up in this state-level report.
The report brings up the issue of specific economic impact on specific districts-- and then notes that the state stopped asking local districts about this in 2013, because...:? Don't ask, don't tell? What you don't know can't hurt your charter PR?
And then the report actually tries to say some nice things about charters, like how competition might help (though all options aren't really available to all students) and parents might become more engaged as they try to figure out what's going on. No, really. When I first read the paragraph, it seemed sort of favorable to charters. But now-- damn you, close reading!
Best Practices Resulting from Charter School Operations
Oh, charter laboratories of education! What genius educational ideas have you brewed up in North Carolina? And, um, why is this part of the thirty-page report only two pages long?
Back in June of 2015, NC set up standards to rate a charter as "high quality." The standards involved academic, operational and financial domains. And of the 146 charters in operation last year, a whopping nine earned the high quality seal of approval. There's a list. Next year they're going to tweak the standards.
Well, how about EVAAS, NC's preferred junk science measure for effectiveness? Did any charters manage high EVAAS scores with high populations of economically disadvantaged students? There were eight, with two way out in front of everybody (Henderson Collegiate and Maureen Joy Charter). The report does not offer any clues to the secret of their success.
Other Stuff
The remainder of the report is a compendium of updates and structures (here's some services the NC Department of Public Instruction offers charter folks, here's some of the pending legislation, and here's an update on some ongoing stuff, like North Carolina's pilot program to enter the wildly unsuccessful cyber-school business).
Good Luck on That Rewrite
So the department now has its marching orders from the Lt. Governor-- "Go make this thing less sad, and don't make charters look so much like a resegregate NC schools while draining taxpayer dollars."
Forest meanwhile felt some pressure to explain exactly what he meant by, "Go rewrite that report so it doesn't make me sad." In an interview with Pete Kaliner of WWNC, he indicated that he saw the negative view of charters as part of a pattern, that positive news was withheld on purpose.
In the interview Forest said he objects to the way the state report compares demographics and letter grades at charter and district schools. And he said a section that details increased state spending on charter schools and concludes that most of that money would otherwise have gone to school districts is “an opinion piece.”
And if the department is unsure about how they can "fix" the report, Forest knows where they can get help.
Forest said said there should be an opportunity for “charter schools themselves to be able to read it and look at it and go, ‘Wait a minute. This isn’t painting our picture.’ There’s a lot of great positive things going on with charter schools in the state. Let’s tell that story, too.”
Meanwhile, since the original draft is right there on line, we'll be able to compare the final product to see exactly how many coats of whitewash have been applied to the big charter barn. Let's hope they do a good job, because facts and the truth are nice and all, but not when they come at the expense of good charter PR. Carry on, North Carolina.
Wednesday was the day to present the state department of public instruction's report on charter schools to the State Board of Education. They were supposed to accept the report on Thursday, but Lt. Governor Dan Forest had a problem. Per Bonner:
Lt. Gov. Dan Forest argued that the report, intended for the legislature and full of data on charter school enrollment, demographics and costs, was too negative.
“The report, to me, did not have a lot of positive things to say,” he said.
And just in case you're thinking maybe Forest is just concerned that charters aren't getting the job done and he wants to shape them up and that's what he's responding to...
Once the board issues reports, Forest said, “that is the fuel the media uses for the next year to criticize whatever we’re doing.”
And so Forest sent the report back to the drawing board, even though the deadline for acceptance of the report is January 15. Forest said that he would "run interference" with the legislature if anyone complained about the missed deadline. Helms offered her own analysis:
I was among the reporters present. The brief discussion struck me as an unusually blunt demand to make data more politically palatable.
Will you be surprised to learn that Forest is a big-time fan of the charter industry? His General Counsel and Policy Director, Steven Walker, who sits on NC's Charter School Advisory Board and was presented the Charter School Champion Award last summer from the Charter School Initiative of North Carolina.
What did Forest not like about the report? Well, as it turns out, since the report was submitted to a public meeting, a copy (what I guess we must now consider the rough draft) is online for the reading. Let's take a look! The report has three main sections, and I'm sure Forest is over-reacting. Surely this report will create a rosy picture of charter life in North Carolina!
Current State of Charter Schools in NC
Once the previous cap of 100 charters was removed back in 2011, the charter gold rush has been on, though more charter requests have been denied than approved. Currently there are 187 charters operating in NC.
The report notes that charters can draw from any geographic location, and while they are encouraged to reflect the racial and ethnic composition of their location, "There is no mechanism by which schools can guarantee racial and ethnic balance, however, nor is there an official consequence for not achieving it."
That might explain why charters in NC are more white and less Hispanic than public schools. Charters student populations are 57% white, compared to 49% for public schools. Public schools are 16% Hispanic, while charters are 8%. Black population is about the same. This statistic is problematic for all those charter fans who insist that charter opponents are trying to deny Black families a choice for a better life.
But the report digs beyond these raw statistics and finds that, well, things are actually worse. The report finds that individual charters are highly segregated, and that the trend over time has been for fewer and fewer non-white students to make it into charters. Public schools have remained a pretty evenly segregated mix over that same time. They refer here to a working paper by Helen Ladd, Charles Clotfelter and John Holbein of Duke University, tracking the growing "segmentation" of charters in NC. That paper is pretty striking read, and it provides this pair of charts to bluntly illustrate the problem:
North Carolina charters have also consistently served fewer economically disadvantaged students. The numbers fluctuate over three years, but the ratio remains consistent-- public school Ed population has been at 50, 61, and 55 percent of student population. In charters, it has been 40, 37, and 36. And once again, it's worse than it looks, because that's an average, and looking closer reveals that a third of NC charters keep their ED student numbers below 20% (and half of those are below 10%).
The news about "exceptional children" is a little more complicated and nuanced, but for the most part, charters are on the same page as public schools.
How do these schools perform? North Carolina is one of those states that now gives its schools grades. The public school grades are distributed in a pretty bell-curvy manner, but charters are more spread out to the A/B and D/F end of the scale than public schools.
Charters do generally perform better than their home LEA, though about a third can't be compared to their home LEA. These data seem incomplete in many ways-- for instance, what about a comparison to the home LEA of the students, rather than that of the building. The data could mean that NC charters are producing amazing results, or that they are creaming top students, or students from more upscale neighborhoods are attending a charter in the poor part of town.
Inadequate charters? There are such things. When the cap was lifted, legislators also created a definition of a crappy charter that included low academic performance (aka "test scores"). In 2012, one charter ran afoul of this. For 2012-2013, the state moved the goalposts so that test results wouldn't count against charters. In 2014-2015, sixteen charters got warning letters for academic suckiness. They could be in trouble. Maybe.
Pre-cap-lifting, 57 charters closed, including 14 that never opened. 35 of those closures were because of financial problems. Since the cap was lifted, 13 charters have closed
Impact of Charter Schools on the Public School System
Charters currently pull $366 million in funding. The report notes that while in theory this is simply money redirected from public schools, since charters also pull in former home or private school students, they are actually adding to the state student population, and since the state doesn't increase school funding proportional to student numbers, this is actually a net loss. In other words, when Pat stops home-schooling or attending Lilywhite Private Academy, Pat's Regular Public High School loses money-- even though Pat never attended RPHS in the first place.
This is actually a financial wrinkle I've not seen brought up often. I'm doubting that charter supporters are happy to see it turn up in this state-level report.
The report brings up the issue of specific economic impact on specific districts-- and then notes that the state stopped asking local districts about this in 2013, because...:? Don't ask, don't tell? What you don't know can't hurt your charter PR?
And then the report actually tries to say some nice things about charters, like how competition might help (though all options aren't really available to all students) and parents might become more engaged as they try to figure out what's going on. No, really. When I first read the paragraph, it seemed sort of favorable to charters. But now-- damn you, close reading!
Best Practices Resulting from Charter School Operations
Oh, charter laboratories of education! What genius educational ideas have you brewed up in North Carolina? And, um, why is this part of the thirty-page report only two pages long?
Back in June of 2015, NC set up standards to rate a charter as "high quality." The standards involved academic, operational and financial domains. And of the 146 charters in operation last year, a whopping nine earned the high quality seal of approval. There's a list. Next year they're going to tweak the standards.
Well, how about EVAAS, NC's preferred junk science measure for effectiveness? Did any charters manage high EVAAS scores with high populations of economically disadvantaged students? There were eight, with two way out in front of everybody (Henderson Collegiate and Maureen Joy Charter). The report does not offer any clues to the secret of their success.
Other Stuff
The remainder of the report is a compendium of updates and structures (here's some services the NC Department of Public Instruction offers charter folks, here's some of the pending legislation, and here's an update on some ongoing stuff, like North Carolina's pilot program to enter the wildly unsuccessful cyber-school business).
Good Luck on That Rewrite
So the department now has its marching orders from the Lt. Governor-- "Go make this thing less sad, and don't make charters look so much like a resegregate NC schools while draining taxpayer dollars."
Forest meanwhile felt some pressure to explain exactly what he meant by, "Go rewrite that report so it doesn't make me sad." In an interview with Pete Kaliner of WWNC, he indicated that he saw the negative view of charters as part of a pattern, that positive news was withheld on purpose.
In the interview Forest said he objects to the way the state report compares demographics and letter grades at charter and district schools. And he said a section that details increased state spending on charter schools and concludes that most of that money would otherwise have gone to school districts is “an opinion piece.”
And if the department is unsure about how they can "fix" the report, Forest knows where they can get help.
Forest said said there should be an opportunity for “charter schools themselves to be able to read it and look at it and go, ‘Wait a minute. This isn’t painting our picture.’ There’s a lot of great positive things going on with charter schools in the state. Let’s tell that story, too.”
Meanwhile, since the original draft is right there on line, we'll be able to compare the final product to see exactly how many coats of whitewash have been applied to the big charter barn. Let's hope they do a good job, because facts and the truth are nice and all, but not when they come at the expense of good charter PR. Carry on, North Carolina.
Saturday, January 9, 2016
The Test-Centered School
While politicians and policy-makers have made mouth noises about the amount of time spent on the Big Standardized Test and the prep therefor, those elements only scratch the surface of how test-and-punish policy has messed with American schools.
At various times in ed history we have talked about teacher-centered schools, community-centered schools, and student-centered schools. What we have seen over the past decade is the rise of the test-centered school.
In the test-centered school, regardless of what its mission or vision statement may say, test results are the guiding force.
In the test-centered school, there are remediation courses, but these are not remedial courses in the classic sense of trying to help students who are behind in their comprehension of content. These are test prep courses, in which students' time and attention is devoted to practicing the skills of test-taking. Perhaps the school uses a program package so that students can work independently on computers, drilling multiple choice responses to test-style questions, over and over and over and over and over, day after day after day after day after mind-numbing day, until the students have been taught that English and/or Math (because these remedial courses are never required in non-tested departments) are miserable disciplines filled with nothing but drudgery and boredom.
These remediation courses will have two other side effects. First, they will fill up the student's schedule, so that students who have not Done Well Enough on the test must take Remediation 101 instead of shop or art or band or accounting. These will be the students whose strengths are NOT English and Math, but they will not be able to fully pursue their strengths, but must instead spend their school day focusing on their weakness, their area of failure. If you have never spent your days being bad at something, you may not understand just how corrosive to the spirit it is.
If you want to get a sense of how this is, just imagine switching the classes involved. "Sorry, pat, but no Junior Honors English class for you until you can finally play a decent B-flat scale on trumpet," said no school ever. "Sorry, Mrs. Bagswatter, but Chris can't sign up for AP Calculus until that physical fitness test is passed in PE."
The other side effect will be on what the school can offer. Your English and Math teachers will have to make room in their schedule for Test Prep 101, which means that they don't have time to teach any elective courses.
In fact, running a test-centered school system doesn't just affect how time in school is used, but how the school is actually structured. Middle schools in particular may feel the push in test-centered districts (though I had a hard time finding current research about middle school structure trends, and I've folded in anecdotal through-the-grapevine stuff here). One tradition of middle schools is for 7th and 8th grade, but that leaves the whole school ranking based on the results of eighth grade testing. So districts may feel test-based pressure to move sixth and even fifth graders under the middle school roof to help with school ratings, or shift to old school K-8 schools, sidestepping the middle school rating issue entirely.
Bottom line-- we have districts that are looking at structural changes based not on what's best for the students or even what works best with the available physical plants. They are looking at structural changes primarily based on what will have the best effect on their test-based accountability measures.
In a test-based school, it comes down to the test scores and accountability measures. In Pennsylvania, AP test results can count toward a school's ranking. Many states are now moving toward using SAT's as the BS Test for high school ranking. Consequently, where decisions about students taking college entrance exams might have been based on what the student needs (Will the AP credit be any use to her at her chosen school? Does he even intend to go to college?), they are now based on how the student's choice affects the school. This spring, somewhere in America, a high school principal is going to say, "I don't care if the credit isn't going to be any use at Pat's school in Pat's program-- that kid's the strongest student we have in that department. You get Pat in there to take that damn AP test, whether Pat wants to or not."
And that ultimately is the problem with test-centered schools; the relationship between the school and the student is turned upside down. Instead of asking, "How does this help us meet the educational needs of our students," administrators ask, "How will this affect our test scores?" In a test-centered school, the school is not there to serve the students-- the students are there to meet the needs of the school. And no-- there isn't a scintilla of evidence that test prep serves student needs, nor that test results are an important indicator of their education.
Maybe we offer bribes. Maybe we restructure school. Maybe we drill forever. Maybe we make it clear that we will accept no excuses. It doesn't matter. The students are there to crank out the scores the school wants, and policies are measured by that metric-- will this get students to give us the scores we need from them? That's separated from the question of "Does this meet the students' educational needs" by a chasm so large that you could lose the entire US education system in it.
Sure, much is riding on test-driven policies these days. But at some point administrators and leaders and parents and classroom teachers have to step up and stand for the needs of the students before all else. Because if we aren't going to stand up for our students, what are we going to stand up for?
At various times in ed history we have talked about teacher-centered schools, community-centered schools, and student-centered schools. What we have seen over the past decade is the rise of the test-centered school.
In the test-centered school, regardless of what its mission or vision statement may say, test results are the guiding force.
In the test-centered school, there are remediation courses, but these are not remedial courses in the classic sense of trying to help students who are behind in their comprehension of content. These are test prep courses, in which students' time and attention is devoted to practicing the skills of test-taking. Perhaps the school uses a program package so that students can work independently on computers, drilling multiple choice responses to test-style questions, over and over and over and over and over, day after day after day after day after mind-numbing day, until the students have been taught that English and/or Math (because these remedial courses are never required in non-tested departments) are miserable disciplines filled with nothing but drudgery and boredom.
These remediation courses will have two other side effects. First, they will fill up the student's schedule, so that students who have not Done Well Enough on the test must take Remediation 101 instead of shop or art or band or accounting. These will be the students whose strengths are NOT English and Math, but they will not be able to fully pursue their strengths, but must instead spend their school day focusing on their weakness, their area of failure. If you have never spent your days being bad at something, you may not understand just how corrosive to the spirit it is.
If you want to get a sense of how this is, just imagine switching the classes involved. "Sorry, pat, but no Junior Honors English class for you until you can finally play a decent B-flat scale on trumpet," said no school ever. "Sorry, Mrs. Bagswatter, but Chris can't sign up for AP Calculus until that physical fitness test is passed in PE."
The other side effect will be on what the school can offer. Your English and Math teachers will have to make room in their schedule for Test Prep 101, which means that they don't have time to teach any elective courses.
In fact, running a test-centered school system doesn't just affect how time in school is used, but how the school is actually structured. Middle schools in particular may feel the push in test-centered districts (though I had a hard time finding current research about middle school structure trends, and I've folded in anecdotal through-the-grapevine stuff here). One tradition of middle schools is for 7th and 8th grade, but that leaves the whole school ranking based on the results of eighth grade testing. So districts may feel test-based pressure to move sixth and even fifth graders under the middle school roof to help with school ratings, or shift to old school K-8 schools, sidestepping the middle school rating issue entirely.
Bottom line-- we have districts that are looking at structural changes based not on what's best for the students or even what works best with the available physical plants. They are looking at structural changes primarily based on what will have the best effect on their test-based accountability measures.
In a test-based school, it comes down to the test scores and accountability measures. In Pennsylvania, AP test results can count toward a school's ranking. Many states are now moving toward using SAT's as the BS Test for high school ranking. Consequently, where decisions about students taking college entrance exams might have been based on what the student needs (Will the AP credit be any use to her at her chosen school? Does he even intend to go to college?), they are now based on how the student's choice affects the school. This spring, somewhere in America, a high school principal is going to say, "I don't care if the credit isn't going to be any use at Pat's school in Pat's program-- that kid's the strongest student we have in that department. You get Pat in there to take that damn AP test, whether Pat wants to or not."
And that ultimately is the problem with test-centered schools; the relationship between the school and the student is turned upside down. Instead of asking, "How does this help us meet the educational needs of our students," administrators ask, "How will this affect our test scores?" In a test-centered school, the school is not there to serve the students-- the students are there to meet the needs of the school. And no-- there isn't a scintilla of evidence that test prep serves student needs, nor that test results are an important indicator of their education.
Maybe we offer bribes. Maybe we restructure school. Maybe we drill forever. Maybe we make it clear that we will accept no excuses. It doesn't matter. The students are there to crank out the scores the school wants, and policies are measured by that metric-- will this get students to give us the scores we need from them? That's separated from the question of "Does this meet the students' educational needs" by a chasm so large that you could lose the entire US education system in it.
Sure, much is riding on test-driven policies these days. But at some point administrators and leaders and parents and classroom teachers have to step up and stand for the needs of the students before all else. Because if we aren't going to stand up for our students, what are we going to stand up for?
Another Bad NCLB Apologia
At FiveThirtyEight, economics writer Ben Casselman has concocted one of the saddest revisionary apologias for No Child Left Behind.
Even the headline/subhead combo signal that this is going to be a tough ride. "No Child Left Behind Worked: At Least in One Important Way." And then Casselman goes on to explain how NCLB really didn't work.
Casselman buries the lede about four paragraphs down:
Nearly a decade and a half later, No Child Left Behind is often described as a failure, and there is no question that the law fell short of many of its most ambitious goals. Most schools didn’t come close to achieving the 100-percent-proficiency mandate, which experts never considered a realistic target. Subsequent research found that the law’s penalties did little to improve student performance, and may have done more harm than good in some schools. Large achievement gaps remain, in part because Congress didn’t provide all of the billions of dollars in additional education funding that the law’s backers envisioned.
And that's why Casselman's "at least" is also a fail. It's worth talking about, because it is the same "at least" that many folks like to tack on NCLB, as in, "Well, at least it accomplished this one great thing."
The "at least" is "at least NCLB made schools disagregate data so that they would discover the little previously-ignored pockets of failure." Casselman even opens with the story of an affluent suburban Massachusetts school that was shocked to "discover" through test results that they were a failure (who knows-- maybe this neighborhood was the home of Arne Duncan's storied white moms)
This is the narrative that helps maintain support for test-and-punish as education policy. But there are several problems with it.
First of all-- nobody is surprised by test results. No local school district in this country has ever, in the last decade-plus of NCLB and NCLB Jr., gotten test results back and said, "Holy smokes! We had no idea that this batch of students was doing poorly!!" Not once. The Big Standardized Tests have told us nothing we didn't know, unless it was that we occasionally discovered that some otherwise great students were lousy test takers.
Second of all-- and Casselman acknowledges this one-- test-and-punish was definitely not test-and-rescue or test-and-assist. NCLB told districts, "Hey, you have a problem right here. Good luck fixing it!" And where test-and-punish turned into test-and-send-students-off-to-charters, the message was "Fix your problems with fewer resources than you had when you got into them in the first place."
Casselman has read up on this-- he devotes a few paragraphs to the research showing that the penalties of NCLB made it harder for schools to get better. Economist-researcher Jacob Vigdor compared the ever-ratcheting punishments to yelling at a failing kid: "You might succeed in scaring the Dickens out of the kid, but you’re not going to help them pass algebra."
So, in other words, NCLB's "success" was to tell districts what they already knew and to offer punishment without assistance.
Casselman also wants to make a case for the "success" of transparent data.
But for all its failures, No Child Left Behind had at least one significant — and, experts say, lasting — success: It changed the way the American educational system collects and uses data. The law may not have achieved the promise of its title, but it did force schools across the country to figure out which students were being left behind, and to make that information public.
Well, the "collect and use" data is true-- schools now collect a bunch of test data that is useful for doing test prep so that we can collect more data. It's a change in the sense that professional baseball would be changed if, between each inning, one team dug holes on the field and then the other team filled them in. It's a waste of everybody's time, but boy are they busy Doing Something (and the shovel companies make a mint).
And no school in the country needed help finding out who was left behind, but then, that's not really the point, is it. It's the "make the information public," because test-and-punish also includes test-and-shame. Because a premise of both NCLB and NCLB 2.0 (Duncan-Obama) was always that schools are big fat lying liars who lie. And it would only be natural that Casselman would pick up that idea, because now many paragraphs in, we discover who one of his his "experts" is. CAP.
“There’s a very long history of states and school districts and schools essentially hiding behind the average performance of their students,” said Scott Sargrad, a former Education Department official in the Obama administration who is now a researcher at the left-leaning Center for American Progress. “That masks really significant differences between kids who are more affluent, who are white, who don’t have disabilities, whatever it is, and their peers who are more disadvantaged.”
What a swell quote. First, of districts were "hiding," one might ask what they were hiding from and why (I'm going with "dumb, punitive federal and state policies that get in the way of doing the actual work of educating students"). Second, please notice that even this CAP tool doesn't talk about this in terms of achievement or education or learning or skill and ability levels, but in terms of affluence, race and disabilities. Even he doesn't think that test-and-punish has an educational purpose or reveal educational results. Testing is all about race and class, and nothing about actual education. Which evokes a hilarious scene in a district office somewhere with administrators poring over test results and exclaiming, "Hey, I think some of these kids might be poor-- in fact, I think some of them are poor and black! man, I'm glad we got these test results so we could figure this out."
Ultimately, Casselman is left with "we handle data differently" and that, by the end of the article, is whittled down to "we can track individual student data year to year" (not everyone's idea of a Good Thing) and "we use specific figures instead of averages." I'm pretty sure we could have moved away from averages on our government reports without up-ending the entire education system with untested, unproven educational malpractice baloney. If that's the best we can offer, I think we can keep right on saying that No Child Left Behind was a complete and utter failure.
Even the headline/subhead combo signal that this is going to be a tough ride. "No Child Left Behind Worked: At Least in One Important Way." And then Casselman goes on to explain how NCLB really didn't work.
Casselman buries the lede about four paragraphs down:
Nearly a decade and a half later, No Child Left Behind is often described as a failure, and there is no question that the law fell short of many of its most ambitious goals. Most schools didn’t come close to achieving the 100-percent-proficiency mandate, which experts never considered a realistic target. Subsequent research found that the law’s penalties did little to improve student performance, and may have done more harm than good in some schools. Large achievement gaps remain, in part because Congress didn’t provide all of the billions of dollars in additional education funding that the law’s backers envisioned.
And that's why Casselman's "at least" is also a fail. It's worth talking about, because it is the same "at least" that many folks like to tack on NCLB, as in, "Well, at least it accomplished this one great thing."
The "at least" is "at least NCLB made schools disagregate data so that they would discover the little previously-ignored pockets of failure." Casselman even opens with the story of an affluent suburban Massachusetts school that was shocked to "discover" through test results that they were a failure (who knows-- maybe this neighborhood was the home of Arne Duncan's storied white moms)
This is the narrative that helps maintain support for test-and-punish as education policy. But there are several problems with it.
First of all-- nobody is surprised by test results. No local school district in this country has ever, in the last decade-plus of NCLB and NCLB Jr., gotten test results back and said, "Holy smokes! We had no idea that this batch of students was doing poorly!!" Not once. The Big Standardized Tests have told us nothing we didn't know, unless it was that we occasionally discovered that some otherwise great students were lousy test takers.
Second of all-- and Casselman acknowledges this one-- test-and-punish was definitely not test-and-rescue or test-and-assist. NCLB told districts, "Hey, you have a problem right here. Good luck fixing it!" And where test-and-punish turned into test-and-send-students-off-to-charters, the message was "Fix your problems with fewer resources than you had when you got into them in the first place."
Casselman has read up on this-- he devotes a few paragraphs to the research showing that the penalties of NCLB made it harder for schools to get better. Economist-researcher Jacob Vigdor compared the ever-ratcheting punishments to yelling at a failing kid: "You might succeed in scaring the Dickens out of the kid, but you’re not going to help them pass algebra."
So, in other words, NCLB's "success" was to tell districts what they already knew and to offer punishment without assistance.
Casselman also wants to make a case for the "success" of transparent data.
But for all its failures, No Child Left Behind had at least one significant — and, experts say, lasting — success: It changed the way the American educational system collects and uses data. The law may not have achieved the promise of its title, but it did force schools across the country to figure out which students were being left behind, and to make that information public.
Well, the "collect and use" data is true-- schools now collect a bunch of test data that is useful for doing test prep so that we can collect more data. It's a change in the sense that professional baseball would be changed if, between each inning, one team dug holes on the field and then the other team filled them in. It's a waste of everybody's time, but boy are they busy Doing Something (and the shovel companies make a mint).
And no school in the country needed help finding out who was left behind, but then, that's not really the point, is it. It's the "make the information public," because test-and-punish also includes test-and-shame. Because a premise of both NCLB and NCLB 2.0 (Duncan-Obama) was always that schools are big fat lying liars who lie. And it would only be natural that Casselman would pick up that idea, because now many paragraphs in, we discover who one of his his "experts" is. CAP.
“There’s a very long history of states and school districts and schools essentially hiding behind the average performance of their students,” said Scott Sargrad, a former Education Department official in the Obama administration who is now a researcher at the left-leaning Center for American Progress. “That masks really significant differences between kids who are more affluent, who are white, who don’t have disabilities, whatever it is, and their peers who are more disadvantaged.”
What a swell quote. First, of districts were "hiding," one might ask what they were hiding from and why (I'm going with "dumb, punitive federal and state policies that get in the way of doing the actual work of educating students"). Second, please notice that even this CAP tool doesn't talk about this in terms of achievement or education or learning or skill and ability levels, but in terms of affluence, race and disabilities. Even he doesn't think that test-and-punish has an educational purpose or reveal educational results. Testing is all about race and class, and nothing about actual education. Which evokes a hilarious scene in a district office somewhere with administrators poring over test results and exclaiming, "Hey, I think some of these kids might be poor-- in fact, I think some of them are poor and black! man, I'm glad we got these test results so we could figure this out."
Ultimately, Casselman is left with "we handle data differently" and that, by the end of the article, is whittled down to "we can track individual student data year to year" (not everyone's idea of a Good Thing) and "we use specific figures instead of averages." I'm pretty sure we could have moved away from averages on our government reports without up-ending the entire education system with untested, unproven educational malpractice baloney. If that's the best we can offer, I think we can keep right on saying that No Child Left Behind was a complete and utter failure.
Fired for Competence
You may have heard this story already. You're going to hear it again, and you should. And that's the point. Because one of the things we need to understand about the world is that it includes people who do bad things for stupid reasons.
Jeena Lee-Walker is bringing a lawsuit in federal court because, she says, she was fired from her job teaching English in an Upper West Side high school for teaching a unit that administrators feared would "rile up" students.
Lee-Walker's unit was about the Central Park Five case,a particularly egregious miscarriage of justice. If you've forgotten the 1989 case, it began with the savage assault and rape of a 28-year-old investment banker in Central Park on a night during which widespread attacks were occurring throughout the park. The police pinned it on a group of five juveniles, whose confessions were taken under circumstances less-than-consistent with any kind of proper procedure. Their stories did not match and there was no physical evidence to tie them to the assault, but they were none of them exactly model citizens, and so they were convicted, serving from six to thirteen years for the crime. Then, in 2002, a career rapist already in prison confessed to the attack. DNA evidence, physical evidence, his account of the attack-- they all confirmed the confession. Oh, and he declared that he had acted alone. The convictions of the Central Park Five were vacated. In 2003, they sued the city for malicious prosecution, but the city under Mayor Bloomberg refused to settle, and in fact still had not settled in 2013, when Lee-Walker was teaching her unit. That settlement didn't happen until 2014, under Mayor de Blasio.
Lee-Walker says her bosses were concerned that her unit was not balanced enough. I am not sure how one works balance into an account of these events. The most common defense of the wrongful conviction is that the Five were all Bad Actors, but the "Well, I'm Sure They Were Guilty of Something" approach to criminal justice is just, well, stupid and wrong. The response to a crime, even one as awful as this (and it was a truly brutal assault), is not to round up some bad actor Black and Hispanic kids and call it a day. There is no legal principle of "If you commit a crime of any sort, you are thereafter criminally liable for all crimes that occur in your general vicinity." I don't know what kind of balance you bring to a study of this event, or what Lee-Walker's bosses felt she was missing. And in all fairness, at this point we have only heard her side, so maybe she was depicting police as evil demons who ate babies while interrogating the Five. But that wouldn't be a problem with balance so much as with accuracy.
But as Lee-Walker says, "The facts are the facts." She refers to "the documentary" which I'm guessing is the film by Ken Burns, a film-maker not exactly known for his slipshod ways or sensationalizing style. In other words, Lee-Walker didn't just pull this unit out of her butt, but leaned on the work of respected sources.
The court documents indicate she was fired for "insubordination" which generally means "we ordered you to do X and you said no," and that ended a six-year teaching career.
Lee-Walker allows that some of her Black students became riled up, and all I can say is Good For Them. I wish students would become riled up more often, particularly when confronting the notion that injustice still rears its head in the world on a regular basis. American history is filled with things that people ought to get riled up about. Getting riled up is the first step toward learning more and coming to some understanding of why the injustice occurs, and that, with luck and effort, leads to actually doing something effective about the problem.
Of course, that involves connecting students to the real world, and education is filled with administrators who want to cut all connections between the classroom and the world, studying everything as a cloud-wrapped abstraction. It is one of our most self-defeating impulse in education-- and then we're surprised that our students don't see any relevant value in what we are trying to teahc them.
That's our job. A competent teacher connects the learning to the world, or the world to the learning, and this can and should include the business of getting riled up. We should be teaching students what to do when they get riled up about something. And we should be showing them things that are worth getting riled up about. Any time students are riled up-- that is a teachable moment.
So while I'm reluctant to wade into these stories where we've only heard one side, it's hard for me to imagine how Lee-Walker was doing anything but her job. She was teaching at the ironically-named High School for the Arts, Imagination and Inquiry, and I'm forced to wonder if that name isn't short for High School for Some of the Arts, A Bit of Imagination, and Just Enough Inquiry. There are so many lessons for young residents of New York City to learn from the story of the Central Park Five; it makes no sense to fire a teacher willing to approach them.
Jeena Lee-Walker is bringing a lawsuit in federal court because, she says, she was fired from her job teaching English in an Upper West Side high school for teaching a unit that administrators feared would "rile up" students.
Lee-Walker's unit was about the Central Park Five case,a particularly egregious miscarriage of justice. If you've forgotten the 1989 case, it began with the savage assault and rape of a 28-year-old investment banker in Central Park on a night during which widespread attacks were occurring throughout the park. The police pinned it on a group of five juveniles, whose confessions were taken under circumstances less-than-consistent with any kind of proper procedure. Their stories did not match and there was no physical evidence to tie them to the assault, but they were none of them exactly model citizens, and so they were convicted, serving from six to thirteen years for the crime. Then, in 2002, a career rapist already in prison confessed to the attack. DNA evidence, physical evidence, his account of the attack-- they all confirmed the confession. Oh, and he declared that he had acted alone. The convictions of the Central Park Five were vacated. In 2003, they sued the city for malicious prosecution, but the city under Mayor Bloomberg refused to settle, and in fact still had not settled in 2013, when Lee-Walker was teaching her unit. That settlement didn't happen until 2014, under Mayor de Blasio.
Lee-Walker says her bosses were concerned that her unit was not balanced enough. I am not sure how one works balance into an account of these events. The most common defense of the wrongful conviction is that the Five were all Bad Actors, but the "Well, I'm Sure They Were Guilty of Something" approach to criminal justice is just, well, stupid and wrong. The response to a crime, even one as awful as this (and it was a truly brutal assault), is not to round up some bad actor Black and Hispanic kids and call it a day. There is no legal principle of "If you commit a crime of any sort, you are thereafter criminally liable for all crimes that occur in your general vicinity." I don't know what kind of balance you bring to a study of this event, or what Lee-Walker's bosses felt she was missing. And in all fairness, at this point we have only heard her side, so maybe she was depicting police as evil demons who ate babies while interrogating the Five. But that wouldn't be a problem with balance so much as with accuracy.
But as Lee-Walker says, "The facts are the facts." She refers to "the documentary" which I'm guessing is the film by Ken Burns, a film-maker not exactly known for his slipshod ways or sensationalizing style. In other words, Lee-Walker didn't just pull this unit out of her butt, but leaned on the work of respected sources.
The court documents indicate she was fired for "insubordination" which generally means "we ordered you to do X and you said no," and that ended a six-year teaching career.
Lee-Walker allows that some of her Black students became riled up, and all I can say is Good For Them. I wish students would become riled up more often, particularly when confronting the notion that injustice still rears its head in the world on a regular basis. American history is filled with things that people ought to get riled up about. Getting riled up is the first step toward learning more and coming to some understanding of why the injustice occurs, and that, with luck and effort, leads to actually doing something effective about the problem.
Of course, that involves connecting students to the real world, and education is filled with administrators who want to cut all connections between the classroom and the world, studying everything as a cloud-wrapped abstraction. It is one of our most self-defeating impulse in education-- and then we're surprised that our students don't see any relevant value in what we are trying to teahc them.
That's our job. A competent teacher connects the learning to the world, or the world to the learning, and this can and should include the business of getting riled up. We should be teaching students what to do when they get riled up about something. And we should be showing them things that are worth getting riled up about. Any time students are riled up-- that is a teachable moment.
So while I'm reluctant to wade into these stories where we've only heard one side, it's hard for me to imagine how Lee-Walker was doing anything but her job. She was teaching at the ironically-named High School for the Arts, Imagination and Inquiry, and I'm forced to wonder if that name isn't short for High School for Some of the Arts, A Bit of Imagination, and Just Enough Inquiry. There are so many lessons for young residents of New York City to learn from the story of the Central Park Five; it makes no sense to fire a teacher willing to approach them.
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