An Evaluation That Teachers Can Use

A post from Jay Wamsted at Education Post (yes, that Education Post--I've said it before and I'll say it again--it's important to read from all over the edu-web) got me thinking about the sources of feedback that teachers can tap. He tells a story about a missed moment in which someone offered him feedback on his teaching that he didn't want to hear, and how he regrets that missed opportunity.

Which I get. I suspect most teachers who have been doing the work more than five years get it. Because the system so rarely gives us feedback we can use, teachers hunker down into a cycle of reflection and self-evaluation, and that is a great and beautiful thing, but it has its drawbacks. Teachers can fall into a despair spiral ("I should have handled that differently today and I also didn't get that student what they needed and I'm a week behind on papers and oh my god did I just choose the wrong profession??")

Teachers can also get into a place where outside feedback hits like a bucket of cold water and our back goes up and our claws come out. That's what happened to Wamsted. It happened to me, a bit differently. It was very early in my career. I was teaching ninth graders, and at the beginning of a unit doing a preliminary check what knowledge they had to bring to the table. And at some point, students said, "Mr. Greene, we don't know any of that stuff. They never taught us that in middle school."

Except, here's the thing--I had just switched teaching positions that year. I had been one of their middle school teachers. I knew damn well what I had taught them, and it had included the stuff they claimed to have never heard of before. My first impulse was to blame those damned kids. Heck, my second impulse was to blame those damned kids. But eventually I had to wrestle with the fact that I had apparently completely biffed that part of their middle school education.

I came up with a tool, which is why Wamsted caught my attention, because he's thinking about the same idea. I started doing annual anonymous student end-of-course evaluations.

It was one page. Some portions were just simple circle-the-number rating responses. Some were open-ended. I asked questions about the course content--too hard, too easy, useful, not useful? What should there be more or less of? I asked questions about my own classroom presence- do you think the teacher knows what he's talking about? Cares? Wastes your time? Is fair? I asked them to rate both the difficulty and usefulness of specific units from the year. I invited them to write anything they wanted to on the back.

I learned from these, every year. It was not always easy to read, but it helped me to tweak and modify both the course content and my own performance in the classroom. I didn't always come across the way I thought I did. I didn't always make the point of the content clear.And I could argue that what I did should have been good enough to get The Point across, but if it didn't, well, then, it wasn't, really. One effect I didn't think about until I was poring through the responses--the evaluations absolutely hammered home to me, as a writing teacher, that numbers and rubrics are great, but nothing sticks with people like written out sentence-form responses. Also, the process of creating the form was useful (though as one more form of reflection and self-evaluation).

The students were never jerks about this process. In all those years, no student ever just hammered me just to strike back; at most a few just didn't fill it out. But they took it seriously. I know the expectation/fear is that students who did poorly or hated the class or hated you will make a mockery of the process, but that didn't happen. I suspect that this has to do with the type of relationship and trust you've built with your class, and if they do abuse the process, that is in itself feedback.

And I still kept my head about some feedback--I reserved the right to decide the student was wrong ("You should sing more often," suggested on student. That student was wrong.) As with any other feedback in life, what others see and say has to be weighed about what you know yourself.

But I realized, looking back, that those sheafs of papers that sat in my desk drawer where  could pull them out and look from year to year to year--those were the most useful evaluations I ever had. I had the standard formal battery of observations along with the assorted paperwork and folderol that went with them, and they were never unpleasant, but they were never much help, either. I even had administrators in some years who would do the smart unofficial style--roam the hall, pop a head in to watch (I know that bugs the heck out of some people but I never minded a principal just popping in), keep an ear to the ground. It's was supportive and bolstering and made me feel that I was doing okay, and that's not nothing. But it wasn't feedback that helped me grow.

So I encourage Mr. Wamsted and others to take the student course evaluation plunge. It won 't tell you everything, and it won't always be exactly what you need to hear, but I don't think you'll ever regret it.

School Choice Dinner Party

Pairagraph is a website set up around the idea of conversations, or debates, around a particular question. The website organizers invite a pair of people to address the question in turn for a total of four posts of no more than 500 words each. It's a fun little concept that has, so far, been applied to a broad range of topics.

I was recently invited to join in one of these pairings around the question "Is school choice essential to educational justice." My counterpart was Terry Stoops of the John Locke Foundation (North Carolina’s Most Trusted and Influential Source of Common Sense). I had the second and fourth positions in the debate. 

Here's what I posted for my first response.

Imagine that you have a dining room with three tables set up. At one is a great feast, with the finest meats and vegetables, beautifully cooked. At another is a good, solid, if not spectacular, spread of hearty, wholesome food. At the third is bread and water. 

Folks are assigned to one of the three tables to eat, but the assignment seems unfair, so one of the people enters the dining room and sets up a fourth table. This person takes a few chairs and some food from each of the other tables for their Table #4, and announces, "We will now have choice."

But there is the same number of chairs, the same amount of food, and the same range of quality. The same number of diners will eat bread and water. 

Mr. Stoops has made an excellent case against the current methods used to distribute and finance education in this country. What he hasn't done is explained why school choice would improve the full picture for all students.

School choice is a broad category that includes many different policy ideas, but what they all have in common is that they shuffle the plates and the diners without actually improving the overall system. In fact, many choice methods are detrimental because they are based on the premise that the same number of dollars that can barely finance one school system can somehow adequately finance several parallel systems. 

Nor does choice address the underlying cause of much educational inequity, which, as Mr. Stoops suggests, is that many folks do not want to pay for a top quality education for Those People's children. In fact, school choice is too often easily adapted to suit the aims of racism and inequity; after Brown v. Board of Education made desegregation the law of the land, private schools (segregation academies) were formed in many states so that white parents could still make sure their children avoided Black students in the public schools (and taxpayers could cut spending for those same public schools).

Advocates for school choice often focus on the depth of the problem facing us instead of the efficacy of their proposed solutions. But the question is not if public schools could be more equitable--they absolutely could. The question, however, is if school choice could help better deliver the promise of a free, quality education for every student. After decades of trying choice in various forms, there is little evidence that it can.

Freedom is not the lifeblood of school choice--at least not freedom for students. Voucher programs maintain a private school's right to choose which students it will accept, and charters have developed many ways to cream or push out students. Based on market dynamics, modern school choice does what markets do--pick winners and losers both among providers and customers. This does not make school choice evil, but it does mean that choice is not well positioned to make good on that promise of a good education for every student.

You can read the entire exchange at the site. Fun trivia fact: Stoops attended a university that's right in my neck of the woods; he undoubtedly went to college with former students of mine. 

The Trouble With Data

Yesterday the Atlantic published an exceptionally helpful piece in the Science section by Robinson Meyer and Alexis C. Madrigal that offers some excellent explanation of why the nation has dropped the data ball for this pandemic. It's a good read from that perspective. But for education folks, there's more.

In the body of the article, Meyer and Madrigal share some observations about data, and the problems with data-driven anything; these points are important, and should be emblazoned on the office door of every data-driven follow-the-science policy maker and administrator in the country.

1. All data are created; data never simply exist.

Before March 2020, the country had no shortage of pandemic-preparation plans. Many stressed the importance of data-driven decision making. Yet these plans largely assumed that detailed and reliable data would simply … exist. They were less concerned with how those data would actually be made.

Here come the data

Data have to come from somewhere. They have to be created, and then they have to be interpreted. Anyone who assumes that the data are good simply because they exist--well, that's a terrible assumption. Every step pf the data-creation chain, from the testing instrument, to scoring, to score conversion, to interpretation of the score--all of that should be questioned and examined and then questioned again.

But in our high stakes testing era, that has not happened (nor is it happening now). When the state says, "22% of your students are below basic in reading non-fiction," that's not a figure that descended from heaven in a burning memo. It's a number that was created, and everyone ought to be asking how it was created. Starting with a faulty instrument, converted from raw score to reported score somehow, then divided by cut scores that are determined after the test has been scored--just a few of the ways this goes wrong.

And right now, when folks are hollering that students have lost 57 days of learning during the pandemic, everyone should be asking how that data was created (spoiler alert: it was totally made up).

2. Data are a photograph, not a window.

This one most people in education get, sort of. The Big Standardized Test "is a snapshot of one particular moment" is a well-worn cliche, even among people who will then go on to argue that for some reason, that snapshot should be weighed as if it were a moment with far more weight than all the other moments that didn't make it into the photo.

3. Data are just another type of information.

There is some great, poster-ready, put-it-on-a-t-shirt stuff in this section.

Data seem to have a preeminent claim on truth. Policy makers boast about data-driven decision making, and vow to “follow the science.” But we’ve spent a year elbow-deep in data. Trust us: Data are really nothing special.

Meyer and Madrigal offer my new favorite definition of data:

Data are just a bunch of qualitative conclusions arranged in a countable way.

And add to that this important note:

Data-driven thinking isn’t necessarily more accurate than other forms of reasoning, and if you do not understand how data are made, their seams and scars, they might even be more likely to mislead you.

Meyer and Madrigal lay out some pandemic examples of when the data contradicted what scientists "knew" through other reasoning, based on their own expertise. In those times of contradiction, it was the data that were wrong. Teachers, of course, are regularly told in so many ways that their own assessments of students mean nothing when set beside the test-based data reports. 

Would you like a nice analogy to wrap all this up?

Data are alluring. Looking at a chart or a spreadsheet, you might feel omniscient, like a sorcerer peering into a crystal ball. But the truth is that you’re much closer to a sanitation worker watching city sewers empty into a wastewater-treatment plant. Sure, you might learn over time which sewers are particularly smelly and which ones reach the plant before the others—but you shouldn’t delude yourself about what’s in the water.

 

Education has been overrun by the Cult of Data, and it's not unusual to feel intimidated by it. But I'll reiterate that I pulled these ideas about data from an article nominally about systemic failures in the federal response to a massive pandemic. Data is not magic, and educators should not bow at the data altar. 
 

Donors Chose Monday: Books and Understanding

 Donors Choose lets you set up filters, so that you can focus on what you choose. The most obvious is a geographic one that allows you to find classrooms in your area looking for help. But you can also set for the types of classrooms and the types of resources, as well as setting (as I usually do) for rural schools.

So one of the classrooms chosen for this week is Ms. McCord's at Allegheny-Clarion Valley Elementary School in Foxburg PA (a cool little town to visit if you're ever in the neighborhood). She's teaching third graders, and she'd like to expand the library for both reading and developing some human-being skills

With your support, I can help my students build character and spread kindness that will reach beyond the walls of my classroom. With purposeful teaching of social-emotional lessons with associated literacy, I am hoping that my students will grow both academically and emotionally.

Mrs. Fanning in Cordova, South Carolina, is looking for similar help. She's another teacher of rural poor students who is looking for some social and emotional learning to go with the literacy

There are many wonderful books available today that can help our students understand and state their feelings and I want them to be able to relate to characters in books that might be feeling like they are.

These books will be read aloud to students who are face to face for learning as well as students who remain virtual. While reading these books, we will be able to discuss our feelings as well as learn ways to be kind to others.

As always, I invite you to contribute to these classrooms, or search for others on Donors Choose, or donate to a local classroom. Stimulus money may trickle down to classrooms, but it's not going to get there this week. If you can share, that's a great thing.

A Learning Loss Debunkery Reader

Apparently we are going to be hearing about learning loss all the flipping time now, so I've tried to collect in one place some of the better responses to the crisis du jour. Feel free to bookmark this and to share the articles listed ever time someone pops up to holler that because of Learning Loss we must have testing or school choice or no summer vacation or increased school staff or bonuses for teachers--ha, just kidding. Nobody is proposing those last two.

The Ridiculousness of Learning Loss (John Ewing)

At Forbes, we get this little gem, whch spends some time talking about opening schools, but also addresses LL clearly:

Of course, the term "learning loss" comes from the language of test enthusiasts. For them, learning is a substance that's poured into students over time. One measures the accumulated substance by the number of correct answers on a test (standardized, usually multiple-choice). By administering two comparable tests at different moments in time, one measures success or failure for learning. An increase in correct responses is gain; a decrease is loss.

Is Learning Lost When Kids Are Out of School? (Alfie Kohn)

Kohn offers a good broad look at the issues involved, back in September of 2020 when the angst was jkust building. But Kohn knows the field and the studies.

In fact, some studies have shown that the capacity for thinking not only isn’t lost over the summer but may show greater gains then than during the school year. As Peter Gray at Boston College, who reviewed some of that research, puckishly proposed, “Maybe instead of expanding the school year to reduce a summer slide in calculation, we should expand summer vacation to reduce the school-year-slide in reasoning.”

Should We Be Worried About Learning Loss in Early Childhood? (Rae Pica)

Pica is always a champion of the littles, and she offers some helpful common sense here.

I’m sorry, but how devastating could it be? What learning, specifically, is being lost? The ability to meet unrealistic standards imposed on them by people who don’t understand child development, including the ridiculous expectation that they read and write by the end of kindergarten? The capacity to fill in worksheets or stare at a computer screen, or to take useless tests? The ability to handle pressure they should never have been exposed to in the first place?

What 'learning loss' really means. (Rachael Gabriel)

Guesting at Valerie Strauss's Washington Post blog, Gabriel. The unlearning expert has perhaps the most radical take on this, but worth the read. What is happening now?

It is loss of a previously imagined trajectory leading to a previously imagined future. Learning is never lost, though it may not always be “found” on pre-written tests of pre-specified knowledge or preexisting measures of pre-coronavirus notions of achievement.

The legacy of the standards movement of the 1990s, and the high-stakes testing it inspired in the early 2000s, is a version of education that is assumed not to exist or matter unless or until it is predicted and measured. The pandemic has illustrated with searing definition how wrong that assumption is. 

Learning Loss Is Just Educational Halitosis (Peter Greene)

Yes, this was me at Forbes, comparing Learning Loss to Listerine's marketing genius as a solution in search of a problem.

It’s not that they made up bad breath. But they gave it a scientific-sounding name which provided a perfect hook for selling their product. Fake science, it turns out, is great for marketing.

A lot of corporate reformers are desperately trying to find a way to cash in right now, and learning loss is the new favorite tool. Something has certainly happened to schooling this year, but it's far more useful to talk about what really has gone on and not simply try to make up a panic for marketing purposes.

ICYMI: Blue Screen of Death Edition (3/14)

 So the main desktop computer here at the institute is in a state, and we're working from the mobile office, which guarantees a 150% increase in typo frequency. But meanwhile, there are things to read.

First, a reminder that NPE's Blog of the Day now provides a daily sampling of the best public education posts on the web. Click on over and subscribe, and get a daily dose of some quality curating.

Voters actually like new taxes for schools

It's always a good day when Andrea Gabor puts out a new piece. Here she is at Bloomberg talking about how support for taxation to support schools is turning up in surprising places (like Arizona).

Democrats split over Biden plan for academic testing during pandemic

Politico has noticed that some Democrats have decided to buck the testocratic bent of party leaders. 

The gig economy for teachers

Andy Spears has a substack. On this post, he talks about some of the ideas rising in popularity that spell bad news for the teaching profession.

Educators in office on the pandemic, teachers, and students

Mariel Padilla at the 19th talked to eight women legislators who are/were teachers and got their perspective on the current pandemess.

Standardized testing amid Covid-19 pandemic will do kids and teachers more harm than good

David DeMatthews is in USA Today adding one more well-informed voice to the chorus of people pointing out that the whole testing 2021 idea is a bad one. 

America's Covid spring shouldn't include standardized tests for any students

Rep. Jamaal Bowman and Randi Weingarten team up for this NBC News piece that says what cannot be said too much. Here's hoping that the USED email servers are drowning in these links, sent over and over again.

Clearview AI uses your online photos to id you. Now there's a lawsuit.

Clearview AI has scraped over 3 billion photos to build its database so that its surveillance equipment can pick you out of a crowd. What could possibly go wrong. The LA Times has a story about the lawsuit brought by four civil liberties groups.

Stuyvesant students and mental health

For Chalkbeat, Amy Zimmer looks at what happened when Stuy students started to open up about the mental health issues of a high pressure high school.

What 'learning loss' really means

You know I'm going to love an essay that starts with "There is no such thing as learning loss." Rachael Gabriel guest posts at Valerie Strauss's Washington Post blog to offer one more explanation of what we're really talking about.

We need an FDA for educational assessments

Les Perelman, friend of the Institute and one of my personal heroes, offered up yet another look at just how bad computer assessments are at their jobs, via Diane Ravitch's blog.

Private schools have become truly obscene

Caitlin Flanagan is at the Atlantic drawing a vivd and horrifying picture of the world of the big league private schools. She gets a couple of things wrong about public schools, but this is a long, worthwhile read.

School boards push back against voucher expansions

Indiana's GOP legislators are on the voucher expansion bus, and public school boards are pushing back, God bless them. And the Associated Press has noticed (this particular link goes to the WNDU website).

Addressing learning loss in one easy lesson

At te Fordham's blog, Robert Pondiscio speaks up in favor of good old fashioned direct instruction and talks about a forty year old reading instruction book. Agree or disagree, this is something to start a discussion.

Thingmaker featuring creepy crawlers

If you are of a Certain Age, you know exactly what Teacher Tom is talking about here. (Personally, I favored the ones that let your pencil into a monster).

From girls high school basketball to the 'Eyes of Texas,' racism still permeates education system

A USA Today op-ed looks at some of the Racism In The News moments of the week and looks at what they tell us about the education system.

Constructing unicorn barns

TC Weber at Dad Gone Wild talks about learning loss and testing and who has a reason to promote these supposed crises

John White and Co: What Are They Up To Now

The indispensable Mercedes Schneider with another well-researched tale of ed reformsters who just keep failing upwards.

'Test and punish system': Parents can opt children out of statewide testing

If there was ever a time for parents to opt out of testing, this is it. The Opt Out Florida network has some information (and if you're not in Florida, this may give you some ideas of what to look at).

An Open Letter to My Son's Recorder

Julie Scagell at McSweeney's with your fun read for the week. 

FL: Let's Assess Four Year Olds

We have been down this road before, but I will beat this drum till my knuckles bleed (and the older my children and my grandchildren get, the harder I'll drum). 

Florida is once again reporting that 40% of Florida kindergartners are "not ready for kindergarten." Rep. Erin Grall (R) told a House early learning subcommittee "That's on us," as part of her pitch for HB 419, a bill intended to restructure Florida's early learning "system."

Florida has been spent a few years giving five year olds their own version of the Big Standardized Test to measure kindergarten readiness, and it has consistently found that nearly half of Florida's littles "are not ready" for kindergarten.

Clearly there is a problem, and the Florida legislature has been steadfast about looking for that problem in the wrong place.

If half of your five year olds are "not ready" for kindergarten, the problem is with either A) your instrument for measuring readiness and/or B) your expectations for what "readiness" looks like.

I bolded that because all caps would just be rude. But nobody in power in Florida seems to be looking at this answer.

There's the Children's Movement of Florida that wants to get to 100% kindergarten readiness by 2030. The group is a real cross-section of Florida's education policy-makers. Founded by David Lawrence, a former newspaper guy whose memoir comes with a Jeb Bush forward. The founding board also included the president of Publix charities, a bunch of former legislators, and the ever-reformy Manny Diaz. The CEO is Vance Aloupis, a lawyer by trade, who helped run Volunteer Florida for Rick Scott and who got some American Enterprise Institute leadership training. The president is Madeline Thakur who was polished up by the Miami Foundation and appears to have spent one year as a teacher's assistant in an ESL classroom, which is about as close as anyone in this outfit comes to having actual classroom education background.

Thakur had this to offer in her own op-ed on Florida's readiness "crisis." 

So what does it mean to be ready for kindergarten? For our 5 year olds, social-emotional skills are far more important than mastering letters, numbers and shapes. Children who are “ready” can listen, communicate and cooperate. They can hold a pencil and focus on a task. They have a foundation for critical thinking and curiosity and they have an eagerness to learn.

As if these qualities need to somehow be train ed into the children instead of allowed to emerge on their individual, natural developmental growth.. Now, note the ultimate objective of all pre-K chicken littling:

Twenty years on, we’ll get higher earners, more innovative employees and more thoughtful citizens.

First, the persistence of Raj Chetty's sexy-but-highly-debatable claims is really irritating, but "a good kindergarten class will affect your lifetime earnings" dies hard, because it makes for great alarm bell ringing. Second, yes, by all means, we want better meat widgets who will please their employers. Never mind happier human beings with better lives. 

Grall's solution to this mis-diagnosed problem is --surprise--more tests sooner. This, among other things, demonstrates mission creep--the original point of the VPK tests, given to littles at the beginning of kindergarten (because what a great way to introduce littles to school) was to measure the effectiveness of Florida's various pre-K programs. Now Grall wants it to provide readiness feedback for parents, but to do that, we need to do more assessment sooner. 

It's all backwards, like a suit maker who discovers that half of their suits fit really, really badly and so, somehow, concludes that human beings have to be engineered into a different shape that better fits the suits they make. 

It cannot be said often enough--if you discover that a huge percentage of five year olds are not ready for your kindergarten program, that is an indictment of your program, not of the five year olds, their parents, their teachers, or their breakfast cereal. 

Read more here: https://www.miamiherald.com/opinion/op-ed/article234052997.html#storylink=cpy