Teacher in a Strange Land

Facing the Truth--and Testing

This blog--the first in a series on testing--is written by guest blogger and Teacher Leaders Network member Marjorie Larner, an instructional coach and facilitator in Colorado.

"Now that the Data Quality Campaign has put data quality on the map, we need to work together to leverage this work and push it to the next level by using data to drive reform. The path to real reform begins with the truth - and we must keep facing the truth and finding the answers until every classroom has a great teacher, and every child has an education that prepares him for college, for work, and for life."  Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, Data Quality Campaign Forum.

What is Secretary Duncan using as the basis for this truth he says we must face? What does he think constitutes data that is evidence of the truth about education to prepare children for college, work and life? We have been immersed in data-driven instruction and decision-making. Some schools are now wholly devoted to producing good data, defined by standardized test scores. Students’ success or failure depends on test performance, with perhaps a nod to graduation or attendance rates. Secretary Duncan calls for "data driven school reform"--while President Obama acknowledges that using standardized test scores as the measure of good or bad teaching creates other problems.

These kinds of public statements demand a definition of specific outcomes aligned with instruments that gather valid, reliable and relevant data--all  kinds of evidence of student progress toward agreed-upon outcomes. Those of us working in the field now have an opportunity to offer advice and ideas based on our real work experience--because as of this moment, we are still committed to standardized tests.

Here's a story about a school I worked in many years ago. Their test scores were very high. One year, all 3rd graders got a perfect score in reading, but the numbers for writing were weaker. In the following years, the district used this information to launch a required school-wide focus on writing. We gave the kids the message that they were weak in writing, and needed to improve.  We also paid for a few released test items ($7 for one student’s response to one item), to analyze these weaknesses. We realized that the students were all proficient and advanced on the actual writing samples. It was the multiple-choice questions, where they had to choose an answer with no context, where they lost points. What did this tell us about the data we had used to “drive” our instruction for several years? They knew how to apply the rules to actual writing, but their actual “weakness” was choosing between tricky multiple-choice answers on isolated rules for writing. Should we spend less time teaching them to be writers, in order to work on testing strategies for multiple choice? Should we drill them on memorizing the rules? What would this do for them, in their lives as writers? What effect would this kind of teaching have on their skills and motivation for real writing?

I have now been working for two years in a school that is based on a big vision for every students' active participation and positive contribution in the 21st century world. Measures on standardized tests are inadequate to assess the internalized habits, dispositions, skills and knowledge that we see our students developing: capacity for leadership, creativity in overcoming constraints, active willingness to help others, issue analysis using multiple perspectives, belief in their own responsibility and agency, ability to build a case or analyze another's argument. It is not easy or simple, nor could it be standardized to hold teachers and students who were not committed to this particular vision "accountable."

But I have seen students challenged and inspired to work hard, investigate, create, strive for greatness in all subjects--and still not consistently score well on a test.  I feel a very deep responsibility for these children’s growth and well-being. After ten years of accepting accountability for test scores, with increasingly narrowed results for kids, I now feel passionate about communicating the truth of what it means for our students’ future prospects if we continue to rely on standardized tests as the measure and definition of success. We need to learn from our experiences with the limits of standardized tests. We must develop strong alternatives for gathering evidence of progress, aligned with a clear vision of who our students will become, what they need to know and be able to do as a result of their years in school. 

 As an educator with a background in qualitative assessment, it breaks my heart to see children’s abilities and potential reduced to test scores, their days in schools reduced to test preparation, teaching reduced to scripted lessons and canned curricula. The truth about data? I'm frustrated, and it's not because I do not believe in accountability, rigor or quality teaching-- but precisely because I do.

Image: TEST/Sidelong/Creative Commons

20th Century Learning

Hanging in my back hallway is an old photograph of a one-room schoolhouse, with 37 children clustered in the dirt yard around the door. The teacher, tall and bespectacled, stands behind the group, and the smallest child holds a slate reading "11-02-1900." My grandmother, who was born in 1890, seventh child in a Dutch immigrant farm family, stands solemnly in the photo, as do four of her nine siblings. All of them, she used to tell me proudly, "finished school."  Meaning they all completed the eighth grade--more free education than their parents, born in Groningen, the Netherlands, had--and a testament to the belief that life in America was a pretty good deal.

My grandmother, Nancy Oudsema Linega, left school in 1903, going to work as a clerk and errand girl in a neighborhood grocery and produce store. She worked there until she married at 33, earning enough to buy a car (before she learned to drive it), put a down payment on a home and do some traveling. Widowed a few years after marriage, she worked steadily through the Great Depression, supporting a young daughter and a mortgage. She was employed full-time well into her sixties, and part-time until she was 80, keeping the books for the same grocery store (now a modern supermarket), and managing customer relations.

I would describe my grandma as an educated woman. She was a whiz at numbers--one of those people who can add up long columns of figures in their head, or calculate percentages in a second or two. She read newspapers, books and magazines, and wrote long, grammatically perfect letters to me when I left home for college. She spoke Dutch, and had encyclopedic knowledge about plants and gardening, among other things. She was well-informed politically, and voted in every election--not surprising, since she was 30 the first time she was allowed to go to the polls. She also had a taste for adventure as a young woman; I am still unearthing travel souvenirs, postcards with mildly naughty messages and photos from her trunk. It must have been some fun, indeed--here's proof that motorcycles were involved:

As the debate around what students need to be successful in the 21st century rages acerbically on, I've been thinking about two very influential documents in education history, bracketing the period when my grandmother got her formal education--the thinking that shaped two distinct movements to define what students needed to be successful a century ago. Point of interest: both documents were commissioned by the National Education Association.

The first was known as the "Committee of Ten" report, written in 1892-3 by a group of university presidents and professors, headmasters of exclusive private high schools and the United States Commissioner of Education. Their mission was the creation of an optimum, standardized course of studies for high school students in the United States. The Committee, of course, was not thinking of poor immigrant or farm children--they were envisioning Young Men from Good Families, Future Leaders of our Nation. I always imagine the ten men on the committee retiring to the smoking room after finishing their work to enjoy a tumbler of brandy and some bonhomie, confident they had shaped the intellectual direction of the melting-pot democracy.

Here's a link to the plan the Committee settled on. There are nine required course threads, including ten years of Geography, Greek, Latin and a third modern language (the committee recommends German, or perhaps French), Geometry (in 5th grade), Physics, Chemistry and Astronomy--of which my grandma studied precisely zero. In fact, examining the entire plan, grades one through twelve, my grandmother experienced perhaps 20% of the recommended curriculum.

The second major shift in defining educational goals for a new era was the Cardinal Principles for Secondary Education, published in 1918 and written by 27 men and one woman, an assortment of college professors and secondary teachers who were supposed to be re-thinking high school, now that increasing numbers of teenagers were showing up there, many of whom were formerly considered "not high school material." The Cardinal Principles committee took the approach that segmenting schooling into required subjects with prescribed time requirements was only one way to get to the desired outcomes of education--the cardinal principles--which they labeled goals for successful living. The Cardinal Principles sound mushy (albeit idealistic)  today, but they had considerable sway until mid-century--as well as strong criticism from those who felt that traditional intellectual rigor had been drowned in a sea of feel-good rhetoric. The Principles also led directly to a tracking model--honors, college, general, vocational--which burrowed deeply into the American educational system.

My grandmother achieved every one of the Cardinal Principles in spades, from ethical character to vocation to worthy home membership and productive use of leisure time.  As for the #1 Cardinal Principle--health--my grandma lived to be 103, and voluntarily gave up her driver's license at 100. I'm not sure that she learned any of those capacities, beyond fundamental processes, in school, however.

My point here is certainly not that my grandmother's very basic, one-room-schoolhouse curriculum was good enough--nor is it a critique of either of the two contrasting, expert visions of an ideal 20th century education, classic academics vs. whole-child progressivism. What I am sure of: trying to know the unknowable future, or defending our cherished beliefs and preferences in wordy Policy Wars, is a waste of time. Especially while there are large subsets of American kids in truly wretched schools, and hucksters trying to sell "new" ideas, machines and programs "guaranteed" to make every child ready for the future.

Neither the Committee of Ten nor the framers of the Cardinal Principles accurately predicted what children would need to be successful in the 20th century. And the smartest, best-educated and most elite students of the last few generations have just led this country into an economic abyss, unable to solve our intransigent problems with health care, energy use and human equity. Speaking of the mushy cardinal principle of ethical character.

I'm not particularly bothered by a murky vision of the future ahead, or the prospect of making it all up as we go along--curriculum, instruction, technology use, learning goals and prioritized skills. You can (and probably will) interpret that as typically muddle-headed eduspeak, but truly proficient teachers adjust the parameters of their practice constantly, to fit the unique students in their class, the resources available and, sometimes, the day's headlines. Planning blind is sometimes part of an effective change process. And sniping over an exact delineation of what 21st century learners need is more about the snipers than the students.

The last word comes from Shannon CdeBaca, a true 21st century teacher, a math and science specialist with long list of well-deserved awards and a penchant for using technology creatively:

We do not have a singular vision of what you should get out of high school. Exactly do we want a high school graduate to have that they cannot get, except by completing high school? It has to be more than the conceptual standards. There has to be some set of skills, some dispositions, some creativity expansion, some appreciation for the arts and diversity and more. I am still searching for someone to succinctly describe "it".

You Didn't Have to Be So Nice

Being a first grade teacher is kind of like playing defensive tackle. Everybody says you're important, but there's no glamour in it. The entire defense rests on your  limited but crucial role: if you mess up, it starts a negative domino effect, keeping your potentially productive offense on the bench. And if you do a great job, all eyes are on what happens afterward, far down the field. Worse, as you're being underappreciated, folks are silently looking at what you do and thinking "that's not so hard."

It's not uncommon for people who start their teaching careers in the first grade to end up someplace else. The responsibility is enormous and incredibly important: you're the one who makes or breaks literacy. And half the job is simply getting the kids to do school--to share things they'd rather keep, safely pass out the scissors, sit up and pay attention, raise their hands, and not punch Jason even if he was being a poopyhead. Impulse control is a huge deal--trust me on this--and it can take many weeks and a hefty bag of tricks to establish a consistently productive learning environment. When I was teaching music in a K-4 building, I became acutely aware of the fact that first graders who are in school all day for the first time really don't behave like organized schoolchildren until somewhere around Thanksgiving. Until then, they're still kindergartners at heart. And in their minds. And especially after lunch, right before recess.

So I tried to imagine today how I'd behave if a team of scientific observers came to hang around my first grade classroom, clipboards at the ready, poised to evaluate my interactions with the kiddos and turn them into a research report. I'm thinking that I'd be aiming for organization and harmony above all. Without those, there isn't much learning. Doing so might have earned me an "inadequate" rating, however--along with three-quarters of my fellow first grade teachers, according to a new study out of the University of Virginia. The study rated 820 classrooms in 700 schools (randomly selected, one assumes, although the summary doesn't say), using "trained" raters who took note of important things like:

A teacher ignoring a student with a question would score low on "sensitivity," while a teacher who responds quickly would score high.

I have known a few six year-olds whose questions I might ignore on purpose, in the presence of a Trained Rater, but never mind. What's interesting is that based on observations (and remember--without handy standardized test data in the first grade, expounding on teacher effectiveness becomes a real researcher nightmare), only 23% of the classrooms observed were deemed "high overall quality," while 28% were "mediocre," 17% were "low overall quality" and 31% of the teachers were labeled, in essence, too nice. That is--their classrooms were positive, happy places but researchers found that

...their "low academic demand" was revealed in their tendency to not give constructive feedback - for instance, not asking students to think a little bit harder about their questions, or by making basic facts more real to students in ways that would expand their understanding of those facts.

Now that's pretty ironic--first grade teachers being accused of low academic demand because they're not taking advantage of teachable moments, in an era of scripted curriculum and Reading First fidelity monitors. Going after first grade teachers, for Pete's sake! What's next? Denying Chesley Sullenberg his retirement money?

Still, that's what nearly every commenter on the Core Knowledge Blog and Joanne Jacobs' blog did--piled on those useless first grade teachers everywhere, with their lack of intellect, poor learning outcomes and jobs that amount to glorified babysitting (I'm just quoting here, faithful readers).

Several years ago, I heard Dan Fallon of the Carnegie Corporation give a marvelous speech, based on a famous research study done at Harvard in the 1970s, comparing the long-term effects that having an excellent first grade teacher provided to one of three groups of students in a working class neighborhood. The differences between students who were randomly assigned to Miss A, Miss B and Miss C were truly stunning, especially considering that the outcomes were measured when the former pupils were adults in their 30s--including occupational success, incarceration rates and adult IQ scores. One thing that stuck out for me: although many people who had Miss B and Miss C had forgotten who their first-grade teacher was, everyone remembered Miss A.

Asked about the secret of her success, her former students and colleagues noted that Miss A never lost her temper and showed obvious affection for the children. She believed in her students' ability and made her classroom a place of confidence and hope. And that's the end of today's lesson, kids. Time for recess.

Standards Finale: Good, Bad, but not Evil

Part of the problem in any discussion about standards is that we don't know what we're talking about. Are standards guidelines for good content organization, or important things for kids to know?  Are standards a way to acquire "scientifically-based" data on school achievement--or do they represent the sound bite most likely to emerge from a policymaker: "raising the bar?" In my experience, raising the bar usually involves shoving things that were once, say, undeniably fourth grade material into the third grade, immediately impacting second and first grades by cramming spillover stuff into their curricular cubbyholes.  All you've done is moved things around and made people anxious--you haven't improved a thing.

So--what do we really mean by standards?

Uniform Curriculum?  "If only we had a standard, detailed curriculum across this country, instead of the incoherent mishmash we have now, our kids might perform like the Finnish kids do."

Benchmarks for learning growth? "The standards include fluent memorization of arithmetic facts by grade four."

Rankings? " National standards and tests that would allow parents to know, at last, how their schools compare with schools elsewhere in the country (NY Times)."

None of these will turn the United States into a nation devoted to increased learning, civic  and intellectual engagement, innovation or progress. Or fix the economy, or get all kids into college.

They do have a national curriculum in Finland, but it's broad and general--and Finns leave instructional decisions strictly up to their (carefully selected and trained) teachers. Finland's population is almost identical to Minnesota's, incidentally--and Minnesota recently scored at top levels, comparable with the highest-scoring nations, in the 2007 TIMMS study. Minnesota credits high standards and attention to instruction for their great leaps forward. Which begs the question: Why do we not leave standards creation and enforcement to states, since they've done considerable work on them over the past couple of decades? Second question: What will happen to good work done in Minnesota (and Massachusetts, and many others) when their standards are dismantled to align with federal standards?

Benchmarks are fine--as long as there are multiple strategies for figuring out what to do when kids have not memorized their math facts at age nine. And multiple opportunities--designed by schools and teachers at ground level--to get kids moving forward. You can spend a lot of precious resources identifying kids' precise achievement levels on a data grid.

Rankings generally tell us what we already know. Quick! Name three terrible school systems. Now name three terrific schools. Now tell me how more data and ranking standards will clarify what needs to be done in those first three schools.

What we want is curriculum guidelines that broadly coordinate learning goals, arranging them into a reasonable, flexible whole to help teachers logically sequence critical skills and content for their students. A good standard will help teachers and parents recognize exemplars as well as growth. A good standard will also be nimble: keep in mind that most students used to learn to type no earlier than the ninth grade, because that's when they were "developmentally ready" to learn. The accursed bar-needing-raising can slink off into the sunset, as curriculum and delivery of instruction undergo rapid and continuous change.

One final thought on standards: I recently listened again to "Two Steps Back," a feature piece on NPR's This American Life. Reporter Ira Glass visited Washington Irving Elementary School in Chicago in 1994, and again ten years later. Here's what he found in 1994:

Washington Irving Elementary School became a model of school reform in Chicago a decade ago. The school did it without adding a ton more money. It wasn't a magnet school or charter school. Their strategy: Get the kids to enjoy reading and writing; get them glasses if they need them; give teachers control of their classrooms. Scores climbed. Students actually liked coming to school.

In 2004, after prescriptive school reforms (for example, a new mandate making teachers write, on the blackboard, the standard on which each lesson is based):

The (1994 teacher-led) reforms that had made the school a model began to unravel. Well-meaning directives from the central school board undermined what the school was trying to do. The new principal didn't quite understand why the teachers were balking at seemingly small things like writing up lesson plans. The climate in the school changes. The head of the Chicago schools, Arne Duncan, says he'll look into the problems.

Yeah, that Arne Duncan. What does he say? He says that we need to move away from a one-size-fits-all mentality, toward a culture more supportive of flexibility and innovation--one that takes excellence to the next level. (You can hear Duncan speak by moving the slider to minute 44.) From your lips to reformers' ears, Arne.

In a large system, it's easier to make everyone do the same thing, a principle well-known to anyone who's ever been in the military--or the criminal justice system.  Easier, but not necessarily better.

Thanks to my old high school buddy, graphic artist Larry Grotewohl, for the image, and the Shangri-las for the blog title.

National Standards: A Thought Experiment

A recap of my previous blog:

• Some education writers think there is now a window of opportunity to finance an expensive national  standards project.

• Mandated state content standards with correlated tests were once considered the solution to hodge-podge curriculum and low achievement rates; if they have not yielded increases in states' achievement, why will national standards and tests be any better?

•  Or is it only about state-to-state comparisons using the same tested benchmarks? If so, how will more standardized information raise achievement? Or illuminate gaps? We already know about the gaps...

• Standards that are too prescriptive and detailed don't leave room for change, differences or creativity.

• We already have voluntary, educator-created content frameworks. But we don't use them. Who's going to write --and enforce--the new standards? Or pay for the inevitable costs of new materials, assessments, data analysis and dissemination of results?

The two thorniest issues around national standards, however, are not about paying for new standards, coming to national consensus in defining essential learnings, or how results of testing will be used. They are more basic than that:

#1) How quickly will content standards become obsolete, and how much will they weigh schools down as they try to adjust to changing skills, workplace norms and global cultural shifts in our hot, crowded and flat world?

#2) In our heart of hearts, do we believe that high national standards and high-stakes national tests will really change things? Where is the convincing evidence that national standards are the next best step we can take to close economic gaps, stimulate job creation or even make America a better place to live? National standards are something that can be done--but are they the right thing to do, immediately, the biggest bang for the buck?

A thought experiment: Let's imagine that Ronald Reagan leveraged the political will engendered by the "Nation at Risk" report to get Congress to agree to a set of national standards.  The year is 1989--not quite twenty years ago--and those standards are now completed and the accompanying national tests will be rolled out shortly. Creating the standards was pure  ed-policy sausage-making and horse-trading, more drawn out and expensive than anticipated, especially when the psychometricians insisted on endless validity testing. But they're done, and in the hands of every K-12 school principal in the country. They are comprehensive, and include several new areas of study--there are standards for the burgeoning field of career education, for example. The plan is to update the standards every 10 years, using the existing standards as template, although updating standards and tests add considerable legacy expense to the original estimate of what national standards would cost. Much of the standards work has been drawn from a spate of recent, popular books on cultural literacy.

May, 1989. Superintendent Williams is walking the halls in one of the two high schools in Elmwood. He likes to enter the building through the vocational hallway, where a recent bond issue has financed state of the art facilities to meet the new standards. He passes the career education office, where students are filling out their new service learning forms, mandated by the standards and designed to enhance civic engagement. He passes the wood shop, the metal shop where boys learn skills to enter the workforce as millwrights, the health sciences room where girls can be trained as Licensed Practical Nurses, and the auto shop where two boys are on their backs under a car, changing the oil.

The business career rooms are outfitted with Selectric typewriters and dictation machines--Williams sees girls learning shorthand and transcribing dictation tapes. He is especially pleased with the broadcast studio, where students can read the morning announcements over the public address system, meeting the application standard for broadcast media; a select group of students is taking German IV via distance learning there, watching the German teacher's TV lecture, then mailing off their homework and quizzes.  To meet the new standards, there are classes in journalism, food preparation, sewing and fashion, court reporting--and an expensive darkroom for the photography class. Photography was the last addition to career cluster standards before they went to press, which pleases Mr. Williams, an amateur photographer himself.

The computer lab is just around the corner. The instructional technology standards were brand new in curricular thinking, and challenging to write—there aren't many people with degrees in instructional technology. Mr. Williams is happy that there are national standards for curriculum, however--without  them, he never would have been able to persuade the Board to buy the computer textbooks, which will drive instruction in the new standards-based technology classes for the next decade.

His computer teachers are early-adopters who know enough to fix the printers when feed wheels break down. They are happy that the new textbooks include the history of computers, with consumable workbooks labeling all parts of the machine, explaining DOS systems.  To get out ahead of the standards, Williams bit the bullet and ordered twenty blazing fast 386 models which will not need replacing for 10 years or more. They have brand-new Windows 2.0 programs; the basketball coach loaded the software for free. The lab is Mr. Smith’s proudest achievement—he got a steal on the computers at $3400 apiece with monitor and keyboard. They will teach students both Works and PC Paintbrush, which will adequately prepare them for their careers of the future, he is sure--and  meet the standards.

It is quiet in the languages and social studies hallway. Mr. Williams frowns as he sees the Government class looking at a pull-down map of the USSR.  Writing national standards for government and civics classes took longer than expected as turf war infighting slowed the process of assigning hundreds of relevant topics, facts and concepts to grade levels. The political world is changing quickly, but the new tests will assess students' knowledge of Soviet-style communism for the next ten years. The new economics class meets next door--a curriculum addition driven by the national standards.  Mr. Williams is unfamiliar with economic theory, but has seen students discussing the Laffer curve and even ethics in economics (added in light of the insider trading scandals of the 80s)--and he feels that this new knowledge will forestall ethical lapses in the future.

There is only one language lab--the standards for foreign languages were raised significantly, as language teachers saw the standards as a way to push more students into four-year programs in order to graduate with an endorsed diploma. Mr. Williams is phasing out advanced German and has decided to offer only French in a four-year block.  He rationalized the move by reminding himself that the French Club could travel to France--but his rural students were not likely to meet Spanish-speaking people in the future.

Mr. Williams smiles as he passes the library, with its state of the art theft-prevention system. It was a big chunk out of the bond money, but Mr. Williams knows that students will be using the books  in the library to meet standards for decades to come--and spreading the cost out over the 25 years of the bond, the investment made sense. His own daughter, Jennifer, is in the library, working on a term paper to meet another new national standard  for research and academic writing. She is flipping through the card catalogue (another standard) to add to the research notes she keeps on 3 x 5 cards.

As he passes through the math and science hallway, Mr. Williams thinks about the recent Education for Economic Security  and Omnibus Trade and Competitiveness Acts, which increased the national focus on math and science. Combined with more rigorous standards, Mr. Williams sees a bright future for science and mathematics  education. He's especially happy that the national math standards proscribe the use of hand-held calculators, which lead, in his opinion, to mental laziness in younger students. He knows that there are now machines which can solve quadratic equations, but thank goodness ordinary high school students will never be able to get their hands on them to cheat on their exams.

He whistles as he passes the band room and art studio. The new music and art standards are drawn from the literature on core cultural knowledge--things that every American should know. Mr. Williams is in full agreement with whomever sorted the list into things that children should know--nursery rhymes, Glen Miller, Bing Crosby--and things that didn't matter. His daughter Jennifer was listening to Bruce Springsteen and a group called U2 on the radio this morning. He's an indulgent father, but he knows that this Springsteen fellow and U2 will not stand the test of time, and don't deserve study by the children in his care.

The only cloud in Superintendent Williams' day is thinking about the other high school in the district, Brightmoor, which doesn't have the facilities or equipment that Elmwood has. Brightmoor will also be remodeled and updated over the next five years, but it will be much more difficult for students there to meet the new national standards at first. Parents in Brightmoor are less involved in school activities and governance, and students there less likely to go to college, so perhaps a slight delay doesn't matter as much on that side of town. No matter--the national standards will eventually prove to be a rising tide that lifts all boats.

RIght?

National Standards: Not Now, Not Ever

Of all the great reform waves that have swept School Nation since I began teaching in 1975, probably the most useful and productive was the standards movement which bubbled up in the 1980s and was locked into place under NCLB. The idea that there should be consensus and consistency around what kids should know and be able to do, and how we might measure their learning, is more or less a no-brainer. Standards, in general, are a good thing.

Last week, however, standards veneration (wherein that generally good thing was transformed into a shiny silver bullet by a crowd of talking edheads) jumped to a new level, when the NY Times ran an article suggesting that the creation of National K-12 Content Standards (proper noun) would be a great way to use the stimulus money.  Actually, this would be a fruitful use of scarce resources for precisely one group: the same edheads who assume they would be sitting on blue ribbon committees to create those standards, then collecting yet more data to analyze and writing white papers about this experience in their spare time.

Investing a bundle of money (after we print it up, of course) in a major national standards initiative is a terrible idea. I really hate the thought that my 401k died for something so unimaginative, especially when there are much better ways to use a windfall.

We already have something like national standards—content standards and benchmarks written by professional advocacy groups like the National Council of the Teachers of Mathematics and the National Science Teachers Association.  All educator organizations, in every discipline, have created broad content frameworks—from the librarians to the tech folks to dance and drama teachers. There have even been national dustups over these—the relative weight assigned to George Washington in the social studies framework, or the ongoing pro-constructivist/pro-direct instruction math wars, for example.

Why aren’t these disciplinary specialist-created curricular outlines considered national standards? Some people think they’re based on The Wrong Stuff (and that they know what The Right Stuff is)—and some people think they’re too vague or nonspecific.  And—wait for it--they’re voluntary, and not linked to easily-administered standardized assessments, either.

I am most familiar with the National Standards for Arts Education. We adapted them in my district as our own benchmarks (before NCLB rendered district standards moot for tested subjects). They’re delightfully broad and imprecise—they describe general competencies and big ideas. Here’s a music standard for students in grades 5 through 8:Students describe distinguishing characteristics of representative music genres and styles from a variety of cultures.  

How could you love a standard like that? It doesn’t tell the teacher when kids should recognize Bach or memorize his historical period (Baroque). It doesn’t sequence content or create hierarchies (putting Bach ahead of Stravinsky or above Snoop Dogg). It doesn’t give the teacher a grade-by-grade list of “shoulds” from the vast, expanding universe of musical styles and cultures. How could something so mushy be useful?

Well—if I were teaching 7^th grade music in Detroit and bound by standards to teaching the Baroque composers in the 7^th grade, I may never get them to listen to Bach, let alone understand the majesty of his music, unless I went through the Snoop. A friend just told me a story about trying to teach To His Coy Mistress by Andrew Marvell in an inner city HS English class. Because it was in the required standards, of course, even though it was irrelevant in the extreme to the students she had finally, finally persuaded to take their English language skills seriously.

But—what about the Confusing Mishmash Theory, generally trotted out to support National Standards? The idea that states have identified different priorities and timetables for learning content? That some states have high, challenging standards, and others are letting kids slack off? And what of the child who learns algebra in the 8^th grade, then moves to another state where she might be forced to learn it all over again in the 9^th grade?

Requiring states to set clear standards and connect them to high-stakes testing was supposed to fix the original confusing mishmash—the educational system we had for decades, where every district/school/teacher did their own thing. By standardizing curricula and developing assessments, we were supposed to raise the bar and address inadequate schools—state by state, where those setting the standards presumably knew something about the districts, and students’ learning needs and capacities.

So—how’s that working out? And what assurance do we have that a national system will be any better—considering that it will force the feds to push additional resources toward playing enforcement cop, requiring states to obtain and utilize expensive data analysis systems? And make districts all over the country buy new materials to align with another set of standards? And position the USDOE,  presumptive manager of the project, as the best judge of whether expectations are too high, too low—or just right?

Those who claim that national standards will, finally, let us accurately compare states on an equal footing are really excited about playing with huge, seductive data sets and complex statistical analysis. But in the end, don’t we already know where the trouble spots are—where schools are failing and kids are not learning nearly enough? Will new, standard curricula and cleaner data get us where we want to go?

Any child moving school to school repeatedly (and this is a huge issue) has far bigger problems than whether the kids in the third grade already know cursive when he gets there. Student transience cannot be solved by standardizing curriculum; kids who stay in one system for thirteen long years are never precisely aligned with every grade-level learning expectation. They’re ahead, or behind—or both—from time to time. If every 6^th grader in America studies the ancient Egyptians, that’s no guarantee that every 7^th grader will have any knowledge or interest in the Great Pyramids. For that, you need a good teacher. If we could standardize passionate teaching, we might be moving forward rapidly.

It occurs me to that a lot of what I’ve written, so far, doesn’t make me sound like a fan of standards—and I haven’t even addressed what I think is the most compelling argument against national standards: nothing about content should ever be set in concrete.

Tomorrow, another blog on national standards—a thought experiment about what might be different if we had written national standards twenty years ago.  Stay tuned.

Quality Time

 At the moment, I am sitting in a room with 50-some Teachers of the Year, the 2009 state, territorial and Department of Defense winners. There are also a half-dozen National Teachers of the Year, lending some brilliance and gravitas to the group.  If one was conducting a thought experiment—what would the  extreme dream team of teaching look like?—you really couldn’t do better than the people gathered here. There are amazing personal stories of courage and innovation, but also something that doesn’t get much credence in the education press these days: longevity. Last night, the eight folks in my dinner group had, collectively, over two centuries of classroom experience.

So I’m privileged to be hanging with the crème de la crème. A hotel meeting room brimming with teacher quality. They’re being briefed on critical issues and ideas in education. 

Yesterday, the National Council on Teacher Quality released its State Teacher Policy Yearbook, an “in-depth analysis of a critical piece of the teacher quality puzzle: the retention of effective new teachers.” The preface includes this observation:

The state controls virtually every aspect of the teaching profession. The Yearbook analyzes what each state is doing to identify teacher effectiveness, support the retention of valuable, early career teachers, and dismiss those found to be ineffective.

The report then proceeds to grade each state, giving no state an A, one B-, and assigning two-thirds of the states Ds and Fs. Evidently, the NCTQ is not grading on a curve.

Teachers in the room have been e-forwarded local press pieces on the NCTQ report from folks back home, and there have been side conversations about what it means to live in a state where headlines are proclaiming that teacher quality is D-minus or F. To be completely accurate and fair—the NCTQ report merely compares and evaluates states’ policies, based on their perceptions of which policies are (here’s that word again) effective in improving teaching.  Effectiveness, it seems, is something that can be measured. Quality, on the other hand, is nice idea, but harder to define.

This shift to “effective” as the preferred descriptor for good teaching firmly establishes the idea of quantitative measurement as the benchmark for credible identification of skilled practice. And it suggests that policies drive practice—that the unit of analysis ought to be the state, and the leverage point for positive change is in policymaking.

The teachers in this room, at this moment, are talking about their personal passions. They are sharing stories from their classrooms—students who were transformed, curriculum reshaped to meet real kids’ needs, colleagues who need support, good vs. useless professional development. To them, the unit of analysis is “my classroom”—or my school or my district. And the leverage point for change is a teacher and his students, a principal and her school.

The NCTQ report asks: How do we support and retain promising novice teachers? If you asked the Teachers of the Year, the answer would not reflect NCTQ's #1 indicator: investing in expensive statewide data systems, the better to track individual student test data--and the corresponding capacity to attach student numbers to the folks who taught them. Nor would it be in tweaking tenure laws or getting better systems in place to exit (NCTQ’s word) ineffective teachers.

It’s not that the teachers in this room are opposed to accountability—in fact, they speak with passion about reaching out to every single child. Susan Waggener, the Arkansas Teacher of the Year, mentors HS students in danger of dropping out and told me a heart-tearing story about a young man who would not have graduated had he not had lunch with Susan, every day for three years. He had decided not to walk in the graduation ceremonies, because there was no family to attend—or, as Susan says, “hoot and holler for him.” Guess who persuaded him to make that final step and was in the front row, hollerin’? That’s accountability, too, on a human scale.

When it comes to “exiting” ineffective teachers, the excellent teachers here are painfully aware of teachers in their schools and districts who are not doing the job. In the past two days, I have heard their thinking about what to do: reach out, don’t turn a blind eye, share and model—or counsel that person to find another job. Fast. We can hope that states will develop stronger regulations on getting ineffective teachers out of classrooms. But think of the power of being mentored and coached by demonstrated experts—given the best possible chance for success or, if that’s not the reality, some well-timed advice on choosing another line of work. From the people who care most about those students and their learning.

It’s a mark of professionalism to fiercely guard the level of practice—read: effectiveness—in your own bailiwick and care deeply about results. If the goal is lasting improvement—better teaching and learning—state policy mandates and data management systems will go only so far in building a better teaching force. What we need is a new focus on what is useful, creative and effective in our classrooms, including the person in front of the room.

Image: Cindi, Tony, Susan/Rigsbee

Teacher Quality: Highly? Hardly? Who knows?

I am still wiping my eyes after the Inaugural speech, and really need to get my act together for the Virtual Inaugural Ball edition of the Carnival of Education which will be held here, in a Strange Land--tomorrow! I should be virtually vacuuming or something. But first, I need to sing a quick chorus of:

Grazing in the stats is a gas
Baby--can you dig it?

My favorite annual statistical round-up, Education Week's Quality Counts 2009, showed up in my mailbox last week, with six beautiful faces on the cover. I haven't had much time to sit down and--well, graze in the stats, which this year are centered on teaching kids whose native language is not English. But last Thursday, January 15, the two largest dailies in Michigan published pieces with the following headlines:

Michigan Students' Core Classes are Taught by Best (Detroit Free Press, Peggy Walsh-Sarnecki)

and

Schools, Teachers Must Produce Better Results  (Detroit News Editorial page)

The Free Press article noted that Michigan has the second highest percentage of "highly qualified teachers" under No Child Left Behind--99.6%, not too shabby--of 41 states surveyed by Gannett. Only North Dakota, where every teacher is highly qualified, ranked higher. The gap in qualifications between teachers who teach our poorest students and those who teach our most advantaged is less than 1%.

In contrast, the Detroit News editorial says that the Quality Counts data gives Teacher Quality in Michigan a grade of D. We also got a D on K-12 Achievement. The News then goes on to assert that teacher quality is the #1 predictor of student success (which kind of makes the lousy teacher-lousy achievement grades seem like a twinset). This issue is so important, says the News, that even Bill Gates has become interested in teacher quality (now that he's fixed Vista, presumably). And one last thing:

For years in Michigan, political leaders and policymakers in Michigan have avoided even a discussion of teacher quality because of the powerful political influence of the Michigan Education Association and its allies.

Well. I taught in Michigan for 31 years, and remember plenty of statewide policy discussions about teacher quality. And I'm wondering which of the teacher unions' "allies" the News is referring to--MASA, the superintendents' association? MASB, the school board folks? The principals' groups? Indicators of teacher quality have been on the table for decades, and rightfully so.

So--which is it? Are Michigan teachers among the most highly qualified in America? Or are we barely passing? Are we a national leader in getting good teachers into the toughest schools? Or are our weak teachers producing substandard results? Or does it merely depend on which newspaper you read, truth being in the journalistic eye of the beholder?

Yes--I see your hand waving, informed one. I do know how to interpret the statistical claims made in the two pieces. My point is that most people who read the News or the Free Press will not, and will instead base their beliefs about Michigan teachers on what they read in the papers. Do we get a 99.6%, or a D?

It's true that Michigan has a very high rate of certified teachers, teaching in their area of content expertise. It's also true that Michigan is a teacher-exporting state--it's extremely hard for new graduates with a teaching license to find a job here. Michigan schools can be picky, most often, and hire people who have the right stuff, at least on paper. It's also true that Michigan has teacher-friendly HOUSSE (High, objective, uniform state standard of evaluation) regulations--created largely to keep effective teachers (as determined by the people who've seen their work--principals and so forth) in their classrooms when the regulatory deal changed under NCLB.

As for the News' claim that Michigan gets Ds in teacher quality and student achievement--well, they're using year-old, 2008 data (although they neglect to mention that). The 2009 data measures different things. In the 2009 data, Michigan gets a C+ on the "Chance for Success" index. We come in 30th, of the 50 states. We are, in fact, slightly above the national norm for 4th grade reading, and a little below for 8th grade math. We're above the national mean in percentage of young adults enrolled in college or with a completed degree. Guess what drags us down most in this index? Our unemployment rate--a condition that is obvious to absolutely everyone in this economically depressed state.

In terms of standards and accountability, Michigan comes in 8th of 50 states. We're leading the pack in early childhood standards, college readiness, a strong, comprehensive required high school curriculum, and work readiness. We look pretty good in school finance, too--15th--although economic conditions make continuing financial stability doubtful.

Do I think that Michigan can and should improve the quality of its teachers? Absolutely. One thing I'd like to see is an emphasis on performance assessments for teachers--perhaps beginning with the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards' Take One model. I want Michigan kids to have teachers with strong content knowledge, and I want student progress measured often, in ways that are meaningful and useful to the people who teach them.

In the meantime, I'll be grazing in the stats, looking for a little reality.

Reading Whenever

Congratulations, astute reader, for picking up on the wry reference to Reading First in the blog title. If you didn’t notice it, you’re probably an actual K-12 teacher, who is too busy trying to get kids  to read—somehow, something, anywhere—to follow the toboggan-run political fortunes of Reading First, or monitor ongoing skirmishes over the One True Path to Reading set out by the National Reading Panel. You, real teacher, may be too busy scrounging boxes of books at garage sales for your class library, or spending your Scholastic bonus points on your third set of hardcover Harry Potters, to weigh in on whole language vs. dibels.

Good for you.

And—I’ve got a video for you. I was flattered to get an e-mail from University of Virginia psychologist Dan Willingham suggesting I take a look at a new video he’s posted on YouTube, “Teaching Content is Teaching Reading.”  It’s a nice piece, especially for parents or a general audience, explaining what makes comprehension—the ultimate goal in reading—possible is accrued knowledge, not decoding skills. The video uses some clever examples to demonstrate how critical it is to build the conceptual libraries in kids’ minds, or all the phonemic awareness in the world will go for naught. Willingham’s upbeat clip makes a pitch for rich, well-rounded curriculum, and neatly illustrates a remark Stephen Krashen just made in Education Week:

We learn to read by understanding what is written. Our ability to decode complex words is the result of reading, not the cause.

The video also dredged up a personal memory:

About a dozen years ago, my district's initiative du jour was "Reading across the Curriculum" (one of our more useful goals). At a professional development workshop on RAC in my middle school, several teachers resisted the idea that “we’re all reading teachers.”

Wally (angry teacher): I shouldn’t have to teach reading to kids in the 8^th grade! And besides, I’m not trained to teach reading! I’m trained in physical education.

Teacher in a strange land: Maybe we should give this a try. It’s about strengthening literacy. I can think of some ways to incorporate reading and writing into music.

Wally: What do you mean? You don’t even have desks—nobody reads in band class!

TIASL: (gritting teeth) Hmm. I’m not trained as a reading specialist, either—so what if we work together on this? I’ll come to your 3^rd hour tomorrow. What are you teaching?

Wally: Bowling. Maybe you could find a nice book on the history of bowling for the kids to read. (snickering from the coach group in the back of the room)

Next day, third hour. Gym floor is taped off into alleys, with heavy rubber balls and pins at the ready. Kids are sitting in bleachers, reading across the curriculum: an inscrutable paragraph from a bowling manual, on scoring. They look fairly miserable—they have to pass a scoring quiz before they get to touch the equipment. Wally’s standing next to a rolling chalkboard.

Wally: So--let's say you get a strike in the first frame. You put an X here. Then in the second frame, let's say you get a 7-10 split, but pick up the spare. It's a slash here, plus the bonus points here. Get it?

And of course-- some of them did and some were utterly mystified. The bowling newbies needed vocabulary, true, but first they needed to actually bowl. Quiz results: about half of them got 100% (kids that Wally thought must be "good at math") and half were dismal failures. Some in the latter group were outstanding athletes--so I got to listen to why RAC discriminated against athletes, who needed an A in gym class to maintain the GPA to participate in sports.

So there you have it. Do check out the video.

Teach for America vs. National Board Certification

If pressed to name my ultimate professional passion and goal—the thing I was put on earth to do—it might be something like “elevate the ideas and voices of excellent teachers.” Like many people in America, I think we can do a vastly better job of educating all our kids, across the socio-economic spectrum. We’re not going to get far with that goal until we upgrade our teaching force, however—skilled and dedicated boots on the ground.

Last week, I wrote about the experience of snooping through some internal TFA listserv messages about Linda Darling-Hammond and her prospective role in the Obama administration. That conversation was far more intelligent and even-handed than most education writers’ recent TFA-Defense pieces, like this little beauty, wherein Richard Whitmire claims that TFA corps members single-handedly thwarted the Darling-Hammond Secretarial bid, from their current "high-powered" positions.

It is possible to respect and admire both the Teach for America premise and TFA teachers and alums, without believing that TFA teachers somehow have special, magical insights into how to “fix” American schools, whatever that means. Whitmire asserts that there are now 14,400 TFA alums out there making a difference, changing the world, wielding the power and so on—all on the basis of their brief, but well-documented sojourns as barely trained educational missionaries in their own land.

Here’s another way to consider this. There are currently about 74,000 National Board Certified Teachers (NBCTs) in the United States. Their practice has been rigorously and scientifically vetted, with most of them having to go through two or more annual rounds of submitting valid evidence of standards-based teaching and high-level student learning. They have at least four years of experience by the time they’re selected—but most of them have a great deal more. NBCTs voluntarily spend 200-400 hours meticulously developing a portfolio of their work over time, to be adjudicated by assessors who don’t know them, and to whom they cannot make excuses. And then they sit for six on-demand content exams. They work in all kinds of schools, in every state in the union, facing a broad range of circumstances, problems and student needs.

National Board Certification may not be perfect, but it’s as good and reliable a benchmark as exists, right now, for identifying strong and efficacious teaching. Whether they certify or not, National Board candidates overwhelmingly say the process reveals new insights into effective practice. And—this is the foundation for my argument—nobody would pursue National Board Certification unless they were absolutely committed to a long-term career in teaching and education reform.

So—why aren’t we asking National Board Certified Teachers what they think about key policy issues, or who should be Secretary of Education? Shouldn’t we be asking for input from a pool of solid practitioners, who have demonstrated a personal willingness to be publicly accountable? What kind of pundit honors the views of two-year field medics over those of veteran physicians with long records of success and innovative practice? It’s a good question.

It might have something to do with the fact that teaching is a huge occupational cluster that has not developed a compelling national vision of its own professionalism. This is in distinct contrast to teachers’ professional behaviors and responsibilities in other, high-achieving nations. The National Board standards were supposed to help with that, but the general public—and a fair number of high-profile researchers, in fact—don’t understand the conceptual framework, intellectual tools or process of national certification for teachers.

Full disclosure: I worked with nine other NBCTs in developing a comprehensive policy brief analyzing current research on National Board Certification—and we were dismayed by the lack of impact NBCTs have had on policy creation, and how quick analysts were to attach national teacher certification to teacher union issues, once again lumping all three million teachers into the category of skilled technical workers rather than creative professionals. Whitmire positions TFA teachers as “not beholden to the system”—as if all other teachers were, in fact, part of an amorphous, not-well-hidden agreement to accept the status quo.

Then there is the unattractive fact that, according to Dan Lortie in the new edition of his classic Schoolteacher,

 "Teaching has attracted many persons who have undergone the uncertainties and deprivations of lower- and working-class life. It has provided a significant step up the social class ladder for many Americans."

It would be unbecoming for academics, policy-creators and opinion leaders to say, hey—why would we listen to low-rent scholars who went to fourth-tier state universities and don’t aspire to anything more prestigious than teaching? So they don’t. Instead, they suggest that it makes sense to endorse the winners of a best-and-brightest competition to obtain a two-year starter job in education. Many TFA recruits become competent, even highly capable, teachers. I want to hear what they have to say about educational change. But theirs is a limited perspective.

Listening to long-term exemplary teachers would represent a fundamental shift in the way we think about transforming American schools. Power to the teachers, right on.

And—Happy New Year.