Teacher in a Strange Land

Brave New (Charter) World

Let’s get biases and politics out of the way first. I am a big fan of the charter school concept—defined as the rich idea that when it comes to schooling, one size does not fit all, and big monolithic districts do not and cannot serve diverse children as well as site-directed, purpose-driven, innovative schools. If I lived in Detroit, I would choose a magnet school or charter school for my children—and even though I live in a district with fine public schools, one of my children attended a public school and the other attended a private school. Ideologically, I’m with Dewey on this one: I want the best possible education for all children, the kind of carefully chosen options my own children had.

One more thing: I think that positioning charter schools as the opposite of public schools, rather than a necessary supplement to public education, has poisoned the discourse. And—it goes both ways. It’s not just public schools and public school teachers being skeptical (or downright nasty) in their remarks about charter schools. Public school academies—charters—seem to be bent on repeating the worst sound bites about public schools, whether they’re strictly true or not, thereby displaying the aphorism that your mother repeated when you were seven years old: you don’t make yourself look better by tearing someone else down. 

I have a number of friends now working in the charter school movement in Detroit, a city where a handful of good charter schools have begun to flourish and bear fruit. Last week, they invited me to attend a showing of “The Providence Effect,” a full-length film depicting a school success story: Providence St. Mel, a K-12 Catholic school on Chicago’s tough west side.

Providence St. Mel has accrued considerable recognition after parents adamantly refused to close it on diocese recommendation, 30 years ago: President Reagan visited, around the time the “Nation at Risk” report was being crafted, and Oprah Winfrey has taken a personal interest (and contributed more than a million dollars). Providence’s outcomes—an average ACT score of 23, and 100% college admission for graduates—resemble those of well-heeled suburban public schools. Now, there is an attempt to replicate the “Providence effect:” a charter school in Englewood, led by Providence graduates and veteran teachers, and based on programs and principles at the original PSM.

The screening was part of a two-day professional conference for charter school proponents and teachers, and featured a panel discussion with Big Names in the Michigan charter school movement, a State Board of Education member, various business-leadership types, and the principal of the new Providence charter school. The room was set up for hundreds of people, but I’m sure the attendance numbers (perhaps 60 people) were disappointing to the organizers. As I was parking on the rooftop of Cobo Hall, charter school teachers wearing conference badges were flooding out of the building, recognizable as teachers by their youth, their post-collegiate dress and tote bags—plus their “let’s go get a beer” demeanor.

Impressions from the film and the panel discussion:

• The movie has a campaign-film aura—gauzy graduation footage with students inexplicably wearing white gloves, bits of talking-head rhetoric, quick-cut black and white shots from Chicago’s troubled past, backed by a vocal track of adolescents singing. It’s impressive, all right, especially their catch phrase: It’s not rocket science. The lingering message: anybody with high expectations and tight rules can turn around kids destined for the dumpster.

• There is curiously little about instruction in the film; we do see a few examples of very traditional classroom teaching. There is a clip of first-graders in a race-to-the-board competitive spelling game (the teacher assigning points to teams, a la Professor Dumbledore), and a HS math lesson where the teacher puts an equation on the board and announces “No calculators!” (which drew a spatter of applause from the audience). An elementary teacher models a familiar and effective questioning strategy but then suggests that nobody in his circle believes that second graders can do work at this level.

• Among the panelists, the principal of the new Providence charter school was most grounded in reality. She admitted that while they were on a strong upward curve, test scores were still mediocre. Asked how they deal with discipline, she said that students were put on a “three strikes and out” contract—if they couldn’t abide by the rules, they held a conference with parents to decide if the child was a “good fit” for Providence. According to the principal, every child, even kindergartners, has a grade point average (another murmur of approval from the audience). Nobody asked about parents who never bothered to come to school, the advisability of a five-year old having a GPA before he understands cumulative averaging, or where the kid who is not a good fit ends up.

• There was a kind of professional pep rally atmosphere. The panel moderator took questions from people who seemed pre-selected, often acknowledging the “great work” Joe was doing or the “outstanding leadership” of Mary. There was an angry question on why charter schools get less money than public schools, on average, from the public coffers. Reginald Turner, the State Board member, clarified: charter schools get the same per-pupil allowance as other public schools in the surrounding area. And guess what? There aren’t many charter schools in Grosse Pointe, where the funding level is high; charter schools are generally found where there is dissatisfaction with public education and not much money. And they get the same public monies as the other schools nearby—you might even call that equitable.

• When asked what Detroit could do as a first step to fix its failing public school, the business folks agreed: get new teachers, preferably from Teach for America (which one panelist described as “the Peace Corps of teaching,” an unfortunate metaphor in a city trying to pull itself out of devastating depression). A woman asked what special training Teach for America corps members got that would make them particularly effective in Detroit. The panelist replied that it wasn’t a matter of training—it was a chance to get “graduates of the top colleges” into the classroom.

If you believe U.S. News and World Report, two of the top twenty Schools of Education are right here in Michigan, including the long-running #1 in Elementary and Secondary teacher preparation, Michigan State University, and the #4 public university in the country, the University of Michigan. There is also a strong network of regional teacher preparation programs. There is no shortage of smart, highly qualified and skilled teachers here in Michigan.

Michigan is a teacher-exporting state. About three-quarters of our best and brightest would-be teachers go to work in other states (when they can get jobs). Of those who remain in Michigan, a significant segment gets jobs in newly formed charter schools—because there are no jobs in public schools. The best new teachers in Michigan? They’re the folks who went streaming out the door to grab a beer with their teaching colleagues as I was parking my car.

When it comes to evaluating charter schools, the key question is always: Compared to what? Charter schools in Detroit have many potential resources that public schools do not, beginning with positive public assumptions and PR.

Charter World is an interesting place, with different beliefs, incentives and catch phrases than Public School World. It would be a shame to lose the opportunity to do something truly different with charter schools, relying instead on rhetorical flourishes and empty myths.

Artsy Smartsy

First, read this--Claus von Zastrow's brilliant, poignantly hilarious treatise on why public schools and teachers just can't win, posted last week on the Public School Insights blog. It encompasses the entire range of criticisms--building yurts with tongue depressors!--and skillfully illustrates the "painted into a corner" nature of being a public school advocate these days. No matter what you believe, no matter how thoughtful your research-based educational practice, someone disagrees. Probably viciously.

Conflict over the role of the arts in intellectual development and public schooling is one of the oldest of these squabbles. As a music teacher, I was pink-slipped six times in 30 years and shifted to a new position 17 times; I've spent a professional lifetime defending the necessity of the arts in school curriculum, from every angle. As human beings, we were created and designed to make representations--in sound, drama, movement and image--of the things that matter most to civilization. 

People who believe that children do not need well-designed experiences with the arts to be fully educated are wrong. The evidence comes from the fact that children naturally create art, music, dance and dramatic play all by themselves, with no education whatsoever--and that all aspects of human communication, from political to religious to commercial, revolve around artistic expression. Developing aesthetic discretion is a useful skill for children, not to mention a lifelong pleasure.

Yesterday, in the Washington Post, David C. Levy, former director of the Corcoran Gallery and founder of the New School for Jazz and Contemporary Music, takes on the challenge of flaws and gaps in K-12 arts education in America. The piece starts strong--but then Levy jumps on the knee-jerk Teacher Blame Bandwagon, claiming that  art education is suffering because school art teachers are lousy artists--"many of them can barely draw." He attempts to soften this indictment by mentioning that art schools are guilty, too: they require a "smorgasbord of classes in unrelated media," making rigorous training and serious specialization impossible. Then, he asserts that the situation is vastly better for prospective musicians (who have a range of "elite musical ensembles" with a "demanding meritocracy" to sharpen their skills).

Really?

Levy's irritating and erroneous assumptions about arts education pile up; he claims that schools don't stress artistic skill development, preferring to let kids just "express themselves"--and that most children begin playing musical instruments early enough to have ten years of instruction with a competent professional before pursuing a music degree. Perhaps in some major cities--but not in my neck of the woods. Levy may well know a great deal about the professional art and music world, but he's clueless about the vagaries of K-12 scheduling, hiring and programming and regional support for the arts--not to mention the nature of teaching large groups of children, where a jack-of-all-trades artistic sensibility comes in handy, as does a bagful of tricks for keeping "media" on the table, rather than in the hair or on the clothes.

The vast majority of kids learn to understand the making of art, and to sing, dance and play an instrument, in a classroom. While there is certainly variance in the quality of teaching, most arts teachers want nothing more than to develop skills and excellence in their students, to ignite a musical or artistic passion that burns well past graduation.  Only three or four in 100 students will pursue a career in the arts, but all of them need to learn some basic skills, as an entry point to enriched taste and enjoyment. College-bound high school students in traditional public schools have no room in their schedules to take a variety of arts courses--even if their school offered them.  Elementary schoolkids who get a 45 -minute art class once a week are lucky, indeed. The picture, as Levy notes, may be gloomy--but let's not point fingers at teachers.

It's not only wrong-headed--it's counterproductive.

In one of my district's financial crises, a high school art teacher who taught jewelry, pottery and graphic design was shifted to an elementary art job (13 weeks apiece in three K-4 schools). As Fine Arts Department chair, I was sent to make sure he was "doing a good job," since he was vocally disappointed when jewelry-making and graphic design courses were dropped from the school curriculum. I watched him teach perspective to first graders, their first art lesson with the new teacher. He used words like "foreground" and "horizon," explaining as he went along. They drew houses. Amazing, realistic houses. They were incredibly excited, and couldn't wait to show their drawings to their parents.

I was beyond impressed, but he was nonchalant.

"Just basic art," he said. ”Anybody can teach perspective."

Image: Flickr Creative Commons, Jansen Mann

I'd Rather Have a Root Canal

Thanks to guest blogger Christine Gleason, whose story about the what passes for professional learning made the Teacher in a Strange Land laugh out loud. She even provided her own illustration.

By Christine Gleason

2009 Texas Teacher of the Year

The time is upon us where teachers across the nation gather to collectively lose brain mass--the infamous full-day in-service. I check the clock again and adjust myself in world's worst chair.  My eyes roll back in my head.  Time is not relevant in in-service land.  Break time is a non-negotiable “ten minutes because we have a lot to cover.”  Lunch is an eternity away.  I lean forward and rest my chin on my fist.  I roll my eyes. Take away the table in front of me, cluttered with coffee cups, blank paper and randomly placed markers, and my posture is in perfect tandem with Rodin’s “The Thinker.”

If Dante were writing this, the level of hell reserved for in-services would be right between the heretics and the violent (that’s level 6.5 for the Dante lovers).  Inferno would be a cafetorium. Roughly 350 teachers would be helplessly seated on uncomfortable chairs.  The schedule says we're done at 4:00, but we all know that roughly translates to eternity.   

The objective:  Teachers will become familiar with the ELL components of…zzzz.

By hour two, we have covered one slide on the PowerPoint presentation and completed an activity where we went around the room and got three different perspectives from three random teachers on the sentence starter “One obstacle ELL students face when trying to learn English is…”  Deep. 

My back is killing me (remember the sub-par chairs…) and I am sick of sitting. As I move to stand in the back of the cafeteria, I look around to see if others are feeling the same way. I see people shoving all of their markers together to make swords.  I see towers of empty coffee cups and juice boxes.

It is confirmed.  The presenter had lost the majority of the people in the room. I know this because of the plethora of side conversations (which involve laughter--and this guy isn’t funny), the body language of the people who aren’t talking and the pantomimed wrist slashing of a colleague with whom I make eye contact. 

The principal slowly walks over to me.  He's seen me surfing the net on my cell phone and reading an essay.  He asks: do I have the book the presenter gave us?  “Yes,” I say.  “I have two copies." We make a quick list of the times the high school staff had ELL training…the last being when the principal himself trained us.  “Yours was better,”  I admit.   He chuckles a little.  Of course, a monkey could give a better in-service than this guy.    

There are no modifications to the speaker’s delivery as the day progresses.  He continues talking at us. He tells us ELLs need multiple opportunities to hear information.  “Give them visual cues, rephrase stuff and have them repeat it back to you” he says.   So where are my visual cues?  The rephrasing?  Small group instruction?  Alternative activities?  Does this guy ever, ever change the tone of his voice?

I draw one of my colleague’s likenesses on an orange. I take a picture of someone who's fallen asleep.  

How can the powers that be expect a room full of educated adults with different learning styles to sit through six hours of lecture and actually walk away with something? The content of the book is amazing.  It's the delivery.

After lunch, the Assistant Superintendent reprimands us: “We expect the kids to learn when we lecture to them."  Translation: “I know this guy is boring. Don’t make marker swords.” 

I don’t expect my kids to learn in this kind of environment. Six hours of spiel is too much for any human being. The marker-sword fight and the countless juice box pyramids strategically set up to hide people texting on their phones should have given the presenter a clue. 

Teachers should be involved in what teachers want or need to learn. Clearly this is not a revolutionary idea.  If we have to spend money, why not give us the opportunity to become National Board Certified?  What about an in-service on how to set up a Professional Learning Community at our school?  Growth opportunities are absolutely imperative to the success of our teachers, especially those on cruise control.  

And why can’t the staff train the staff?  I went to Space Camp this summer and could teach a whole day on Space to the elementary school.  I’m also a Smithsonian Ambassador.  Plus, I’m engaging, relatively funny, and know how to use hands-on activities. And that’s just me! Think of all the staff members with unique skills...

I’d love to see multiple sessions going on in multiple classrooms so teachers have a choice of where they want to go all day long.  While I’m presenting how to make Water Bottle Rockets as part of the Science and Math curriculum in one room, my principal could be presenting ELL strategies in another.  We are exciting, talented, we know our kids and we are free.

In-service day is over. I've reflected on what I learned--and I’m off to have a chat with my principal.  Hope he feels like joining my PLC. 

Yo! Extremely Bad Idea!

I suppose it was inevitable. When the blurring between reality TV and, you know, actual reality has encompassed things like marriage, parenting and Hugh Hefner, it was only a matter of time until schools offered up their students--and their integrity--for fifteen minutes of fame and $3500 an episode.

Tony Danza--who wasn't even The Boss--appears to be headed for a well-publicized turn as a fake teacher on a reality show based in a public school in Philadelphia. I thought Channel One  was bad--and renting a brand-new school in my hometown as movie set for a stoner flick was abominable. This is much worse.

Philly Mayor Michael Nutter is all for it. His rationale? Students might be allowed to serve as production interns, he says-- and such a reality show will make it easier to recruit teachers.

"Teach' represents a unique opportunity to highlight many of our city's dedicated teachers and administrators, and the talented students they serve.''

Well, gosh. If the show were truly going to highlight the city's best bona fide teachers, I'd be all for it. And I'll believe that having high school students work as gofers on a TV set in their own school is a good idea when I see the rigorous national content standards for movie production. My thinking runs along the lines of Philadelphia Daily News' Ronnie Polaneczky who said the idea was:

"...a way to pimp our kids' education to an unemployed sitcom actor who wants to kick-start his stalled career on the backs of students who'll be distracted by cameras and microphones.''

This is actually something I have experience with; I can offer some first-hand insights into how this will likely play out with Tony and the kids in Philadelphia:

Some years ago, I was asked to be a featured teacher in the Annenberg Foundation's video series on teaching, The Learning Classroom. It was a project with an excellent pedigree--the series advisors were highly respected academics, and the mission was sterling: filming teachers at work, hearing how and why they make teaching decisions, integrating theory and practice. My segment was Feelings Count: Emotions and Learning.

I had several conversations with the producer before they came to film. The plan was for the crew to spend five full days in my classroom. Don't worry, she said. You won't even know we're here. I was the one who insisted on notifying parents, and getting release forms signed--a precaution the producer found ridiculous.

I also spent considerable energy devising lessons that would tap into the emotions of volatile middle schoolers to yield richer learning. My seventh grade band was working on Ashokan Farewell, a lovely tune that Ken Burns used throughout his Civil War series, most notably during the heartbreaking letter from Major Sullivan Ballou of the Union army to his wife, Sarah. One of my students--a young man--read excerpts from the letter, and I shared some thoughts about how music helps people through milestone moments in their lives. Students spoke about music played at a grandparent's funeral--or how they found joy and consolation in particular songs. It was a terrific lesson, a nice blend of rich musical content and relevant emotion.

Unfortunately, none of that lesson--or any other bits of creative, solid teaching--ended up in the final segment. At lunchtime on Day One, the producer (who turned my office into her own personal Disgusting Starbucks) had a little problem. She wanted to know when they were going to see some reality. The kids were so good. So polite. Clearly, this was not the way they behaved every day. "I feel like I'm in Mayberry," she said--and she didn't mean that in a nice way. Where, she asked, was the emotion?

I explained that it took months of hard work to build a functioning community of 65 12-year old musicians, to the point where they could express emotion in class. She didn't buy it. She needed to see some conflict--somebody crying would be ideal. On Day Two, the production crew moved from my classroom to the hallway, hoping to catch a fight or a breakup.  The producer went to the principal, asking for permission to film all the kids. At a quick after-school staff meeting, permission slips for the entire student body were distributed. I shared my apprehension with the rest of the teachers. Some of them were concerned--but others were hoping for a visit from the camera crew. "You're not the only good teacher in the building, you know," one said. "Some of us would love a chance to be on TV, too."

It was a long week. The worst moment occurred on Friday. One of my 8th graders had been out of school for several weeks, undergoing treatment for testicular cancer. He came back for a quick visit, and was surrounded by friends, trying to figure out what to say to another teenage boy who has a life-threatening illness. As I hugged him, I heard the cameras whirring. They followed him into the band room and filmed his interactions with friends attempting to be cool, and his own struggle to describe his illness without telling them where his cancer was, or what procedures he had undergone.

I would never have interrupted these painful but essential conversations--but I sure as hell did not want them exploited. I told the producer later that we had no release form, so they would have to scrap the film they were salivating over. We did not part on good terms. While I do appear in the video series, none of the things that were important to me were captured or highlighted.

One can only wonder what the producers of a reality show will find compelling. And whose education will be compromised.

Image: ianmc_p @ Flickr Creative Commons

Bestseller: They Only Get What They Deserve

I have been fooled before. Back in college, all the girls in my dorm were devouring Love Story, admiring plucky, foul-mouthed Jenny and secretly wishing to find their own Ivy League hottie with a trust fund (which—trust me—was a stretch for girls raised in the flat farmlands of mid-Michigan). By the time the well-thumbed copy was passed to me (with the spine broken at the scene where Oliver-n-Jenny studied philosophy and Renaissance polyphony while intertwined on the couch…sigh), I could not wait to read it.

Major letdown. Not just the insipid, teen-romance writing—it was the sloppy thinking. Love means having to say you’re sorry pretty much daily. And wasn’t it cheating to kill off the main character rather than deal with the inevitable dreary stint in an ugly concrete apartment complex while the formerly flush Oliver IV paid off crushing law school debts?

My roommates thought I was a snob and a cynic. By the time Bridges of Madison County was the book du jour, and the talk of B lunch in the faculty lounge, I knew better than to publicly assert that even Clint Eastwood couldn’t save this turkey. I’m OK. You’re OK?  Not OK, as far as I was concerned. Nobody ever moved my cheese. And don’t get me started on Da Vinci Code. 

Here’s the thing: I actually like romance, mystery, pop psychology, and pulp fiction of all kinds. Maybe I am just Not Like Other People—the book-buying segment, anyway. I’ve developed a reflexive bias against best-sellers and books that are recommended by too many people. And so it was that I decided not to read Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell’s latest foray into looking at patterns and data that reveal unexpected things about our habits and beliefs.

I liked Gladwell’s Tipping Point, but didn’t see it as revelatory gospel. I read his piece in The New Yorker last December which started a mini-tsunami of blogs defending or refuting the idea that teachers were born, not made, so meticulously screening prospective teachers and educating them in pedagogy was a giant waste of resources. I thought he missed—totally—the point of all the research done on “with-it-ness,” the human qualities that make teachers effective. Suggesting that we hire almost anyone to teach, then let them sink or swim depending on their innate ability to give kids useful feedback, keep the good ones and boot the rest, didn’t sound like an outrageous, brain-stretching concept to me; it sounded all too much like what we actually do.

Last week, I found myself with a delayed flight, dead iPod and no reading material. I popped for a hardback copy of Outliers. And I liked it—I really, really liked it. And thought that the key ideas in the book have serious ramifications for lots of traditional schooling practices.

His data on the kids who make the top hockey teams was priceless (and vindication for parents who red-shirt their kindergartner, hoping to make him the biggest kid in the next class). As a musician, I totally get the concept of 10,000 hours of practice trumping identified talent; the most promising kids in the 6^th grade beginner band were routinely outstripped in the 8^th grade by kids who had a stronger desire to be a great players and lugged their horns home to practice every weekend. Gladwell's stories about regional differences and cultural-ethnic heritage are ideas embedded in stereotype—but also observable in data. That differences between spoken words for numbers between Asian and Western nations might impact the way children think about mathematical operations makes perfect sense.

And this:

"Because we so profoundly personalize success, we miss opportunities to lift others onto the top rung. We make rules that frustrate achievement. We prematurely write people off as failures. We are too much in awe of those who succeed and far too dismissive of those who fail. We overlook just how large a role we all play—and by “we,” I mean society—in determining who makes it and who doesn’t. We could easily take control of the machinery of achievement. But we don’t. And why? Because we cling to the idea that success is a simple function of individual merit and that the world in which we all grow up and the rules we choose to write as a society don’t matter at all."

Gladwell spends most of the book—using layers of evidence and data—proving that point, which has even more profound, even damning, implications for the things we take for granted in American education. All those tests we give to second graders, to figure out who is “gifted?” All the honors classes, the scholarships, the awards, the select choir and the rigorously winnowed travel teams? Not about talent or ability at all, even if we were able to truly measure talent and ability.

Recommended reading, especially for successful people who see their advantages as 100% deserved.

Merit Badge

 

Happy Fourth.

What truths seem self-evident to educators in the year 2009?  Are all teachers created equal?  Which of their rights are still unalienable? Life, certainly--but who gets to pursue happiness or feel liberated, these days? It's hard to follow your bliss when unemployed, and studying the indicators that currently constitute effective teaching is the antithesis of liberty.

There were fireworks over Jonathon Alter's June 15 Newsweek column in which he declares that the key to fixing education is figuring out who can teach and who can't (and asserts that teachers are born, not made). This good teacher/bad teacher schism should be glaringly obvious and embedded in policy creation, he says, but is currently obscured by educrats who "remain fiercely committed to the status quo."

OK. Raise your hand if you know anyone, anywhere in the land of free, who's fiercely committed to bad public schools. Right. There are educators fiercely committed to improving dreadful schools, of course. Some parents are appropriately loyal to the public schools where their children thrive--and some are determined to preserve a status quo that lets them send their children to exclusive schools with individual attention and rich curriculum, while other people's children get 5 hours of reading and math, plus test prep. I don't think that's the status quo Jonathon Alter is referring to, however.

There will never be equality in outcomes, but we can pursue--relentlessly--equity of opportunity for all American students. Part of that pursuit will be a continuous improvement strategy for the coalition of willing, effective teachers (who are made, and refined in experience, not born).

I'm not writing to shake another finger at Alter, however. I'm here to praise an earlier column, on a "misplaced faith in the meritocracy"--an interesting (and kind of schizophrenic) contrast to his natural-teacher argument. In the June 1 Newsweek, Alter writes warmly of his father, a member of the Greatest Generation--the men and women whose social, economic and workplace values were also refined in experience, often during wartime and while they were very young. He contrasts these solid citizens with the whiz kids who represent the meritocracy in the 21st century, who are:

...shaped not by war, but by college. To win the battle for admissions, fellowships and the other totems of success, they needed not bravery or proven leadership, but test-taking skills and a specific kind of cunning that's come to be confused with "merit." Obamaworld is loaded with these exact types...policy wonks who have experienced little in life but sound unfailingly articulate and confident about their elegant economic models. 

Obama's faith in data and in his ability to reach the "right" policy answer will not be enough for success. That's because every expert opinion is the product of the biases and backgrounds of the experts. He needs some people around him who, in LBJ's words, have "run for sheriff."

Absolutely. Perhaps someone who's been successful on genuine battlefields in education ought to step in, and point out that a true meritocracy in teaching is earned in trial by fire in real schools. And that putting whiz kids, armed with test-taking skills and academic cunning, into classrooms, assuming that their high SAT scores and elegant policy solutions will save the day, is not a viable long-term strategy for cutting out the rotten spots in the status quo. Perhaps we should be pairing whiz-kids newbie teachers with the teacher equivalent of the local sheriff. Maybe we should pair them with educators whose biases and backgrounds resemble the those of the students in non-meritorious communities.

Malcolm Gladwell, who seems to be developing a new peripheral career as an education spokesperson, in his keynote to the National Educational Computing Conference, reiterated his "effort trumps talent"  idea. Ten thousand of hours of practice makes perfect. You can't short-cut the development of a teaching career. Made, not born.

Image: Drexer Shift-Drifter, Flickr Creative Commons

Warped Soul of an Old Machine: The Technology of Tracking

 

Tracking is a technology. You can't plug it in, but--like 3-ring binders, twelve grade levels, and the agrarian calendar--tracking is an educational technology. A device dreamed up for the purpose of making schooling more "efficient."  A tool.

And just as a man with a hammer sees every problem as a nail, school technologies are often considered the "obvious" solution to every dilemma we face in schools. Many of these durable cogs in the vast education machine date back to the era when poor immigrants were flooding city schools at the same time the industrial age promoted a technical approach to everyday tasks. Everything from traffic management to measuring the intelligence of army recruits could be done better through science--and many of these efficiencies were translated into educational practice as the system expanded.

We seem to have a national compulsion to sort, identify, select, test, standardize, compare and compete in our schools. Intellectual growth, unfortunately, does not automatically thrive via classification or homogeny. Human learning is neither predictable nor controllable, and doesn't happen at a consistent rate. Students respond in different ways to varying content, disciplines and instructional models--not to mention different teachers and emotional states.  Lots of bad education policy has been created by people who assume that uniformity is a great virtue. And even more bad policy has been instituted by folks who believe that the way they learn best is the way all people learn, or should learn.

And so it is with tracking, the technological solution to the non-problem of having a roomful of learners who don't know precisely the same things.

Here's my worst experience with tracking, from the early 80s, when I was teaching one section of 7th grade math. The 7th graders were divided, using reliable assessment data from 6th grade state tests, into five tracks: Honors (which was Pre-Algebra), Advanced, High/Low Basic, and Special Education. I taught Low Basic. Every 10 weeks, we gave a common assessment (from the math text) and moved kids from track to track, based on their scores-- in theory, a system that would allow us to continuously fine-tune our stratified instruction, and use the "motivation" of quarterly opportunities to move up to higher tracks. Even though students were not studying the same topics at exactly the same time, the assumption was that since we were all following a sequenced curriculum, but differentiating the pace and amount of practice, kids who mastered something in September (or 6th grade) would still know it in January. That turned out to be not true.

After the first 10 weeks, 16 of my 30 students qualified to move up--two went all the way up to Honors--and I got 16 new kids who'd struck out in the higher tracks. With every 10-week shuffle, I got dispirited kids whose math egos had taken a beating, and had to convince them that they could indeed re-master ratios, probability, negative integers or whatever had stopped them in their tracks. Approximately a third of the kids got moved around every quarter. By the final quarter, I had only 6 of my original kids (one of whom confessed that he deliberately blew his quarterly move-up tests so he could stay with me).

It was hard on my Basic kids, who felt that they'd been written off, early in the game. But it was hardest on the kids who started out in Honors, then drifted downward all year, ending up in Basic. Tracking did much more than impact egos and the social system--it made a muddle of instruction. My Basic kids were constantly saying "I already learned this"--even when their tests indicated that they were clueless. In each of the four quarters, my group--scientifically selected for uniformity-- had superstars and laggards. And students continued to need different ways of learning critical content and skills.

There are a number of education critics who believe that differentiating learning in mixed-ability groups is not truly workable. I know that it is, because I've done it, for decades. You start building equity by demanding excellence from everyone, rather than trying to figure out who might not be "capable" of excellence, or how to stretch achievement data over a curve rather than pushing everyone as far and fast as possible. Everyone should get the good stuff--the most rigorous content, their teachers' confidence that high levels of learning are within reach for all. There are more insidious beliefs hidden by the practice of tracking. But let's not go there--because that would be giving the creaky obsolete technology of tracking more power and attention than it deserves.

Remembering: A Seniority Moment

It's natural for me to think of my dad on Memorial Day. He was a proud veteran of World War II, a tail gunner in the Army Air Corps, serving in the Pacific theatre for the duration of the war.  He enlisted early in 1942, at age 20, inspiring his younger brother, my Uncle Don, to lie about his age so he could get into combat, too. My dad made it home but Don did not--he was killed in action, in the first Marine landing on Iwo Jima, February 1945. He was nineteen years old.

I don't think my dad ever got over the terrible loss of his brother; the war was a powerful influence on his character and thinking. Most of the life lessons I learned from my dad sprang from perceptions born of his wartime experience: Have confidence--you're as good as anyone else. We live in the best country in the world. Tattoos are OK only if they're memorial crosses. Freedom is worth any cost. Buy American. And--the Palmer House (where he and his unit did their radio training) is the best hotel in Chicago.

When my dad came home, in 1945, he was diagnosed with "battle fatigue."  The discharging physician recommended a job that involved physical labor, independent work without constant supervision, and friendly colleagues. My dad got a job delivering bread. He became a Teamster, and was a loyal union member until he died, in 1980, of brain cancer. Another lesson from my father:  The union keeps us strong, and watches out for the little guy. When I joined the teachers' union, in 1975, nobody was more pleased than my dad.

According to my father, there are people with money and control, and there are people whose assets are loyalty and community. He did not go into battle, or survive having his plane shot down, for the benefit of the rich and powerful. He fought for the rights of ordinary Joes to make a good living for their families, to live in a country where their contributions were honored. The union was there to protect justice for the working man.

I thought about my dad when I read "Is Seniority Best Practice?" in the Stories from School blog. The blogger, Kim, shares her dismay over losing so many fine new teachers with budget cuts in WA, and asks "...with all of the pressure being put on teachers to meet professional standards through reflection and best practices, shouldn’t the teachers who are doing that have some advantage?"

I know what my dad would have said:  Seniority protects loyal workers, when their bosses can replace them with someone cheaper. And in a brutal economy, it's often difficult to determine whether employers are valuing quality practice or merely seeking the lowest price.

Still--in a profession critical to building human capacity, shouldn't exemplary practice be rewarded above all else? In teaching, there must be a balance between excellence and mere longevity. We owe that to our children, as much as we owe fair employment practices to workers.

John Adams  said: I was a warrior so my son could be a farmer--so his son could be a poet.  I would hate to think that my dad got up every morning at 4:00 a.m., lugging heavy bread racks when he was 58 years old, so that I could turn my back on fairness. But don't the blessings of liberty include the right to an affordable, high-quality education for everyone--the 21st century ticket to opportunity? Isn't that also a right worthy of sacrifice?

My father was also right about the Palmer House: it's magnificent.

Truth, Consequences and National Standards

Over at Flypaper, Mike Petrilli is all excited about the seminar Fordham sponsored today--especially the fact that at the conclusion of the program, a majority of people in the audience raised their hands when asked if they thought we would have a system of national standards in five years. This reminded me of Catholic grade-school stories my husband tells, wherein Father Flanagan visits the 3rd grade classroom to urge children to consider a life as a priest or nun. Who wants to become a priest? Raise your hands--keeping in mind that it's the highest possible goal you can have, kids. A quick look at the list of presenters and panelists will tell you that using this hand-raising thing as a poll would present some, um, sampling errors.

Not that I'm opposed to national standards, as long as they are structured as voluntary curriculum frameworks and benchmarks. Sequencing important content to keep students following the same general path is a good idea. But--let's look at the reasons Petrilli's turning cartwheels over the prospect:

There are innumerable reasons that national standards and tests would be better for the country than the fifty state patchwork we have today (numbers added by TIASL):

#1) greater comparability of schools across state lines

#2) the opportunity to aim much higher than most states do 

#3) the potential that it could create a national marketplace for instructional materials, professional development, and teacher preparation, and on and on.

#4) the leaders of the common standards initiative are interested in getting to common tests—and to use these standards and tests to drive instructional change at the classroom level.

So--notice anything missing in this list of reasons to endorse national standards? To whom do benefits, control and power flow in Petrilli's vision? Well--data analysts, commercial education publishers, test developers and those who would re-shape instruction and teacher preparation, or sell professional development. I don't see anything about direct advantages for students, especially those in challenging contexts. "Aiming higher" is something that can be done--and is done, every day--in individual schools and classrooms, driven by goal-oriented teachers and school leaders. And just how "high" is high enough to honor top-scoring states, while leaving no state behind? Speaking of "comparability."

Not that Petrilli is overly sanguine:

What’s the process for making decisions about what the common standards will entail? With the NGA and CCSSO leading an ad-hoc group of “partners” (including Achieve, ACT, and the College Board), it remains unclear who, at the end of the day, will make judgments about the scope of the standards themselves. If these folks think that they will find a way to avoid the math wars and the reading wars, or the content vs. 21st Century Skills debate, they are kidding themselves. I also fear that they don’t yet have a process in place that will successfully adjudicate these pressures and come out with a solid product.

I'm guessing that Petrilli could give them a short list of who should be "adjudicating" these thorny issues to develop a solid product that would please the NGA and CCSSO (politicians all) and Achieve, ACT and the College Board (developers and monitors of standardized tests).  I'm wondering: might they need any other partners or input, to make this expensive national initiative pay off for students and teachers?

Arne Duncan and Social Justice

So, I put the phrase "social justice" in the title of this blog for all the prickly folks who have their Google alerts set to snag any blogger with the temerity to write about equity and fairness in American education. I could come up with a dozen more interesting titles for this dispatch from D.C.--but the money quote in this blog is about social justice, a once-righteous phrase that has lately taken a licking and, one hopes, will come out ticking.

I have been in the capitol this week to attend the National Teacher of the Year gala and give the fabulous 2009 State Teachers of the Year a hand in developing their own virtual think tank (a project led by the Center for Teaching Quality, as a part of the Teacher Leaders Network). The 2009 TOYs were on a major high, having been recognized in the White House Rose Garden, and feted by various and sundry Big Names, including the President. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan was the kickoff speaker at their (very classy) recognition dinner. And he said some wonderful--perhaps surprising, and even reassuring--things.

The conventional wisdom on the Secretary has been that he's not moving a bold or innovative ed reform agenda so far. Or that he is, in Diane Ravitch's words, Margaret Spellings in drag--a man whose default strategy has been to keep from rocking the accountability boat. Depending in which "reform" crusade you march, you can see Duncan's first hundred days as annoyingly static or encouragingly stable. His big policy pronouncements--i.e., some kids need more time to raise achievement data--have been humdrum or recycled.  There doesn't seem to be a clear or stirring vision of what American schools could look like, or aspire to--only sporadic opinions on charters, the miraculous power of data, and irritating goal-post metaphors.

Probably because he was speaking to a crowd of education insiders and funders, plus fifty-odd extraordinary teachers from across the country, the Secretary's remarks were centered on good teaching as the solution to any number of problems. We've heard that before--in fact, it's become the centerpiece of education policy in both progressive and conservative camps. We all want good teachers--the political conflict begins when we try to define and measure effective teaching, describe the right candidates for the job, and figure out how to maintain consistency, excellence, and enthusiasm while paying them peanuts.

Duncan's remarks at the Teacher of the Year gathering began with some boilerplate along the lines of "I'm in a room full of amazing teachers"--then shifted to our most intractable problem, the ugly gap between our high-achieving children of advantage and those who drop out after facing daily failure. He said "this is the civil rights issue of our age" and "money does matter in education."  He spoke about our "window of opportunity" to turn this terrible situation around. I started to feel flickers of something I haven't felt in several months: hope.

Duncan went on to say that we needed a full-out campaign in teaching to "attract the best and brightest--and to retain the best and brightest for the next twenty-five years." It was the second half of the sentence that floored me. We haven't heard that lately--a recognition that keeping great talent in K-12 schools, long-term, is a worthy goal. In fact, Duncan used the words "retain" and "retention" six times in his speech. "We want to transform the teaching profession," the man said--and it was clear that he didn't mean a revolving door of de-skilled teachers or suggesting that experience is a drawback, rather than an asset.

"We have not served all communities equally," said the Secretary. "This is nothing less than a fight for social justice."

Well, I loved hearing that. The idea of democratic equality--liberty and justice for all-- once a cornerstone of our national commitment to a free public education, has been bruised and bloodied. The last time I put "social justice" in a blog title, I was visited by an enraged crank who posted threatening racist comments. I had to snip them because they were disgusting. The rising tide that lifts all boats, the inherent beauty of pluralistic community?--not so much, these days. We are trying so hard to be "efficient" that we've bypassed "all men are created equal" and have moved on to segregating our students for motivational test-prep assemblies. These assemblies may or may not raise test scores, but they are certainly a sign that our democratic values are royally screwed up.

To hear Arne Duncan call the quest for better public schools a fight for social justice was refreshing. Just a few lines, in a speech that exemplified preaching to the choir--but enough to re-generate a touch of optimism. Thanks, Secretary Duncan.