Is it time to get off the bus? Will the plane remain in flight?

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As we prepare for the Common Core, new assessments, and new evaluation systems, I often wonder are we going about this the wrong way. The more I hear people describe our current status prior to the implementation of all of these changes, the more I begin to hope we are not making the wrong choices.

There are two analogies related to all of these changes that I have heard that make me laugh and cringe at the same time.  The first analogy relates our preparation for new testing to the movie, Speed.  You know the scene where there is a bomb on the bus and they send a second bus next to it to transport the people off.  The analogy that someone made in my district is that we are on the first bus circling around waiting to transported to safety. We can’t get off yet because we still have our current testing.  While we are circling, the other bus is analogous to the preparation waiting for that moment when the first bus unloads and the new tests begin.  Hopefully, there are no casualties like the movie.  Hopefully, we all get transported safely off the old testing bus onto the new Common Core based assessment one.  

The second analogy relates the new teacher evaluation system to building a plane in flight.  As I write this, teachers are piloting teacher evaluation systems that will go into effect next year.  In many cases, several components of these systems need more than a year of piloting.  We should not be rating a teacher’s success with a system that still needs to be tweaked or changed as we go.  For example, how can you expect teachers to be evaluated on a system that uses the Danielson Framework when they have not been properly trained on how it defines good teaching?  In our district, teachers are writing student learning objectives to evaluate student growth.  The pilot teachers are testing out these SLOs this year, but there is no guarantee that these are actually effective tools for evaluating student growth and teacher success.  

My question is “Why rush?”.  If we are to keep to the promise that the Common Core and the new evaluation systems are going to create stronger students and more effective teachers, then we should be taking our steps carefully to make sure that these changes are lasting and meaningful rather than just another phase in the swing of the education pendulum.  

Common-Core Math and End-of-Year Testing

Our little rural junior high math teachers are so excited about the common core.

And who wouldn’t be? The common core is about thinking, about real problem solving, not just memorizing formulas (although that’s part of the equation, pardon the pun).

But here’s the kicker:

Even though our whole state has adopted the common core (along with many other states in the country), the end-of-year high-stakes AYP exams do not test what is learned in the common core.

They test what was covered in the old curriculum.

It was hard enough to stretch toward the hypothetical but unreachable 100% test scores projected for 2012. All of us teachers know that a great deal depends on these tests.

So now let’s up the ante: teach other stuff than what is going to be tested.

What’s the rationale for this? Scott, one of our great teachers, tells me that it’s because common-core creators feel that they cannot produce a viable test within the year. Yet here are these teachers rising to the occasion, teaching a difficult and brand-new curriculum with grace and skill. Certainly, even with testing the tests, a cadre of professionals can put together a viable test.

Ah, public education. You never stop being surprised.

Teaching to the Test

Earlier this month Education Week published an article written by Kelly Gallagher titled, “Why I Will Not Teach to the Test.” The primary idea of the article is that there are too many standards to address in-depth, so the result of teaching to standardized tests is a very shallow knowledge of content.  If we want kids to really learn what the standards call for them to learn, then we need to reduce the number of standards and give them the time they deserve.

One such standard from 10th grade California history is, “Relate the moral and ethical principles in ancient Greek and Roman philosophy, in Judaism, and in Christianity to the development of Western political thought.”  Gallagher asks how long it would reasonably take a 10th grader to really learn and understand this content.  The standard itself is a worthy goal, but how many standards like this one can a teacher reasonably cover well in a year?  By well I mean that the student can do more than parrot back an answer, they can fully explain, provide specific examples, and make their own connections to the content.

Sure, a teacher could have kids read a text that told summarized the ideas and told them the answer, but is memorization learning?  I memorized a lot of things as a student that still have no meaning to me.  There is a huge difference between knowing the facts about the events leading up to the American Revolution and understanding how we moved from some grumbling after the Proclamation of 1763 to organized rebellion after the Townshend Acts prompted colonists to send delegates to the First Continental Congress, resulting in the decision to maintain local militias and arms, leading to the British attacks on Lexington and Concord.

Neither does knowing the parts of speech or the parts of an essay mean that a child can write well, yet assessment of students continues to center on what can be measured on a multiple choice test, namely the trivia of the discipline.

To illustrate the madness of where we’ve gone as a nation with testing and standards, I’d like to share a story about a friend of mine who teaches in Virginia.  This woman is a truly gifted literacy teacher.  During her time at our school, she turned out kids who were proficient, avid readers and writers.  Since our focus is not on the tests but on teaching content deeply, she was able to do this at our school.  Now that she’s in a more traditional setting in another state, she finds herself handicapped.  When her principal saw her teaching writing to her elementary class, he called her in and told her to stop because it wasn’t in the standards for her grade.

The idea is insane, but it is happening all over our nation in the name of high expectations.  Our kids may end up able to play a mean game of Trivial Pursuit, but when they actually have to think and apply what they’ve learned, how will they fare? 

Test Scores and Teacher Suicide

By now, you have no doubt heard of the Los Angeles fifth-grade teacher who received a low ranking in a published evaluation because his inner-city kids didn’t make AYP–didn’t pass the tests.

Here was a teacher who helped save the lives of some of the most at-risk kids in the nation. ”He took the worst students and tried to change their lives,” said Ismael Delgado, a 20-year-old former student. “I had friends who wanted to be gangsters, but he talked them out of it. He treated you like family.”

As in many areas where kids are highly at risk, it’s not particularly easy to make AYP, especially as the scores must rise every year.”Test scores are directly related to the socio-economic status of the student population,” said Taylor. “The best teachers are given the toughest kids. This man had won many awards.”

Ruelas worked tirelessly to help kids avoid the gang life so prevalent in the area, and he also helped many kids toward college.  One community member wrote: “He often stayed after school to tutor struggling kids and offer counseling so they stayed on the straight and narrow.” You could say that he saved lives.

And that is what makes the rest of this story so sad. Although Ruelas was generally a cheerful person, after the bad evaluation was publicly announced, he lost heart. Friends and associates noted that he seemed depressed.

And then he took his own life.

Sure, you can argue that there may have been other circumstances, but all of us have known teachers (and many of us have been that teacher whose whole life is woven around our success with helping kids in our classrooms. I can easily imagine Ruelas’ despair when he was publicly announced to be an inadequate teacher.

What a loss to his community; what a loss to us, when he took his own life.

The Invisible Gorilla, The Illusion of Memory–and the foolishness of high-stakes testing

I’m reading a new book, The Invisible Gorilla and Other Ways Our Intuitions Deceive Us. This is a vibrantly-written nonfiction book on how we remember.

Actually, it’s a book about how we don’t remember. The latest brain research shows that no matter what our intuition or emotions tell us, we only remember about 15% of our experiences (including reading and classroom experiences). That 15% may be completely wrong. To illustrate this point, the book describes a couple, driving along the road, who happens to drive right by a murder in progress. Within moments, the couple disagrees on many vital points, including what the perpetrator was wearing, what other cars and people were around, and who called 911, how long it took, and what was said.

And that is right after the event, just after! Memory disintegrates over time.

This research points out that this inability to remember is simply the human condition, not a failing in particular individuals. We’re all in this together.

However, we infer from the research that high-stakes, once-a-year testing is utter foolishness. Adequate yearly progress? Who can know? We forget almost everything. Certainly we cannot remember specific grammar rules or mathematical formulas, not many of them. Certainly we cannot remember a stack of science facts, nor dates and places from history.

Hey, legislators! President Obama! US Office of Education! School Boards!:

New brain research shows that our brains cannot remember all that stuff on the standardized tests. We are wasting your money. We are frustrating students. We are losing essential instructional time and even worse, we are engaging in questionable teach-to-the-test techniques, which are lousy at the best.

What’s the answer? Dismantle No Child Left Behind and let us move forward to good classroom instruction.

Learning: a measurable end or a flowing continuum?

Dare I suggest, in these days of high-stakes testing (at a great financial cost to state budgets and districts and at some personal cost to students and teachers), that testing is worth little?

Sure, it’s good to see how a student is reading at any particular time. It’s nice to know what math concepts that a child still needs to work with. These approaches are evaluative, though. Their meaning comes from what we can to do help a child, not from getting any real understanding of what a child is learning.

Learning is mysterious. We climb precariously and then level off for a while. Sometimes we are not actively learning but our brain is coalescing skills and information. Sometimes we forget; sometimes we re-remember. Sometimes children at test-time are hungry, tired, high, worried, or brain-dead. This is no surprise; it happens to adults too.

I teach art in a junior high in the morning and English (and related stuff, lots of stuff, music, art..lots of stuff) in juvenile corrections in the afternoon. And after that, I go home and teach two sections of art for the Utah Virtual Academy, a public online charter school.

At our UTVA year-end meetings, we were tossing around ideas about grading and deadlines. Since this is an online school, meeting deadlines is a good topic for discussion. If students don’t get work in on time, they can fall behind. However, the nature of the work is asynchronous, so there could theoretically be room for flexibility in deadlines. Some wanted to hold students to hard-and-fast deadlines, with steep cuts in grades for late work, while others wanted to be more flexible. A colleague said, “I love to play basketball! But if I were constantly judged by NBA standards, I wouldn’t like it much. I’d probably quit.”

I look at testing in much the same way. I look at grades that way. Of course, we want students to learn and achieve, and testing is a way to see if they did or not. However, as I said, learning is a mysterious thing. And childhood, adolescence, these are mysterious things. Sorry, legislators everywhere: you cannot rely on test scores to know if your hard-spent education dollars are doing any good. This is because, like adults, children are a work in progress.

We educators are helping them grow up, helping them grow their minds and bodies and emotions and aesthetic sense. In some ways, childhood is very long (at least at the time, it may seem), but in some ways, quite short. Pretty soon, these kids will be grown up and out in the real world, learning to live their lives. No one will ever look at those test scores again; no one will care.

But what does matter is what the children take away with them, and much of that has to do with experiences that lodge deep and sure in the brain. Most of the time, what remains has more to do with a child’s innate disposition (and with occasional master teachers) than with constant review of content standards.

In a climate of intense high-stakes testing, change seems impossible, but I believe it is possible. A deliberate first step would be to remove NCLB legislation and start with a fresh way of thinking about, and evaluating, learning.

The Death and Life of the Great American School System

Diane Ravitch has written a new book on education, titled The Death and Life of the Great American School System:  How Testing and Choice are Undermining Education.  For readers unfamiliar with Dr. Ravitch, she is a research professor of Education at New York University and served under George H. Bush as Assistant Secretary of Education.  President Clinton appointed her to the National Assessment Governing Board, which oversees federal testing.  She has had a heavy hand in subsequent federal policy, including No Child Left Behind (NCLB).

In her new book, Dr. Ravitch is forthright about her prominent influence in American Educational policy and in the fact that she has changed her mind about the merits of NCLB.  What once seemed to be a sensible policy of accountability and choice, she asserts, has turned out in practice to undermine education in general and failed to serve the scores of kids the law was originally designed to help.

I must admit not having finished her book at the time of this post, but what I’ve read so far compels me to write this blog recommending it to all educators and policymakers.  She has a lot to offer and she does so from the inside, with credibility and candor.  Do check it out.  dven.

Project Based Learning? Standardized Testing?

Our alternative high qualifies to apply for a grant in a competition for a great deal of funding for out-of-the-box project-based high-tech learning. Cooperation and cross-curricular work are emphasized. There’s a lot of money out there for this type of thing.

Oddly enough, the schools that qualify are those that have produced not-very-good test scores over three years. Standardized testing results qualify us for a HUGE amount of money to purchase high-tech equipment for projects which are not measured by standardized testing.

Oh, the delicious irony. Far be it from me to turn down any funding, large or small. However, I believe that the concensus is growing that standardized tests are expensive, present huge problems in adminstering (many schools don’t have enough computer labs and glitches cause endless delays and hiccups in the testing process), and don’t necessarily measure a student’s competency, when it all comes out.

I wish that there were funding for all schools to amp up their technology and move into project-based, cross-curricular, cooperative learning. It doesn’t have to be expensive, but I believe we must have relief from the consequences of high-stakes testing to do the experimentation that can make it work.

“I Prefer Not To,” Notes from John Gatto

I attended a Far West Philosophy of Education Conference at a nearby university this weekend. It was surprisingly interesting and I made it through most of the sessions without wiggling–me, the kinesthetic learner who can’t sit still.

The featured speaker was John Gatto, famed author of Dumbing Us Down and his newest, Weapons of Mass Instruction: A Schoolteacher’s Journey through the Dark World of Compulsory Schooling. Gatto was genuine, relaxed, intellectual, and inspiring. If you know his work, you know he has no patience for all this NCLB testing, thinking it a profound waste of time and resources.

And as usual, he had a simple solution. Quoting Melville’s Bartleby Scrivener, he suggested that students could politely write at the top of the test, “I prefer not to.”

Well, that would be a gesture, wouldn’t it? Such a polite refusal smacks of courtesy and intelligence. It is no tantrum. I suppose the standard snarling response to such a note would be, “Well, you have to.”

I know that’s how they respond to me, when there are things I would rather not do, such as follow a scripted pacing guide to teach tenth grade English and administer countless benchmarks: I have to.

How lovely it would be to serve in a civilized system where the administrators’ response might be instead, “Ah, then, what might you prefer?”

Why Should I Stay?

In a December 19 article in The Baltimore Sun, Sharonda Buckman, CEO of Detroit Parent Network was quoted as saying, “Somebody needs to go to jail.  Somebody needs to pay for this. Somebody needs to go to jail, and it shouldn’t be the kids.”

Admittedly, test scores are horrendous, and parents are angry about it.  Is there a problem?  Absolutely.  But jail?  This sort of talk worries me, especially as a teacher who spent the first nine years of her career teaching at a 95% free/reduced lunch school in inner city St. Louis.  Why on earth would I ever return to a school like the one I left (for a cross-country move) if I was the only one held responsible in the triad directly involved with the education of each child?

I was chatting with my sister-in-law today, a Kindergarten teacher, who has kids entering Kindergarten not even knowing their letters or numbers.  When she has talked with parents about ways they can continue working with struggling kids at home, parents have point-blank told her, “That’s your job.”  Furthermore, she has little control over what and how to teach, being instructed to use particular lessons and materials, and getting written up if she deviates at all.  She explains that the lessons aren’t meeting the needs of her kids, to no avail.  And then, at data-reviewing meetings, her administrators ask her why X number of kids haven’t hit their benchmarks and why she didn’t adjust instruction to meet her needs.  She feels a little like Yossarian in Catch-22, and I don’t blame her.

I am all for accountability, but I want to be held accountable on reasonable issues, and I want everyone responsible for the education of the child to be held accountable.  I want parents to set high expectations for learning and real consequences for misbehavior instead of yelling at me about their child’s grade or for taking their child’s cellphone from them when they were texting in class.  If we’re going to persist in using standardized testing as the sole means of evaluating a child’s progress, then I want test scores to have real meaning for students with consequences for not taking it seriously.  Every year teachers have several capable kids who fill in random bubbles just to get the test done because it’s “boring,” something that shocked me to my core because I was the kid who always tried my best.

More importantly, I want test scores to be used in an apples to apples comparison and not apples to oranges.  If little Susie enters my classroom testing at a fourth grade level, there is no way she is going to be testing at an eighth grade level at the end of  nine months, especially not in a classroom of 30 and a student load of 150 or more.  Yet, Susie’s raw score is the only thing that matters, though she entered my classroom behind.  Not only that, but my scores this year will be scored with my scores for last year, which has a completely different group of kids with very different learning levels and needs.  Our kids aren’t uniform, much as it would make my job easier.

What am I willing to be held accountable for?  The progress of each and every child.  Non-educators might be interested to find I receive absolutely no data from the testing company on the growth of each child, only a raw score.  Part of what I do at the beginning of each school year is pull out the individual test data from the year before my students had me and then compare it, student by student, with the test data from the year my students were in my classroom.  I want to see if I made a difference and in what areas because the growth of each student is what’s most important.  This is something I have done every year since I started teaching, and I’d be willing to be offered a contract or fired based on the results because my students make huge gains while they’re with me. Are they all proficient?  No.  But they go from far below basic to basic, or from below basic to proficient, and that’s success for both of us!

Under the current system of accountability, however, I was a really horrible teacher when I taught in the inner city of St. Louis, but my move to California must have really taught me something because my test scores jumped significantly.  The large amount of parental involvement, the reduced class size and student load, and the better socioeconomic levels of my students had nothing to do with it, I’m sure, at least not according to how society wants to evaluate me as a teacher.

The truth is, as teachers are continued to be bashed by the media and used as a convenient scapegoat for politicians, the more I think about leaving the profession.  I love my job and I love the kids I teach, but you reach a point when being treated like the nation’s toilet becomes too much to bear.  I’m not one of those teachers who complains about the low pay as I know what I signed up for, but when I consider I was making nearly what I’m making now as a bartender and people were appreciative about the service I rendered and were happy to see me, it becomes a little hard to take.

How much longer will I remain in this profession?  I honestly can’t say, but I feel the time ticking down more rapidly than even a few years ago and far faster than when I began.  When I began teaching, I planned to stay forever, even after a year with kids who taught me more about classroom management than any college course.

What will I do if I leave the classroom?  I don’t know, but I think I’d settle for anything that gave me even just a little respect.