October 2007 Archives

Dear Deb,

There are times when I feel that we are on the same wavelength, and times when I know we are not. Right now, my frustration is multiplied because in the course of your last mini-essay, I found myself alternately agreeing and disagreeing with your assertions.

I said that many people who have spoken out about the recent round of NAEP scores seem not to have read the report in which the scores were embedded. I expressed the wish that the commentators would take the trouble to read the report before characterizing what they read in the newspapers, which is third-hand at best. This observation sent you into musing about how the original sources themselves are “an interpretation of data,” and how we all rely on the writers that we trust—or happen to agree with.

But that was not my point. The NAEP data are an original source for those who wish to discuss the latest round of national tests. They are not an “interpretation of data.” They are the data. I assume that you mean to say that you are unimpressed by NAEP, that you do not like the content of the NAEP frameworks or the methodology of the NAEP assessments. That is fair enough. But that is a different discussion from the one I raised.

Policymakers in Washington and the state capitols are influenced by the every-other-year reports from NAEP about state and national progress. It is your right to dismiss NAEP out of hand, but the people making important decisions about education policy are on a different trajectory. They look at the numbers and they see a reality that you dismiss as trivial and unimportant. Maybe you are right and they are wrong.

My point is that if public policy is going to be affected by NAEP—and I believe it is (and should be)—then at least the people who write about the NAEP scores should read the data and not rely on second-hand or third-hand accounts. Like the tests or hate them, they are the best measure we have right now. As the recent report from the Thomas B. Fordham Institute (“The Proficiency Illusion”) showed, the state tests vary widely and randomly in terms of their expectations and standards.

As I said in my last post, the progress on NAEP in most areas has been slight or insignificant from 2003-2007. I take this to mean that NCLB has had trivial effects on student achievement in reading and math, the subjects tested every other year. Now that the president and the U.S. Department of Education have made it their business to show that federal legislation can and will raise test scores, every release of NAEP data is accompanied by a press statement from the U.S. Secretary of Education that magnifies slight gains as huge achievements.

This is troublesome. It is troublesome because the federal government’s role as the honest, impartial collector and distributor of information gets corrupted when it acts as a cheerleader. And it is troublesome because it is unrealistic to expect test scores to make major leaps in a few years. When they do, one should suspect chicanery of some kind.

NAEP shines a light on state testing practices, as the Fordham report shows. Many states are reporting unrealistic leaps in achievement and high levels of proficiency to satisfy the absurd demand of NCLB for a trajectory that will bring every child to "proficiency" by the year 2014. NAEP shows how unlikely it is that any state will meet that goal and how inflated most of the states' claims of achievement are.

You make a transition from national testing to the dangers of a national curriculum. We have discussed this often. Like you, I would like to see schools where children have time to build, to create, to explore, to experiment, to play. I would like to see kids in the primary grades building castles and fortresses and stores with blocks. But unlike you, I don’t think this kind of playful learning is at odds with a national curriculum.

What is really frightening today—due in large measure to NCLB—is that we have a national testing mania without any curriculum at all. So now our schools are obsessed with preparing to take tests, getting good scores on tests, and then starting the test prep all over again. Out the window goes any thoughtful or playful engagement with history, literature, or the arts, as well as time for physical education (in many New York City schools, children are lucky to have one period a week for physical education). This is outrageous. This is not good education.

So here is where we find our differences and we find our agreements. Unlike you, I am not frightened by a national curriculum and national testing; I believe we already have both, supplied by commercial publishers of textbooks and tests. And what we have is low-level and antithetical to good education. Where we agree is that we have a vision of what good education is and should be. Even if we don’t agree on every detail, we do agree that what we have now is far from good education.

Diane

Posted by Diane Ravitch at 8:28 AM | Permalink | 6 Comments | TrackBacks (0)

Dear Diane,

Your frustration about folks avoiding original sources is reasonable. Especially when it's actually easily available. But, of course, the "original source" itself is an interpretation of data. In short, we fall back on easier, less time-consuming ways. ("We" being me. See the back-and-forth comments about—presumably—the same data between Erin Johnson and myself.)

In fields that I don't feel deeply connected to, I mostly look for the experts I "trust". There's no way to be an expert in all the subjects I need to have an opinion about! So I go along with the consensus in some cases (like climate) and rely on "my" experts (generally via the magazines I read) on foreign policy and economics—e.g. Richard Rothstein, or Paul Krugman. So why should I expect folks to do otherwise about schooling?

But it's why it is so easy to get myths out there into the public sphere as though they were facts. In our field, there's the myth about the good old days. It rests in part on how often opinion leaders of all political stripes refer casually to the "decline" of public education; ditto for the assumption that most other nations are doing better at something called "schooling" or "education" without our having stopped to define what either means. We fall back on test scores whose contents and assumptions few question, whose methodology even education reporters know little if anything about, not to mention the narrowness of the measures—or the way scores are set. We use a language that assumes that being well-educated is a zero-sum game, in which the progress of others has to injure us.

We trust these assumptions because to think otherwise would require going against the grain and becoming an expert oneself. Rothstein's piece in American Prospect is not the first masterly complicating of the economic/schooling myths, but precisely by complicating it he loses part of his audience. For example, he reminds us that we "forget" that there's a 20-30-year gap between when the tests are administered and when that age group has an impact on the economy. In the information age, resources are also not evenly distributed. While, for example, FairTest—the only national organization that is in the business of being skeptical about test data, has a budget of less than half a million, the three or four leading testing agencies each spend many millions on promoting the idea that tests are the one true measure. (Disclosure: I'm on the board of FairTest.)

It leads me to wish we had a very different way of spending those 13-20 schooling years—preparing people to assess the events that surround them, independently sorting out pros and cons. I'm for the "liberal arts"—but not at the expense of "making sense" of the world around us, those "habits of mind" we build our curriculum around at schools associated with the Coalition of Essential Schools. The traditional liberal arts might even support such habits, if we designed them with this in mind. It would, for example, take a very different definition of advanced mathematics. The public's much-criticized lack of interest in advanced math may, in fact, betray their good sense, not their bad. Calculus-driven math may be foolish-driven math, that mis-prepares us, leaving us disarmed before the realities of our world. Perhaps a "statistics-driven" math would be equally tough and "advanced" but more suitable for a democratic citizenry?

In short, what frightens me about a national curriculum is not merely that I think it's more exciting to teach based on the particular interests and events that swirl around the young but because I think I can even "cover" more stuff of importance if I begin with what grabs our interest—from dinosaurs, mummies, castles, to modern Iraq or climate claims. I can better engage kids with the world they live in—including its history—if I make that the central aim of my work. Diane, it seems unlikely we can get a national consensus around the kind of experimentation that many of us think needs to take place. Nor should we! But suppose I'm right, that more "coverage" of the traditional fare won't make us either scientifically more sophisticated or mathematically more at home in this world? I'm not interested in banning traditionalism, but I'm also not interested in prohibiting us from the kind of exploration that needs to take place. Nor do I want to leave it all to private schools to experiment with the age-old conundrums. I think there are responsible ways to engage in this work, not just in private but also in public schools.

Our scientific future depends, I believe, on our remaining a nation that appreciates "play"—the non-utilitarian (or at least not immediately so) mindset that we're born with. We are systematically cutting ourselves off from the roots of human intellectual inventiveness. We need to find the equivalent of a generation-old practice of taking cars and radios apart to see how they work and building fortresses out of whatever is on hand. Computer-programmed games can't replace the old chemistry sets. Finding the modern equivalents requires us to experiment, not to return to the 1896 Ivy League consensus, great as it was. Some of us were lucky to have had both, but too many kids today have neither. They thus develop an acquiescent mindset or else a merely rebellious one, but an insufficiently curious and self-disciplined one.

As I meet with teachers and principals and parents I hear a lot of anguish and fear. Of course my sample is biased, but…. Read Dan Brown's book, "The Great Expectations School: A Rookie Year in the New Blackboard Jungle" for a moving account of why we may be entering an era of temp teachers.

Deb

Posted by Deborah Meier at 8:05 AM | Permalink | 11 Comments | TrackBacks (0)

Hi Deb,

Welcome home from Russia! Hope you got your 36 hours of sleep. Given the sad history of Russia over the past century, it will be difficult for them to shake off the burden of so many decades of authoritarianism and totalitarianism. For sure, one can find dissidents under Czarism and under Soviet rule, yet not much of a democratic tradition. Even today, the idea of a free press or the checks and balances that we associate with a healthy democracy seem to be waning, and the forces of authoritarianism appear to be gaining ground.

I have learned over these many weeks of communicating with you that it is hopeless to try to persuade you that a national curriculum is not synonymous with totalitarianism. Many democratic nations in Europe and in Asia have a national curriculum and have not forsworn their democratic institutions or their freedom. A few years ago, researchers at the American Institutes for Research compared achievement on international tests in a dozen nations that participated in both TIMSS and PISA, and only two of them—Australia and the United States—did not have a national curriculum or national testing.

It is interesting and not surprising that you met democratic educators who are turning to private schooling. I had the same experience when I was in Poland in 1991. Some of the most ambitious reformers were opposed altogether to government-controlled education, what we call public education. In their experience, it was nothing more than a conduit for propaganda and mind control by the state. Even now, in this country, I have heard conservatives and libertarians refer to public education as "government schooling," which they do not mean as a compliment. Indeed, they use the phrase as a way to validate their belief in vouchers and any other funding mechanisms that allow children to escape the clutches of the government education system.

Your anecdote serves to bring home something that we have often discussed. Is public education in the United States still a cornerstone of our democracy? Would it be more or less democratic if there were common academic standards for the nation? Is it more democratic to promote public education or to promote alternatives to public education? Who should control the schools that educate the public's children?

These are questions that we will continue to debate and discuss, I am sure. Meanwhile, let me catch you up on what happened in your absence.

On Sept. 25, the National Assessment Governing Board released NAEP scores for 2007 in reading and math. The report was mixed, with scores up a bit in both subjects in fourth and eighth grades. As you can well imagine, the U.S. Department of Education trumpeted the gains and attributed them to No Child Left Behind, but the gains were really very modest. The report can be viewed here.

I read the reports, which I highly recommend, and this is what I found:

* Fourth grade reading scores were up by a modest 2 points from 2005 to 2007, from 219 to 221. Actually, scores for this grade on NAEP had been 219 in 2002. The biggest increase in reading scores occurred between 2000 and 2002, when the scores went up by six points. In other words, the gains since NCLB was enacted do not equal the gains recorded on NAEP in the years prior to NCLB.
* Eighth grade reading scores were up by only one point. The trend line for this grade in reading from 1998 to 2007 is a flat line. The score was 263 in 1998 and it is 263 in 2007.
* Fourth grade mathematics scores increased by two points, from 238 in 2005 to 240 in 2007. The trend line in this grade points steadily upward. The biggest gains occurred in the pre-NCLB period, when scores rose from 226 in 2000 to 235 in 2003.
* Eighth grade mathematics scores were up by two points, from 279 in 2005 to 281 in 2007. Again, the pre-NCLB gains were larger, when scores increased from 273 in 2000 to 278 in 2003.

After I read the NAEP reports, I wrote two articles. I referred to NAEP to debunk New York state's claims of historic eighth grade gains on its state tests in May and June 2007. On NAEP, the scores for eighth graders in New York state in both subjects were flat. The state assessment director wrote a letter saying that tests that sample students, like NAEP, are less accurate than those that test every single student. I suppose if the scores on NAEP had been good for New York state, the state Education Department would have been satisfied with its methodology.

Then on Oct. 3, I published an article in The New York Times arguing that NCLB was "fundamentally flawed" and should be radically overhauled. I pointed out in the opening paragraph that the test score gains before NCLB, as I showed above, were larger than those that have followed the implementation of NCLB. I also said that "the main goal of the law—that all children in the United States will be proficient in reading and mathematics by 2014—is simply unattainable," and that this had never been accomplished in any district, state, or nation. My article prompted a response from Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings. Her letter cleverly elided my first point that the gains in achievement were larger before NCLB by stating that "students have reached all-time highs" in achievement (which is untrue for eighth grade reading, which is exactly the same in 2007 as it was in 1998). She also cleverly revised the goal of NCLB: Instead of universal "proficiency," which is what the law calls for, she writes that the goal is to have "every child at grade level by 2014." Of course, if grade level is identified by a normed test, then by definition only half the children can possibly meet that goal!

I have been reading the debates in the press and on the blogs about what NAEP really says and what the scores really mean. I have been struck most forcefully by the fact that so many people who argue these questions have not read the NAEP reports, which are written in plain English, and have not seen the graphs, which are intelligible. Instead, they repeat what they read and what they heard. I would feel much better about the state of our democracy if everyone who opines made a point of reviewing the facts first before uttering an opinion about them. Commentators should be ashamed to recycle what they heard, instead of checking the source for themselves.

Diane

Posted by Diane Ravitch at 10:05 AM | Permalink | 4 Comments | TrackBacks (0)

Dear Diane,

I needed 36 hours of sleep when I got back from Russia! But it's time to begin to sort out my thoughts. Aside from all the fun, including the pleasure of traveling with my sons, it has reinforced some old theories, and raised some new questions.

The most obvious is that "command"-style schooling is still alive and well in Russia. After a brief "pestroika" for schools, the heavy hand of the state has come down again. The rhetoric is very familiar. Some of which you'd like (a single state curriculum) perhaps? But most of which would chill you as it does me. But there are also more and more private schools in Russia, and some of these do interesting things (I'm told). Many teachers I met thought positively about this since it might free them from tight state supervision.

The one school I visited—The School of Self-Determination—was a largely neighborhood K-12 public school founded by Alexander Tubelesky in the 1990s along lines that are familiar to me: influenced by both Summerhill and progressive education. It's that rarity: consciously concerned with Democracy. They appear to be more innovative in out-of-classroom life than classroom life. The 3-5-year-old wing delighted me; a lovely setting designed around inter-age play. Kids are allowed to do a lot of unsupervised activities both indoors and out that we wouldn't dare do. (Less fear of lawsuits?) There's a comfortable mix of ages everywhere one looks. At recess, the kids of all ages danced and sang old Russian songs for us! And their voices were of a quality and power that one rarely hears in young American singers. This latter puzzles me. When my mother visited in 1936, she was aghast with what she saw, but delighted with the singing!

Data. In the old Soviet days there were, we were told, NO dropouts. A little like there being no gays in Iran? But maybe it was true. Kids were required to stay in school until they were ready for the army. Period. Under the new regime there are drop-outs, but no one agrees on how many. Sound familiar? Kids who pass the university exams are exempt from the military—those who fail the exams are in the army for 2-3 years. How's that for an incentive system? (Still most fail.)

Alas, we didn't see "regular" schools, but heard that they are mostly very "traditional"—including being influenced again by the Russian Orthodox church.

The Russians assume their system's task is to fill the Universities with the required number of future middle managers and specialists, in the interests of a strong economy. Democracy doesn't, as usual, make it onto their official agenda—not in China, Russia or here at home. (The conference I attended, organized precisely to think about how democracy and schooling connected, would not be mainstream here or there.)

A recent article in Phi Delta Kappan notes that the Chinese are trying to become more like America—which they see as a font of creativity—while America is trying to imitate China! I'm not sure where Russia fits in this cycle—but it seems more like the USA. But the issue is critical: what we do with 3-6-year-olds may not show up for 30 years in terms of its impact on the economy, innovation, et al—much less democracy. That same issue of PDK has a number of articles that probe the significance of this long-term issue.

The disappearance of half a century of Communism in such rapid order is startling—a striking reminder to would-be reformers. I grew up at a time when all the experts considered it irreversible except by force. Many Russians I spoke to were, however, deeply afraid about the future, even as they enjoyed the money now available to rebuild the nation—including its schools. Inequality was far from absent under Communism, but there probably were not many super-rich. And the safety net for the less-well-off has disappeared. We were told that there was no national health insurance system.

The habits of rude bureaucrat'ism are still strong! I've never heard so much scolding of the public as I heard in their museums. A little like schools! It was the first shock I had when I got involved with public education in the early 60s. That tone—with its undertone of fear. It's a combination that doesn't invite strong adults to make a career of teaching. I think a lot lately about the extent to which those in charge in the US are systematically re-building a seamless
system built on replaceable temps—and fear.

Diane, have you seen the Paris-based Organization for Economic Development's study? Of 29 OECD countries, it finds that the US teachers are "among the lowest paid," work longer hours, and that the United States ranks 10th in its efforts to control class size. Contrary to popular belief.

Best,
Deb

Posted by Deborah Meier at 8:00 AM | Permalink | 22 Comments | TrackBacks (0)

Dear Deb,

I agree with you about the uncertainty involved in medicine. The closer any of us gets to a very serious medical problem, the likelier we are to encounter medical uncertainty. Many years ago, I lost a two-year-old child to leukemia. At that time, in the mid-1960s, the doctors tried a range of drugs, knowing that in the end, it was a lost cause. I kept hoping for a miracle that never happened. That was when I discovered that there is a limit to what doctors know. The good news is that medical research keeps pushing the limit farther and farther out. So, today, most children who have the same disease that killed my little boy in six months are likely to survive and live a normal life. That is incredible progress!

About ten years ago, when I suffered a near-fatal pulmonary embolism, I compared medical research to education research in an article for Education Week called “What if Research Really Mattered.” When I was flat on my back in the intensive care unit of my neighborhood hospital, I was incredibly impressed that everyone knew what to do. There were standard tests and standard procedures, and all the doctors, interns, and residents knew exactly what to do. They saved my life, and to them it was no big deal. It was standard operating procedure.

In education, we have no standard operating procedure. You probably think that is a good thing. I am not so sure. However, I suspect that we both would recoil at the standard operating procedures advocated and imposed by the business leaders who are now calling the tune in so many school districts.

I certainly agree with you about the importance of discussion and debate. I passionately advocate for minority views, not least because I am usually the one in the minority and don’t want to be censored or ruled out of order! Like you, I agree that democracy rests on disagreements. Life is not a standardized test. It was Robert Hutchins (did you know him, Deb?) who said that one must always listen to the other person because he (or she) might turn out to be right.

It seems to me that the more you know about history, the more you become aware of dilemmas and uncertainties. One of the terrible things about the history textbooks is that they make it seem that leaders made decisions with full knowledge of how things would turn out. No, they didn’t know. They made educated—and sometimes uneducated—guesses.

In watching the Ken Burns documentary about World War II, I once again have been reminded of bad decisions by the leaders, of information withheld from the public, of chaos and error on the battlefield. It made me think of Tolstoy’s observation in "War and Peace" about how different the battle looks to the general and the soldiers. The general sees order; the soldiers see confusion and smoke.

One could easily become nihilistic. But I would not do that, Deb, nor would you. There are these millions of children. They need to learn lots of things to prepare them for life, for citizenship, for work. The grown-ups have to teach them. One can’t just wave the whole matter away and say let everyone do his or her own thing. There is too much at stake. We agree on that.

Diane

Deborah Meier will write about her recent visit to Russia in her post later this week.

Posted by Diane Ravitch at 8:00 AM | Permalink | 6 Comments | TrackBacks (0)

Dear Diane,

Did you read The New York Times Magazine piece called "Do We Really Know What Makes Us Healthy?" by Gary Taubes? Or the follow-up on Oct. 9 in the Times Science Section by John Tierney?

Medicine (and nutrition) have all the odds in their favor vs. education when it comes to being "scientific". There's a lot less disagreement about what constitutes good health, for one thing. Politics—in the best and worst senses—is less intimately tied to medicine. It's easier to have placebos and random samples. And it's easier to track patients for long enough to assess side effects.

John Tierney takes up the "consensus" claims about low-fat diets, and the nutrition end of Taubes' work. He describes how easy it is for an interesting hypothesis (high fat, bad for heart), with the right "political" support to become a consensus, and thus the continued existence of fads in medicine and nutrition. Ditto for schooling, Diane. And—more another time—the "consensus" around the current "science" of reading is a case in point. At least in medicine it doesn't get worked into federal law!

Author Taubes concludes that "we end up having to fall back on the following guidelines when it comes to scientific research about medicine". (What follows is my summary) (1) Look for all other possible explanations for the data. (2) Assume the first reported association is incorrect or meaningless—be skeptical when it first hits the news. (3) If the correlation appears in many studies and populations but is small (in the range of 10s of percents), continue to doubt it. (4) If the correlation involves some aspect of human behavior then question its validity. (5) "The best advice is to keep in mind the law of unintended consequences." There's too much that either can't be measured or in which the measurement itself is subjective—even if it can be coded. The principal investigator of a famous large-scale Nurse's Health Study concluded: "I'm back to the place where I doubt everything."

I say all this, Diane, because that's where I end up, too—and I actually did not begin there—about almost all school-related data. Because above and beyond all the reasons Taubes gives above, there is inevitably more bias—meaning individual values—involved in education research, and more political pressure on schools to comply. Teachers and principals, as you noted, don't have the freedom professors do. In part it's also because I have never met two kids who responded the same way to anything—even if on a coded response sheet it might look as though they do.

Yet one cannot fall back on nihilism; so one reaches some conclusions—makes one's best guess (judgment) and leaves the door open for those with other conclusions! It's still a one-on-one kind of diagnosis. One even encourages, as in medicine, continued research of less likely minority views.

It's not all that much different than what we have to do in any field which is bigger than our own anecdotal evidence. Like Iraq, or human-induced global warming, etc. We simply do not and cannot wait for certainty. (So, as laymen, we go along with the experts we most trust.)

But it's also the reason I keep the door open to the idea of being wrong even as I act as vigorously and persuasively as I can on the assumption I'm right! That's why I like kids to hear knowledgeable and expert adults disagreeing. My friend Brenda tells me they have a rule at home: we never argue about something that can be settled by looking it up (Googling these days). I think that's a good rule, although that assumes we can know for sure when it's "that kind" of argument, and besides there are some advantages in kicking a fact around for a while before looking it up.

Democracy rests on disagreements—if there weren't any we wouldn't need it. If there were mostly wrong and right answers to life's dilemmas, we'd just be able to choose our rulers by a standardized test.

But there are no such tests, nor probably no such foolproof graduation or attendance data, or measures of what we all would even agree is "success". But that doesn't make trying to figure out how best to assess this or that less useful. We just need a much healthier sense of tentativeness about our assessments—an open mind.

As with the baby-sitter I described in my last letter, this is in part why I'm for as FEW, not as many, "no-no's" as we can get away with. Let's not "make a law against it" unless pressed to the wall. But let's collect all kinds of data and expose all those interested to a good debate about the data, leading in turn to further data, and more debate. We don't always need to end it with a vote—or a rule.

I recently attended a Mission Hill Board meeting (what an amazing event it is). On the agenda was a discussion of what kind of data we wanted to collect about the kids who graduate from our school. What kind we collect will, after all, affect the kind of answers available to us. A former teacher who is writing his doctoral dissertation (in Wisconsin) has agreed to sort through the last 13 years of data. That could be the assigned service task for every doctoral student!

Deb

Posted by Deborah Meier at 7:55 AM | Permalink | 2 Comments | TrackBacks (0)

Dear Deb,

No, I don't think the dilemmas you describe are as omnipresent in all of life's vocations as they are in teaching. I don't have the classroom experience that you have. I have taught mainly graduate students in my life as a professor and have spent most of my time as a historian and writer about education. In many ways, maybe most ways, that puts me at a disadvantage in comparison to you. But the great advantage that I have had in my own career has been that I have been free from the kinds of dictates and mandates that you have encountered. The life of a professor and a writer is far, far less regulated than the life of a teacher!

Most professors, I think, have tenure, which insulates them from political pressures. I have never had tenure and have not had that layer of protection. In 1994, I was pushed out of my untenured position at Teachers College because (as I was told at the time), my colleagues did not like my views. Fortunately for me, I landed at New York University, also untenured, and so far no one has told me that my views demand my exclusion.

I am not teaching now, just writing. When students ask me for advice, I encourage them to be true to themselves, but I know that in the university today, there are limitations on what one is allowed to say and believe and write. Of course, you can say and believe and write anything, but if you offend the reigning orthodoxy in your department, you cannot count on being hired the next year unless you already have tenure. So, the unwritten rule for born rule-breakers is to stay in the conventional mode and keep your views to yourself until after you have tenure.

Nonetheless, there is no doubt in my mind that people who work in higher education are far freer than teachers to express their views, to criticize their leaders, and to dissent from current policies. There is far likelier to be open dissent and discussion in the university setting about the university's policies than there will be in schools about the policies of the school, the "system," the district, or the state.

Back in the 1930s, Howard K. Beale wrote a book titled "Are American Teachers Free?" His answer was negative, because there were so many restraints on teachers' freedom of belief and speech. Today, for different reasons, the challenges to teachers' freedom of belief and speech are very different. Yet, I think that if a similar book were written, it would come to disturbing conclusions about teachers' freedom and professionalism.

Diane

Posted by Diane Ravitch at 8:00 AM | Permalink | 2 Comments | TrackBacks (0)

Dear Diane,

Years ago—when I was teaching both 5-year-olds at PS 144 in Harlem and teachers at City College—adults said that, unlike me, they weren't allowed to do x and y. After ascertaining why they thought it was so important to do x or y, I'd ask: "and what will happen if you do?" There was always a pause.

So we'd have a class discussion about the consequences of not following orders (usually none).

I think this is an important exercise—for adults and kids. We can't always get our way; there can be consequences that follow. But there may still be good reasons to accept the possible consequences and tactfully (or do I mean tactically) do what you believe is right.

Our first responsibility is to have a strong basis for making decisions—knowledge about kids, the nation's system of schooling, mandated rules, curriculum, subject matter more broadly, pedagogy, and one's own risk-status. (Of course, often you have to act instinctively.) I advise: take fewer risks, for example, before you have tenure, or if your principal doesn't like you. Also, decide what's important and what's trivial.

When I left my kids with a baby-sitter I had the same dilemma in reverse. How many dictates should I lay down? My five rules. Rule one: Any good child-care giver had to be someone whom I trusted enough to make split-second judgments (there's virtually no other kind when dealing with kids). Rule two: Provide information about the kids, the household (where things were), and how I could be reached. Rule three: Provide as few no-no's as you can—we don't hit our kids ever, or if they want the light left on in their bedroom, that's okay. Rule four: Listen carefully to what the kids say after and what the sitter says about the same events. Finally, if there's no one whose judgment I sufficiently trusted, I stayed with the kids myself. These pretty much fit the way I looked at being a principal, too.

I began teaching ten years after my first child was born, and I brought the same mindset into my classroom, and later into my schools. Over the decades I had many different supervisors, and fortunately no one ever stopped me from going my own way even when I did it pretty openly. Was it all just good luck? Probably partially.

What happens if you're not so lucky? You learn to hide a bit more, say "sorry" rather (and rarely ask permission), build a strong record in other ways, and keep open to the possibility that you are wrong! That latter is not just wise strategy, but wise for getting to be smarter at one's craft.

But there are some things I could never have done; and fortunately was never "required" to. Certain forms of discipline, for example. Teaching (e.g. covering too much) in ways that left kids feeling dumber than when I started off. Comparing kids in ways that led to misleading conclusions about their place in the world. Those were my "bottom lines."

After I left Boston new rules came out that I'd have had a hard time following. During state testing sessions (which are un-timed and can last 2-3 hours a session) one is not allowed to pat a nervous 7-year-old kid on the back, offer a drink of water, or suggest a short break when clearly a kid has become too tense, and so on. All of those gestures are viewed as forms of cheating and could get me fired today. (I even had food brought into the testing room at Mission Hill in the early days!) I'm sad not to be in the schoolhouse anymore, but I'm glad not to be the adult responsible for carrying out such rules on little kids who trust me to use good sense. It's not good sense.

One late afternoon, as I was leaving my Grade 7-12 school in East Harlem, I noticed three boys playing basketball (unsupervised) in the gym. I reminded them that it was too dangerous to allow them to continue and that they'd have to leave the building. They were very courteous about leaving; but the last lad turned and asked me, "do you really think we'll be safer playing in the street?" I accepted the critique—I was thinking about my personal and "institutional" safety, not theirs. When we're going along with bad policies, at least we ought to be straight about it.

At some point the compromises we make lead us to lose our love for the work. I hope that all practitioners can catch themselves before they reach that point and reverse course: break more rules?, get them changed, or…….quit. But "creative compliance" "creative non-compliance" in the interest of good practice is, as my one-time bosses Tony Alvarado and Sy Fliegal reminded me, an option one should not shun. For hundreds of years teachers have known this. There may be reasons to change the culture from solo to collaborative work—but not to giving up our collective
conscience.

So I still tell folks, push ahead as far as you can doing what you think is right, and when someone in authority says "stop"—stop and think about what comes next. Maybe try a different crack in the pavement? In short, I still give my colleagues the same advice I did 30 years ago at City College. It may, however, be harder than I think.

Are these dilemmas that face folks in all life's vocations, Diane?

Deborah

Posted by Deborah Meier at 7:03 AM | Permalink | 9 Comments | TrackBacks (0)

Dear Deb,

It's no big surprise that "standards" involve judgments. Only standards related to physical objects are fixed, like systems of weights and measurements (e.g., the metric system).

But any standard that involves decision-making, real decision-making, means that human judgment is required. People make decisions about what is considered a passing score on the medical boards, on the law school admissions tests, even on the pass mark for the written test to get a driver's license. Some group of fallible human beings decides what constitutes the appropriate body of knowledge, and how much of that knowledge the applicant should possess. This may be a "viewpoint," but there could be no standards at all without relying on the judgment of people who are hopefully, presumably "knowledgeable" about what constitutes a passing mark.

As part of my own ideological evolution, which I referred to in an earlier post, I have come to believe that no single measure should be completely determinative and that students (and others) should have not only multiple measures of their capacity but multiple opportunities to demonstrate it. There was a time when my faith in testing was greater than it is today, when I thought that a single test could serve as a proxy for a pile of judgments. But my view now is that the test matters—it reveals whether students have mastered what was taught (math, for example) or what they learned in their home environment (vocabulary, concepts). But it is also the case, as I readily admit, that some students are not good test-takers and that some tests are simply not very good tests. Therefore, I would not want to have anyone's life or career or year in school judged by a single test score.

We know that college admissions, for example, depend on a range of measures. Admissions officers consider many pieces of evidence: grades, test scores, the student's essay, letters of recommendation, and other signifiers of the student's readiness and motivation for college-level work. The more competitive the college, the likelier it is to have this elaborate process of review. Granted, schools do not have the time or resources to make so nuanced a decision about every student every year. Tests are a shortcut for saving time and resources. The danger—and I agree with you that the danger has turned into a present-day reality—is that the tests become not only a shortcut, but the only means of judgment, a substitution for human decision-making and for the multiple measures that should be considered when the stakes are high (promotion, graduation).

I disagree with you about the "expertise" involved in deciding what kids "should" be reading. Those decisions are made all the time. They are made by textbook publishers and editors. The results of those decisions are to be found in the literature textbooks used in the majority of American public schools. When I was writing "The Language Police," I ordered every mass-market literature textbook used in the schools. I was really chagrined; the decisions had been made, and from my point of view, they were uniformly awful. I am a strong believer that literature taught in schools should be a mix of the classic and the modern, but that it should all be really wonderful literature by someone's lights. What I found instead was about 30-40 percent good literature, classic and new, and a lot of assorted trivia. Also a huge proportion of the books devoted to graphics and blank space.

I don't know whether or not you agree with me about the importance of classic literature (I am referring here not to the ancients, but to English and American writers who are generally acknowledged to be worth reading like Shakespeare, Donne, Mill, Thoreau, Dickinson, Longfellow). To make my case, I prepared two anthologies, "The American Reader" (1991), which is multiculturally American, and "The English Reader" (2006), which I edited with my son Michael. Sorry to be self-referential, but these books were my attempt to gather the wonderful things that are usually left out of the prescribed curriculum in the literature textbooks, and to save busy teachers the time required to find all these pieces. To anyone who says, "but that's not what I would choose," I say, "okay, choose your own." No problem.

I know, having studied the history of curriculum, that the content of history textbooks and literature textbooks changes from generation to generation. So it has been and so it ever will be. But we should not throw out all we have known in the past as irrelevant. That way lies a generation with no common grounds for discussion and debate, with no songs to sing communally. That way leaves to commercial interests all that we know.

Diane

Posted by Diane Ravitch at 9:33 AM | Permalink | 3 Comments | TrackBacks (0)