September 2009 Archives

Forty five years ago, UC Berkeley was rocked by the Free Speech Movement, which erupted over the university's attempt to squelch political activism on campus.

Here is what movement leader Mario Savio said then:

We have an autocracy which runs this university. It's managed. We asked the following: if President Kerr actually tried to get something more liberal out of the Regents in his telephone conversation, why didn't he make some public statement to that effect? And the answer we received -- from a well-meaning liberal -- was the following: He said, "Would you ever imagine the manager of a firm making a statement publicly in opposition to his board of directors?" That's the answer! Now, I ask you to consider: if this is a firm, and if the Board of Regents are the board of directors, and if President Kerr in fact is the manager, then I'll tell you something: the faculty are a bunch of employees, and we're the raw material! But we're a bunch of raw material[s] that don't mean to have any process upon us, don't mean to be made into any product, don't mean to end up being bought by some clients of the University, be they the government, be they industry, be they organized labor, be they anyone! We're human beings!

There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part; you can't even passively take part, and you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop. And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!

I was only six years old at the time of the Free Speech Movement, but my parents were involved in the events that unfolded. Their bookstore on Telegraph Avenue was a hotspot in those days, and Mario Savio worked there in the 1970s. I helped organize a twentieth anniversary commemoration of the FSM when I was a student at Berkeley in the 1980s.

It is inspiring to see today's students picking up the torch and fighting for the rapidly eroding principles of public education.

Last Thursday 5,000 students and staff at UC Berkeley walked out in protest over plans to boost fees by 32%, pushing attendance out of reach for many students.

A hundred miles away, at UC Santa Cruz, students have been occupying the Graduate Student Commons building for almost a week.

One student wrote, in a Communique from an Absent Future, words that carry an echo of Savio,

University life finally appears as just what it has always been: a machine for producing compliant producers and consumers. Even leisure is a form of job training. The idiot crew of the frat houses drink themselves into a stupor with all the dedication of lawyers working late at the office. Kids who smoked weed and cut class in high-school now pop Adderall and get to work. We power the diploma factory on the treadmills in the gym. We run tirelessly in elliptical circles.

It makes little sense, then, to think of the university as an ivory tower in Arcadia, as either idyllic or idle. "Work hard, play hard" has been the over-eager motto of a generation in training for...what?--drawing hearts in cappuccino foam or plugging names and numbers into databases. The gleaming techno-future of American capitalism was long ago packed up and sold to China for a few more years of borrowed junk. A university diploma is now worth no more than a share in General Motors.

We work and we borrow in order to work and to borrow. And the jobs we work toward are the jobs we already have. Close to three quarters of students work while in school, many full-time; for most, the level of employment we obtain while students is the same that awaits after graduation. Meanwhile, what we acquire isn't education; it's debt. We work to make money we have already spent, and our future labor has already been sold on the worst market around. Average student loan debt rose 20 percent in the first five years of the twenty-first century--80-100 percent for students of color. Student loan volume--a figure inversely proportional to state funding for education--rose by nearly 800 percent from 1977 to 2003. What our borrowed tuition buys is the privilege of making monthly payments for the rest of our lives. What we learn is the choreography of credit: you can't walk to class without being offered another piece of plastic charging 20 percent interest. Yesterday's finance majors buy their summer homes with the bleak futures of today's humanities majors.

Update #1: Several hundred UC Berkeley students occupied the Anthropology library for 24 hours this weekend (Oct. 10-11) to protest budget cuts and library closings. Read details here.

Update #2: An agenda for the Oct. 24 Save Public Education conference has been posted here.

What do you think of the protest movement taking shape in California? What should be done to defend public education? What should teachers be doing?

Photo provided through Creative Commons, by Epiole.

Posted by Anthony Cody at 10:18 AM | Permalink | 1 Comment | Recommend

There is a deep thirst for justice in our schools, and a powerful sense that things are not as they should be. The desire for better outcomes for the less privileged was the original justification for No Child Left Behind, a law that placed the entire responsibility for fixing these problems on the unfortunate staffs who work with these even less fortunate students.

In his speech in Washington, DC, this week, Duncan evokes the ghost of Martin Luther King, Jr., whose Letter from a Birmingham Jail inspired the title of this blog. King was frustrated with religious leaders who counseled patience in the face of intransigent defenders of Jim Crow laws. He demanded action. Here I think we can all agree with Duncan. Something should be done - the question is what.

I started my teaching career studying the words of Martin Luther King, Jr., as they pertained to education. King was a passionate advocate for the poor, and knew very well the deprivations they faced. King advocated desegregation, but much more than that, he was a believer in economic and social justice.
At the conclusion of the Selma to Montgomery march in 1965, King spelled out his vision for the future.

Let us therefore continue our triumphant march (Uh huh) to the realization of the American dream. (Yes, sir) Let us march on segregated housing (Yes, sir) until every ghetto or social and economic depression dissolves, and Negroes and whites live side by side in decent, safe, and sanitary housing. (Yes, sir) Let us march on segregated schools (Let us march, Tell it) until every vestige of segregated and inferior education becomes a thing of the past, and Negroes and whites study side-by-side in the socially-healing context of the classroom.

Let us march on poverty (Let us march) until no American parent has to skip a meal so that their children may eat. (Yes, sir) March on poverty (Let us march) until no starved man walks the streets of our cities and towns (Yes, sir) in search of jobs that do not exist. (Yes, sir) Let us march on poverty (Let us march) until wrinkled stomachs in Mississippi are filled, (That's right) and the idle industries of Appalachia are realized and revitalized, and broken lives in sweltering ghettos are mended and remolded.

In his speech this week, Secretary Duncan described a future for our schools that we can all believe in. He says:

Let's build a law that respects the honored, noble status of educators - who should be valued as skilled professionals rather than mere practitioners and compensated accordingly.

Let us end the culture of blame, self-interest and disrespect that has demeaned the field of education. Instead, let's encourage, recognize, and reward excellence in teaching and be honest with each other about its absence.

Let us build a law that demands real accountability tied to growth and gain in the classroom - rather than utopian goals - a law that encourages educators to work with children at every level - and not just the ones near the middle who can be lifted over the bar of proficiency with minimal effort.

Let us build a law that discourages a narrowing of curriculum and promotes a well-rounded education that draws children into sciences and history, languages and the arts in order to build a society distinguished by both intellectual and economic prowess

Let us build a law that brings equity and opportunity to those who are economically disadvantaged, or challenged by disabilities or background - a law that finally responds to King's inspiring call for equality and justice from the Birmingham jail and the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.

While these sound like good goals, a closer look reveals that some of them have proven to be mutually exclusive. If you pursue accountability by measuring performance in reading and math, then you get the narrowing of curriculum we have clearly seen in the past seven years. This results in students in impoverished schools having an equally impoverished curriculum - the four hours of scripted reading and math described in the comment here this week by a California teacher.

What is more, there are a few elephants in the room, obscured by this flowery language. According to research by the Civil Rights Project of UCLA, America's schools are more segregated now than they were in the 1950s.

Latinos and blacks, the two largest minority groups, attend schools more segregated today than during the civil rights movement forty years ago. In Latino and African American populations, two of every five students attend intensely segregated schools. For Latinos this increase in segregation reflects growing residential segregation. For blacks a significant part of the reversal reflects the ending of desegregation plans in public schools throughout the nation.

Schools in low-income communities remain highly unequal in terms of funding, qualified teachers, and curriculum. The report indicates that schools with high levels of poverty have weaker staffs, fewer high-achieving peers, health and nutrition problems, residential instability, single-parent households, high exposure to crime and gangs, and many other conditions that strongly affect student performance levels. Low-income campuses are more likely to be ignored by college and job market recruiters. The impact of funding cuts in welfare and social programs since the 1990s was partially masked by the economic boom that suddenly ended in the fall of 2008. As a consequence, conditions are likely to get even worse in the immediate future.

Of this re-segregation of our schools we hear not a peep from Secretary Duncan. Only the promise to intensify accountability measures that have resulted in the drill and kill emphasis on reading and math test preparation in the afflicted schools.

Furthermore, even as the schools have become more racially segregated, the gap between rich and poor has widened. The economic crisis has placed even greater pressure on the poor, decreasing school funding, and food and medical programs that serve the poor. It is unconscionable under these circumstances to continue the ritual flogging of schools that has made NCLB such a failure.

President Obama promised a new era of shared responsibility for the school children of our nation. Thus far, however, in spite of the rhetoric, Secretary Duncan's bottom line holds schools and teachers alone accountable.

What do you think? How can we advance civil rights in the era of NCLB and Duncan?

Posted by Anthony Cody at 12:46 PM | Permalink | 2 Comments | Recommend

I have been reading a fascinating book - The Management Myth, Why the Experts Keep Getting it Wrong, in which author Matthew Stewart unveils the secrets of the field of modern management consultants, revealing that behind all the charts and claims of strategic planning, there is very little solid evidence, and even less of predictive value.

What good is a theory if it fails to predict the future? From the point of view of a scientist, we observe nature -- or human activity such as commerce or education - and make hypotheses that can be tested. Then, if we are diligent, we conduct experiments, or at the very least intensify our observations to see if our predictions are borne out.

Education in the United States remains in the throes of a monumental experiment engineered by ideologues of the left and right - No Child Left Behind. The basic theory that drives this project is that poverty and race should not matter in educational achievement, and that we can close any achievement gaps by "shining light" on them. Once this light has shone the inadequacies of these schools, they are to be inspired to improve by the threat of closure.

This approach asserts that we can drive change forward by creating marketplace alternatives, in the form of charter schools that are unconstrained by numerous disadvantages that weigh down traditional schools - such as the requirement that they accept all students in their attendance areas. We also drive change by continuously ratcheting up performance expectations until they reach levels that everyone agrees are impossible - 100% proficiency by 2014.

Here we are in 2009, with almost eight years of experience with this law. Surely by this time we should have ample evidence to determine if it has been successful.

If we were evaluating a medicine to see if it should be approved, the first question would be "Has it done the patient any good?" According to Chester Finn, one of NCLB's most ardent defenders, it has not.

In a speech earlier this month, Finn states that,

despite all the reforming, U.S. scores have remained essentially flat, graduation rates have remained essentially flat, and our international rankings have remained essentially flat. You can find some upward blips but you can also find downward blips. Big picture, over 25 years, is flat, flat, flat. In other words, all the reforming has yielded little or nothing by way of stronger outcomes.

So the medicine has not worked on the primary measure chosen by its proponents.

How have the component strategies worked? Arne Duncan's Race to the Top is requiring states to allow unlimited expansion of charters. Is there evidence that they have produced results? At best, the evidence is mixed. In Minnesota, an early pioneer in charters, there is scant evidence that they have achieved their goals. The Stanford University CREDO study released in July compared charter schools to their public school counterparts and found the charters actually had significantly worse performance in reading and math. In their favor, senior Hoover Institution fellow Caroline Hoxby recently released a report in which New York City charter schools are found to be better than traditional public schools. In the face of this confusion, Duncan has asserted that he is not for all charters - merely for successful ones. How clever! I am not sure how he will know in advance which ones will be successful once he has removed all barriers to their formation though. It seems as if this zeal for charters is motivated more by a belief that they should work than any actual evidence that they do -- especially for the ailment for which they are being prescribed.

The other step we would take in evaluating our new medicine would be to look for side effects. Here the evidence is unequivocal.

Chester Finn (with Diane Ravitch) wrote in 2007:

We should have seen this coming ... more emphasis on some things would inevitably mean less attention to others. ... We were wrong.

[If NCLB continues,] rich kids will study philosophy and art, music and history, while their poor peers fill in bubbles on test sheets. The lucky few will spawn the next generation of tycoons, political leaders, inventors, authors, artists and entrepreneurs. The less lucky masses will see narrower opportunities.

A teacher named Ellen posted the following comment on my blog this week, providing very solid evidence that this has already occurred. She works in a low-income school in California that is 87% Latino.

I can see the disparity on a daily basis, as the tight economy and the effects of NCLB with its relentless pursuit of annual "progress" narrow the scope of my students' education. Where once students had the opportunity to express themselves in art, music or organized sports, they are now forced into the straightjacket of language arts and math.

I am required to have a daily 2 1/2 hour language arts block (using a scripted program, no less) and a 1 1/2 hour math block. Science was recently added to this limited curriculum because it is now tested on the CSTs, but there are no hands-on experiments because of the time constraints and lack of equipment. Science consists of students reading from a textbook and answering multiple choice comprehension questions in a workbook.

We have zero funds for field trips for children who need it the most. Many of my students have never been farther than 10 miles from home and have very little understanding of the world beyond their violent barrio.

Even the annual zoo trip had to be canceled because the cost of bus transportation was almost doubled. Our fund raising efforts last year yielded $2500, which was used to buy instructional supplies for the classrooms.

Recently our school celebrated an increase in test scores, but teachers were castigated because the English Learner subgroup did not pass.

Many teachers at my school see the writing on the wall. By next year our school will be failing no matter how much we improve.

With all the talk about teacher accountability and pay tied to student achievement, is it any wonder that most of our staff is planning to move to schools in higher income areas?

If we assume good intent, the designers of NCLB thought their plan would lift students in poverty by improving their schools. They had their ideas, and their ideology to support them. But as we survey the results in our schools, especially those in areas of poverty, surely ideology alone is insufficient to continue down this path.

What do you think? What does the evidence reveal about No Child Left Behind? When will our politicians be held accountable for what they have done to our schools?

Posted by Anthony Cody at 10:47 AM | Permalink | 3 Comments | Recommend

Do public schools in poor neighborhoods get shortchanged while schools in wealthy communities are protected from the ravages of the cuts? It sure looks that way, according to last week's report from San Diego public radio and TV station KPBS.

Reporter Joanne Faryon went to two schools in San Diego. At the toney La Jolla Elementary, overlooking the Pacific Ocean, she found a parent organization that raises at least $300,000 every year. According to the Friends of La Jolla Elementary site,

The funds raised each year pay for educational enrichment such as art program, choral music program, technology in the classrooms, additional teacher for upper grades (lower class size), and instructional resources and materials. Additionally, funds are raised for school campus improvements.

This year they actually raised $450,000 so additional money could be spent installing artificial turf and beautifying the school. As you might suspect, fewer than 10% of the students at the school are economically disadvantaged, and 99% of the fifth graders scored proficient or advanced on the state reading and math tests.

Eighteen miles away, she found Horton Elementary, where more than 90% of the students come from disadvantaged households, and most are English learners. While the school gets a bit of additional funding for these reasons, it does not have any foundation to raise special funds. This school has no artificial turf, and there are holes in the playground where trees that were planted years ago have died. Here, 23% of the fifth graders scored proficient or advanced in reading, and only 20% were proficient or advanced in math.

There are small, affluent areas where these practices are district-wide. In Rancho Santa Fe, the elementary school is only about 2% economically disadvantaged, and parents raise enough money to lower class sizes to seventeen. About 90% of the students are proficient or advanced in reading and math. The Del Mar Union district sends a letter home every year to each family asking for a donation of $800 for every student they have enrolled. In this district, fewer than five percent are disadvantaged, and more than 90% proficient and advanced.

This disparity occurs in Oakland as well, where schools in wealthy neighborhoods like Chabot Elementary raise more than $100,000 each year through silent auctions and many other fundraisers, the money spent on classes in music, Spanish, technology, and a new library and media center.

You can't really blame parents for wanting to support their children's education, and it is really the best aspect of a community that says we pull together to give our children what they need. At one time we had a notion that the whole state was our community, and everyone was taxed at a level necessary to support the schools at a decent level. But back in 1978, Proposition 13 in California rolled back property taxes for all property owners. The proposition was sold with sympathetic images of elderly people getting taxed beyond their means as their home values rose. But the benefits have largely accrued to large corporate property owners, and the tax base for our schools has shifted onto homeowners even more. San Francisco's assessor, Phil Ting, reports that in his county,

Thirty years ago, commercial property owners contributed 59 percent of property tax revenues and residential property owners contributed 41 percent. Today, we see a virtual flip: commercial property owners contributed just 43 percent of property taxes in 2008, while residential property owners contributed 57 percent.

Now that property values have fallen, state revenues and support for schools has plummeted, and schools are in real trouble. An effort is underway to close this corporate loophole in California.

What we are seeing is that people with money are stepping forward to protect the schools in their immediate community from the full impact of these cuts. Meanwhile, schools in poor neighborhoods are forced to lay off teachers, increase class sizes, cut off needed supplies and eliminate after-school programs.

The students in poor neighborhoods are also being hit with cuts to state and local programs that support those in poverty - local health programs, support for homeless shelters, and many other programs. More than third of the funding for Healthy Families -- $144 million, was cut. This program covers 942,000 children in California, and will result in hundreds of thousands of children losing health care.

There are racial implications as well. The impoverished schools I cited above have predominately Latino or African American students, many of them English learners, while the wealthy schools are predominately white. And as Barbara Ehrenreich and Derrick Muhammed recently reported in the New York Times, this recession is having a hugely disproportionate impact on African American families.

There are two big lessons in this for me.

First of all, we can no longer pretend that money does not matter in school achievement. Rich people are not stupid. If money did not matter, they would not go to so much trouble to raise money for their schools. While test scores should not be the only measure of learning, they provide some evidence of the impact money can have - and the impacts extend beyond test scores and can be seen in dropout rates and other indicators as well.

Second, our society needs to decide if we want to continue the path we are on to widening the divide between rich and poor. Education is supposed to be an equalizer in our society, providing opportunities for all to excel. But this democratic ideal is threatened by the deprivation now being inflicted on students in the wrong schools. If we truly expect to reduce the achievement gap, here would be an obvious place to start.

This is not the fault of the schools, or of their teachers, or of their parents. In spite of our reluctance to see our country as anything other than a democratic meritocracy, we are seeing class war up close, and the poor are getting slaughtered.

What do you think? What do you think about these disparities? Who should be held accountable when schools are not funded equitably?

photo by Anthony Cody

Posted by Anthony Cody at 8:34 PM | Permalink | 4 Comments | Recommend

In July I encountered a video featuring Chinese-born scholar Yong Zhao who turned the push for global competitiveness in our schools on its head. Rather than focusing on "raising the bar" through tougher standards and more tests, he suggested we had much more to gain by enhancing what is best in American schools - our spirit of creativity and innovation.

This month Zhao published a book, Catching Up or Leading the Way; American Education in the Age of Globalization, which provides solid backing for his perspective. Zhao has an unusual background - raised in a rural village in China, he considers himself lucky that he escaped some of the tyranny of his nation's rigid schooling. He reports firsthand how the Chinese system, rooted in the keju -- the civil service exams developed 1400 years ago, has resulted in a culture that values test performance above all else. The Chinese word for education is dushu, which literally means reading the books. Until the start of the 20th century, this meant the ability to memorize classic texts and reinterpret or restate them. More recently it has meant intensive preparation for the gaokao - the college entrance exam, which has many of the same qualities as the keju.

The result of this emphasis on test ability is a systematic stifling of creativity and innovation. Paradoxically, Zhao reports, many of those who score highest on tests in school fail to live up to this potential in their careers after graduation. As a society, China has failed to produce innovations in spite of leading the world in manufacturing. In 2005, there were 21,519 patent applications from China, while more than 134,000 originated from the United States. Furthermore, most of the Chinese patents were for changes in appearance, rather than original inventions.

Zhao makes a strong case that uniform tests result in monolithic thinking. In the modern global economy, the passion that results when people are allowed to develop along diverse paths is far more precious than the large scale mediocrity that results from national standards and a test-centered (or "data-driven") school culture.

Asian leaders are keenly aware of these problems, and have launched education reforms that sound much like those being advocated here by the 21st Century Skills movement. In Singapore, Zhao tells us, reforms aim to reduce subject content and increase critical thinking. They are allowing greater autonomy for teachers and schools, and encouraging diversity and flexibility.

Zhao writes:

While the United States is moving towards more standardization and centralization, the Asian countries are working hard to allow more flexibility and autonomy at the local level. While the United States is investing resources to ensure all students are taking the same courses and pass the same tests, the Asian countries are advocating for more individualization and attending to emotions, creativity and other skills. While the United States is raising the stakes on testing, the Asian countries are exerting great efforts to reduce the power and pressure of testing.

Why are the Asian countries, which some American reformers admire, eager to abandon their education tradition, which seems to have resulted in high test scores or academic excellence, and instead learn from America? The answer is simple: because they know very well the damage that results from standardization and high stakes testing.

Zhao makes no bones about the implications of his observations. He concludes:

American education is at a crossroads. Two paths lie in front of us: one in which we destroy our strengths in order to catch up with others on test scores and one in which we build on our strengths so we can keep the lead in innovation and creativity. The current push for more standardization, centralization, high stakes testing, and test-based accountability is rushing us down the first path, while what will keep America truly strong and American prosperous should be the latter, the one that cherishes individual talents, cultivates creativity, celebrates diversity, and inspires curiosity. As we enter a new world rapidly changed by globalization and technology, we need to change course. Instead of instilling fear in the public about the rise of other countries, bureaucratizing education with bean-counting policies, demoralizing educators through dubious accountability measures, homogenizing school curriculum, and turning children into test takers, we should inform the public about the possibilities brought about by globalization, encourage education innovations, inspire educators with genuine support, diversify and decentralize curriculum, and educate children as confident, unique, and well-rounded human beings.

I believe this book helps illuminate the challenges posed by both Merrow and Ravitch this week. Zhao helps us understand why the US, in spite of the frequent sloppy indictments of our schools, remains a world leader in scientific and creative innovation. He provides a solid defense of the critical thinking skills derided by Ravitch, and warns us of the dangers of the test-centered path we are on. Most pointedly, he questions the contradiction between President Obama's condemnation of the emphasis on tests, and his embrace of "tougher, clearer standards" as the key to reform.

In his afterward, he weighs in on the latest effort to standardize education in the US:

Theoretically national curriculum standards for each subject can be useful, but unless we can develop sound standards for all subjects and knowledge we think our students should have, unless we can develop and implement valid and reliable assessment for all standards, unless we can enable our students to choose from a wide range of offerings, and unless we can attach equal value to a broad range of knowledge and skills, national standards will do more harm than good.

What do you think of Yong Zhao's perspective? What lessons can we learn from China? Which path should we follow forward?

Image provided through Creative Commons, by neuezukunft.

Posted by Anthony Cody at 10:50 PM | Permalink | 6 Comments | Recommend

Diane Ravitch shows us one reason innovation in education has proved to be so elusive over the past century. In her op-ed this week, she takes the advocates of 21st Century Skills to task for their focus on critical thinking as opposed to the bedrock knowledge she suggests is a prerequisite foundation for our students.

Ravitch echoes the point made in my post earlier this week, that project-based approaches have been around for a century. However she does not consider that a good thing. According to her: “None of these initiatives survived. They did have impact, however: They inserted into American education a deeply ingrained suspicion of academic studies and subject matter.” Here she turns reality on its head, blaming these alternative approaches for the very alienation they sought to address.

I taught in inner city Oakland for 18 years. My students often arrived lacking the knowledge Ravitch would like to emphasize. I had many 6th graders who did not know their times tables, and could not add or multiply fractions. This knowledge is taught in the second to fourth grade. Many of my students did not know the first thing about science, and could not tell you that matter is made of atoms, or how seeds grow into plants.

They had likely been taught these things, but they had not learned them. This is the fundamental challenge classroom educators meet, especially in the tough schools where many students have decided they are “not good at math,” or are uninterested in science. In order to engage our students we need to ignite the passion for learning that comes from a fresh challenge. So we see teachers like Karen Dolan in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, with her curriculum focused on the renovation of a 153 year-old mill, which has recently been attacked for lacking rigor.

In my classroom, I found that students were far more excited about experiments when, rather than simply following steps in a book, they cooked up their own recipes, with firm guidance from me to make sure they were carefully collecting real data, and conducting real investigations.

The thing I find a bit depressing about Ravitch’s view is her clear statement that we must choose between these two approaches. She writes: “Inevitably, putting a priority on skills pushes other subjects, including history, literature, and the arts, to the margins. But skill-centered, knowledge-free education has never worked.” According to her, if we teach critical thinking, we necessarily must shortchange the students in their basic knowledge. This kind of thinking has led to the incremental expansion of mandated knowledge contained in state content standards – and soon to be joined, I fear, by similarly prescriptive national standards. Taken this way, education is a zero sum game. And of course for those of us working with populations on the wrong side of the achievement gap, this is an indictment that carries real weight.

Ravitch believes that “Thinking critically involves comparing and contrasting and synthesizing what one has learned. And a great deal of knowledge is necessary before one can begin to reflect on its meaning and look for alternative explanations.” So our students must wait to think critically, until they have amassed this prerequisite store of knowledge.

The populations that most need creative, relevant approaches, are not coincidentally, those that tend to perform lower on standardized tests. Many of these students do not identify with the knowledge acquisition goals of the school system, and it is precisely for that reason that teachers have continually sought to enliven their curriculum by building real challenges for the students, incorporating aspects of their lives and community neglected by a traditional approach.

But we do not need to accept the dichotomy Ravitch poses. Our classrooms do not offer us a zero sum choice between critical thinking and basic knowledge. Over the past several years I had the chance to work with a pair of talented teachers at Edna Brewer Middle School in Oakland. Fay Pisciotta and Gabe Jenkins felt their students were not being sufficiently challenged by the one size fits all approach they had been using, so they implemented a strategy called Layered Curriculum, originally developed by Dr. Kathie Nunley. They developed three tiers of assignments, and allowed students to choose within an array of assignments targeting their learning objectives, which were tied to state science standards. These assignments included challenging projects and independent lab activities. In order to progress from one level to the next, students needed to pass an oral formative assessment given by the teacher, making sure they mastered the essential knowledge. At the end of the year, the number of students who were proficient and advanced in science at this school went from 30% in 2007 to 72% in 2008. Those that were scoring at the Basic and Far Below Basic levels dropped from 42% to 14%. Furthermore, the biggest gains were made by students who were disadvantaged – who actually out-scored the non-disadvantaged students!

Clever educators like Pisciotta and Jenkins have built basic knowledge into the foundation of creative projects. It is possible to waste a day baking bread with children, as Ravitch points out. But it is equally possible to use that shared experience as the linchpin for a month’s lessons on proportions, and gain a great deal of engagement and motivation as a result.

As Herb Kohl pointed out in this space a couple of weeks ago, there are times when it is appropriate to learn things by rote, and other times when an open-ended project unleashes great energy. If we insist that our students must master the canon before they begin to think for themselves, I believe we will continue to lose a great many of them, especially those most at risk. We need the balance demonstrated by Jenkins and Pisciotta, who show us that critical thinking and knowledge can grow side by side, without sacrificing either.

What do you think? Do we need to build basic knowledge before asking our students to think critically and analyze? What has been your experience with your students?

photo of Gabe Jenkins' classroom by Anthony Cody

Posted by Anthony Cody at 9:14 AM | Permalink | 3 Comments | Recommend

Why has the structure of learning in our country remained basically the same for so long?
John Merrow’s blog, Taking Note, this week poses an interesting set of questions based on the premise that there has been little innovation in the field of education in the past 50 years. He wonders why, and offers reasons primarily related to the flat pay structure for teachers, resulting in few incentives for innovation.

He writes:

The thirst for money, prestige and fame are reliable spurs of innovation. Living in Silicon Valley as I do, I’ve seen plenty of evidence of that. Unfortunately, public education is not the road to travel if your goals are money, prestige and fame.

Education’s ‘one size fits all’ approach to evaluating and paying teachers has to dampen enthusiasm for trying new approaches. Why bother if you aren’t going to be rewarded?

I think these are valid observations, and I believe the coming decades will see teachers embracing more differentiation in the roles we play, with more room for leadership and teachers playing special roles in schools.

But I finished his essay feeling as if the focus on technology and pay misses the point. I believe the main reason we have so little innovation is that, as a society, we remain deeply conflicted about how to prepare young people for adulthood.

The fundamental educational innovation of the past century has been the idea that young people can and should learn to think for themselves. There have been a thousand educational movements aimed in this direction. Whole language and the writing process in English, constructivism and inquiry in science and math, using original source documents in history, problem-based learning in a variety of content areas.

But as a society, Americans are not ready to allow our children this freedom.

In Science, a majority still believe in the Biblical story of creation, and are skeptical of the theory of evolution. As a result we have religious dogma presented alongside scientific theory in many schools. In California, when science content standards were designed about 11 years ago, there was a huge fight over those who wanted to emphasize the processes of science, so that students could learn science by actually investigating the natural world, and those who saw science as a body of knowledge to be learned. In the end, the latter group won for the most part, and we have a very detailed set of standards that reads like the table of contents from a science textbook.

There is a very strong movement to elevate educational standards to the national level to codify what must be learned across the country, and make it possible to measure learning from coast to coast with a single set of tests.

At the same time, there is a deep suspicion of the role education plays in “brainwashing” our children, as we saw recently in the furor over President Obama’s schoolhouse lecture. When traditionalists wanted to repeal gay marriage in California recently, their most powerful weapons were TV ads predicting that "children will be taught about homosexual lifestyles in school." I still recall in California how a wholistic testing system developed over a decade ago under state Superintendent Bill Honig was attacked because one of the writing prompts asked students to “think of a time in their lives when they wanted to rebel,” and write about that. Some parents were outraged and accused the schools of fomenting rebellion. The assessment system was dismantled and replaced with the much more traditional multiple choice tests we have now.

Merrow cites an auto mechanic and a doctor as example of two careers that have seen substantial innovations over the past few decades. But these are fields in which technology is at the forefront. Where has technology led us in the field of education?

In education technology has led us back to the fundamental conundrum I describe. Do we use technology to allow our students to develop their own ideas? To create original videos? To write, edit and publish their own works? Or do we use it to deliver videotaped lectures, or have everyone play games that reinforce basic concepts?

I believe Americans are deeply divided over the fundamental nature of freedom in our society. Many people feel threatened by changes they see occurring in society, and want schools to play the traditional role they have had, of being a sort of shock absorber for the system, providing a little room for debate, but steering young people back into the roles we have planned out for them. If we really want schools to embrace innovation, we are going to need to get over the fear of change that grips us every time it appears possible.

Update: Education historian Diane Ravitch has posted a fascinating exposition contrasting the two approaches I have described in my entry above -- coming down firmly on the side of "knowledge first." I will have a response in a day or two.

What do you think? What are the forces that block innovations in schools? Where are there signs of change?

Posted by Anthony Cody at 10:16 AM | Permalink | 3 Comments | Recommend

How can we balance the nurturing and acceptance our children need with our role as academic taskmasters?

Today’s entry is a departure. Rather than just tell you what I think, supported with facts and figures, I want to open some questions for discussion. After all, this is intended to be a dialogue.

I just watched a couple of old videos of one of my favorite characters, the late Fred Rogers. My family did not have a television until I was ten years old, so that must be when I watched his show sometimes, on days I stayed home from school with a “stomach ache.” I know his show was aimed at much younger children, but I must have been hungry to hear those reassuring talks and songs he would share. “It’s you I love, it’s not the clothes you wear, not the way you do your hair.” “I love you for just being yourself.”

I have tried to bring that spirit to my work with students. I think we do best when we accept our students as they are for our starting point. But that can be a very tough balancing act as a middle school teacher. If a student comes to me in the 6th grade and does not know times tables, as his teacher I cannot accept that – we have to create a learning agenda so he can boost his skills and handle fractions and more advanced math.

Every time you give a test, you have stated an expectation of what a student should know how to do. As we have moved tests down into kindergarten, we have increased the pressure on students at younger ages. I really wonder about how this is affecting our children. Finland has recently attracted attention because their math and science scores are tops in the world. But they do not even begin formal schooling until age 7. In this country, there are many Waldorf schools that hold off on reading instruction until children are in the second grade.

One of the problems I have with NCLB is that our testing mechanisms have become central to the way we judge the effectiveness of a school or a teacher. There are so many other dimensions to teaching that will not be revealed by a test. Furthermore, the pressure we put on adults to increase student test scores is passed on to their students, and I think many times this places teachers in a position of using their love as leverage to get students to perform better, withholding our approval unless they learn what they must for us.

Children are dying to please the adults in their lives. They so want to hear words of praise. They so want to know they are ok. But what if that child, like Albert Einstein, cannot read at age 8? Many of us entered the profession with the impulse to nurture, which I believe means we must accept our students in the spirit of Fred Rogers, as they are. We want to encourage them to grow, to create interesting challenges for them and help them see how great they are by virtue of all they can learn. But the test agenda lays out a strict set of expectations for what every child should be able to do in every tested subject. A child who, like Einstein, might have been good in math, might still flunk the second grade if he could not read. As their teacher, we have to prod, cajole and even threaten. “If you don’t learn this by May, you might not go on to the next grade.“

We are forced to be agents of these systemic expectations.

Some would argue that this is how we best love these students – by preparing them to be academically successful. After all, few of them will make a living “just by being themselves.” They will need to develop skills and knowledge, and they need to work at this. But I wonder if the rigid expectations we set for all students – the “high bars” Secretaries of Education Spellings and Duncan are so fond of, actually are the best way to promote excellence.

But why must excellence look the same for every child? Why isn’t it ok for some children to be fantastic readers, but poor mathematicians? Or lousy at math and reading, but great at making music, or dancing? We all know successful adults who would describe themselves as just that. But we have a huge fear that if we allow the system to make room for these different outcomes, large numbers of students will be passed along without the skills they need for success in college, and thus be condemned to a life as second class citizens.

I honestly do not have the answer for this conundrum. I cannot accept the rigid expectations model currently in place, but I am not completely comfortable with the alternative model either, because I share the fear that many students could be left behind academically.

So what do you think? Are we using our love as leverage with our students? Is that ok? How can we both accept our students as they are, and still challenge them to grow?

photo by Anthony Cody sf2ih8vtn5
Website for Mister Rogers' Neighborhood

Posted by Anthony Cody at 12:09 PM | Permalink | 5 Comments | Recommend

Last week I shared Dan Pink’s convincing case against the use of bonuses to motivate teachers to pursue higher test scores. It is very important that we move beyond dead-end reforms such as NCLB and pay for test scores, so we can do things we know will work.

We got a clear indication this week that shows us the way. A study arrived from the American Economics Journal: Applied Economics that looks at 12 years of data from North Carolina schools, and discovered that teachers are profoundly affected by the quality of their peers. As teachers, we know how much our students can learn from one another, so it is not really surprising to learn that we teachers effect one another as well.

This study found that when a strong teacher joins a staff, the performance of her colleague’s students rises significantly. Because these affects seem to persist even in cases when the strong teacher has moved on to another school, the authors believe that the reason for the improvement is that the teachers have learned to teach better. This is a working definition of teacher leadership in practice.

This resonates with me because it matches my own experience at the Oakland middle school where I taught for 18 years. Our science and math departments were struggling with turnover, so we applied and received a state grant to improve instruction (back in the days when California had a pot to put our peas in). We assigned each new teacher an experienced colleague to serve as their informal mentor, and we met several times a month to share and learn together. We conducted lesson study, developing lessons together, then observing one another teach. We looked hard at our assessment practices, and learned to do formative assessments.

There were several keys to making this work.
1. Classroom teachers were in charge. We set the direction of the project, and we chose the tools we would use to collaborate. We had a vision for what we needed and we owned the process. (This is the Autonomy Dan Pink spoke about.)
2. Our principal, Mary Hamadeh, was supportive but not prescriptive. She encouraged us to apply for the grant, but she did not attempt to micromanage it.
3. We brought in resources from partners in the community. Local experts in Lesson Study from Mills College joined us and shared protocols so we could learn from their experience. (This is the Mastery element – we were working together to build our expertise).
4. We focused on evidence of student learning. Our work with Lesson Study and formative assessment had all of us looking at how we knew what our students were actually learning. (Here we are at Purpose!)
5. We shared expertise and built collegiality. We had some outstanding experienced teachers who generously shared their best lesson and assessment ideas with their colleagues. Even beyond that, we built a community of mutual support that sustained each of us when times got tough during the year.

As a result of this work, we were able to retain all our teachers for several years, and our math scores rose for four years in a row.

Unfortunately, many of these gains were lost a few years later as the school was undermined by the loss of funds and the ravages of No Child Left Behind. Only a few of the 17 of my colleagues in the math and science departments remains there today, and most of these posts are held by interns in their first few years of teaching.

In Oakland we are working to apply these lessons to a District-wide project we call TeamScience, now in its second year. We have a team of more than twenty experienced teachers who are serving as mentors for the many novices in the District. We have partnered with the New Teacher Center to make sure our mentors are highly trained and supported, and we are also giving them opportunities to develop and share curriculum that we know will work with our students. TeamScience is working to build a district-wide culture of collegiality and mutual support in science, because we want our students to all get the best education we can give them.

We already have stories from second-year teachers that our project made a big difference for them last year. Our goal is to build on this success, and establish some stability for our science program in Oakland, so we can expand the number of expert teachers, and raise the level of learning for all our students.

What do you think? What influence have your peers had on your teaching? Do you see evidence that a strong teacher can raise the effectiveness of his or her peers? How can we improve schools based on this understanding?

Photos by Anthony Cody.

Posted by Anthony Cody at 11:17 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Teacher motivation is front and center in educational policy, and many seem to think that rewarding teachers for higher test scores is the most efficient way to close the achievement gap and make the US more competitive. Some powerful evidence to the contrary is emerging from a surprising source – the world of business.

This week a video featuring Dan Pink came along from TED, where he builds a strong case that systems of rewards and punishments actually inhibit performance, especially in higher-order tasks. Pink, a former speech-writer for Al Gore, marshals several studies from sources such as the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston and the London School of Economics to make his case.

Our business operating systems are built entirely around these “extrinsic motivators,” around carrots and sticks. That is actually fine for 20th century tasks. But for 21st century tasks, that mechanistic reward and punishment approach often doesn’t work and often does harm.

If-then rewards work really well (for the sort of task) where there is a simple set of rules and a clear destination to go to. Rewards, by their very nature, narrow our focus, concentrate the mind – that’s why they work in so many cases. For tasks with a narrow focus, where you see the goal right there, and go straight ahead to it, they work really well. But for the REAL candle problem [a creative challenge], you don’t want to be looking straight ahead – you want to be looking on the periphery. You want to be looking around. The reward actually narrows our focus and restricts our possibility.

Pink shares research done by Dan Ariely of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, who tested the effect different levels of bonuses had on performance and found that:

As long as the task involved only a rudimentary skill, bonuses worked as they would be expected: the higher the pay, the better the performance. But once the task involved “even rudimentary cognitive skill,” a larger reward “led to poorer performance. “

They went over to India to see if this were still true – and yes it was. In fact, “In eight of the nine tasks we examined across three experiments, higher incentives led to worse performance.”

Next he goes to Dr. Bernd Irlenbusch, of the London School of Economics, who recently concluded a meta-analysis of 51 studies, and concluded: “We find that financial incentives can have an overall negative impact on overall performance.”

Pink uses these studies to warn his audience to think twice about motivation.

What worries me as we stand here in the rubble of the economic collapse, is that too many organizations are making their decisions, their policies about talent and people based on assumptions that are outdated, unexamined, and rooted more in folklore than in science.

Pink goes on to suggest that the most powerful motivators are intrinsic -- “the desire to do things because they matter, because we like it, because they are interesting, because they are part of something important.” He calls on us to develop autonomy, mastery and purpose. Traditional management is great if you want compliance, he asserts, but if you want engagement, autonomy works better.

What do you think of Dan Pink’s perspective and the case he has built against a carrot and stick approach? Why is it that policymakers seem to be ignoring what science has learned about motivation?

Image provided through Creative Commons, credit to Borman818.

Posted by Anthony Cody at 11:49 AM | Permalink | 1 Comment | Recommend

Stop this train! That is the message Jerry Brown sent this week to Arne Duncan. Secretary of Education Duncan will visit Sacramento on Thursday, to make sure the state complies with his requirements that we allow test scores to be linked to teacher pay and evaluations, and to unlimited expansion of charter schools. California's former governor and current Attorney General Jerry Brown sent this comment on August 28, 2009, in response to Arne Duncan's Race to the Top. I think it is worth reading.

Via eRulemaking Portal: www.regulations.gov

Re: Race to the Top Fund [Docket ID ED-2009-OESE-0006]

In view of the hundreds of comments that are being submitted, I am confining my own to just a few general observations.

1. The basic assumption of your draft regulations appears to be that top down, Washington driven standardization is best. This is a “one size fit all” approach that ignores the vast diversity of our federal system and the creativity inherent in local communities. What we have at stake are the impressionable minds of the children of America. You are not collecting data or devising standards for operating machines or establishing a credit score. You are funding teaching interventions or changes to the learning environment that promise to make public education better, i.e. greater mastery of what it takes to become an effective citizen and a productive member of society. In the draft you have circulated, I sense a pervasive technocratic bias and an uncritical faith in the power of social science.

2. Inherent in the command and control philosophy of your draft regulations is a belief that everyone agrees on what should be taught--to whom and when--and how the lowest performing schools can best be turned around. Yet, there are so many unknowns about what produces educational success that a little humility would be in order. A better way would be to state what educational outcomes children should reach and then permit state and local flexibility to figure out how to reach the desired outcomes. The current draft regulations conflate what must be done with entirely too much specification about how to do it.

3. Curriculum choices are not just technical and “evidence based” issues, but go to the heart of deeply held beliefs and understandings of what children should learn. California's current curriculum standards have received high national rankings and there is no evidence that they need a radical overhaul.

4. Your draft also specifies very specific data elements that need to be included without sufficient justification for why all these date elements are essential or how they should be utilized.

5. You assume we know how to "turn around all the struggling low performing schools,” when the real answers may lie outside of school. As Oakland mayor, I directly confronted conditions that hindered education, and that were deeply rooted in the social and economic conditions of the community or were embedded in the particular attitudes and situations of the parents. There is insufficient recognition in the draft regulations that inside and outside of school strategies must be interactive and merged.

6. Most current state wide tests rely too much on closed end multiple choice answers and do not contain enough written and open ended responses that require students to synthesize, analyze and solve multi-dimensional problems and construct their own answers.

7. There are huge technical and conceptual problems that remain on how to assess the specific impact of individual teachers and principals on the scores of students on annual state tests. Test score increases and decreases can be caused by many factors in a specific year, and it is beyond the current state of the art to sort out what is the unique and independent influence of teachers and principals. Performance pay schemes for teachers based primarily on annual test scores in other states reveal more about how not to structure performance pay rather than show what are viable ways to restructure teacher compensation. Compensation should to be just one element of a broader approach to improving teacher effectiveness that includes initial recruitment and preparation to retention and professional development.

Having $4.3 billion to spend on education in this time of draconian cuts is a godsend. We in California look forward to joining with you in promoting a real love of learning and outstanding achievement in all our public schools.

What do you think of Attorney General Brown's stance? Will Duncan listen? Will President Obama?

Posted by Anthony Cody at 1:10 AM | Permalink | 4 Comments | Recommend