Living in Dialogue

Our students arrive at school with vastly different levels of preparation for the rigors of kindergarten. These children, in their first few months, will have to pass tests showing they know their alphabet and number system, and soon will be on their way to real academic work, choosing among a number of options on a test.

For example, the New York Times reports that four year olds need to pass multiple choice tests to gain entrance to the city's public GATE kindergarten program. A typical question showed the children a picture of a slice of cake and a whole cake, and a picture of a loaf of bread. Which picture went with the loaf of bread the same way?

The ignorant four-year-old in the story was unable to answer this question. "Too hard," she is reported to have whined.

Fortunately, parents are stepping in to enroll their students in programs to prepare them for this rigorous thinking. The only misfortune is that this type of preparation is not available to all.

But we have a great opportunity, with the spreading of the internet, to make such opportunities more widely available. Parents need to understand that after all, life IS very much like a multiple choice test. When I get up in the morning, I have four pairs of shoes from which to choose. Which pair will go with the blue pants I plan to wear? If I choose brown, then I am in trouble! At the grocery store, which brand of soda should I buy? Again, I have options I must choose from. Everywhere we look, we have multiple choices!

What is missing is the label. If only it was transparent that we are making these choices! I have invented a simple kit that will be made available to parents at a nominal cost. The kit consists of a set of lettered stickers that can be easily affixed on all objects and choices available to the children. For example, in the morning, orange juice, apple juice, milk and water will all be offered to the child. But before he gets a sip, he must darken the appropriate bubble. The under five group can use crayons, but by six years of age, the child can graduate to a proper number two pencil.

TV channels can be similarly labeled. Spongebob is A, Sesame Street is B, Hannah Montana is C, and so on. Want to watch, you have to bubble your choice!

Then we get to the more advanced thinking. Analogies are critical to the young mind, clearly, since they feature so prominently on all these tests. To supplement the letter stickers, I have prepared a set of NUMBER stickers that can be placed on objects as well. All appliances in the kitchen should be lettered. Then all toys should be numbered. Which toy is like a refrigerator? Which toy is like a sink? Children should be required to explain how their toy is like an appliance before they are allowed to play with it. This provides them with the critical skill of making analogies.

The children can learn! We must have the highest expectations of them all. We have allowed them to frolic in ignorant post-natal bliss for far too long. Child labor laws and the rise of the middle class in the industrial revolution is credited with the invention of childhood, but we are now in a post-industrial economy, and knowledge workers are what is needed. Childhood is a luxury we can no longer afford. Who is to say that these little minds are not able to work? I say, there is no time too early for the infant to learn. A dedicated mother I know has labeled her breasts A and B, and before breastfeeding asks the little nipper to make a choice. He is too young to fill in the bubble, but not too young to make a choice! He will have a big head start on life as a result.

What do you think? What have you done to prepare your toddler for the multiple choices ahead?

Creative Commons image by Matteo Bagnoli.

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It has been two weeks since I posted my Open Letter to President Obama here, and began a Facebook group to collect letters from other teachers around the country. More than four hundred teachers have joined, and we have collected scores of letters. I plan to assemble all the letters and on Nov. 23rd, send them special delivery to President Obama and Secretary of Education Duncan.

In the past few days, we have been joined in our effort by several outstanding teacher bloggers across the country. Here are some excerpts from their letters:

TeachMoore by Mississippi educator Renee Moore:

I am puzzled by the limited number of persons within the DOE, particularly at the senior level, with experience as highly effective or accomplished practitioners in public education. I would think that demonstration of the ability to close the achievement gap, to consistently do the complex work of teaching all students well, would be among the requirements needed to hold a top position in the federal agency that oversees education.

At the community college where I now work, the faculty recently investigated the writing skills of our incoming freshman over a six year period that paralleled the development of our state's language arts testing for public school students under NCLB. Our disturbing conclusion, borne out by hundreds of student writing samples as well as college entrance exam scores, confirmed that as the testing program accelerated, student performance correspondingly declined. A greater percentage of our incoming students exiting the public schools need remediation since the enactment of NCLB than before. Equally distressing is the disillusioning effect that this test focused culture has had on teachers and the chronic critical teacher shortages in the schools whose students were already significantly underserved. Scores of dedicated and talented teachers who want to work in high needs schools face unnecessary penalties for doing so. Not since the Brown decision, has a Federal action done so much damage to the education of those it was intended to help.

Middle School, day by day from a teacher's point of view, by Cossondra George

Funding for education is another issue which concerns me. My students deserve to have the same opportunities as students in more affluent school districts. While I realize that technology is simply a tool for teachers to use, more equitable distribution of technology resources needs to be a priority. Students at other schools are engaged with SmartBoards, new laptops with exciting software, and other gadgets that spark their imagination and creativity. My students are using laptops that are so old, most are missing multiple keys; their processing speeds are so slow working on them takes longer than handwriting a paper would; they have no cool software and won't even run online programs such as Google Earth. We cannot use our laptops to collaborate and communicate with students in other places. We cannot link to famous authors, mathematicians and scientists. We cannot use GIS software to analyze data. We are living and learning with 20th Century technology in a 21st Century world.

We are a rich nation, with many resources. Yet, too often our spending priorities are not aligned with what we say our priorities are. If our children are our priority, if we truly believe that education is the key to our future, then we need to fund education adequately. Educational opportunities should not be equitable to socioeconomic status. Our current educational system locks children of poverty into the same cycle as their parents. Until education is funded equitably and adequately, our students will not leave school prepared for their adult lives.

teacherken of the Daily Kos:

There is a basic question which I do not hear being addressed. What is the purpose of our having public schools? For me, it is to educate the whole person, to prepare our students to learn how to learn, to participate as citizens in a liberal democracy, to develop as persons, to be able to develop the skills that matter to them.

There are skills that employers will need, that we hope our children will develop. Might I suggest that being able to select the least worst from four or five choices on a multiple choice test is not high on the priorities of most employers? Are not things like the ability to work cooperatively, to learn to overcome differences, to persist, to come up with new approaches that might involve thinking outside the box, are all of greater value to almost every employer who wants anything other than a drone? Should not our schools reflect that in how they are structured, in how we teach?

Most of my students are 10th graders. Some are taking College level government in the sophomore years. Each year they have arrived in my classroom with less and less background, a direct outcome of the strictures of No Child Left Behind, which emphasized testing on reading and math, which because those scores were used to evaluate schools increasingly meant a narrowing of their educational experience. Many are frustrated with school, and have not learned how to develop ideas in speaking or in writing - these are not tested, therefore they are not valued. Tying teacher compensation mainly to test scores will only serve to exacerbate this problem.

Mary Tedrow wrote about the project at her blog, Walking to School:
Rather than reform through policymakers, we want reform through teacher voices.
I post the link so any fellow teachers can join their voices with others from around the country in getting lawmakers to heed the advice of career educators. We now have the electronic tools to make the classroom teachers' voice loom large. In addition, we are not affiliating ourselves with a union message - just talking about good practice and what works with our most struggling students. If you wish to have your voice included, please take a look at the site and add your vision.

From perusing some of the messages posted thus far, it is clear that accomplished teachers have a similar messages: Teaching is about building relationships, creating safety so young minds are willing to take risks, and running alongside our developing students rather than standing at the finish line keeping score.

Marsha Ratzel, Reflections of a Techie, writes:

Additionally we see more and more students who no longer get to do science in elementary schools. Under the microscope and intense pressure to perform better and better in reading and math, schools have cut time spent on anything but the tested subjects. One article I read said that time spent on nontested subjects (science and social studies) have been cut by 44%. 44%....can you imagine how dull it is to be in school where there is very little science and social studies. Can you imagine how ill prepared and how little background students have when they get to me at the middle school level? It's tragic.

The way in which your policy is moving is only going to continue this narrowing of curriculum. It is going to have the opposite effect that I think you want...it will not produce more scientists...in fact, I think students will be less and less interested in science if it is reduced to reading and answer fact based questions. The idea that the remedy for all the ills of science is a national curriculum...well, that's ridiculous. The only thing this will accomplish is more companies developing narrowly defined sets of facts that will generate more standardized tests for students. It isn't the curriculum that's the problem.

Please, please, please....you need someone include teachers in reform policy making. Clearly the people who advise you now don't have a clue what helps students in the classroom. I'd invite you to come to my room any time, any day and talk with my students. They'll tell you in a second what helps them learn more.

What do you think? Will you add your voice to the chorus? What would your Letter to President Obama say?

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Ten days have passed since I posted my Open Letter to President Obama. The Facebook group, Teachers' Letters to Obama, has grown to more than 300 members. Scores of teachers have posted their own passionate and insightful letters. I am compiling them all, and in a few days will have them delivered to the White House and Department of Education. Please come join us and share your own reality. The policymakers need to hear from us!

Unfortunately, this town, like many of the overlooked small towns in the nation, is suffering. With the state of the economy this year, what little industry that was here has been closed or has been forced to lay off a large number of employees. So, the small number of jobs is getting smaller. I have not seen any benefit of stimulus money, only more people jobless, fewer opportunities to find work, and high budget and salary cuts in the school system. The only people who can help the economy have been hurt the most: the average working citizens. These are the taxpayers who fund the school systems and the welfare that their neighbors live off of. The community is crumbling. How are extra regulations, standardized tests, and improvement-based funding going to relieve this problem? They will not, and cannot. We need new methods to build community stability and therefore enhance the county's educational system.
Elizabeth

I continue to be concerned with "merit pay." I work in an urban school which has been dealt many blows. Now, my immediate neighborhood has become more impoverished and we are serving almost 95% of our students FREE breakfast and lunch. On top of that, I am teaching in a special ed. kindergarten class. My students may never meet the critical mark forced upon us by the state. Does that mean I do not teach them? NO, but I have to teach them at the level they are at... I can't expect them to compose a sentence if they can not even write their name on a paper. My fear is that the current policies are going to punish teachers who choose to teach in my position because the population they teach is not ready to meet the standards that "someone" has set in place. What is to become of schools like mine? Chances are, quality teachers will be run off to districts that have a chance, and the students in my district will continually have new and inexperienced teachers.

I have been unhappy in my career path in the past few years because I feel that the TEST is all that we do. I have no freedom to teach my students about cultures, diversity, or community because I have to be teaching 2 hours of reading from the prescribed curriculum, math from the prescribed curriculum, and still expect exemplary behavior (without any time to teach and review it). My students now are not leaving my class any smarter than they did when I had more freedom to teach what they needed, while sneaking in a little fun and excitement. In fact, I think they are suffering because there is no magic left in my class...all there is are the TEXTS... which we have to use in order to improve test readiness.
Jennifer

I have taught young children for 14 years, and am appalled at the direction that education seems to be taking. My preschool students are mostly small town or rural children of poverty. I try to provide them with a nurturing environment which will stimulate their natural curiosity, love of learning and enjoyment of school. In recent years, kindergarten has become increasingly regimented, with little time for social interaction and much time spent working at tables or being lectured to.

The mandates handed down by the federal government do not reflect good practices or understanding of current research regarding how children learn. All this pressure on teachers and children to perform leaves little room for the things that make life and learning worthwhile: creative expression, the excitement of discovery, the joy of learning.
Martha Garner-Duhe, Lafayette, LA

Please allow us to address how the course set by you and Secretary Duncan will not create the future you are working toward in other areas of public policy. We believed you were listening to us. Now, we aren't certain. Allow America's teachers into your circle. Please create a National Forum for the Teacher Voice. We are policy leaders, researchers, authors, and curriculum experts. We work a second job on weekends to make ends meet and then purchase classroom supplies from our own pockets. We know that the high stakes tests that we are doing everything we can to help our students pass actually fail to equip them for jobs for which they must compete in the 21st Century.
Jennifer L. Barnett Teacher, Alabama

Update: Our letters posted here and on the Facebook site caught the attention of a reporter from NPR's Morning Edition, who phoned me a couple of days ago for an interview. The story ran yesterday, and can be downloaded here. He captured a small bit of our frustration, but we have a lot more work to do to get our message out.

What do you think of the perspectives shared here? What is the reality in YOUR school? What do you want our policymakers to know?

Photo by Anthony Cody

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Three days ago I posted this open letter to President Obama, asking him to take a closer look at the education policies being enacted by his administration. I invited people to add their own messages to President Obama in the comments, and set up a Facebook group for this purpose as well. Thus far 35 people have posted their thoughts in those places, and 163 have joined the Facebook group. Here is a sample of what is being said:

Teaching is the only profession I can think of where the experts (the teachers) are not the ones driving the reforms/formulating the policy. Instead we have the people who fled the classroom and spent the majority of their careers telling those of us who remained in the classroom how to be better at what they fled.

That would be like the guy who worked on cars for 2-3 years leaving the oil pit and spending the next 30 years telling mechanics how to fix your car. Who knows more about fixing your car? The one who quit fixing them?...or the one who stayed and did it year after year after year?

Exactly.

Teachers need to be the ones at the table - telling Congress what we need for them to do. Please pardon me for saying this - we teachers need to be telling you what we need for you to do. NOT the folks who taught for a couple of years and left to go on to decide policy the rest of their careers - but those of us who stuck with it and learned from our years of experience and advanced study.

Kelly Meuller, Missouri

Remember that policy levers (RTTT grants, pay for performance, national standards and tests, alternate entry into teaching, non-standard school governance models, and mandating high-tech statistical analysis of achievement) are merely things that policy-makers can do. We can expect those things to shift the balance of decision-making power. But we cannot and should not expect policy creation to shift actual classroom practice or change our mindset from "punishment" to "investment." Reaching our potential will never happen unless and until instructional practice--what happens between teachers and their students--radically changes.

Nancy Flanagan, Michigan

The most important thing I can teach is critical thinking. That isn't assessed on the standardized tests we use in our state achievement tests. Since we have had to teach to these tests there isn't as much time for teaching higher-level t...hinking. Also, creativity has fallen by the wayside. Creative thinking exercises are as important as ever, yet, there is no emphasis placed on giving students creative opportunities.

I hope President Obama will deliver on his promises and listen to those of us who are on the "front lines." Administrators and politicians really have no idea what we do. They don't realize that so many of us live to teach. Teachers need to be listened to and heard. Law makers need to support us so that we can support our students and give them what they need to be contributing citizens.

Roberta Zivanov

Those teachers we so fondly recall are still there, but now they are restricted by a system that instructs teachers to remove the creative process and instead teach their students to "critically" analyze between a set of possible responses to a given question and learn to recognize which of four possibilities is more correct than the other. So teachers have become coaches that reinforce strategies based on a formula that two of the responses will likely be ridiculously errant, while the two remaining possibilities will have a semblance of correctness, yet one answer is more perfect than the other, and it is the student's task to spot the more correct answer and make that selection.

When I was learning, the best lessons were the ones where the teacher through his/her initiative would inspire in the student the importance of the subject matter while challenging the student to develop the lesson further through the students own enterprise.

Albert Pardo

On the subject of merit pay, I would simply remind you that while some teachers have students who come to school prepared to take on the rigors of learning, others are not so well-prepared. Can we consider merit pay when it doesn't take into account the hand a teacher is dealt? I am reminded of the "Blueberry Story"---about a businessman (a business dealing with fresh fruits) who thought he could run schools just like a business, only to be reminded by a teacher, that, when HE receives a batch of blueberries that are not up to his standards, he can refuse to take them, teachers take each of these blueberries (students) as they come, with all their differences (ADHD, ADD, Autism, Asberger's, OCD, ODD, low/high IQs, etc.) and take each one as far as we can.

Jacque Verrall, Washington

I hope that President Obama would push for educational policies that mirror the private school education (Sidwell Friends) his daughters enjoy. Many politicians send their children to this school. Is Sidwell caught up in a testing frenzy? I have a relative who also attends this school and I've never heard any mention of the school curriculum focus being on improving test scores. Why is the Sidwell model not the model for public education?

Sigrid Wurthman

I respect your goals for education and the level of engagement you had on this topic while working in Chicago. But I am concerned that the approaches you are using will throw the baby out with the bath water. In attempting to reform education, much of the emphasis seems to be on YOUNG teachers as role models for what is right. I urge you to work more closely with veteran teachers who are successful with high-risk students. These teachers have been through the high-energy, ultra-involved phase that young teachers experience, but have avoided the burnout that leads many new teachers to give up in frustration. The oft-cited culprit for burnout is "the system;" but the goal of changing the ENTIRE system lacks focus, and therefore support, from some of the more experienced educators. Listening to successful long-term educators, in addition to younger teachers, would give the Education Department an idea of how to triage the areas of public education in need of attention. It would also avoid organized opposition to reforms.

Adrienne Mooney Karyadi

What do you think of these views? Will you add your own voice to the dialogue with President Obama?

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Dear President Obama,

I was one of the millions of teachers across the USA who actively supported your candidacy. I organized a fundraiser with fellow educators, and walked my neighborhood precinct during the primary. I used my blog on Teacher Magazine to share your vision. I took heart when I read on your campaign website:

Obama believes teachers should not be forced to spend the academic year preparing students to fill in bubbles on standardized tests. He will improve the assessments used to track student progress to measure readiness for college and the workplace and improve student learning in a timely, individualized manner. Obama will also improve NCLB's accountability system so that we are supporting schools that need improvement, rather than punishing them.

You have spoken eloquently of a new era of mutual responsibility for our schools, and have called on parents to take a greater role in their children's education. The provision of health care for families without it will be a tremendous help to our students, so this work is deeply appreciated. This year ARRA funds have saved many thousands of teachers' jobs, but we have a huge problem looming. State budgets, and the schools that depend on them, remain in dire straits. It appears that Race to the Top funding will not be used to save jobs or plug massive holes in state budgets, but instead will be used to "drive reforms." But these reforms do not enact the vision you have put forward.

As it stands now, Secretary Duncan has initiated policies to:

• "Turn around" 5000 of the nation's "worst" schools (based on test scores) although recent reports from Chicago reveal that the 5,445 students displaced by his school closures there did not do any better than before.


• Tie teacher pay to test scores, though research and common sense suggest this will result in even more narrowing of the curriculum and teaching to the test.


• Insist, in spite of more and more research that questions their effectiveness, that charter schools should be dramatically expanded.


• Rank teacher preparation programs - once again, by how well they increase student test scores

We have had eight long years of No Child Left Behind, which systematically assaulted our schools by establishing impossible to meet test score targets and Byzantine rules about subgroups. Your election a year ago was supposed to change all that. But thus far the policies we see are actually worse than before.

We can agree that teacher quality is critical for the success of our schools, but test scores are a wholly inadequate means to measure or improve quality. Furthermore, you have a Secretary of Education who is not listening to teachers. Teachers need to be active partners in school reform at every level, from the classroom up to the cabinet meeting. Right now our views are being shut out and ignored, and we are not represented. This is driving morale down at a time when our schools need to rally together for our students.

If teachers are demoralized and sidelined, we are lost as partners in the change process. We will remain the subjects of change rather than agents, and our creative vision will be missing. This is the biggest reason NCLB has failed, and will continue to fail under Secretary Duncan so long as he maintains this direction.

It does not have to be this way. Teachers are ready for change, ready for mutual responsibility, ready for better assessments of student learning that honor our classroom practice and our students' capacity for critical thinking. We are ready, but we are still waiting to see these things.

I urge you to take a closer look at the policies that are being implemented by the Department of Education.

• Review the report recently offered by the National Academy of Sciences which points out many flaws in the Race to the Top guidelines.


• Review research that reveals that charter schools are no better on average than their public school counterparts.


• Pay attention to the continued narrowing of the curriculum that you decried as a candidate.


• Listen to the deeply held concerns of this nation's classroom teachers.


• Hold your Secretary of Education accountable for enacting the vision that you campaigned on, that gave so much hope to millions of teachers and students across this country.

Your supporter still,

Anthony Cody

What do you think? Will you join me in signing this letter? Or authoring your own? What would you tell Obama if he joined you for lunch today?

image by Anthony Cody

Update: I created a Facebook group to allow teachers to post their own letters to President Obama, or sign on to others that are posted. Come and speak your mind.

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Baby Einstein videos were supposed to make babies smarter by playing them classical music for hours on end. But guess what the research showed? The videos actually DECREASED the rate at which the little ones learned words! The Disney Corporation is actually offering refunds to the parents who wasted $15.95 on this miseducative junk. The hours and IQ points the children lost will never be recovered.

But at least Disney is minimally accountable for the dollars wasted on its product. Our government should be so scrupulous. Eight years ago we heard about the "Houston Miracle," the amazing test score gains that supposedly resulted from the high expectations set by school leaders there. Houston Superintendent Rod Paige was appointed by GW Bush to be Secretary of Education on the strength of these lofty results.

These results were used to justify the NCLB policies that hold schools accountable for test scores and under the belief that this would force them to improve.

But a few years later the Houston Miracle was debunked. It turned out that schools there systematically manipulated the system to generate better numbers. Students in the 9th grade were held back so as to avoid lowering the average scores on tenth grade tests. Thousands of dropouts were hidden. And principals received $5000 bonuses for their great statistics.

Now here we are and it is déjà vu all over again. Secretary Duncan is continuing and in many ways intensifying the practices of NCLB, based on the supposed successes he presided over as CEO of Chicago schools.

As former president Bush once said, "fool me once...shame on you ...you can't get fooled again." A report came out today that reveals that the ambitious program of school closures initiated under Duncan did not work. The report states: "there was almost no difference in achievement for students whose elementary schools were closed from 2001 to 2006, mostly because the schools they later went to were among the city's worst."

Nonetheless, Duncan has called for the "turnaround" of 5000 of the nation's worst schools, citing his success in Chicago as justification.

Other reports show that during Duncan's tenure in Chicago test scores improved very little, and the achievement gap actually widened.

To be fair, I do not believe standardized tests should be used as the only measure of success. However, the Duncan administration has made it clear that test scores will continue to be the primary drivers of reform, so it is only fair to apply this to his own system.

This week another big blow came to the credibility of Duncan's Race to the Top when the National Academy of Sciences released a strongly worded report questioning the research base of its reform strategies.

The NAS rarely takes such a public stand. The Board on Testing and Assessment (BOTA) made a number of sharp points responding to key elements of Race To the Top:

They warned against the use of the National Assessment of Educational Progress as means of checking achievement data for specific initiatives, because it is not designed to reveal performance at the local school or district level. They also warned that NAEP's validity flows from the low stakes attached to it. If it becomes important, schools will "teach to the test," and this will invalidate the results.

They are also very clear about the weakness of systems that rely on a single set of tests to measure achievement:

We encourage the Department to pursue vigorously the use of multiple indicators of what students know and can do. A single test should not be relied on as the sole indicator of program effectiveness. This caveat applies as well to other targets of measurement, such as teacher quality and effectiveness and school progress in closing achievement gaps. Development of an appropriate system of multiple indicators involves thinking about the objectives of the system and the nature of the different information that different indicators can provide. Such a system should be constructed from a careful consideration of the complementary information that is provided by different measures.

The use of the value-added model was also questioned, and the BOTA pointed out numerous specific problems with this approach.

1. Estimates of value added by a teacher can vary greatly from year to year, with many
teachers moving between high and low performance categories in successive years
(McCaffrey, Sass, and Lockwood, 2008).
2. Estimates of value added by a teacher may vary depending on the method used to
calculate the value added, which may make it difficult to defend the choice of a
particular method (e.g., Briggs, Weeks, and Wiley, 2008).
3. VAM cannot be used to evaluate educators for untested grades and subjects.
4. Most data bases used to support value-added analyses still face fundamental
challenges related to their ability to correctly link students with teachers by subject.
5. Students often receive instruction from multiple teachers, making it difficult to
attribute learning gains to a specific teacher, even if the data bases were to correctly
record the contributions of all teachers.
6. There are considerable limitations to the transparency of VAM approaches for
educators, parents and policy makers, among others, given the sophisticated statistical
methods they employ.

They conclude,

Even in pilot projects, VAM estimates of teacher effectiveness that are based on data for a single class of students should not used to make operational decisions because such estimates are far too unstable to be considered fair or reliable.

They point out that the large-scale tests currently used for accountability purposes are very different from the sorts of tests educators should use for more frequent checks on student understanding, and that the Department of Education should be careful not to promote the inappropriate use of such tests. This sentence jumped out at me:

Assessment of complex reasoning and problem-solving skills typically demands assessment formats that require students to generate their own extended responses rather than selecting a word or phrase from a short list of options.

It appears that Secretary Duncan is preparing to spend more than $4 billion of our money on reforms unsupported and even proven worthless by solid research and concrete experience. The hucksters that sold us Baby Einstein videos are giving refunds for their product. But Rod Paige and George W. Bush have not offered us a refund of the billions spent on NCLB. And we are getting ready to spend even more billions on the next surefire cures for our schools.

I do not know what combination of solid research, legal pressure and conscience prompted the Disney Company to offer refunds on Baby Einstein videos. But I think we need to figure it out, and apply the same combination to Arne Duncan and the Department of Education, because it looks as if we have another boondoggle in the making.

What do you think? Should we be demanding a refund for NCLB? How about Race to the Top?

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It may be a strange place to turn, but humans are learning about economics by studying the behavior of monkeys. As I learned this morning listening to Morning Edition's Planet Money segment, a primate ethologist by the name of Dr. Ronald Noe, from the University of Strasbourg, has been doing experiments with vervet monkeys. Monkeys, like humans, have a social structure. But with monkeys, grooming takes the place of money. High status monkeys are often groomed, and do very little grooming of others. Low status monkeys must earn their place in the monkey world by grooming their "betters."

Dr. Noe's team did a clever experiment. They taught a single low-status monkey how to open a special container filled with tasty apples, which were then available to all. Within an hour, this low-status money was enjoying new status, lying back and being groomed.

Then Dr. Noe taught a second monkey this ability. Now the first monkey was not the only one with this special ability - and guess what? The grooming she got dropped by half. The monkeys intuitively knew this skill was no longer so precious, and the "price" she was paid for it dropped accordingly.

This makes me think of two things related to education issues. First of all, we are constantly told that "all our students" must be prepared to go to college. The students themselves are told this will guarantee them a middle class income. But if the monkeys are any indication, the more of our students we get to college, the less special these abilities will be, and the lower the rewards will be for having the skills a college education gives us.

And let's take a look at the teaching profession. Teachers have some special skills, but, like can-opening monkeys, can be replaced relatively easily. The amount of skill or responsibility a job requires seems to actually have zero connection to the amount of pay. Just look at airline pilots, who must have thousands of hours of training, and have hundreds of lives in their hands - yet are paid miserably. Simply because there are plenty of people who want to be pilots, and are willing to work for peanuts.

There is a time-worn solution to this dilemma. The can-opening monkeys need a union! They need to be willing to act together to withhold their can-opening services to bargain for a decent rate of pay. The pilots' union has been greatly weakened by deregulation of the airline industry, which allowed regional carriers to make cut-rate contracts for pilots.

Teachers have two of the strongest unions still standing in a largely disorganized American workforce. But the strength of these unions has been greatly undermined, in part because the unions have been portrayed as opponents of educational reform. But if our profession is going to have decent pay, and the ability to advocate for ourselves in our working conditions, we absolutely need an organization that can bring us together to act together - and to withhold our services if necessary.

What do you think? Do teachers need unions?

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Americans have grown accustomed to being on top. When fascism spread and the Japanese attacked in the 1940s, we retooled our factories and sent our soldiers to war. We rewarded our returning GIs with college educations and access to loans to buy homes. We extended assistance to our vanquished rivals and helped them rebuild their countries. We took advantage of the industrial vacuum created by the destruction of our rivals and, for a while, were on top of the world. But somehow, along the way, we got the idea that we were on top because we were smarter than everyone else.

That idea echoes in education reform rhetoric today. Sometimes it feels as if we are fighting the last war, with calls for a new Sputnik-fueled push for education to beat our economic rivals. Young people are told by our leaders that if they work hard and go to college, they will prosper. We are told that our economy will beat back threats from abroad if our workforce is well-educated. But I am feeling a bit skeptical about the promise of education to fix what is wrong with our economy.

It was the very smart and well-educated financial wizards who invented the derivatives and credit default swaps that have destroyed our economy. Their ingenuity was our downfall. Across the country college-educated people are finding themselves out of work, with few prospects for employment. Those that took out big loans to finance their educations are in the worst shape of all.

And higher education is becoming dramatically more expensive, and thus will soon be out of reach for even more people.

Brains and education are not enough. We need to be smart enough to save our economy from our own worst tendencies.

We are beginning to realize that wealth comes from producing real things. Wealth is produced when we create something of value to others. There is a limited value in financial services, but most of the trillions that industry generated over the past decade were illusory, and now that they have vanished we are all paying the price. The basis of our economy has to be growing things, building things, and harvesting energy. We need to get over the idea that we will get wealthy through speculation and catching the next bubble on the way up. Too many people get hurt when these bubbles pop.

We also need to reappraise what makes us feel wealthy. We all need a basic level of shelter and food, but beyond that, we can live in luxury if we appreciate the things that are free in our lives. The beauty that comes from art we create, the joy we get from walking in nature, the pleasure we get from the company of friends. These things are much more precious than the mansions and toys our culture has become fixated upon.

Our students also might do well to learn that as industry expanded after World War Two, labor unions expanded as well. Wages did not rise just because workers were more productive. We have seen huge increases in worker productivity over the past decade, but real wages have fallen for working people. Wages during the 1950s and 1960s rose because workers organized themselves into powerful labor unions that defended their interests. They acted together, because one worker was no match for a large corporation, but thousands together had some clout. The social and cultural changes of the past half-century were likewise the result of organization and collective action. We will need to act together to create the change we want.

We also need to press the reset button on our educational values. Our goal should not be the degree at the end of college. Our goal is knowledge and the ability to do useful, creative and productive things in the world. The quality of education needs to be measured not by how well we get our students to score on tests, but on how capable they are at interacting powerfully with the real world. Are they able to do skillful work? Are they able to express themselves through writing, music and art? Can they invent solutions to the problems that have landed in their laps?

No multiple choice tests can give us this data. This will be seen in the work our students do - the ways they are encountering the world. Are they learning about their own community and proposing solutions to the problems they face? Can they use a knowledge of history to understand what is unfolding around them? Are they using the skills of math and writing to express new ideas? Are they able to use science to investigate the local environment? To pose and answer their own questions?

Albert Einstein once said "No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it." Our students are faced with a set of problems created by a Twentieth Century consciousness. We keep pushing them to work harder to fit into the molds for roles that no longer exist, as if that will magically sustain a system that is breaking down around us. It is time to let go of the illusions that have sustained this system. It is time to let our children help us re-imagine how things should be. Give them the permission they do not need to reshape our economy and culture, and create one that is sustainable, just and humane.

What do you think? Can we reshape our way of life? How can we best equip our students to meet the challenges of this new economy?

image by Anthony Cody

Posted by Anthony Cody at 12:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

Dr. J Myron Atkin is a professor (emeritus) of education at Stanford University. Eight years ago I was part of the NSF-funded CAPITAL Project (Classroom Assessment Project to Improve Teaching And Learning), a group of science teachers who worked with a team of researchers led by Atkin who were probing how teacher assessment practices would shift as we became aware of how much student learning could grow when we used powerful assessments. We learned about formative assessment, the value of specific teacher feedback, using rubrics and having students give feedback to one another. The researchers observed our teaching, but the heart of the work was reflections we did over the course of two years time. Atkin's belief was that assessment practices reflected deeply held values, and could only be shifted through processes that recognized this, and created space for teachers to wrestle with the values embedded in their customary practices as well as those in the new models. This thoughtful approach honors teachers as more than passive implementers of curriculum and assessment, but as thinking professionals. It also flows from a belief that daily classroom assessment, guided by the teacher, is among the most powerful levers we have for improving student understanding. This work resulted in the publication of a book, entitled Designing Everyday Assessment in the Science Classroom.

Dr. Atkin recently sent me a paper he published in the UK, entitled "What Role for the Humanities in Science Education Research?" (subscription required). In this article, he offers some insights into some issues that have cropped up recently around the nexus of education policy and research. I asked him some questions so he could share some of these thoughts with us.

Cody: Why is it that education research seems to be ignored or only cited when convenient in making education policy?

Atkin: Education policy, like all social policy, is undergirded by a set of values. Scientifically based educational research seldom addresses the often conflicting underlying values. It can't. Yes, education research can inform a decision about whether a particular method of teaching Newton's Laws seems more effective than another, but only if there is agreement about what should be taught about Newton's Laws. Teach students to state them and give examples? Teach them to state them and also understand the evidence that supports them? Understand the conception of motion that preceded Newton's Laws, better to understand their extraordinary contribution to human knowledge? Understand how Newton's Laws apply to novel situations? These kinds of questions about what should be included in the curriculum are best resolved by deliberations about what is of value educationally. And different people bring different values to the table. Scientific research alone is insufficient. What works is a different matter from what is of worth. Scientifically driven research can sometimes contribute to deciding the former. It is of little value with the latter.

Cody: What role does scientific evidence play in decisions about educational policy?

Atkin: It is often the case scientific research is cited to buttress a policy that has already been formulated on the basis of the educational values of the policy maker. When European high schools went comprehensive after World War II and moved away from different schools for students of different apparent academic ability, there was first a political decision to do so. The Swedes liked to consider themselves "scientific," so they commissioned an expensive and well-conducted study to collect data about schools that selected by ability and those that were "comprehensive." The study found that low-performing students did better in comprehensive schools. But the study was commissioned to legitimate a policy that already had been decided on the basis of a politically held position about the importance to Sweden's emerging view of itself as a more egalitarian society. Mixed-ability grouping at the secondary school level was a political priority. (The researchers did not examine the effects of mixed-ability grouping on high-performing students.)

We have come to the recognition that scientific research can be used to
legitimate policy -- despite the fact that different American think tanks predictably develop different recommendations about a given matter and despite the fact that they are staffed with people of equivalent academic credentials. The underlying values at each think tank make a difference in the recommendations in the report.

Cody: What sort of education research is of the most value in determining what course of action we should take?

Atkin: My own predilection is to focus more resources than at present to understanding what is happening in classrooms today. For example, if we're interested in improving English-language learning of six-year-olds whose first language is not English, let's identify classrooms where such learning seems to be occurring pretty well. Furthermore let's identify a range of classrooms where there appear to be differences in the classroom setting, the teacher's approach, the resources used, etc. -- yet all the approaches seem to be effective when knowledgeable people (other teachers, parents, school administrators, accreditation reports) make evaluations. Right now in this large country, many teachers are doing this work with six-year-olds relatively well -- but they're not all doing it the same way. The research community can help the profession and the public to understand variation in good practice, instead of looking for the one best way.

Teachers operate in different contexts, and they have their own strengths. Building on strength strikes me as a more effective method of improving education than solely trying to remedy weakness. The specific approaches to improving education stem from the teacher's professional and personal goals, as well as from circumstances in the class and community. If we're looking for metaphors, education improvement is more like evolution than engineering. Pushing the metaphor, each teacher works in a particular niche that has to be understood. There is enormous natural variation in American schools. Researchers would do well to focus on variation as well as similarity -- and at least do no harm.

Cody: What can be learned from more contextualized, small-scale studies?

Atkin: It's this point that I try to emphasize in my preceding comment. All kinds of challenges have been already addressed in the classrooms where a program seems to be going pretty well. Let's build on what we have, rather than implement new "solutions." Even in engineering, unanticipated side effects -- many of them counterproductive -- will arise. And if values shift, the side effects can begin to look like the main effects. We design heavy and large vehicles to go 90 miles per hour, but then people decide that fuel consumption or air pollution are more important than speed and cargo capacity. Companies with the best and brightest engineers go out of business. We design a program to teach reading to six-year-olds. Then we find out the decoding methods used are so aversive that the children taught by such methods do not read as much as students taught by less rigid methods.

Cody: What value is there in teacher action research?

Atkin: Teachers have enormous potential to improve their practice if they are encouraged to try -- and evaluate -- new approaches that grow from their own sense of how to improve their work. The effectiveness of teacher-conducted research on their own practices is enhanced when teachers work together in such an effort. How can we design assessments that more closely gauge what we really want to teach in seventh-grade science? What should we try? And what can we learn from each others' experience in the collaborative effort.

What do you think? Why is education research often ignored when policies are crafted? What kinds of research do you think are of greatest value?

Photo by J Myron Atkin.

Posted by Anthony Cody at 9:50 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The latest report from EdWeek tells us that school districts are struggling to report how every dollar of stimulus funding has been spent. Much of the money went to states to prevent the layoffs of thousands of teachers.

Edweek reports:

"The reporting requirements are so huge and so vast; they're really quite onerous," said John Musso, the executive director of the Association of School Business Officials International, based in Reston, Va. For example, officials from across the spectrum of the federal government have issued hundreds of pages of guidance and regulations, much of it highly technical, that govern how stimulus spending is to be tracked and reported.

There is no doubt that tracking this spending will consume thousands of hours of time by District-level administrators. And this is at a time when everyone's top priority should be getting resources to our classrooms.

There should be accountability for taxpayer funds. However I have to wonder how come schools are held to these stringent standards, while other institutions who have received bail-out funds have had no accountability whatsoever. Today comes the news that in spite of the banks having received more than $800 billion last year, foreclosures are higher than ever and few homeowners have benefited from loan modifications that could save their homes.

Teachers are among the most responsible members of our society. We have the most powerful form of accountability greeting us every morning - those students who show up in our classrooms. We know we need to challenge them, communicate with parents, plan engaging lessons, and monitor their progress towards meeting our goals. The best schools are ones in which peers are accountable to one another for meeting high professional standards. We agree to collaborate together to set common goals, to share curricular resources, and figure out how to build a framework for success for our students.

We are told by Secretary Duncan and others that one key to improving student achievement is to tie teacher pay to test scores. However, teachers are only one of many factors that affect student performance, and the small number of students in a given class means that one or two very high or low students could completely skew results.

Meanwhile, performance bonuses go out to bank executives who have gambled and lost with company funds, their bets (and bonuses) covered by the taxpayers. It is thought that these perverse incentive structures that rewarded risk led to the financial collapse. Providing incentives for high test scores is also likely to have perverse effects -- increasing the tendency to narrow the curriculum to focus on tested subjects and test-like lessons. Meanwhile teacher pay is the first casualty of state budget shortfalls, and we are unlikely to make up the current cuts for years.

The Green Financial Advisor reports

1. The compensation of 29 CEOs increased in 2008 by more than 1,000%.

2. Nearly three-quarters of CEOs had increases in base salary, and only 3% saw a decrease.

Incredibly, in a year in which so many companies had dismal performance, only 3% of CEOs saw a decrease in pay, which is supposed to be linked to performance

While President Obama has called these bonuses "shameful," he has declined to advocate firm limits on executive compensation. Teacher ARE taxpayers. We have our taxes withheld, and we have no opportunities to hide our income through offshore accounts or other loopholes. President Obama has slammed Americans who dodge an estimated $210 billion each year in income by using offshore accounts. However, The Hill, an inside news source in Washington, DC, reports that the Obama administration has "temporarily put aside" proposals to outlaw the practice.

Teachers have been unfairly painted as being afraid of accountability. We do need to improve our evaluation processes, and get teachers more involved in looking at one another's practice. There are robust models, such as the one developed by the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards, that actually look at teaching practice deeply. Seventy-four thousand teachers across the country have voluntarily submitted their work to this examination and met their rigorous standards. This is the sort of model our schools should be emulating. We need to shift our evaluation practices to involve teachers more directly, and to focus on deep reflection on evidence of the effectiveness of our teaching.

However, there is such a glaring double standard at work here, I believe it is time teachers begin to take our dismay beyond the teacher lunchroom. The next time our representatives show up at a town hall, I say we let them know where we stand!

What do you think? Is there a double standard at work regarding accountability? How should teachers get our voices heard?

Posted by Anthony Cody at 7:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)