Where Reading Improvement Comes From

Recently on multiple platforms, Robert Pondiscio talked about reading on his way to standing up for Secretary of Education John King. We disagree about his praise of King for making all the correct word noises, but he's made a point worth repeating about the improvement of reading.

Every teacher of low-income children and English language learners has had this moment: You’re sitting with a student, working line by line through a text, grappling with what should be fairly simple comprehension questions.

“Did you read it?” you ask. “I read it,” the child replies. “But I didn’t get it.”

This is what reading failure often looks like in a struggling school. A child can read the words on a page in front of him, but he can’t always make sense of them.

I would tweak this a bit-- you don't have to teach low-income and ELL students to have this moment. But the rest is absolutely familiar, and I think the insight he applies is also valid.

Pondiscio argues that the traditional response-- more reading instruction, harder-- is not useful. And under the Big Fat Standards movement, we have pushed in exactly the wrong direction. Common Core and its mutant siblings all emphasize reading as a set of discrete skills, somehow existing in a vacuum separate from any content. This is rubbish. Reading never happens in a vacuum, and the reader's relationship with the material, which in turn is based on reader interest and reader knowledge, is always critical. Or as Pondiscio puts it

Children’s ability to understand what they read is intimately intertwined with their background knowledge and vocabulary. If a child is not broadly educated, he won’t be fully literate.

When a student doesn't know the words or the context or the background of what she's reading, reading is hard. If you give someone who has never heard of Harry Potter ten pages from the end of the last book to read, all the reading skill drills in the world will not help that person make sense of what's on the page.

Pondiscio is a member of the E. D. Hirsch fan club, and I half agree with him-- in order to read well, you have to Know Stuff. Hirsch just happens to have a particular view of what stuff everyone needs to know, and that Master List of Stuff is highly debatable, regardless of whose list we're looking at.
When we talk about standardized tests being biased, this is what we're talking about-- what stuff the test-taker already needs to know in order for the test to make sense.

Here's a classic example from the Archive of Terrible SAT Analogies:


RUNNER: MARATHON ::
A) envoy: embassy
B) martyr: massacre
C) oarsman: regatta
D) referee: tournament
E) horse: stable

Embed this batch of vocabulary in a reading selection; we don't have a reading problem, or even a vocabulary problem. We have a "what's your community culture of origin" problem, aka a "what have you actually experienced in life" problem.

Particularly at my level (high school), the solution to supposed reading comprehension problems is rarely context clue skills or decoding skills or the fabled "passage reading skills." The most useful skill at my level is discussion. We read a selection last week that led to a question about collective bargaining, and my students were largely stumped, and it was nothing as complicated as some set of reading skills or attack strategies. They has just never heard of collective bargaining before and had no idea what it was, and so I picked the approach of discussion, probing to see what experience and background knowledge they had that I could connect to the idea of collective bargaining (because the best way to explain something unknown is to connect it to something known) and they could ask clarifying questions of their own and, in this case, even argue a little bit about the issues related to the concept. None of that was reading instruction as we currently understand it, but nothing else would get me better results on the "reading comprehension" questions dealing with "collective bargaining."

The new round of calls for a more rounded education are correct for so many reason (even if some, like King, are undercutting their own words even as they speak), but at a bare minimum, even with the modern reform narrowed view of reading and math as the be-all and end-all, a well-rounded education matters because the more you know, the better you read. Common Core has been denying that for years. As Pondiscio puts it:

There’s a surface plausibility to the idea that nothing matters more than reading, but we’ve followed this well-intentioned idea off a cliff.

If we could stop perpetuating the failed concept of reading as a content-free skills, it would be a huge service to all our students.

Work

It has been a Very Medical couple of weeks. My father-in-law experienced a pair of strokes, and my father is currently doing the hospital shuffle as a quick-and-simple pacemaker lead replacement turns into a bit more complex. Oh, and somewhere in there my wife's aged grandmother doing a swan dive on a nature hike and lacerating her head and smooshing some vertebrae and walking herself out of the wilderness to go find help from some poor ranger who must have thought he was meeting some cast of the Walking Dead. She's in the hospital, too. And my colleague next door is trying to get his missing-day ducks in a row in anticipation of the arrival of his second child next week. Lot of medical.

What I keep noticing through all of these family adventures is the degree to which work rules our world. Yes, if there's a family emergency you should definitely get there to help. You should rush to your family's side.

Just make sure you have your employer's permission first.

We celebrate the human connections, push all the feels buttons to sell everything from mouthwash to Presidents, but still, always remember-- before you act on any of your human feelings, make sure you have your employer's permission first.

We love our national holidays, and in particular share traditional warm images of families gathered around dinner tables, sharing special gathering time. And yet, family holidays have become a mark of socio-economic class, because if you are still stuck in the minimum-wage economy, you probably don't have the whole day off for Memorial Day or Thanksgiving or Christmas. Your employer needs you, so that beats any of the rest of it.

I am not a fuzzy-headed anarchist. I believe in hard work, a good job, the value of exchanging your sweat, blood, skill and work for the money you need to make a life. I'm just old enough to remember the folks who said we should drop out and stick it to the man were often in no danger of actually running out of food, clothing or shelter. I totally get that an employer deserves to get what they pay for, and that it makes no sense nor serves any sense of justice for me to receive a full paycheck if I'm running home every other day to make sure my kitten's pillow is properly fluffed. I'm not saying that I should get a full day's wage even if I had to go home because I was feeling a little verklempt.

But it does say something about us as a culture and country that of the following statements, only one is automatically considered an excuse, an obligation that can only be broken with someone else's permission (unless you are highly enough placed to be a permission-giver).

       1) My family needs me right now.
       2) My aging mother just called.
       3) I have to go be with my spouse today.
       4) I have work.

And we're just talking crises and semi-crises here. I couldn't even seriously include "it's my birthday" or "it's our wedding anniversary" on the list. "I have a family thing" is open to negotiation, or a sign that you're Not Serious about your work. "I have work" is the stopper, the conversation-ender, the immovable non-negotiable reason for the choices you make.

We've let this Work Uber Alles philosophy infect school. School is these children's job, and so is homework, and any whining about how you couldn't get your homework done because of family stuff is just a sign that you are Not Serious about your education.

That's nothing new. What's new is the installation of College and Career Ready as the be-all and end-all of education. We have transferred the work imperative to school, replacing all other reasons for getting an education (good citizen, better human being, more fulfilled individual, fully realized self, etc) with just the one-- you need to do this so that you can work. You need to get ready to work. You need to have useful skills that make you an asset to work.

I know that I'm making an old point, an oft-made point. I also know that I'm not exactly the prime person to make it, because I've been a borderline workaholic my whole life. And I know this borders on cliche-- but when you're watching part of a family scramble around trying to take care of the rest of family-- well. You know. Is work important? Sure. Is it everything? No.

Have we constructed a society in which the rights of people who pay other people to do work have been given primacy over the rights of those workers to have an actual human life? I suspect we have. And I also suspect that the college-and-career-ready crowd is trying to extend that primacy, to say that the right of the people who might some day hire those students to do work-- those future bosses' rights have been given primacy over the rights of our children to have a full and rich education that serves their own needs. "It's on the test" is a bad enough reason to cover certain material in school, but it's even worse when that is just a smokescreen to hide "one of your future employers might want you to be able to do this."

Talking about the work-life balance has many implications. It implies that your work and your life should carry equal weight, that your work is at least as important as the rest of who you are and what you do. It implies that you should not get so wrapped up in having a life that you forget work. And most of all, it implies that life and work are two different things.

Work is eternal. It will always go on, and when you finally step away from the wheel, someone will step in to take your place. Your family is just for right now. Take care of each other. Just sayin'.

John King Is Concerned

If you're on the USED mailing list, this weekend you received a "Friend" e-mail from John King, the latest in a series best entitled Let's Keep Throwing PR Spaghetti At The Wall Until Something Sticks.

The theme, as with his Vegas speech a few weeks ago, is that gosh, we just have to get the focus back on a well-rounded education because somehow, some way, we've just gotten all twisted up with this testing stuff.

The most powerful thing about John King is his story, so he pulls that out again and seriously, there is nothing that anyone can mock about King's story. His mother died, and he was raised for a few years by a very sick father who then also died, and King was an orphan at age 12. He credits his teachers in general and one, Mr. Osterweil, in particular, for saving his life. And in this letter's retelling of the story, he also credits how involvement in and exposure to the arts also made a huge difference. That's a new feature; the moral of King's story is usually that great teachers and an orderly school can turn a student's life around. Now they also need exposure to the arts to open up the world.

The most intriguing thing about King's story has always been that he fails to draw any of the obvious lessons from it, like that fact that Alan Osterweil saved King's life without the benefit of Common Core Standards or a Big Standardized Test. King has never publicly considered whether the reforms he has championed would have helped or hindered Osterweil, or if Osterweil would have approved of the aggressive, excessive suspension policy at King's Roxbury charter.

But King plows on, with more thin-sliced baloney:

I hear frequently and passionately from educators and families who believe that the elements of a great well-rounded education are being neglected because of a too tight focus on reading and math.Well, yes. I'm sure you do. But do you have any idea how such a thing happened?

Sometimes, that's because of constraints on resources, time, and money. Often, teachers and administrators describe how No Child Left Behind and its intense focus on English and math performance left other subjects under-attended to or even ignored.The mystery here is whether King is incredibly dense, or he thinks the rest of us are. First, the constraints of resources, time and money would not necessarily affect the arts except the federal government mandated that reading and math must be the focus of all education. And that didn't just happen under NCLB-- it continued and was intensified under the Obama-Duncan administration and Race to the Top along with Waiverpallooza, which required states to tie math and reading scores to teacher and school evaluations.

And King has to know that. Arne Duncan can claim ignorance from being safely esconced in the beltway bubble, but King was out there trying to sell this mess to the people of New York in meetings so contentious that King canceled them and had to be forced back out there to meet with people.

The narrowing of the America's curriculum did not just mysteriously happen. It was the direct and completely predictable result of the policies pursued by the last two administrations.

I’ve been clear, as has the President and my predecessor, Arne Duncan, that in many places in the country, testing has become excessive, redundant, and overemphasized.

We're committed at the Department of Education to changing that reality, but we need your help. We need to work together to make well-rounded education a priority for the benefit of our students.Great. I look forward to the department calling for the end of Big Standardized Tests. I look forward to the department demanding that teacher and school evaluations no longer be linked in any way to such tests, so that no system of perverse incentives continues to twist education out of shape. If all that happens, I will even be willing to move forward and stop waiting for the day when USED wailing and moaning about too much testing and narrowing of curriculum is accompanied by a secretary saying, "We did that. We did that. It was our policies. Our ideas. This is totally our fault."

But none of that is going to happen.

Done well and thoughtfully, assessments provide vital information to educators and families, but this shouldn’t come at the cost of those subjects that spark passion and inspire the joy of learning.Y'all keep testing. Just, you know, do it more thoughtfully.

King goes on to say that a well-rounded education is now the thing, and that many non-wealthy non-white students are missing out on this swell stuff, and that's a huge bummer. Then we reach the money sentence (I know because it is in bold, underlined text).

We’ve got to see this as an urgent social justice challenge for the country. Help me share the message far and wide: we must work together to give every child the well-rounded education they deserve.

"Help me share" turns out to mean "click on this link and post a cool meme on Facebook."

That's what a well-rounded education is all about: that inextricable intersection between what our kids learn and who they become.

I think the inextricable intersection here is between denying responsibility for past policy screw-ups and attempting to co-opt movements that are already going on. I mean, does King think that the rest of us do not already know that a well-rounded education is important, or that such roundedness has been a casualty of the last fifteen years  worth of reformsterdom.

What audience is he imagining here? Who on the USED mailing list is smacking themselves in the forehead, saying, "Why, damn! That's right! A well-rounded education IS important! How have I not seen this??!!" We all already knew this. We've been trying to tell the USED this for years!

No, this is the fine political process of figuring out where the crowd is headed and trying to run out ahead of them so you can pretend you're the leader. And it's a weak attempt. King would get so much further by saying, "We've made a lot of mistakes. We meant well, but we screwed things up, and now we would like to sit down and listen to you. We know you've been trying to tell us for years what public education needs, and now we are ready to hear what you have to say." But of course, listening has never been King's strong suit.

The Lessons of Puerto RIco

If you are one of those folks who last watched John Oliver when he took on standardized testing and haven't really checked back since because his other topics didn't grab you, it's time to check in again. (Note: if you are the reader who is also my mom, I should warn you that some of the language is rather uncouth.)




The Puerto Rican debt crisis has been brewing for a while, and it may not matter that much to you (though it should, because these are fellow Americans who are getting cut off at the knees). But if most of your focus is on the education debates, here's what you need to know about the debt crisis in Puerto Rico.

1) A huge amount of the debt is now owned by hedge funds.

2) Hedge funders are putting their own bottom line ahead of everything, including education and health care.

Imagine. Your neighbor borrows some money from you, and after making some payments on it, says, "I've hit a rough patch, and if I pay you off, I won't be able to pay the rent or buy food for my family this month. Plus, a tree limb fell on my roof last week and if we can't work something out, my whole roof is going to cave in, which is going to be bad for me and for the whole neighborhood. Can we work out a new deal somehow?"

Do you say, "Don't care. Just pay me now." Well, if you're a hedge fund, you do.

You may try to hide that message behind some baloney-filled PR. You may try to spin it as a "way forward," as did the hedge funders who proposed a "Better Way" for Puerto Rico that included recommendations like raising property taxes, firing teachers, and cutting Medicaid. As long as they get their money.

It's vulture capitalism, the same hedge fund money-grabbing that drives much of the charter and school policy arguments raging here on the mainland. When these folks start talking about how to "fix" education, it's important to remember Puerto Rico, where they are showing clearly what they value most.

Stand With Troy

Chicago principal Troy LaRaviere has been relieved of his job as principal of Blaine Elementary because he won't shut up and stay in place.

I'm not writing about this because I think it's news; at this point, the news has spread far and wide. Lots of folks are writing about it, and I'm writing about it because everybody should be writing about it.

It's alarming because it is wrong in the specific, narrow focus. LaRaviere has repeatedly won the mayor's award for excellence and achievement. He has been a strong, articulate role model for his students and a leader for his community and school. His removal is a political power play, and it is not only an attack on the man's professional career, but an attack on the students and community that he has served.

This is a man who has repeatedly been shown to be at the top of his profession, and he has been sidelined for literally no good reason. CPS has refused to tell LaRaviere exactly what he's done wrong; they should do so now, today.

But beyond the specific injustice of LaRiviere's removal, there is the larger demonstration of one reason that the CEO model of school leadership is fatally flawed.

Reformsters love the CEO model, the idea that putting one high-powered visionary in charge of a system will Fix Everything. Across the country we've seen pushes for a CEO-driven system like the Achievement School District of Tennessee. Reformsters have expressed their love for mayoral control, so that just one person is in charge. Just what Chicago has and, some reformsters would say, just what Chicago needs. None of that messy board of elected directors stuff. In a perfect world, just put a hard-driving visionary in charge, give him some tools, remove obstructions like regulations and union contracts, and let him do his thing.

Except that this model does not pursue excellence in education. As LaRaviere's booting demonstrates, the hero CEO model most values loyalty and compliance.

All workers in the district, all teachers and administrators, lunch ladies and bus drivers-- every last one must be unswervingly loyal to the CEO and his vision.

And so LaRaviere, who has proven his excellence even on the mayor's own terms, must go because he won't be properly obedient and loyal to the CEO (and worse yet, might be acquiring the political heft to challenge Emanuel).

When you put a hero CEO in charge of a school system, you make politics and power-- not educational excellence-- the central focus of management. In fact, anyone who tries to stand up for educational excellence becomes a problem, a liability, a guy who has to be removed from his job because he won't properly kiss the boss's ring.

LaRaviere's benching is not merely an injustice and a wrong that should be righted immediately (if there is any justice and backbone in Chicago, he'll be elected head of the principals association anyway). It is a vivid and clear demonstration of why the Hero CEO model of school management should be rejected. The removal or elevation of employees based on loyalty rather than educational excellence is bad for the system, bad for schools, bad for students, and bad for the community (it's also proof, once again, of why tenure is necessary).

Speaking out about corruption in a system should be welcomed as an important part of keeping the system on track, whole and aimed at its best goals. Leaders within the system should not be slammed with mysterious charges, condemned for daring to challenge the Boss. This is no way to treat a great principal, and it's no way to run a school district.

Why Our Betters Like Charter Schools

You must read this post from Mercedes Schneider, if you have not already, showing the many connections between Education Post, the administration, and the usual gang of reformsters.

This is not news, exactly. We've seen it before. The Center for American Progress was founded by John Podesta after he left the Clinton White House and before he left CAP to run the current Clinton campaign (catch him in Connecticut, trying to distance the Clinton campaign form the same policies that CAP pushed). Go back and watch Food, Inc for just one layout of the revolving door between companies like Monsanto and the government agencies that set food policy. Go all the way back to Eisenhower and the military-industrial complex.

Oddly enough, this type of government, this way of running a group of organizations, is readily recognizable to anyone who lives in a small town. It's not about "How can we find the best person to handle this?" It's about "I know a guy."

Boy, I wish we could find somebody to get this policy pushed through. "Hey, I know a guy."

Man, if only we could get some groups started to build some support for this policy. "Hey, I know a guy."

We need somebody with the expertise and connections to run this operation. "Hey, I know a guy."

We really need to get somebody in that office who shares our vision. "Hey, I know a guy who's be perfect."

This is not meritocracy. This is betterocracy. This is operating a whole system of organizations through your personal connections with The Right Kind of People, and it doesn't matter whether the organization is a business or an advocacy group or a lobbying outfit or an agency of the US government. What matters is getting the Right Kind of People in there, people we know, people we already have connections to and who know how to get the right things done in the way that we agree with.

This is where the GOP and Democrats agree-- they may disagree about what exact policies should be followed, but they both agree that the way you get things done is by getting the Right People in the Right Positions. Letting people vote? Well, sometimes that's a tool you have to spend money to harness, but it's also great if you can work around it. Democracy has no value in and of itself. In fact, it can be downright dangerous because sometimes those crazy voters will go rogue and refuse to put the Right People in office.

And what is the charter school movement except an attempt to extend this same operating system to the education business. Isn't it simply our bettercrats looking at public education and saying, "Well, this is stupid. have to get elected? Have to get special qualifications? Have to negotiate with the help? Have to be plugged into the whole system that is NOT run by the Right People just so I can open a school? That's no good. When I want to open a school, I should just be able to call a guy I know. And if I'm looking to get some schools opened in my area, I should be able to just make some calls. And all of this should be under the management of the Right Kind of People."

The networking is the tip off. In sectors of a small town, there are only so many qualified and interested people, so everything in certain sectors is run by the same group of people. They move around between jobs (Right now, Chris, you can help most by running this non-profit, and we'll move Pat into the City Hall job. Maybe next year y'all will trade back), but it's always basically the same group of folks. In a small town nobody may kick because nobody else cares how things are run. Or someone may kick and you get a spectacular power struggle.

In the big time, the network idea still works, but now admission to the network is tougher because you have to have the right connections, prove you have the right stuff, be able to flash the right stack of money and show of power. And of course you can still run into spectacular problems, like when some demented narcissist or cranky old guy get in the way of the people whose turn it was to get the Big Job.

But the point doesn't change. The charter school movement is about the takeover of public education by the network of Betters, the people who would like to be able to operate schools without having to deal with government and elections and rules and unions. What are operations like the Broad Academy and Teach for America except a way to formalize the injection of Right People with the Right Connections into the system? When Detroit needed a superintendent, somebody said "I know a guy" and called Eli Broad who said "I know a guy" and made a call and--whoosh!-- John Covington left one job to take another.

Sure, there are people who get into the charter biz to make money. But I'm increasingly convinced that the movement as a whole is mainly by extending the system of Government by the Right People by Way of Their Connections with Other Right People to our education system. They would like to operate schools with the same system they use to operate Ed Post and CAP and the Broad Academy. I know a guy. I'll make some calls. We need to get the Right Person working on that. Charter schools are just the logical extension of that system into the world of education. For those of us who don't know the Right People-- well, that's just proof we aren't the Right People ourselves.

ICYMI: Edu-reads from the week

Here's your assortment of reading goodies for the week:

Race and the Standardized Testing Wars

Kate Taylor's piece from yesterday's New York Times is a worthwhile read about tough issues. Additionally, she quotes Jennifer Berkshire's Have You Heard podcast and Jose Luis Vilson (an actual teacher). Nice to see a major mainstream article about education that doesn't just go straight to the usual reformy mouthpieces (though those voices are certainly represented here).

Sam Brownback Declares War on Kansas

Kansas has become a real showplace for the efforts to starve government to death and beat democracy into dust. Here's a good look at how Brownback did it.

Charlotte Danielson on Rethinking Teacher Evaluation

I know I already wrote a whole blog piece about this, but if you haven't gotten around to reading Danielson's thoughts, now's your next chance. Worth a look.

My ESSA Accountability Plan

Russ Walsh offers his own basic layout for an accountability plan under the new federal education regulations. This is how it could be done well.


The New Emergency Manager: Woman who got over $100K for school she never opened now imposing CEOs on struggling schools

From Eclectablog, a tale of more "you can't make this stuff up" shenanigans from Governor Snyder.

Off the Deep End: Swim Test vs. Standardized Test

Jesse Hagopian, Progressive Education Fellows, nationally renowned ed activist, and editor of More Than A Score, takes a moment to respond to writer's attempt to dismiss the opt out movement.

He Is More Than a Test Score

One writer's personal response to the results of the testing movement.

Who Will Lead the Edu-Revolution

Jose Luis Vilson's blog hosts the North Carolina teacher of the year, who offers some challenging thoughts for teachers of non-white, noon-wealthy students. It's the piece that includes this line: "teachers cannot simply advocate for student’s educational rights and stay silent on their civil and human ones."