Bridging Differences

Dear Diane,

I don’t want to argue about the word “constructivism” because words can, I agree, be slippery. But I urge you not to parody that viewpoint. There are few—if any—schools (in the public sector at least) where teachers are just “guides on the side.” Never were! I’ve seen hapless teachers. But not purposely. I also think that you have misread Dewey’s "The Way Out of Educational Confusion”. Or should I say “differently read”? (joke) I think he meant it in the same way as Ted Sizer did in describing a mindless Honor’s English course vs. a rigorous Shop class! In reality, few children in our science classes are learning the principles of science. The name of the course is not what interests either of us.

Neither guide on the side nor sage on the stage—let that be our bridging motto.

Two visual images have been most helpful to me. One comes from my colleague Ted Chittenden (retired researcher at ETS—the testing people) and the other from David Hawkins (the late physicist at the U of Colorado). I wish I had the technical skill to represent their diagrams visually right here.

Chittenden’s: Picture two axes crossing. One pointing east and the other north. Imagine the one pointing east is called “teacher initiative” and the one pointing north is “student initiative”. That produces four quadrants. In the high teacher/low student quadrant, he placed what we think of as traditional classrooms—with the teacher pouring forth knowledge to a fairly passive audience. In the low teacher/high student quadrant, he placed the much ballyhooed—and rarely practiced—“free school” Summerhill’ian model. In the low teacher and student quadrant, he put what once was called “mastery learning”, also “individualized instruction”, otherwise also known as “scripted learning”. Neither teacher nor student were in a position to take much initiative. Naturally, my favorite quadrant was the one in the far opposite corner in which both student and teacher were major actors, engaged in a balancing act that needed to be carefully constructed and structured, teacher by teacher and class by class (with help).

David Hawkins': Imagine a triangle. In one corner is the teacher, in another the student, and in the third was X, the object/course being studied. The relationship between teacher and student was formed in the process of “uncovering” the meaning or nature of X—the object of study. It was, I immediately recognized, a diagram that my parents had described as Talmudic study! It worked best if the X was of genuine interest to the teacher—something he felt was revealing, useful, and particularly so for the students he was teaching. But also for himself. While they were not equals in terms of knowledge or wisdom, the best lessons were those in which they were equally interested in hearing about the X and from each other. The course of study was an open road depending on how they heard each other. They might, over the course of time, discover that they agreed about baseball or Mozart—or disagreed. But the burning question was how they understood the X before them. (Keep in mind, I like this best in the context of a community of teachers and learners.)

If you read Eleanor Duckworth’s “The Having of Wonderful Ideas”—which we used as our text when we started Mission Hill—you’ll get the flavor of how this affected the relationships between the Mission Hill staff—who were after all, also of very different levels of knowledge, experience, and expertise.

These two diagrams changed my way of thinking about the difference between teaching and learning—the latter being my burning passion. It also, oddly enough, changed forever my way of thinking about politics. “Campaigning” on behalf of certain ideas and policies is a process of trying to connect with an audience—finding the bridges between their experiences and yours. In the process you hope to “convert” them to your politics, but lo and behold, they also make you reexamine your own. But it’s hard work.

The constraints you describe seem unnecessary. Worse. In fact, it is precisely the degree to which we have always had a traditional curriculum in real-life that explains our fascination with Oprah Winfrey and Marilyn Monroe. In large part, our differences are now, and always have been, over the "what is” happening in the world of schooling not “what should.”

I believe we’ve rarely encountered in our classrooms—above all those in which the least advantaged sit—teachers who exude the authenticity, curiosity, and authority that makes Oprah so fascinating to them. And surely you can’t blame Progressive Education for the age-old fascination with fame and beauty.

More seriously: The measure of my success as a teacher is not in what I taught them, but “what they picked up on their own” afterwards that wasn’t accessible or valued before. If teachers doubt the possibility of influencing the “afterwards”, Diane, I don’t know how they can stick to it. Of course, you need to be careful of what you wish for.

What the young teacher from KIPP told me last week rings in my ears—how his practices changed when he discovered what happened to his KIPP 8th graders when they went to high school. I may have my quarrels with KIPP, but I have no quarrels with his priorities. I’m intrigued, as he is, by the way schools impact on our way of thinking, writing, speaking, tackling novel dilemmas, treating others, responding to truth claims (like the ones our mutual friend Mayor Bloomberg likes to make about NYC’s schools).

Finally, getting into the mind of the foundation leaders is beyond me. Small schools are still high on my agenda, although I worry more about the trade-offs necessitated by our rush to mandate smallness. Possibly they just see it as easier to do than changing what really goes on in that Triangle that Hawkins described. I’m fearful that the “curriculum reformers” are making a similar mistake.

Deb

Posted by Deborah Meier at 9:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (10) | TrackBacks (0)

Dear Debbie,

Words are slippery things.

Take the idea of “constructivism.” Yes, I agree with you that we all “construct” knowledge as we encounter new ideas. We try to make sense of new ideas by fitting them to what we already know, using the vocabulary and experiences that we have already accumulated. If we have a meager vocabulary—or none at all, as when we visit a foreign country and are unfamiliar with the language—and if we have no experiences that are connected to the new ideas, then we will not be able to do much constructing of knowledge.

So the job of the school becomes one of conscientiously, purposefully building the vocabulary and background knowledge of students so that they can use them dynamically to understand new ideas and enlarge their knowledge.

There is another sort of constructivism in which students are busily discovering whatever they want to discover or trying to figure out through inquiry what the teacher knows but refuses to teach them or sitting around idly because they don’t know what they feel like discovering today. This is not the sort of classroom I admire. I have never much cottoned to the idea of the teacher as a “guide on the side, rather than a sage on the stage.” I tend to like the happy medium: the teacher who has clear aims, who knows what knowledge he or she is trying to convey, and who figures out imaginative, creative, innovative ways to teach it.

I don’t think that teachers are hamstrung or hampered by knowing that the 5th grade social studies curriculum will be focused on the Colonial era in U.S. history or that in 6th grade the curriculum will be focused on the Ancient World. It would seem to me to be helpful to teachers to know, in a general way, what they are expected to teach. My own children went to a progressive school where the 5th grade every year was devoted to the study of ancient Greece. The kids loved it.

I don’t imagine any circumstances in which my “ideal curriculum” would interfere with the imagination, professionalism, or creativity of any teacher, unless he or she wanted no curriculum at all.

It troubles me when I learn of surveys where American teenagers say that Oprah Winfrey and Marilyn Monroe are among the 10 most important figures in American history. Or surveys showing that Americans select John Kennedy and Ronald Reagan as the best presidents in history. These surveys lead me to believe that people are identifying figures they have heard about or remember or saw on television, and that they actually have little or no knowledge of American history. I shudder to think how little most people know today about world affairs, world history, or geography.

I have always believed that one of the most important jobs of the schools was to provide equal, democratic access to knowledge. I confess that I do believe in the value of a fairly traditional curriculum, at least in the subjects that I know most about, history and literature. It may be that reading the writing of other students is a wonderful classroom activity, but I would hate to see kids graduate from high school and college without ever reading classic American, British, and world literature. Maybe they will pick it up on their own, but I doubt it.

I do believe that it is possible to make a distinction between more and less important knowledge, information, and skills. If there were not, how could we educate, how could we decide what to teach every day?

I recall reading a passage from John Dewey in his book "The Way Out of Educational Confusion" where he said that it was futile to establish a hierarchy of values among studies, to say that one was more valuable than another. Thus he argued that there was no reason to favor a course in zoology over a course in laundry work, since either might be narrow and confining, and either might be a source of understanding. In theory, I suppose, this might be true, but in reality, the children who were studying zoology were learning the principles of science, while those in the laundry work course were learning to wash and press clothes.

Far be it from me to take on John Dewey, let alone Deborah Meier on these subjects. We do disagree.

And yes, I think it is bizarre to mandate constructivism, as Joel Klein did in New York City. But please note that phonics is not doing fine in the New York City schools. The last time I checked, no education school in the city was even teaching phonics to future teachers, except for special ed teachers. The mandated reading program was and is “balanced literacy.” There were no gains in reading for New York City kids on NAEP over these past four and a half years in which balanced literacy was mandated.

I need your help to figure out the small school puzzle. I know that the Gates Foundation pumped a billion dollars into small high schools. In every urban district, maybe in suburban ones, too, small schools are in. For reasons I don’t understand, there seems to be a convergence between the small school movement that you pioneered and the interests of the billionaire philanthropic sector. Why? Help me understand how this happened.

Diane

Posted by Diane Ravitch at 7:50 AM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

Dear Diane,

I just read a column about Sol Stern in The New York Times on why vouchers aren't the answer. I'm glad he's given up on them; alas, he has joined you in viewing a standard curriculum reform as the answer. The dilemma for me is not who is right on curriculum or phonics but with the idea of imposing either solution.

Democracy uses the tool of "majority wins" because sometimes only one decision is feasible: we either go to war or don't, build the highway or don't. But I'm a libertarian wherever I can be—like about the ways we organize knowledge, which knowledge is most important, and how best to help this or that particular human being learn. And within very broad limits, how we raise our kids. So while we can justify decisions about curriculum and pedagogy being made at any level of government, there are, I believe, strong reasons to keep these matters close to the site of learning. (Which doesn't equal "anything goes.") One reason has to do with the purpose of schooling, and the other has to do with the health of democratic life. Here I'm focusing on the first.

I admit that I have trouble understanding why constructivism is controversial. But I know it is—and opponents include smart democratically minded people like you and Sol. Still, I just don't get it. It seems so obvious to me that we each "construct" our understanding based on the mindset and experiences we bring into each new situation. Part of what makes democracy difficult is precisely this "fact". I take it for granted that it's how human beings make sense of the world—and I want to encourage it, not discourage this way of approaching "making sense” and resisting “non-sense.”

But my problem is that my argument doesn't exclude schools (and thus teachers and parents) from pursuing your ideal curriculum, whereas yours prohibits me (as parent or teacher) from pursuing mine.

Ah, yes. You think Klein is trying to mandate constructivism, outlaw phonics, promote social promotion, etc. I think you've got him wrong. We're agreed that he is a petty dictator and ignorant about matters he has too much power over, etc. We even agree that he tried to mandate a particular "constructivist" curriculum—an oxymoron! But phonics is doing just fine—starting with 4-year-olds, and so is the lecture method of teaching, and all NY high schools (except a few I love best) have to pass the Regents curriculum, which whatever else one can say about it is pretty traditional. Dumbed down but traditional. Probably half or more of our students are entering high school over age, and increasingly can legally drop out before they even get to high school. Social promotion??

You mention claims made to you by "academics" about small high schools, including the vocational nature of some them. I need the who, where, what? Behind some of those vocational school names is a conscientious effort to connect serious ideas and subject matter to the interests of this or that youngster. I remember listening to a graduation speech by a young woman at the first MET school in Providence. She noted that the MET was the first time anyone honored her burning desire to be a hair stylist. That fact, she insisted, shifted her whole sense of herself and schooling. It led her eventually to decide to go to college to become a social worker because, as she explored the beauty business, she realized that behind "fooling around with hair" was a deep interest in how people saw themselves and led her into taking "academia" more seriously. I take this to heart rather than dismiss it as vocationalism.

I've got plenty of complaints about how the small school idea that I pioneered (ah, vanity) has been misused. But, keep in mind, kids were going to separate small "schools" within the old big schools for a century. My own kids went through public school before smallness was a fad and were almost always in classes with kids of similar backgrounds. The exceptions were those programs we fought for in the de-tracking movement of the 70s, when "progressive" educators and parents joined together to effect changes (most of which have now been dropped). We thought they required us to rethink pedagogy and curriculum, not just who sat next to whom. Progressives and traditionalists in the private sector, as you have made clear, never tackled that task.

Dozens of NY elementary and secondary schools broke the pattern in the 80s with results certified as success by our esteemed NYC state chancellor Mills and his specially selected committee of psychometricians! These schools succeeded by breaking with the traditional curriculum and pedagogy, while also taking ideas and knowledge seriously. Differently, but not less seriously. We tried to build a "system" around some shared ideas—people do their best work when they have choices, are working in settings where they are respected, have the time and resources to conduct their work well, and have a substantial voice in making decisions. This goes for parents, kids, and teachers. I don’t think it's utopian for this to be done in the public sector, and Klein’s claim that this is precisely what he’s done needs to be exposed. Yes, it’s a fraud.

To make it real is what maybe we can both agree on?

Deb

Posted by Deborah Meier at 9:55 AM | Permalink | Comments (11) | TrackBacks (0)

Dear Debbie,

The reason that I directed your attention to the AIR study was that it included only the dozen nations that participated in both TIMSS and PISA. Otherwise, it is confusing to refer to the U.S.'s standing in these assessments because many nations participated only once. When several less-developed nations join in the assessments, our scores look better and better. Should we really congratulate ourselves because we got higher scores on TIMSS than Cyprus, Yemen, Botswana, and Iran? These countries were not included in the AIR study, nor was the “one district of China” to which you refer, because they did not participate in both assessments.

I agree with you about the rise of Taylorism. Frederick Taylor was the best-known proponent of scientific management and efficiency in the early part of the 20th Century, and he had a wide impact on American society, and certainly on American education. The best book on the subject, in my view, is Raymond Callahan’s "Education and the Cult of Efficiency," which was published in the early 1960s. Taylor emphasized that there was a best way to do everything and that the determination of the “best way” should be taken away from workers and put into the hands of the managers. As you acknowledge, Taylorism was thought of in its time as progressive, because it was supposedly “modern” and “scientific.” And certainly anything that was scientific was considered to be a great advance over traditional methods.

I tried to show in my book "Left Back" that John Dewey’s ideas resonated more with affluent school districts and elite private schools than regular public schools, while Taylor’s ideas had a profound impact on the public schools that most children attended. In addition, the I.Q. testing movement that burgeoned after the First World War was embraced in virtually all schools, even by leaders of the progressive education movement because it too was considered “scientific” and was promoted by the top pedagogical experts of the time (such as Edward Thorndike of Teachers College).

We don’t seem to be able to escape our history, so it seems awfully important to study it, to know which coils have wrapped themselves around our brains, which ideas undergird our assumptions.

The present small school movement has become a vehicle for some of the pernicious ideas that we thought our society had long ago discarded. Under the rubric of choice, children are sorting themselves (and being sorted) into different silos. A strange sort of vocationalism is emerging: I just read about a new high school that will open soon in Brooklyn called the High School for Innovation in Advertising and Media. How strange is it that children of 14 and 15 are supposed to decide on a career in advertising? How likely is it that any of them will actually engage in such a career? Yet, we have countless examples of small schools geared towards a specific job title like this one.

As it happens, I received several emails today from academics explaining that many of the new small high schools are deeply committed to “credit recovery.” That is, the students don’t actually attend classes, but they do “projects” outside schools that are not monitored by teachers and they receive credits toward graduation. This is social promotion, intended to speed kids toward graduation, to burnish the school’s reputation, and to boost the city’s 50 percent graduation rate. A teacher said, “They have to do this, they have to move the kids out regardless of their performance or they would have very little room to admit new students.” As a colleague wrote, in reference to the new small high schools: “Everyone is doing it; social promotion is rampant.”

There are all sorts of fraud being perpetrated on the public, but worse, on the students. Does anyone care?

Diane

Posted by Diane Ravitch at 7:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (6) | TrackBacks (0)

Dear Diane,

I’ve been exploring PISA and TIMSS scores via the Web and the more I know the less impressed I am at how significant it all is, especially with regard to whether we need a more centralized curriculum. For example, on the latest TIMSS there are nine participants above and 25 below us and 11 statistically in the same place. The top nine include one district of China and many quite small countries; and the list of “competitors” who aren’t part of the study at all (like France, Germany, Austria, Greece, Spain) is considerable. Furthermore, some do and some don’t have a mandated national curriculum. But, like you, I am impressed with some of the samples I’ve seen of how math is taught in some other classrooms and countries, and hope we learn from these.

But I want to pursue the issue of what it is we mean by being “well-educated”, as well as “smart”. While I am dubious about the possibility of our agreeing, I’m not dubious about the value of discussing these issues rather than falling back on empty slogans like “all children can learn”. Even phrases like “high-level thinking” or “problem solving” leave me unimpressed.

I just got in the mail a huge two-volume “compendium” called "Battleground Schools" (edited by Sandra Mathison and E. Wayne Ross), which contrasts John Dewey’s views with those of Frederick Taylor a century ago. Taylorism is what I think we’ve returned to in our current reform wave, with its focus on “scientific management”, efficiency, and enthusiasm for testing. The authors say of Dewey's followers that they were “focused on the effectiveness of schools in promoting democratic principles”. They believed schools should “(1) help each individual reach his or her own abilities, interests, ideas, needs and cultural identity and (2) [aid in] developing a critical, socially engaged intelligence, enabling individuals to understand and participate effectively in the affairs of their community in a collaborative effort to achieve a common good.”

I know, Diane, that it is far more complicated and hardly an adequate description of either. We’d disagree about both the history of progressivism (what happened to both forms of progressivism—Taylor's and Dewey's) and how the best of Dewey’s ideas should have been implemented. What else?

My concern with Dewey lies, in fact, with the first of his goals, and the degree to which he did not rethink some historically commonplace assumptions about individual human “abilities”, “interests,” and “needs”. This failure made it easy for many progressives to see Dewey’s ideas as applicable more to wealthier Americans (thus their enormous influence on private schools or wealthy public schools) than to those at the other end of the socio-economic scale—add in race. This failure made the testing movement seem like a useful adjunct to progressive ideas, and certainly did not lead to a fight against the use of IQ and so-called achievement testing in deciding who got what kind of schooling.

Nor did it sufficiently contest the related idea that “academics” were beyond the reach of the bottom half, nor that even Dewey’s supporters were defining “academics” in a narrow and sterile fashion. That’s where I join Gerald Graff in his critique of “the academy” in "Clueless in Academe" (which I mentioned earlier). And that’s where Ted Sizer’s study of American high schools picked up. “Learning to use one’s mind well”—in Sizer’s terms—turned “academics” on its head in a way that you and I may disagree about. It weakens the rigid boundaries between “practical” schooling and “academic” schooling, between the liberal arts and vocational education. Our vocation as citizens (to go back to Dewey) and as productive members of society can and are best served together. The “how” is still an experiment and should be explored with patience, tentativeness, and respect. The positive side of the 60s-70s was in the start of a number of interesting schools that tried to explore these ideas in action.

In the rush to small schools we probably both decry the ways in which choice lands us back into the same “ability tracks” that Sizer was criticizing and into the same assumptions that underlie them. The names of the new little schools make it easy to guess their demographics—the “school for arts and sciences” versus the “school for x or y career”. In too many places, as if this weren’t enough, many small schools have entrance requirements based on the assumption that “high-level academics” isn’t do-able for all.

I know our beliefs in the capacity of “all children” to learn to be powerful members of society rests on sand when I realize that the currently powerful are extremely hesitant (to say the least) to educate their children in settings which actually match the larger population. This phenomenon crosses all ideological boundaries. It troubled me, and still does, with regard to my own children a half-century ago. Private progressive schools, and private non-progressive schools, do not accept all children (even all those who can pay—on a lottery basis). They rely heavily on “test scores” in deciding who to admit. Between kindergarten and 12th grade they, furthermore, become choosier and choosier. “He’s just not ‘right’ for us,” is an oft-heard phrase in even my favorite private schools—and in an increasing number of public schools of choice.

These are subjects about which there is too much silence. Let’s pursue this train of thought for a while?

Deborah

P.S. “Dear Josie”, by Joseph Featherstone is still in print and worth reading. Featherstone has a great short chapter entitled “Five Big Ideas” that summarizes what I think he and I mean by a “good education”. But it is not “mandatable”. For a good critique of modern Taylorism, I like Larry Cuban’s "The Blackboard and the Bottom Line Why Schools Can't Be Businesses".

Posted by Deborah Meier at 9:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (7) | TrackBacks (0)

Dear Deborah,

I think a few words are in order about the AIR study of TIMSS and PISA. The 11 countries that have taken all of these tests are, in addition to the U.S.: Australia, Belgium, Hong Kong, Hungary, Italy, Japan, Latvia, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Russia. It is true that Hong Kong is a city-state. It is true that none of these is as populous as the United States. It is also true that U.S. student performance was consistently mediocre in comparison to the others.

Maybe that matters, maybe not. The report, referenced in my previous blog, is well worth reading. The authors of the report point out that one of the interesting differences among the dozen participating nations is that all except Australia, Belgium, and the United States have a national mathematics curriculum, "although Belgium has a national test that acts as de facto standards. A national mathematics curriculum does not guarantee high performance (Italy is a good example), but conversely, in the absence of a national mathematics curriculum, the U.S. has 50 separate state curriculums." I read only a few weeks ago that Australia plans to develop a national curriculum.

The authors point out that state curricula differ considerably in their topic coverage, and that textbook publishers try to cover all their bases (i.e., all the diverse state curricula) by covering about twice as many topics as they really should. Consequently, "With so many topics, U.S. teachers, in trying to follow the textbooks, rarely get much beyond teaching mathematical procedures and do not develop in their students a deep conceptual understanding of mathematics topics and their applications." Thus, we have the familiar phrase that was coined (I believe) by William Schmidt, referring to the American curriculum in mathematics, that it is "a mile wide and an inch deep." Bill Schmidt was speaking about the superficiality of coverage that is encouraged by the textbooks where everything must be thrown in to satisfy the differing requirements of so many states.

My guess is that we mandate so much in this country because we don't have a national curriculum. In lieu of a national curriculum, we have federal and state and local authorities trying to micromanage the teachers' days. Many of those authorities, as we know, are not educators; many of them are legislators trying to steer people to their pet reform.

My preference would be to set national guidelines for the topics to be covered in each grade, and to leave teachers free to teach it without constant interference by heavy-handed bureaucrats, politicians, and management consultants. I would also like to see national testing (without stakes), based on the national curriculum.

But I don't want to push your blood pressure too high, so let's turn to the last subject you raised: early-childhood education. I agree with you about the importance of play. I would hate to see kids being raised without the chance to let their imagination run free. I would hate to see preschools and kindergartens without blocks or clay or water paints.

And one of our readers, instructivist, who is a middle-school teacher in Chicago, sent a very interesting comment a couple of weeks ago about what is happening to Chicago's high schools. He tells us that Gates money is being used to "transform" all of the high schools into inquiry centers, or words to that effect. I think that is a euphemism for making everything constructivist and removing what I think of as academic content and substance from the classroom. I don't know if that pleases you, but it sure doesn't please me. Nor does it please me that the Gates Foundation, with its obscene amount of money, has the power to set education policy for one of the nation's largest school districts. I wonder if the day will ever come when the public will demand an end to this power grab by rich foundations which exercise de facto control of their schools.

Diane

Posted by Diane Ravitch at 9:50 AM | Permalink | Comments (11) | TrackBacks (0)

Dear Diane,

Agreed. It would be foolhardy to dismiss any data out of hand. Agreed also: There is stuff imbedded in these international studies that we can learn from. In fact, on the whole, the data goes against the current wave of top-down test-based reforms.

(On a side note: the potential for data bias that you refer to is not necessarily a reflection of dishonesty on the part of the studies’ designers or implementers—but in the comparability of the data collected, the state of psychometrics, and how the data is publicly reported.)

One thing we can learn from international studies is that it may help if decisions are made closer to those who are affected by them. Not only are all the high-scoring countries much, much smaller than most of our 50 states, much less the US as a whole, but many do NOT have a national curriculum or national exams.

That’s what Linda Darling-Hammond reported to us last weekend at a meeting of the Forum for Education and Democracy! We were all startled, having bought the oft-repeated claim that international studies prove that national exams equal high scores. In some of the “high-scoring” nations, standards are set by districts, and in others by even smaller sub-units. And, none come close to doing as much mandating as we do.

Which nations was Linda referring to? At the top on most of the TIMMS and PISA tests are Finland, Australia, New Zealand, the Netherlands, Canada and South Korea. Also usually Switzerland and sometimes Japan. Singapore? That’s a city, not a State, and, after all, virtually all of our cities have had citywide standards for a long time. Some of the list above do and some don’t have “national” standards and tests, and some have standards but no national tests; Japan now does have both—but didn’t when they were ranking highest!

Also, a reminder: Most are highly advanced welfare states, compared with the US. Last year, the US ranked 20th of 21 in UNICEF’s data on the welfare of children and at the bottom of a list of 24 countries in terms of relative poverty. As in the case of test scores, how these figures are calculated is worth learning more about.

But one sentence stuck out in your letter, Diane—the notion that without such a national curriculum teachers “have to engage in guesswork about what students needed to learn.” In fact, as you know, teachers have many other choices—and always have! Their own math education, the textbook being used in their school and/or district, the NCTM standards, and the standards (and tests) set by the locality they teach in. When it comes to any individual class or child, informed “guesswork” is what life’s all about. Like any parent, much of our practice is “guesswork” based on the wisest information available to us. Sometimes (like every minute) parents have to make split-second decisions and fall back on “intuition”, past experience, books we’ve read, or what a neighbor suggested. So too with teachers. If the neighbor is a well-trained math teacher, our intuition has been honed over years of thoughtfully scrutinized teaching experience, we’ve been attentive to research in our field, and we had a good math education when we were young…….then those split-second decisions work more often, too. So good teacher ed pays attention to all of these.

Steve Koss (see your last letter) is right about the dumbness that passes for standards. Cities and states are in a competition to look good, versus “do good.” Someone wrote me recently about how Massachusetts is being touted for the rigorousness of its standards. Proof: that it includes in its 4th grade language arts test a paragraph from Tolstoy! It turns out to be an “urban myth”. However the item on Tolstoy does appear on a test published by NWEA called MAP, and the item is amazingly “easy” if one has been well-prepared on test-taking skills, not on literacy or literature.

To completely change the subject, for a moment. (Although maybe it’s right ON the subject?) I’ve been looking around the country at prekindergarten and kindergarten classrooms. I have noted that all the staples of the classrooms I taught in are now absent. No blocks (or a few old cardboard ones!), no pretend corners, no paint and clay, no sand or water, no cooking and no animals or plants! And since the classroom represents for many parents the model “learning environment” I’ll bet those things are increasingly absent from homes as well. All the ways in which humans have learned about the “real world” have been replaced by virtual realities (and take-out order dinners) carefully fed to passive watchers. I suspect the impact of introducing our young to the world in this manner will not be good. I worry how few of us are focused on this. It worries me far more these days than low scores on advanced math tests and won’t be solved by simply starting school earlier. (See Indefenseofchildhood.org and allianceforchildhood.org)

Deborah

Posted by Deborah Meier at 9:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBacks (0)

Dear Deborah,

I have read the reports of the international assessments over the years and think it would be foolhardy to dismiss them out of hand. The professionals who create them and administer them have no axe to grind; they don’t get bonuses if the scores go up or down. They are scrupulous about reporting the participation rates, the exclusion rates, the age of the students who took the tests, and all other relevant factors. Unlike district superintendents and state superintendents, they have no reason to boast about rising scores or seek better results.

The analysis of the international tests that I have found especially interesting is one published in 2005 by the American Institutes of Research called Reassessing U.S. International Mathematics Performance. This study examined the dozen nations that participated in both TIMSS and PISA. It exploded a common myth that American students do well in fourth grade, are about average compared to other nations by eighth grade, and perform dismally in senior year in high school. No, says the study, this is not an accurate characterization. In fact, when looking only at the nations that have consistently taken part in international testing, students in the U.S. are mediocre at every grade level, not ranking better than eighth or ninth out of the dozen nations.

One of the characteristics of most of the high-scoring nations was a national curriculum in mathematics. That way, teachers did not have to engage in guesswork about what students needed to learn.

While on the subject of math, there is an interesting insight about the New York State Regents that I want to share with you. A former mathematics teacher, Steve Koss, regularly writes for the New York City parent blog, and he recently pointed out that the passing score on the Regents exam in mathematics is a farce. A student need answer only 31 percent of the questions on the exam correctly in order to get a passing grade of 65. Or, as he puts it, “a paltry 31 percent is now the new 65 percent.” The public presumes (I certainly did), that a grade of 65 on an exam means that a student answered 65 percent of the questions correctly. This is not, according to Koss, the case. So much for high standards. Education Week, by the way, ranked New York as the #1 state in the nation recently in education. I wonder if those who created the rankings looked at the examination system.

Diane

Posted by Diane Ravitch at 10:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (7) | TrackBacks (0)