Living in Dialogue

Former New York Times columnist Richard Rothstein has published a powerful book at a critical moment. We find ourselves poised on the brink of change, but just at this moment, we seem to be wavering. In my view, No Child Left Behind was a dismal failure. Nonetheless as we go forward some leaders seem bound and determined to preserve many of its most destructive elements. In Grading Education: Getting Accountability Right, Rothstein has come along just in time to remind us what we should be focused on.

First, let’s remember why we educate. For this, Rothstein recalls that Franklin, Washington and Jefferson all saw enlightened citizenship as a central goal of education. He reviews a range of educational initiatives over the past 250 years, and arrives at eight key outcomes that emerge. These are:
Basic academic skills and knowledge
Critical thinking and problem solving
Appreciation of the arts and literature
Preparation for skilled employment
Social skills and work ethic
Citizenship and community responsibility
Physical health
Emotional health

If we can agree that all of these goals are important, then we arrive at the first problem with our current accountability system. It is focused almost entirely on academic skills and knowledge and even that is primarily in the areas of reading and math. Rothstein points out that when we reward one set of outcomes above others, unrewarded outcomes suffer. I see this firsthand in the poorer elementary schools in my district, where many teachers report they lack instructional time for science because of the pressure to boost reading and math.

Rothstein next treats us to a tour of the perverse results inherent in test-driven accountability. Tests lack the reliability needed to draw the high stakes conclusions for which they are used. This is important enough to warrant a quote:

If we hope to use tests for school or teacher accountability, we might be tempted to ignore the unreliability of any single student’s score and assume that some students’ good days would offset other students’ bad days; then, the average results for an entire grade or class would be accurate, a fair indication of schools’ and teachers’ effectiveness even if individual student scores could not provide such an indication. In any survey or assessment, the larger the number of students tested, the more likely it is that erratic scores will cancel each other out in an average. But as it turns out, most schools are too small to support statistical confidence that childrens’ good and bad days will average out with a single test.

He goes on to point out that the use of racial and economic subgroups makes the sample sizes even smaller, and thus even less reliable. Honest statisticians account for this uncertainty with a margin of error. However, in these cases, the margin of error is usually larger than the difference between a school that is labeled failing and one that has met its growth targets. So the lawmakers simply ignore the inaccuracy and use the data as they will. I experienced this injustice first-hand at the middle school where I taught for 18 years, which was labeled a failure in spite of substantial growth, due to subgroups not all growing at the same rate. (see my earlier post here.)

Rothstein is at his most moving when he addresses the goal that “all students will be proficient by 2014.” He writes:

Inadequate schools are only one reason disadvantaged children perform poorly. They come to school under stress from high-crime neighborhoods and economically insecure households. Their low-cost day-care tends to park them before televisions, rather than provide opportunities for developmentally appropriate play. They switch schools more often because of inadequate housing and rents rising faster than parents' wages. They have greater health problems, some (like lead poisoning or iron-deficiency anemia) directly depressing cognitive ability, and some causing more absenteeism or inattentiveness. Their households include fewer college-educated adults to provide rich intellectual environments, and their parents are less likely to expect academic success. Nearly 15 percent of the black-white test-score gap can be traced to differences in housing mobility, and 25 percent to differences in child- and maternal-health.

Yet contemporary test-based accountability policies that establish the goal of all students being proficient require that school improvement alone -- higher expectations, better teachers, improved curriculum, and more testing -- should raise all children to high levels of achievement, poised for college and professional success. Natural human variability would still distinguish children, but these distinctions would have nothing to do with family disadvantage. If true, there really would be no reason for progressive housing or health and economic policies. The nation's social and economic problems would take care of themselves, by the next generation.

Teachers of children who come to school hungry, scared, abused, or ill, consider this absurd. But increasingly, in our test-based accountability environment, pronouncements of politicians and some educational leaders intimidate teachers from acknowledging the obvious. Instead, teachers are expected to repeat the mantra "all children can learn," a truth carrying the false implication that the level to which children learn has nothing to do with their starting points. Teachers are warned that any mention of children's socioeconomic disadvantages only "makes excuses" for teachers' own poor performance.

Of course, there are better and worse schools and better and worse teachers. Of course, some disadvantaged children excel more than others. But our federal and state test-based accountability policies, anchored to the demand for a single standard of proficiency for all students, regardless of background, have turned these obvious truths into the fantasy that teachers can wipe out socioeconomic differences among children simply by trying harder.

Denouncing schools as the chief cause of American inequality -- in academic achievement, thus in the labor market, and thus in life generally -- stimulates cynicism among teachers who are expected to act on a theory they know to be false. Many dedicated and talented teachers are abandoning education; they may have achieved exceptional results with disadvantaged children, but with state and federal proficiency bars set so impossibly high, even these teachers are labeled failures.

The continuation of the rhetoric of test-based accountability will also erode support for public education. Under pressure, educators now publicly vow they can eliminate achievement gaps, but they will inevitably fall short. When these educators then fail to fulfill the impossible expectations they themselves have endorsed, the reasonable conclusion can only be that they and their colleagues in public education are hopelessly incompetent.

But the question remains -- how can schools be held accountable for the outcomes we value? Next week I will explore how Rothstein and his co-authors, Rebecca Jacobsen and Tamara Wilder, have proposed an alternative to the current test-driven approach.

UPDATE: My friend teacherken has just posted an excellent interview with Rothstein, Jacobsen and Wilder on his blog at DailyKos.

What do you think? Do you agree with Rothstein's list of outcomes? Is his indictment of test-driven accountability well-founded?

Posted by Anthony Cody at 9:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

In my blog last week, focusing on the chance that the Dept. of Education may promote some form of merit pay based on standardized test scores, I got a bit more hyperbolic than usual, and wrote the following:

But if those rewards are based on the same standardized tests that candidate Obama decried, what behavior will they promote? More emphasis on test preparation, and less time for art, science, music and history. Test preparation is educational malpractice -- it is bad for our students. We must not reward malpractice.

I see a lot of test preparation occurring in low-scoring schools. It looks like this:

Blueprint Mapping: This means we get a copy of the “test blueprint,” the list of concepts that will be tested, and map out our daily instruction to cover these concepts. This narrows the range of what is taught to the predetermined list of concepts chosen by whatever group designed the tests. I find this alienating for teacher and student alike, because it means the entire curriculum revolves around guessing what will be on the test, rather than that which excites the interests and imagination of the students.

Scripted Curriculum: Discretion is further removed from teachers who are given daily scripts to ensure they cover the material to be tested according to the schedule, and using the prescribed strategies developed by the publisher. See my objection to blueprint mapping above.

Narrow Curriculum: In many elementary schools there is little or no time for non-tested subjects such as art, music, even science and history. What we have seen in many urban areas (and many rural ones as well) is an impoverishment of the curriculum for students in low-scoring schools. They get extra math, extra reading instruction, and other subjects that are equally essential to a well-rounded, happy student are stripped away.

Manipulations: Mary Tedrow describes a strategy in her blog whereby students who are behind in math in the fall are shunted into a class where they repeat the first semester. Then they do not take the test for their grade in the spring, and voila, the school's score improves. This is similar to the observed bulge at the 9th grade caused by the many students retained at that grade to avert their downward pull on the school's scores. This bulge has expanded greatly with increased pressure to boost scores. These retentions result in higher dropout rates.

In my opinion, so long as we have tests that can be prepared for in these ways, and we continue to attach heavy consequences (punishments or rewards) to these tests, we are promoting malpractice.

I think teachers and schools SHOULD examine the test scores of our students, and we should seek to improve our instruction to respond to the weaknesses our scores may reveal. So I do not think we should simply ignore test scores. But I think the heavy consequences attached to test scores have us going way overboard in the ways I describe, with negative consequences for our students.

What do you think? Is test preparation malpractice?

Posted by Anthony Cody at 9:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (8) | TrackBacks (0)

One of the reasons I was excited about the election of Barack Obama was the chance it offered us to turn our energies in education in a positive direction.

His campaign website stated:

Obama and Biden believe teachers should not be forced to spend the academic year preparing students to fill in bubbles on standardized tests and he will improve the assessments used to track student progress to measure readiness for college.

There are disturbing signs, however, that under the leadership of Education Secretary Arne Duncan we may not have escaped the tyranny of the tests.

In his recent speech on education policy, Obama again spoke about merit pay, the idea that we should identify the best teachers and “reward them for their greatness.”

Arne Duncan later explained, saying "What you want to do is really identify the best and brightest by a range of metrics, including student achievement."

I have been researching and debating the idea of paying teachers more for improved performance for several years, and the sticking point is always the same. We do not have a clear, reliable method for assessing the contribution of an individual teacher to student learning. What is more, the primary means in place for assessing student learning are narrow and likewise inadequate. The whole emphasis of No Child Left Behind was to pressure schools and teachers to increase test scores – and it yielded the result decried by Obama and Biden during the campaign.

Test-driven reforms have lost legitimacy in the hearts and minds of America’s teachers and parents. Candidates Obama and Clinton found the mention of ending NCLB to be one of their most popular lines in their stump speeches. The public knows that schools have cut recess, kindergartens have eliminate time for play, and elementary schools have cut art, music, history and science, in order to focus instructional time on tested subjects – English and Math. They know teachers have become demoralized by the relentless pressure to boost scores. We are ready for a change.

I have heard Obama and Duncan speak of improved assessments, but until those assessments are shared and demonstrated to be of high quality, I am deeply skeptical, because it is so much easier and cheaper to use the assessments in place than to develop the capacity to assess student learning more deeply. Indeed, there are reports of a tremendous investment about to occur in improved data systems, all of which rely on the same old low-quality standardized test scores.

That does not mean it is impossible to measure student learning. The big question is can we build a system that is legitimate, and that actually expands student learning rather than narrows it. What would such a system look like?

Assessment should be tied to classroom instruction. Paul Black and Dylan Wiliam authored a seminal piece of work entitled Inside the Black Box, about a decade ago about the critical role formative assessment can play in guiding and promoting student growth. It can serve as timely feedback to both the teacher and the learner. For this reason, a solid assessment system would not only measure student performance once in the Spring, but numerous times during the school year. Teachers should play a central role in designing these assessments, so they are rich enough to encompass their instruction.

Assessment should allow students to express their understanding in more than one dimension. Most standardized tests are multiple choice and short answer, limiting the depth of knowledge that can be assessed. Students should be able to express their understanding in a variety of ways, and the use of portfolios scored with clear rubrics would allow this to measure richer expressions of learning. These portfolios can be shared with the public through open forums, at parent/teacher/student conferences, and at school-wide expositions.

Standards must be limited to critical big ideas in order allow instruction to achieve depth. Education reform policy has been driven by fear of foreign competition for far too long. There are those who believe that the tougher we make school, the better. So we shove math standards down earlier and earlier, so that 6th, 7th and 8th grade math teachers end up wasting months of instructional time re-teaching concepts that were introduced too early, and never mastered. And we have Algebra for all 8th graders mandated with little input from educators or regard for actual conditions in our schools. California’s science curriculum is likewise overly prescriptive and fact-driven. I think our students would be much better served by a more deliberate, in-depth curriculum than the current race to cram as many concepts in a semester as possible. Classroom teachers must be integrally involved in the creation of these standards.

Much of Obama’s agenda for education is positive. It is a relief to see that real resources will be flowing to early childhood education, and that there is a recognition of the value of excellent teachers. But we have fought the phony equivalence of test scores and student learning for too long to allow it to continue to distort our schools and harm our students. Yes, we want accountability for student learning. Yes, we want authentic assessments. Yes, we want rewards for excellent teachers.

But if those rewards are based on the same standardized tests that candidate Obama decried, what behavior will they promote? More emphasis on test preparation, and less time for art, science, music and history. Test preparation is educational malpractice -- it is bad for our students. We must not reward malpractice. To truly improve learning, rewards should be based on legitimate measurements, not the discredited tests that sunk No Child Left Behind.

As we assess, so shall we teach.

What do you think? How can we identify and reward excellent teachers? How can we best measure student achievement?

Posted by Anthony Cody at 4:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (13) | TrackBacks (0)

I have been writing about teacher turnover in my urban district because I think it is critical that education policy be informed by real on-the-ground data. Numbers alone do not tell the story. Last week we heard from two urban teachers, one in the San Francisco area, and one (in the comments) in Philadelphia, who shared their similar realities and the reasons they will be leaving soon. The portrait they drew is backed up by statistics that show that after three years, 55% of the teachers who start out teaching in Oakland will be gone. This University of Pennsylvania study just released points to the fact that if we could successfully deal with the turnover problem, current shortages of math and science teachers would disappear. The problem is not that we produce too few, but that few will stay.

We are at a crossroads in the quest for teacher quality. Diane Ravitch wrote critically recently of the tendency to seek miraculous saviors for our schools. If only we could draw our teachers from Ivy League schools, then we would have the best and brightest capable of inspiring our students. And while we’re at it, let’s weed out the old-timers responsible for the mediocrity that is prevalent. But my experiences tell me that just won't work.

I taught at an urban middle school in Oakland for 18 years. We had the same challenge with teacher turnover that I have described here, and our science department of ten teachers was losing two or three teachers a year. This was about ten years ago, when the state of California still had a nickel to spare, so we got a small grant to support professional development. We set a goal of retaining our teachers. We paired each novice teacher in the science department with a veteran to support and coach them. We held department meetings where we shared curriculum and assessment strategies. We engaged in Lesson Study together, where we would observe one another teach, and then discuss how the students were learning.

When the next school year began, we had retained 100% of our science teachers. These teachers were not all natural geniuses, but they were engaged in a community of learners, and they were growing. We all felt as if we were gaining a better understanding of our students, and we were working across the school to create an atmosphere of seriousness and pride about science. We knew there was a similar need for support across the District, so we used some additional state funding to connect with other teacher leaders at other schools to offer broader support. For two years we led periodic professional development sessions where curriculum and strategies were shared. (see my old web site here.) There were even a few beginning teachers who stepped forward and shared with their peers.

But the state funding evaporated six years ago. For a number of reasons, conditions at my school began to resemble those described by the teacher last week. We had a fantastic team at that school, including two NBCTs, but we could not overcome the pressures we faced. Today, just eight years after we managed to retain every teacher, only one teacher from our team of ten is still at that school.

Before we can solve these challenges we have to be clear about what success looks like. Success looks like a team of teachers of a range of experience working together to learn how to meet the needs of their students. That team could have some trailblazers, some stick-in-the-muds, some techno-wizards, some Luddites. That team has the time and money to create quality time to meet and collaborate to create the curriculum and assessments the students can best respond to. They meet and agree to engage in some systemic form of reflective practice such as lesson study or teacher action research. They wrestle with the real challenges and disagreements that arise, and come up with solutions that work across the school. The school has an administration dedicated to preserving the sanctity of the classroom learning environment, with the resources and will to do so. The school has a proactive relationship with parents and the community, so it is clear we are all working as a team to advance the interests of all of our students. The school has a means of communicating what the students are learning, through public displays, student-teacher-parent conferences or school-wide expositions. These are the things that promote pride and a culture of learning at a school, and forge strong connections with parents and the community.

We must also be clear about what is NOT working. It is not working to bring in a revolving cadre of novices, no matter what elevated strata of academia they come from, to teach our students for a two or three year stint and leave. As the baby boomer generation of teachers retires, the proportion of experienced teachers at our urban schools will dwindle further, and we will lose a vital source of wisdom and knowledge. For a learning community to form, there must be a balance between those with experience and the novices. If there are twice as many novices as veterans, the vets are likely to close their doors and let the novices sink or swim. It takes a lot of energy to support a new teacher, and if that teacher is not committed to stay beyond a year or two, that may not feel like a good investment.

It is not working to think we can make up for inexperience and the absence of coherent collaborative professional growth by giving teachers a collection of techniques applied through periodic professional developments performed by outside consultants.

It is not working to pay our teachers poorly. We must pay our teachers enough to make the profession one people can choose without sacrificing their own families. We expect teachers to be compassionate and somewhat altruistic, but we should not have to live in poverty, unable to purchase a home or send our own children to college.

Some of the comments on last week’s post focused on possible weaknesses revealed by the teacher’s description of her situation. I think it is a mistake to expect perfection from anyone, most especially our new teachers. We want them to stay and grow and thrive. A few may intuitively understand how to challenge their students to greatness, how to communicate effectively with parents, and how to garner support from their administrators. But most of us took years to get a handle on these things, and had many mentors along the way that showed us how. We need our new teachers to be engaged in a community that models these practices and supports them as they learn.

We must have some stability and continuity in order to build the kind of collaborative practices that elevate the whole school. This will not come about through any saviors on white horses. Miracles are remarkable due to their rarity. We need something much more common, if more difficult to sustain – investment and hard work. Teachers are already working hard. We need the investment of resources, and a bit of faith, that, as President Obama asserted last year, we are the ones we have been waiting for.

What do you think? What does success look like to you? How can we best get there?

Posted by Anthony Cody at 12:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

As I have written, I work to support science teachers in Oakland, seeking to retain them so as to strengthen instruction, and so our students can benefit from their experience. As the year has progressed, it has become clear that this is a difficult challenge, and so I have been trying to delve into the reasons our teachers are leaving. Last week I wrote about the many pressures these teachers face. This week, I want to share a message I received from a young science teacher in an urban Bay Area school district who is preparing to leave. If we are to address this problem, we need to listen.

I am a middle school science teacher. I have taught at the same school for the last four years. One of my classes has 33 students, 11 of which have an IEP. The rest of the students are low-skilled. Along with low skills comes bad behavior. Yes, I do have a teaching assistant, but that’s not enough. There need to be fewer bodies in the classroom at one time. Math and English classes have reduced class sizes (at the most 20) because our country and state have deemed them more important subjects than history or science. Science uses the same skills as are needed in Math and English. I have complained to my administration about the class size and a reduction is promised in the near future.

The administration tries to help but really they are just the district’s tools. Administration provides no direction, just directives. Each year there is a new magic bullet that will answer our school’s problems. And each year, the staff is forced to attend some new training. Each training costs the district thousands of dollars. In my four years at this district, I have seen something new introduced each year. If we are in such a budget crisis, why are we spending our money so carelessly?

The district is flailing their arms and grabbing onto anything they heard that worked somewhere else. The district and the administration have no focus. Their focus should be on the learning or the lack of learning taking place in the classroom.

One way the administration could increase learning is by suspending students that are continuously disrupting the classroom and school environment. At my school, we have a number of students that yell out, say and do inappropriate things and are disrespectful to other students and adults. These students take away class time and causes a sense of chaos. Interventions should be in place for these students, but we have none. For each student, the school gets a certain amount of money and if students are absent or suspended the school loses that money. The district pointed this out to us. They made it clear that the amount of money lost to suspensions in one year was equivalent to an administrator’s salary. Since then, these students continue to wander the halls and sit in the classrooms with this disruptive behavior.

As a teacher, I try to contact students' homes if they are having behavioral or academic problems. Most parents say they are going to help out and talk to their child. Often there is no change and if there is change, it is short-lived. The students who really need a call home often have given me numbers that do not work. Parents and the community have become more of a distraction than anything else. Earlier this month, there were two fights. One fight was between two parents and the second fight was between two adults from the community involving guns. Both incidents occurred in the same week and in front of the students after school.

I often leave school feeling defeated. I come back day after day because I am motivated by a paycheck and health care (neither of which are that great), and the hope that I will be able to pay off my student loan one day. I did not start off with this bleak outlook. I always wanted to be a teacher. The teachers I had growing up inspired me. I went off to college and majored in Marine Biology. I could work in the field but I would rather teach science. After teaching here for four years, I often wonder if I made the right decision. Many friends and colleagues point out that maybe I just need to teach somewhere else, and I agree with them.

What do you think of the issues this teacher raises? What changes do you think could be made to help teachers like this find more success?

Posted by Anthony Cody at 10:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (16) | TrackBacks (0)