The Tempered Radical

Election 2008: A Lesson on Media Bias

One of the best parts of the new school year is that my principal hired me for an extra month to drive a vision for 21st Century learning in our building's classrooms.   

On Thursday, I taught an after school session on the role that Pageflakes---an RSS Feed Reader---can play in the classroom.  "Showing students how to manage information," I argued, "Is probably the most important 21st Century skill to teach to our kids because learning in the 21st Century is going to require efficiency."

After the session, several teachers came up and asked me to create a set of feeds on the upcoming Presidential election here in the United States---which is the perfect topic for introducing RSS to students, simply because there are thousands of sites being updated regularly on the election.

As I assembled my collection of feeds---which you can explore here---I grouped them into categories.

The "flakes" on the left hand side of the screen come from traditional news sources like Fox News, CNN, ABC and the BBC.  The "flakes" in the center of the screen come from the kinds of sites that will motivate middle schoolers.  There are (or will be when I'm finished with this column) feeds to election videos, podcasts, MTV election news and Rock the Vote. 

And the flakes on the right hand side of the screen come from political bloggers.  There are teen and student bloggers from sites like Vogue, Rock the Vote and Seventeen magazine, as well as adult bloggers from Fox and CNN.

Then, I decided that one of the most important lessons that students can learn in today's digital news marketplace is that there is often downright overt hidden bias in reporting.  Learning to judge the validity of online sources couldn't be any more important to promoting democracy, right? 

So I put together a handout designed to introduce students to the idea that news sources may just be trying to influence readers to lean in one political direction or another.  You can download it here:

Download Handout_Election_2008.doc   

What I figure I'll have students do is pick an article from two or three different news sources that cover the same event or topic---candidate performance in a debate, candidate position towards the war in Iraq or the current fiscal crisis, candidate gaffes or public miscues, McCain's age or Obama's inexperience---and evaluate the ways that each news source covers the topic. 

By doing so, students will learn to identify the kinds of strategies that authors use to influence readers.  They'll also recognize that not all news sources are as fair and balanced as they claim to be!  Finally, they can learn the difference between reporting done by professionals working for traditional news outlets and "reporting" done by bloggers---an increasingly important source of information for today's citizen.

Whaddya' think? 

I know that some people are going to be disappointed, but this lesson didn't require a single dollar worth of additional technology investment for my classroom at all.  Instead, it uses a free application and an internet connection to teach the kinds of skills that I believe are important to preparing kids for the future.

Does this sound like a worthy example of 21st Century learning? 

(Image retrieved from http://cunyjschool.pbwiki.com/f/Election_2008-400x300.jpg on Saturday, September 27, 2008)

The Wrongheaded Quest for Cheap and Easy. . .

If you haven't had the chance to check out the comment section of my recent post on Barack Obama's thoughts regarding education and technology, then you're missing out on a pretty interesting conversation about accountability in education between two regular radical readers---Mike and K. Borden.

K.'s pushing the idea that educators should take ownership over their profession and design alternative methods for evaluating performance that can be used to supplement standardized tests.  She (he?) wrote: 

We agree that the standardized tests alone (without other measures) are inadequate to fully measure teacher or student performance.

The rub is, what other measures? This is where I as a parent look to you the teaching community to offer answers. I want to learn and hopefully be able to advocate with you for acceptable, reliable accountability. I want to know that you as a community of teachers recognize some in your profession are failing and some are blazing trails we all may be wise to follow.

I'll jump in this conversation, K, and I'll lay out a vision for holding teachers accountable that might blow your mind----but before I do, I want to give you three non-negotiables that are required from the general public before holding teachers "accountable for results" is even possible:

1.  You've got to delineate and prioritize your expected outcomes:  This is probably the source of greatest frustration---and resistance---for teachers involved in conversations about accountability because it is impossible to deny that communities are asking schools to tackle more tasks than it is possible to achieve. 

Once a community can clearly define exactly what it is that they most want their children to learn in schools, we can start to have meaningful conversations about how to measure mastery of those skills and delineate between successful and unsuccessful educators. 

2.  You've got to make a commitment to providing necessary resources to meet expected outcomes:  One of my favorite quotes about accountability comes from Richard Elmore, who is responsible for the term reciprocal accountability.  Elmore writes:

Accountability must be a reciprocal process. For every increment of performance I demand from you, I have an equal responsibility to provide you with the capacity to meet that expectation. Likewise, for every investment you make in my skill and knowledge, I have a reciprocal responsibility to demonstrate some new increment in performance. This is the principle of "reciprocity of accountability for capacity." It is the glue that, in the final analysis, will hold accountability systems together (Elmore, 2000).

I'm not certain that most communities can honestly say that they are providing enough capacity to meet the litany of expectations that they have set for schools.  New demands and expectations are placed on schools---and teachers, in particular----without any additional time or training to meet those expectations. 

Here's a simple example from my classroom:  In our data driven world, I'm expected to collect and manipulate numbers about student performance in order to make informed decisions.  This is a completely reasonable expectation---and one that can help to document the "bang for the buck" that taxpayers get from my services.

But my school and system struggle to find the funds to provide me with the kinds of ongoing, job embedded professional development that it takes to develop the skills necessary to manage data effectively.  What's more, they struggle to find the funds to provide me with the tools that data managers in other industries take for granted. 

So I collect "data" on post-it notes, move those results to my paper and pencil grade book and then try to identify trends in my 85-student class load with a yellow highlighter.  The entire process is frustratingly inefficient---taking away time that I should be spending on planning and providing students with meaningful feedback----and would simply not be tolerated in the business world.   

"For every increment of performance I demand from you, I have an equal responsibility to provide you with the capacity to meet that expectation," is a powerful idea that communities need to embrace before most teachers will embrace accountability.

3.  You've got to differentiate compensation for teachers in high needs schools no matter what:  The biggest failure that our society currently makes is rewarding teachers equally regardless of the kinds of schools they choose to work in.  As a result, students in high needs communities are consistently exposed to higher numbers of inexperienced or ineffective teachers----and we do nothing to make work in high needs buildings more attractive.

That should be a source of great shame for everyone---from policy makers to taxpayers.  We're knowingly putting students who need the most help in buildings where that help is unlikely to ever arrive. 

Crazy. 

Once communities narrow and prioritize their expectations for schools and commit themselves to providing the capacity to meet new expectations, I'd propose that all teachers be held accountable for working through yearly cycles of action research conducted at the classroom level, documenting the impact of their instructional decisions on the learning gains of their students. 

Here's how it could look:  At the beginning of each school year, teachers---with the guidance of school leaders---should set specific areas of instructional focus for the upcoming year based on learning data available at the school level.

Over the course of the school year, teachers should be expected to research instructional practices that have been effective at addressing identified weaknesses, implement those strategies in their classrooms, and document the results of their instruction.  Next, they should be expected to revise their instructional practices and work through a second cycle of implementation and documentation.

At the end of each year, teachers should be expected to present their findings to a school/community based committee.  While the findings may not always show that a teacher has identified instructional practices that are worth continued exploration---remember that failures are an accepted result of attempts at innovation in other professions----he/she must be able to show that they've made responsible decisions based on an awareness of the impact that their actions were having on the students of their classrooms. 

And here's the good part, K:  After collectively reviewing the work of an individual teacher, the school/community based committee of parents, policymakers and education professionals can make recommendations about a teacher's continued employment and compensation.

Yup---I said it:  Let's get rid of tenure and put teachers on terminating contracts that are open to review by members of the communities that they serve every few years. 

That's gotta make teachers cringe, huh?! 

But when I think about my own efforts at reflection, I'm pretty confident that I could convince a review committee that I was worth keeping on board.  While my instructional practices don't always hit pay dirt, I'm at least constantly looking for ways to improve----and I think that kind of persistence is valued and respected by most families in the neighborhood that I serve. 

I'm also certain that tenure is a permanent scar on our profession.  No one takes us seriously because EVERYONE has a story about some miserable old bat that had been teaching for too long yet was making serious cabbage.  Worse yet, the kind of job security teachers have is non-existent in other professions. 

Mike's going to hate this, but what makes us any different from any other "profession" where people have to prove their worth to keep their gig? 

For you, K., this system gives community members control over teacher quality---and an inside look into the kind of work that the teachers in your schools are doing.  Transparency would be absolute---and the standards of judgment would be completely in the hands of the people footing the bill. 

Here's why my ideas will never fly, though:  This whole process is going to cost a helluva lot more than running a bunch of bubble sheets through a scantron machine.  School boards and state elected officials---the folks that would be responsible for driving this kind of change---are constantly counting every nickel and dime in an effort to keep tax bills down. 

It's about re-election, right?

It's also going to take a whole ton of time!  I seriously doubt that most schools could find enough interested community members to be involved in the evaluation and review process.  While people like to complain about not having input in public schools, who's got the time to sit in on dozens of teacher review meetings each year? 

So trying to sell a program of evaluation that carries inherent rewards for the community----the ability to have direct input in the kind of teachers who remain employed in their schools---and for teachers---the ability to be evaluated based on their own professional actions and decisions---will probably never happen because it ain't cheap and easy!

Does anyone see anything in my pipe-dreams that is worth embracing, though? 

Are there starting points that we might be able to agree on?

(Image credit:  IMGP2933ac43x.jpg by Bosela, licensed Creative Commons Attribution)

Education, Technology and Obama's Imagination. . .

So in the interest of full disclosure, I should probably start by saying that I'm a bit of a left-leaner when it comes to politics. 

Working in classrooms for over a decade gives you a real sense for the disparity between the haves and have-nots in our country---and you tend to want to find ways to stick up for the little guy. In that sense, I've been Obama-fied over the last year.

His recent comments on technology in education---spotlighted in this eSchool News article---have left me nothing short of gobsmacked, though!  Here's the entire quote:

"Imagine a future where our children are more motivated because they aren't just learning on blackboards, but on new whiteboards with digital touch screens; where every student in a classroom has a laptop at [his or her] desk; where [students] don't just do book reports but design PowerPoint presentations; where they don't just write papers, but they build web sites; where research isn't done just by taking a book out of the library, but by eMailing experts in the field; and where teachers are less a source of knowledge than a coach for how best to use it and obtain knowledge. By fostering innovation, we can help make sure every school in America is a school of the future.

"And that's what we're going to do when I'm president. We will help schools integrate technology into their curriculum, so we can make sure public school students are fluent in the digital language of the 21st-century economy. We'll teach our students not only math and science, but teamwork and critical thinking and communication skills, because that's how we'll make sure they're prepared for today's workplace."

Let's tackle a few bits of Obama's imagination one at a time:

"Imagine a future where our children are more motivated because they aren't just learning on blackboards, but on new whiteboards with digital touch screens; where every student in a classroom has a laptop at [his or her] desk;

This one almost cost Obama my vote in and of itself!  You see, he's making the same mistake that nearly every decision-maker in the past ten years has made when talking about educational technology:  He's believing that nifty tools are needed to increase student motivation.

I used to be a nifty-tools guy, too.  Ask my friend Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach.  I'd drive her crazy with my commitment to gadgets. 

Then I started paying pretty careful attention to the kinds of work being done in the loaded classroom (think cheese fries), and what I found was shocking:  Rooms kitted out with thousands and thousands of dollars of technology are often no different than the nun-and-ruler-driven classrooms of old.  Dropping technology into a classroom rarely changes instruction in meaningful ways.   

Whiteboards are easily the best example because those digital touch screens that Obama is dreaming of are rarely even touched by students in most loaded classrooms!  Instead, they become a new-and-improved way for teachers to do what they've always done:  Drone from the board in a one-way broadcast model of classroom instruction. 

Are we really reforming education by introducing teachers to electronic chalk?

The Senator drove the knife even deeper with this one:

where [students] don't just do book reports but design PowerPoint presentations; where they don't just write papers, but they build web sites; where research isn't done just by taking a book out of the library, but by eMailing experts in the field;

Tell me that we aren't really going to argue that PowerPoint and email are innovations? 

That's got to be a joke, right?

Ask any kid today what they think of PowerPoint and they'll tell you they're completely fed up with it.  Again, does it really change instruction---or is it just another fancy tool for teachers to deliver notes to kids?  Maybe it's a nice replacement for color Vis a Vis overhead projector pens, but it ain't much beyond that!

And Barack----you've got kids, right? 

Do they email anyone? 

Chances are they don't! 

Today's generation instant messages and texts.  They Skype and video-chat.  Synchronous communication defines the work that they do with peers away from school.  Why should we believe they're actually going to sit and wait for days for a reply from an expert when they're used to getting answers NOW?  Email might feel good to most of us---at least everyone outside of Senator McCain---but it's nearly pointless to our students.

Now, Obama gets a bit closer to the kinds of conversations we should be having when he wrote:

and where teachers are less a source of knowledge than a coach for how best to use it and obtain knowledge. By fostering innovation, we can help make sure every school in America is a school of the future...

We'll teach our students not only math and science, but teamwork and critical thinking and communication skills, because that's how we'll make sure they're prepared for today's workplace."

We really do need to foster innovation in our classrooms and to redefine teachers as knowledge coaches.  After all, the majority of today's students have figured out that school actually hinders their ability to learn.  With a couple of mouse clicks, they can stumble upon information for any topic that they're interested in mastering---and chances are, that content will be far more varied and aligned with different learning styles than what they get in most classrooms.

Showing students how to access and manage this information is nothing short of an essential first step towards developing the oft-cliched "life-long learners" that we profess constant commitment to. 

Teamwork, critical thinking and communication are EXACTLY the kinds of skills that we need to emphasize in order to prepare children for the workplaces of tomorrow.  Read Daniel Pink's Whole New Mind someday.  He makes a pretty good case for the fact that we live in a world where design and innovation are becoming the "new normal." 

The functionality epitomized by the right-brained generation of the '70s and '80s is a basic expectation today...businesses need creativity to excel, and the most successful workers in this new economy will be those who can cross boundaries between topics----making connections and innovations that join seemingly diverse fields.

But my question, Senator Obama, is simple:  How can you honestly expect this kind of creative thinking to define classrooms when the sole indicators of success are multiple choice tests in reading and mathematics?

I've written pretty extensively about what standardized tests have done to my classroom.  Every year, team work, critical thinking and communication are pushed out of my lessons---replaced by multiple choice quizzes and questions that are designed to prepare my kids for the end of grade exams. 

If you're serious about making the kinds of skills that you describe as essential for preparing kids for tomorrow's workplace an important part of today's classrooms, you'd better start talking about ditching accountability systems that place no emphasis on anything other than Scantron bubble sheets when measuring "results," because instruction will never change until you do.

As unfortunate as it may seem, what's tested is definitely what's taught.

Now, maybe I'm being a bit unfair here---after all, I'm drawing conclusions about Senator Obama's entire educational platform from a two-paragraph quote in an article I stumbled across in my feed reader the other day.  I'm also smart enough to recognize that the president, Congress and the Department of Education have far less control over school decisions than policy makers at the state level.

I just cringe every time I see someone as influential as a presidential candidate "imagining a future" where email, PowerPoints and whiteboards are the keys to redefining education.

Redefining education begins by asking ourselves a simple question that my buddy Adam Garry asks his clients all the time:  What do we want to see students doing in our classrooms?  Are creation, communication and collaboration the keys to tomorrow's kingdom?  What sorts of instructional practices support the development and mastery of these skills and behaviors?

Are today's schools effective at developing new learners?  Why? 

Once we have the answers to these kinds of questions, we can begin to choose digital tools responsibly---rather than throwing any more money on misdirected tools like whiteboards and student responders! 

Brainpop and the Overloaded Curriculum. . .

I was poking through my feed reader today and came across a Larry Ferlazzo conversation on In Practice about the merits of Brainpop---a service that provides short, animated cartoons on a range of curricular topics that target middle grades students. 

Responding to a Gary Stager post criticizing Brainpop as a "shallow easily pitched curriculum product," centered around simplistic cartoons that result in understanding that is "unlikely or purely accidental," Ferlazzo points out that Brainpop videos are nothing more than a tool for extending other learning experiences developed by teachers:

The key to teaching, and learning, in my view is what you do with students prior to and after their reading or watching the material. Sticking a student in front of an individual computer without combining that action with activities that access prior knowledge, without including small group collaborative learning, or without adding other engaging questions to provoke higher-order thinking skills is just taking the “easy way out.”

While I'd love to wrestle with what responsible instruction with a tool like Brainpop actually looks like, I thought that the most interesting nugget in this conversation came when Stager wrote:

My viewing of BrainPop cartoons suggests that too many topics are addressed in too little time, with complex issues, stories or concepts reduced to the most trivial level of education - vocabulary development.

Well, welcome to my world, Gary.

Brainpop cartoons aren't the only place that too many topics are addressed in too little time.  You're describing my curriculum---and it is a curriculum that I'm held accountable for teaching to twelve-year olds each year! 

Take sixth grade science, for example.  My curriculum requires that students learn about folding, faulting, deposition, crustal plate movement, volcano patterns, and earthquake patterns.  They must also learn about the rock cycle, the carbon cycle, the water cycle and the nitrogen cycle.  We study the properties of soil, including

• Color.
• Horizon profile.
• Infiltration.
• Soil temperature.
• Structure.
• Consistency.
• Texture.
• Particle size.
• pH.
• Fertility.
• Soil moisture

Then, we look at how humans can use vegetative cover, responsible agriculture and land use, nutrient balance and "soil as a vector" (whatever that is!) to control the impact that their activities have on the pedosphere.

And that covers the content in just one of SEVEN objectives!

Now, I know all about the lip-service that we pay to "identifying essential outcomes" and "eliminating non-essential outcomes" from the curriculum.  Heck, people like Bob Marzano and Rick Stiggins have been writing about the excessive number of benchmarks defined by state curriculum guides for years now

Few people working in today's classrooms really believe that we can get through our entire standard course of study in one year.

But teachers often feel incredibly torn when they are forced to leave required outcomes out of their plans.  There is almost constant fear that we might be called on the carpet by our administrators for knowingly "skipping" content in our curriculum.  No one in a position of authority has ever given me stated permission to hack away at the instructional objectives defined in my standards.

What's more, we rarely know which content will remain untested---and in today's world, the pressure to perform makes leaving topics out a risky proposition at best.  We are, after all, a "data-driven" profession, aren't we?  Numbers matter---and poor coverage can lead to poor numbers.

So---whether we'll admit it or not----most teachers do a lot of "teaching by mentioning it"----and services like Brainpop look good to us because we can knock several benchmarks out in short periods of time without massive amounts of preparation and planning.

Am I proud of the fact that I'll teach students about the Roman Empire this year in about 40 minutes by working through three or four Brainpop videos?

Nope. 

But until decision-makers wake up and pare down the curriculum, working with an awareness of the amount of time that we have available for instruction and placing emphasis on more meaningful outcomes for teaching and learning, I haven't got a lot of options. 

I've just got 7,000 standards---and a heaping cheeseload of vocabulary---to teach!

(Image Credit:  Pressure by Casey Serin, licensed Creative Commons:  Attribution)

Scrapping the Sacrosanct Salary Schedule. . .

That's the title of a relatively interesting article written by Jacob Vigdor, an associate professor of policy studies and economics at Duke University that was recently run in Education Next---the journal of the Hoover Institution. 

Arguing that the current salary schedule in education is flawed because it rewards teachers for credentials that are not tied to increased performance and because it drives new teachers---who struggle for years to reach peak earning potential---away from the profession, Vigdor makes a few points that I think are legitimate. 

First and foremost, Vigdor's assertion that additional degrees don't necessarily translate into increased performance is one that I wholeheartedly embrace.  When blanket rewards are given for life to teachers who work through master's or doctoral studies, taxpayer dollars are wasted---and that's coming from a guy who earns a 10% stipend on his salary each year for a master's degree! 

How could I argue against rewarding teachers for advanced degrees?

Easy---the information that I learned in my "Advanced Teaching" program from 1992-1997 is hardly advanced today!  Not only have children changed, requiring me to constantly tailor my instructional practices, the tools for teaching have changed (I didn't have Internet access in my first three classrooms, people---and I'm not that old!), and the outcomes of education have changed.  In the early '90s, there were still industry jobs and assembly lines for struggling students to fall back on.

That translates into a rather astonishing admission:  My master's degree means little to me today, and yet I'll be rewarded for it for the next fifteen years that I spend in a classroom. 

As a teacher, I'm thankful---I couldn't remain in the classroom without that 10% supplement to my already low compared to my peers in other professions salary.  As a professional, I'm ashamed because I know that I'm being rewarded for something that has little impact on my teaching today.

As a taxpayer, I'm just plain peeved!

I also like Vigdor's desire to front-load teacher salaries and completely agree that teachers reach their peak performance within the first 5-10 years of their careers.  To rapidly increase salaries early in a career will definitely help with recruiting and retaining teachers, simply because their compensation will finally reflect their growth in performance and put them on equal footing with peers---both in the schoolhouse and beyond.

I can't tell you how discouraging the last 10 years have been for me professionally because I've invested my whole self into improving as a practitioner, and yet I've watched my salary creep up by two or three hundred dollars a year----while teachers that who had been working in classrooms since I was born were racking in several thousand dollars more than me each year simply because they were older than I was. 

Maddening.  Made me want to quit more than once.  (Still makes me want to quit, actually!)

But Vigdor's plans---like nearly every other proposal that I've ever read to change teacher compensation---have a handful of very obvious flaws.  First and foremost, Vigdor bases all increases in compensation on increased scores on standardized tests.  Consider this quote:

So now we have some basic principles on which to build a better model: Reward characteristics associated with greater effectiveness; do not reward those that have no evidence linking them to effectiveness. To launch the system, all we need to do is pin down the increment of compensation for a given increase in effectiveness. There are several ways to do this, but let’s consider just one. Suppose that we reward a characteristic associated with an improvement in test scores of 1 percent of a standard deviation with a 1 percent increase in salary.

Wow, Jacob---you make it sound so easy!

There are dozens of problems with tying teacher compensation to standardized test results.  I've written about them time and again.  On a philosophical level, they include a narrowing of the curriculum that produces misleading results and a constant drift away from the kinds of teaching that students most need in order to succeed in an increasingly complex world driven by knowledge creation.

On a practical level, what are we going to do about the 60-80% of teachers in any school who don't teach a tested subject?----or to school professionals beyond the classroom like guidance counselors and media specialists?  The way I facetiously see it, there are two options: 

1. Develop more tests for more subjects to be given to more kids over the course of more years in their school careers----which will wipe out any savings that states and districts might find in your proposal, as well as the joy out of life for 5 year olds who will be drilled and killed from day one.
2. Only give pay raises to teachers of tested subjects.  Heck, let's get rid of any subject in a school that we can't test.

(It's kind of frightening to consider where thinking like Jake's can land us, isn't it?  Gotta love economists.  The only thing that matters are numbers to those guys.)

My second beef with Vigdor's plans is the swipe that he takes at National Board Certification as a semi-useless tool for identifying accomplished teachers and a waste of cash.  He writes:

To a large extent, the jury is still out on the importance of NBPTS certification. Studies have shown that teachers nominated for this certification have a legacy of superior classroom performance, but there is less evidence that the process of certification actually improves their performance.

I guess it is only natural for me to support National Board certification---after all, I earned certification in 1997 (my third year of teaching) and have been collecting a 12% salary stipend from the state of North Carolina ever since.

But I also support National Board certification as a taxpayer, too. 

You see, teachers who work through the certification process are forced to spend a year reflecting on their practice.  They document the impact of their instruction on students, videotape their lessons, and articulate the connections between the choices that they make and the children that they teach.

Oh yeah, they also take a big ol' exam to gauge their mastery of the content that they teach AND their certificate expires after 10 years, at which time they must document the impact of their work on student achievement in their schools, districts and states over the course of their entire license cycle in order to earn recertification. 

I call that a fail-safe system, protecting the investment that a state is willing to make into a teacher who works through certification. 

Not only is the process rigorous (my initial portfolio was nearly 400 pages long and took me about 300 hours to create), it is ongoing.  Unlike my master's degree---which I set aside as soon as I was finished with my last blue book, I'm constantly looking for ways to improve as a teacher because I know that I need to in order to recertify!

Like many critics of the current pay scale, Jake seems to suggest that revising teacher compensation is something that is completely opposed by educators and their unions. 

In some ways, I agree with him:  Unions fought hard to get our profession to the point where teachers can make a living wage.  For the first 70 years of the century, taxpayers were only too happy to short-change those who chose to work in a profession dominated by women---and letting go of what was once a major success is never easy to do.

But our profession is changing with the times.  As more young professionals enter our unions, they push for change to a system of compensation built for long-term stability in a time when long-term stability is somewhat foreign to most workers.  Conversations are being had at all levels of every teacher organization about "scrapping the salary schedule."

What we'll never go for, though, are proposals that fail to take into account consequences for the curriculum when standardized testing is placed at the center of efforts to evaluate teachers---and it's important to know that our opposition doesn't stem from a fear of being held accountable for results.

Instead, it stems an intimate understanding of what such systems will do to the children who sit in our classrooms. 

Whew----glad I got that off my chest!

(Image Credit:  Quiet Please by Taliesin, licensed Creative Commons:  Attribution)

Holding Teachers Accountable Ain't That Easy. . .

My boy Bob---who reads the Radical regularly and pushes me with provocative comments---has me thinking about teacher accountability this week.  In response to a recent post about the characteristics of inspirational teachers, he wrote:

I, too, hold similar thoughts, but find mixed results to the following Q: How do you see these ideas translating into student learning rates, the teacher's central duty?

And then in response to my thoughts on preservice educators, he wrote:

As for teacher prep, make it clear that individuals learn, not aggregates. Require student teachers to demonstrate that they can increase measured individual student learning rates before signing off on teaching certificates. Yes? :)

Now, few would mistake me as an apologist for teachers who push back at efforts to hold educators accountable for results.  In fact, I tend to rub colleagues the wrong way more often than not simply because I've grown tired of our resistance to accountability.  It's almost embarrassing to me to hear teachers complain about not earning "professional respect," yet refuse to take responsibility for producing gains in student learning. 

But Bob's comments leave me worried because they illustrate one of the most harmful over-simplifications in education.  The idea that teachers should be held accountable for increasing "measured individual student learning rates" seems obvious, right? 

But it ain't ever that easy.  Here's why:

1.  The term "student learning rates" is poorly defined:  Ask ten parents what kinds of outcomes they most value from schools and you're likely to get ten different answers.

Some will care most about academic achievement measured by standardized tests.  Others will care more about seeing their students learn life skills like how to collaborate.  Society expects schools to prepare students to participate in our democracy.  Public health organizations want us to address challenges ranging from childhood obesity to teenage pregnancy.   

In the end, we need a clear definition of the "student learning rates" that people expect us to increase before we can make any guarantees to anyone----and because of the range of interests that people have in public schools, I'm afraid we'll never get clarity on the outcomes that should be valued the most. 

2.  Defined curricula border on the ridiculous:  Most would agree that teachers should be held accountable for student mastery of their state-defined curriculum, right?  How can we have confusion about what to hold teachers accountable for when there are sets of standards that students are supposed to master in every grade level and content area?

The answer is simple:  State-defined curricula contain far more content than it's actually possible to teach.  Researcher Bob Marzano---in his 2003 book What Works in Schools---determined that the average curriculum for a K-12 student contained nearly 200 standards, which would take nearly 15,000 hours over the course of a child's school career to adequately address. 

The problem:  During the typical 180-day school year, there is an average of about 1,008 hours available for instruction---of which, 69% is actually used for instruction (fire drills and discipline takes time too, you know)----leaving about 9,000 hours of time for student learning between kindergarten and college.  Is it really fair to hold teachers accountable for student mastery of a curriculum that simply won't fit into the teaching hours that we have available to us?   

3.  Testing results in a narrowing of the curriculum and score inflation:  For many, "increasing measured student learning rates" translates to higher scores on standardized tests because standardized test results carry great currency in conversations about education right now. 

They just seem so trustworthy and scientific!

The hitch is this:  Standardized tests only measure student mastery of a small range of skills within a curriculum.  With a little bit of mathematical magic, extrapolations are made and conclusions are drawn about a student's mastery of the entire curriculum based on his or her answers on end of grade exams.

In theory, this should work just fine.  Demonstrated mastery of the subset of skills tested on standardized exams should allow for reliable conclusions about student understanding of the entire curriculum.

In reality, though, it doesn't.  As Daniel Koretz of Harvard University recently showed in his new book Measuring Up, teachers, schools and districts----withering under the pressure to produce results on exams----focus their instruction solely on the skills that they expect to see on standardized tests.

This narrowing of the curriculum produces score inflation.  While results suggest that students have mastered the content for their grade level or content area, they have really only mastered the small set of skills that end-of-grade exams actually test.  Parents and policymakers end up with a false sense of what their kids actually know.

I'm ready for accountability to be introduced to education, primarily because I want the opportunity to be rewarded differently based on my abilities as an educator.  The single-salary schedule has frustrated me since day one because it ensures that my compensation will remain the same regardless of how hard I work to improve my practice. 

But real barriers must be addressed before teachers can be fairly held accountable for "student learning."  We deserve clear definitions of the kinds of learning that communities value the most.  We also deserve to have a manageable curriculum that can be adequately taught in the time that we have available.  Finally, we deserve more complex measures of "achievement" than we currently have. 

Does this make sense to anyone besides me?

(Image credit:  Why Not by Kevin Collins, licensed Creative Commons:  Attribution)