May 2010 Archives

When I spoke with Secretary Duncan last week, I tried my best in the few minutes I had to convey my frustration with the way students in high poverty schools are being hurt by the strange brand of accountability that requires schools to be closed, or faculty to be fired in order for the school to receive improvement grants. These students have instability in so many aspects of their lives - the least we can do is build their schools into resilient and powerful places - not give up on them when scores do not climb fast enough.

Chuck Olynyk was on our original phone call as well (though he did not get to speak). It would have been good for Secretary Duncan to hear directly from this man, who has taught for 16 years at Fremont High, earning distinction for truly embodying the history he teaches, by donning period armor to go with the lessons of the day. He is teaching us all what the current forms of reconstitution yield, for teachers and students. Here is his latest report.

Today is Friday, May 28, 2010 and Day 34 of my time left at the Mont.

What touched me yesterday: one of those days where I could put the kids on auto-pilot; they knew what they had to get done, and I didn't feel like cracking the whip. I noticed one student, we'll call her J., standing by the open window, looking at the rain. Good kid, done early, no problem. I joined her and asked what was up. Without looking at me, she said, "I don't know what to do about next year."

"What do you mean?" I asked, knowing the meaning.

"I don't want to stay at Fremont." When I asked why, she said, "All the good teachers are leaving. There won't be any Aesthetics next year. It's just going to be all messed up."

"Are you worried about uniforms?" She looked at me with a non-verbal "Duh." I like it when kids think past the surface. "No, I'm scared my education will get messed up. I'm going to graduate in two years. I want to be able to go to someplace good."

"Are you learning anything here? Any of your teachers? Anything in my class?"

J. didn't answer for a long time. I thought I was getting an ignore, but she was trying to form her words, I guess. "Yeah, A bunch of you are going because you say what they're doing is wrong and that if you stay, it will be like that priest's poem (Pastor Martin Niemoller, who wrote "First they came for the Jews..."). You'll just be going along with it, knowing it's wrong. You'd be a part of it. You said that you can't use the excuse, 'You were just following orders.'"

I tried to find some way to just let her find the words without putting my own words in her mouth. "That's right." I thought of a "co-worker" who came into my room to tell me in front of my students, after loudly announcing to the kids months ago that she'd never reapply, that I was wrong for not reapplying, and that what kept her going was to look into "their sweet, young faces." I remembered telling her it was because of my kids that I knew I couldn't reapply. But here was the reality. This is one of the casualties of the war on public education. This is one of the victims.

"You don't know where you'll be next year?"

I shook my head. "No clue."

"Siberia?" She smiled a little bit.

"Yeah, just like my grandfather, huh? Nah, no idea. They'll probably ship me to a middle school or make me a pool teacher." I was thinking about how this might be the last time I teach about the World Wars and Totalitarian regimes, bringing to life my family's visions of those times, keeping them alive in a way, and the Cold War and Vietnam and the Fall of the Berlin War. I flashed on Roy Batty's (Rutger Hauer) last words in "Blade Runner": "I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I've watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in the rain. Time to die." Maybe it was the rain, or the time of year.

"So why can't I leave, too?"

"Do you think that is the answer?"

"I don't want to be a part of this, either. If it wrong for you, why isn't it wrong for me?"

That's the problem with teaching. Sometimes the kids learn the lessons and apply them. This wasn't coaxing. This wasn't brainwashing. This wasn't a trail of breadcrumbs she was supposed to follow to reach a conclusion I wanted. I was teaching for months about right and wrong, about standing up for others, about totalitarian regimes and loss of freedom and how life has no easy answers. And then this child turned into a young woman right before my eyes.

That's why we do this.

Even a drop of water can wear a hole in a stone.

-- Chuck Olynyk

You can read more of Chuck's posts at www.savefremont.org, and join in the discussion of alternative approaches to school reform at the Teachers' Letters to Obama Facebook group here.

What do you think?

image provided by Chuck Olynyk.

Posted by Anthony Cody at 10:33 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Monday we finally had our talk with Secretary Duncan. As I have written, we tried to carry the messages from the two thousand members of our group, Teachers' Letters to Obama. We worked for hours to prepare our six topics. But in the end, we felt largely unheard, in part because the time was so short, the phone line so poor, the words too few to convey the depth of frustration we all feel about where education is headed.

We have their attention. Somebody up there finally has awoken to the fact that teachers can make a difference -- in politics as well as in the classroom. Perhaps it was the thousands of teachers who mobilized in Florida to stop Senate Bill 6. Perhaps it was the backlash to the administration's support of the firing of teachers in Rhode Island. But all of a sudden, for some reason, they care what we think. We need to make sure they know exactly what we think, in no uncertain terms.

Two months ago we polled the members of Teachers' Letters to Obama and asked what issues we should raise when we spoke with Secretary Duncan. The top three issues are: Overreliance on test scores for high stakes decisions (93%), narrowing of the curriculum due to over-reliance on test scores (87%), and tying teacher pay and evaluations to test scores (84%). But in our call to Secretary Duncan, the Department of Education seemed to have quick answers to every point we raised around these issues. We need to develop our understanding, including current proposals, so we can weigh in effectively on the policies being decided upon. We need to do a bit of homework, and sharpen our thinking. Then we need to get out there and take a strong stand on what we believe in.

We need you. We are proposing a summer of teacher activism focused on getting smart, getting clear, and getting involved in the policies that are affecting all of us and our students -- too often in terrible ways. Here is how this will look:

Discussion Openers: What is wrong about the ways tests are being used? What are the negative consequences? What are alternatives to this approach?

For the month of June, we are asking everyone to jump on this topic. If you have a blog, write about it. If you have books about this, read them. And most importantly, come to the Teachers' Letters to Obama discussion forums and discuss. We need clarity. What do we want tests to be used for? What do we want to change about the ways they are used? We need to reach a consensus, as teachers, and decide on concrete policies we will support that will enact our vision. We will also have threads where we can suggest ways to affect change: who to pressure, what legislation to support, where to protest, where to write.

We will organize two large webinars for the month of June. The first will be designed as a learning session. We will invite a few experts, teacher leaders and advocates to share some key understandings about standardized tests and the ways they are being used and abused, and some possible alternative approaches. The webinar will be open to all, and there will be channels for participation. This will be followed by a period of active discussion, where we will seek the consensus we need to speak powerfully on this matter.

Then we will hold the second webinar, which will be the Teacher Roundtable, where we will allow prominent and powerful voices from the discussion to speak out publicly. We will invite the Department of Education, members of Congress, and the press to attend. This will be their chance to hear teachers. And our voices will reflect not just the ideas of the few who are speaking, but will carry the power of all who have been involved and contributing. The policy ideas that emerge will become the items that we will ask the Department of Education and members of Congress to act on in the months to come.

Please join us on the Teachers' Letters to Obama Discussion forum to discuss this process, and the big questions we are raising about our obsession with testing.

What do you say? Will you join in this process and make your voice heard?

Posted by Anthony Cody at 6:14 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Yesterday afternoon my phone rang. "Hello, this is Arne Duncan calling. Can we talk?"

I had heard he might be calling this week, but I was still a bit shocked. "Hello, Arne!" I said a bit loudly. He asked if I wanted to share any more with him. I told him about Chuck Olynyk, a great Los Angeles teacher who had refused to reapply for his own job at Fremont High. I told him about the Oakland schools which face restructuring. I told him that I worked with the some of the teachers at these schools, and they were so dedicated to their students. I told him it was not fair that these schools that take on the greatest challenges, in the toughest neighborhoods, have the screws put to them. A teacher at one of these schools told me their principal is the heart and soul of their school, and yet they have been told they must fire their principal to qualify for a school improvement grant.

Mr. Duncan told me that the principal need not be fired if she had been there less than three years. (unfortunately, the principal has been there too long to use this loophole.)

I then said that the continued emphasis on boosting test scores made these schools focus too much on test prep. "Oh no, we don't want that," he said. "We are using a whole bunch of outcomes, like dropout rates, not just test scores."

I was honestly a bit incredulous at this point. I said "These schools are on this list because they haven't made AYP. The biggest factor in AYP is test scores."

Secretary Duncan responded, "But we are going to get rid of AYP."

I will have to investigate this. I have been under the impression that test scores remain hugely important in designating schools as being in need of restructuring.

Then I asked about followup. I said we would like a way to continue to have dialog on these issues. He said our group had obviously put a lot of work into preparing, and we had been "extraordinarily thoughtful and useful," and that he would have an assistant follow up with us to set up the next chance to connect. He placed a similar call to Marsha Ratzel, who helped convene Monday's meeting.

I have to say the impact of this is still sinking in. We wrote our letters six months ago, and we hoped we might be heard. We have many of the same concerns and even disagreements with administration policies that we had then. But it appears we now have the attention of the Secretary of Education, and we are speaking our truths. We are going to keep speaking up, and keep finding ways to get teachers around the country involved in thinking about these tough issues -- and finding ways to be heard.

The blog I posted on Monday was written in frustration, and asked whether we had been heard. The call from Secretary Duncan was an acknowledgment of that frustration, and an invitation to extend the dialogue. There has been a breakdown in communication between America's teachers and the Department of Education, that stretches back long before the current administration. There is a huge logjam of unheard ideas, perceptions and wisdom. We have not shared a vision for a long time.

In comments and emails in response to my first post I have been accused of groveling by some, and of being ungrateful and negative by others. This is symptomatic of the broken lines of communication we are trying to repair. We still have a long road ahead of us, but at least it feels as if we have a chance, and we will build on it as best we can, because our students deserve the best we can offer. I truly appreciate the chance we have been given, with special thanks to Marsha Ratzel, Patrick Kerr, Secretary Duncan and his staff. I will continue to share as the process unfolds. Join us in discussing next steps over at the Teachers' Letters to Obama Facebook group.

What do you think? Is there a chance we might begin to be heard?

Posted by Anthony Cody at 9:07 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

So we twelve finally had our thirty minutes to speak with Secretary Duncan. We spent weeks preparing what we would say. We polled the 2000 members of Teachers' Letters to Obama and got more than 270 teachers to take time to share their ideas of what we should say. We knew we would not have much time, so we paired up, and wrote short statements carrying our experiences and insights. We wanted to be critical but constructive.

I want to find positive things to take from what unfolded, but it is challenging. Here is what happened. We were given a magic phone number to call in. There were about six Dept of Ed people back in DC in a room with Arne Duncan, who introduced themselves one by one. Then Secretary Duncan took the mic and talked very fast. He talked about how wonderful teachers are, and how much they had learned about the problems associated with NCLB, and how they were looking forward to making many changes. He also wanted to make sure we would support their push to get an emergency school funding bill through Congress right away to prevent teacher lay-offs.

Then, about halfway through our thirty minutes, it was our chance to talk. Marsha Ratzel introduced our goals. She said:

What we hope to offer you is a vast set of experience teachers who bring a wealth of knowledge to bear on the ideas put forward in the BP. These are respected teachers in their buildings, their state and beyond. We are not academics with lengthy research projects or a special interest group that is promoting something...instead we bring you years and years of in-the-trenches teaching of every kind of student you can find in the country.

But something was awry. Marsha's voice came in and out, rising and falling as if her mic was attached to a yo-yo.

Then Heather Wolpert-Gawron took the mic, and tried to explain why current assessment practices are inadequate, and why we need to move towards classroom-based assessments. She said, in part:

Many teachers have already developed highly efficient methods of assessing these higher order skills that colleges and employers are seeking. Persuasive writing to a Congressman to better one's community, wikis and blogs to collaborate in the elaborate solution of a math problem, applied science labs, real-world publishing of student work, exit portfolios that have been gathering a student's best work throughout their school career to show growth, mock job interviews complete with cover letters and resumes...all of these authentically assess skills and knowledge. Embedded in these are the core competencies we are all familiar with: writing, reading, and logic.

There are thousands of teachers willing to help create and score those assessments. We would like to suggest redirecting some of the funding the Blueprint currently earmarks for outside innovators toward training classroom teachers in promoting, developing, and scoring classroom-tested and authentic-skill assessments.

But once again, we were foiled by the phone connection. Halfway through someone on the other end said "We hear you saying we need more critical thinking, right?" Then we heard from someone that this was a great suggestion, and that they have earmarked more than $300 million for this purpose in Race to the Top. Great. Except they haven't. Not for what Heather was actually suggesting.

Then it was Mary Tedrow's turn. Her partner, Renee Moore, unfortunately was stuck on an airplane and missed the call. But Mary was actually loud and clear for some reason, and spoke eloquently for the need to invest in teachers' professional growth through rich programs such as the National Writing Project and National Board certification. Secretary Duncan said he was a big supporter of National Board and agreed with us very much.

Sandee Palmquist came next, and did a great job articulating the need for more individualized assessments that are developmentally appropriate. She said:

The Blueprint mentions Universal Design for Learning principles. The principles of UDL utilize systems of curriculum and instruction applicable to the greatest number of students with the least number of adaptations necessary to meet that goal. In applying those principles to assessment, we need to move away from standardized tests and toward multiple measures of student performance. While we appreciate the Blueprint's statement that assessment measures for these students will be more flexible in the future, the future cannot start soon enough.

"Oh, yes, we are working on new assessments," we were told.

Now our thirty minutes were up, and Elena Aguilar got the mic for a last comment, and suggested that the Department should take a closer look at how English Language learners were actually learning - and some of the strides being made at some Oakland schools in particular.

Then Secretary Duncan came back on, and thanked us all for our questions. And that was it. As for me, I never got to say boo. I had paired up with Chuck Olynyk, one of the many teachers at Fremont High School in Los Angeles who was told to reapply for his own job this year. We were going to advocate for more flexible models for restructuring schools (see my blog last week) but we were in the bottom half of the speakers' roster, so the call was over before we had our chance.

In a conversation after the call, Alaska Teacher of the Year Bob Williams, who also missed his chance to speak, said that perhaps the whole experience was a metaphor. Secretary Duncan and his staff could hear one another very well, but teachers' voices had a very hard time getting through.

It is a good sign that the Department of Education and Secretary Duncan created a space for teachers' voices to be heard. If they are really interested in hearing us, they will follow up, and we will be invited to share more.

The funny thing about the conversation was that the whole time, they seemed to think we had questions, and their job was to answer them. We had actually approached the conversation from a different place. We thought perhaps they might want to ask US questions, or hear our ideas about how to improve schools.

What do you think? Were we heard? What should we do next?

Posted by Anthony Cody at 9:35 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Today, Monday, May 24, twelve teachers will be holding a thirty minute phone conference with Secretary of Education Arne Duncan. This is a very rare occurrence, and we are working hard to find the best ways to express our views on behalf of the larger group, and our fellow teachers as a whole.

This all began six months ago, when I wrote an open letter to President Obama about his education policies. I started a Facebook group called Teachers' Letters to Obama, and a month later sent a binder of more than 100 eloquent letters from teachers all over America. At the beginning of April, one of our members, Marsha Ratzel, made a connection with a regional officer of the Department of Education and convinced him that we had some constructive ideas to share.

We worked to get a diverse group to represent us, and several were added in response to input from members. Thirty minutes is not long, so we have divided the twelve people into pairs, who will be focused on different aspects of the Department's Blueprint for the ESEA. We are determined to share not only our concerns and criticisms, but also concrete suggestions for ways that policies might be improved.

With input from a survey sent to the 1,970 members of the group, we have some clear directions about what the key concerns are. With a bit of help from the Center for Teaching Quality, we have held several online meetings to discuss how to use our short time. We hope that Secretary Duncan's willingness to hear from teachers will lead to more such opportunities down the road. We will be sharing a full report on what was said next week, soon after the phone conference.

Here are the names and bios of the 12 teachers representing us:

1. Nancy Flanagan was the 1993 Michigan Teacher of the Year, and is a National Board Certified Teacher who also served on the NBPTS Music Certificate team and as Teacher in Residence for the National Board. She taught K-12 Music in Hartland, Michigan for 30 years. Her blog, Teacher in a Strange Land, is featured on Education Week's Teacher magazine--and her current passion is building virtual communities in education. She is a PhD candidate in Education Policy at Michigan State University, where she delivered the commencement address for the School of Education, a high point in her career. She has two children--and next year, both will be through college, thank goodness. Her blog is Teacher in a Strange Land.

2. Jane Ching Fung is a National Board Certified kindergarten teacher in urban Los Angeles. She has taught all of her 23 years for the Los Angeles Unified School District. Jane's teaching experiences range from preschool to teacher education. She serves on the board of the National Commission on Teaching and America's Future and PBS Teacher Advisory Group. Jane is a 2002 Milken Educator, National Board Certified, and holds a Masters Degree in Curriculum and Instruction (Reading and Language Arts). She is a member of Teachers Leaders Network and has conducted and published action research on teacher collaboration through the Teachers Network Leadership Institute. She is trying to balance her life as a teacher leader and single parent to two adorable, but challenging boys!

3. Marsha Ratzel is a National Board certified teacher who has worked in middle schools for the past 16 years teaching math and science. She has worked as a District Coordinating Teacher for Technology and is a second-career teacher who spent 10 years as a health systems planner and administrator. She has published in national educational magazines and writes about the successes/failures in her classroom on her blog, Reflections of a Techie.

4. Renee Moore, a second-career teacher, has taught English at the high school and community college level in the Mississippi Delta for 20 years. She was the 2001 Mississippi Teacher of the Year and a National Board Certified teacher. Renee's classroom research on culturally engaged instruction has been supported by the Spencer and Carnegie Foundations. She has served on numerous boards and commissions including the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, and is currently a member of the Board of Directors of the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards. She is a member of the Teacher Leaders Network, and has written extensively in educational publications, as well as at her blog, TeachMoore. She and her husband have also raised 11 children; all of whom completed public school.

5. Bob Williams began his teaching career 23 years ago as a Peace Corps teacher in Gambia, Africa. He currently teaches Geometry, Algebra 1, and Advanced Placement Calculus at Colony High School, Palmer, Alaska.

Bob won an Alaska Teacher of the Year award in 2009 and was one of five national finalists for the 2010 National Education Association Teaching Excellence award. His highest award was a student's 2008 graduation stole with the following note: "Mr. Williams, I have a confession to make. Before this year, I didn't like math. It was a struggle and made very little sense. Calculus was another story entirely. You made it fun, exciting, and easy to learn. I went from despising math to babbling incessantly about integrals and derivatives in the span of 9 months. I sport my [calculus] tee-shirt proudly and will bring my cross-sections project wherever life manages to take me. I haven't told my parents for fear that they will disown me, but I have every intention of minoring in math."

Bob has a B.S. in petroleum engineering from the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, an M.A. in mathematics education from Columbia University, and an M.Ed. in educational leadership from the University of Alaska, Anchorage. He is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in public policy and administration.

6. Heather Wolpert-Gawron is an award-winning teacher, fellow of the National Writing Project, and a member of the Teacher Leaders Network. She is an 11 year teacher currently teaching middle school Language Arts. She is also a coach of an award-winning Speech and Debate team. She has written two workbooks on Internet Literacy, multiple articles for educational magazines, and is currently working on a book for fellow tween teachers for EyeOnEducation Publishing. She is an avid blogger about all things policy and practice, writing for The George Lucas Educational Foundation and moderating their middle school discussion group. She also blogs on her own website as Tweenteacher. Her son will be entering Kindergarten in the CA public schools in 2011.

7. Mary Tedrow is a National Board Certified Teacher and a District Teacher of the Year with 21 years in the high school English classroom in Winchester, Virginia beginning in 1978. She is Co-Director for the Northern Virginia Writing Project housed at George Mason University and directs an annual Summer Writing Institute for teacher development in the Shenandoah Valley. For eight years, Mary was the author of Reading Connection Intermediate, distributed to middle school households nationwide. She currently contributes essays to various publications and maintains a blog, Walking to School, focused on education policy. Mary has two grandchildren who will enter the public school system beginning in 2014.

8. Anthony Cody is a National Board certified teacher who has worked for 23 years in the Oakland (California) public schools. He is a coach of science teachers, and leads a team of mentors working with new teachers. His open letter to President Obama last November launched the Teachers' Letters to Obama Facebook group. He writes a regular blog at Teacher Magazine, and is a parent of two sons, one of whom is a high school senior.

9. Rian Fike has been teaching Art in Miami for 27 years at all grade levels. He has been chosen Teacher of the Year at three different schools, most recently in 2009 at Greynolds Park Elementary. Rian's students have won local, national, and international awards - including display in the Smithsonian Institution alongside Pablo Picasso. Rian posts at the Daily Kos.

10. Chuck Olynyk is a 27 year veteran of teaching social studies, having taught world history at in LAUSD for 22 years, 16 at Edison Middle School, and currently at Fremont High School, which is currently in the news because of a reconstitution effort. He has served as a mentor to new teachers, and has made his resources available to anyone teaching social studies at fremonths.org. Chuck is involved with living history organizations (most notably as Kyr (Sir) Yaroslav the Persistent in the Society for Creative Anachronism or the S.C.A.) and has used his experiences in the organizations to bring history to life in the classroom. He is currently blogging away at savefremont.org

11. Elena Aguilar always had aspirations to be a teacher and was the first in her family to go to college. In 1995, she joined Teach For America and was assigned to a bilingual elementary class in the Oakland Unified School District (OUSD) where she has worked ever since. Aguilar was a founding member of ASCEND, (A School Cultivating Excellence, Nurturing Diversity) a small, K-8 public school which opened in 2001. At ASCEND she taught middle school History and English, engaged in a three year teacher inquiry project, and documented many of the school's practices that led to significant growth for low income students of color. The National Writing Project and the Carnegie Foundation published her research on teaching reading to English Language Learners. Aguilar blogs for Edutopia.com and she is currently writing a book on effective assessment practices. For the last four years, Aguilar has been an instructional and leadership coach in OUSD.

12. Sandee Palmquist: I worked as a paraeducator for a profoundly disabled child while my children were growing up - and I found I loved the work. When my oldest son went off to college I went back to school to get my teaching certificate. I went on to earn my Masters in Teaching and my special ed endorsement. I taught in a special ed preschool setting in Redmond WA for 3 years. Then I worked in an inner city school in Seattle teaching a transitional kindergarten. I left there to open a new program for severely disabled students in 3rd through 6th grade with Northshore Schools and am there now. I run a peer helpers program for my school and am serving on a District committee to develop a true curriculum for severe and profound students. I am in the midst of my National Boards Year with the tests just finished! I have two sons both of whom are now grown and out of the house.

(Note: Retired Massachusetts teacher Bill Schecter is also a part of this group, but unfortunately will be out of the country on Monday.)

What do you think of this conversation? What do you hope is said?

(all photos used by permission)

Posted by Anthony Cody at 7:51 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Recently the State of California placed five Oakland middle schools on its list of "persistently low-achieving schools." Each of these schools is less than five years old. These schools were started when the school at the same site was closed down due to poor performance. These five schools are all within a few miles of each other, in East Oakland, where the majority of the city's 150-plus murders occur each year, and where unemployment exceeds 25%. The vast majority of the students are eligible for free or reduced price lunches due to poverty, and many are English language learners.

I work with teachers at some of these schools. One of them shared with me some of her concerns about this process. The entire classification system is based on test scores, and the schools needed to show they had moved up 50 points on the API ladder. But while other schools had five years to make these gains, these new schools only had two, and so although their scores were improving, the rate was not fast enough to get them out of trouble.

We also need to become more sophisticated in how we measure student learning. We cannot simply set arbitrary test score goals and demand the same performance regardless of the circumstances. We need to be able to look more carefully at how students are learning - including art, music, pe, science and history, otherwise schools in danger of reconstitution will be forced to pursue test preparation above all else.

Another thing that is troubling is the solutions offered for "restructuring." To qualify for a "School Improvement Grant," a school must choose from one of these options:

1. Close and send their students to other schools
2. Close and reopen as a charter school
3. Fire the principal and half the teaching staff; or
4. Fire the principal, extend the school day and make other changes.

Why are we so fixated on closing schools and firing people? Donald Trump makes for great TV drama, but these methods have a very poor track record in our schools. At two of the Oakland schools, the principal has been there less than two years, so they can choose Option 4 and still keep their principal. But at two other schools, the principal is a key school leader who has been there for longer, and must be fired in order for the school to qualify for a school improvement grant. My colleague shared with me that the principal is the heart of the school, and they do not want to lose her. And the staff has had very high turnover. Only five of the fourteen teachers have been there for more than two years. The solutions being offered for restructuring actually create more instability, when what is needed is persistence and investment.

In Rhode Island last week, we learned that the teachers and administration have reached an agreement that allows all to continue working, rescinding the decision to fire them. It is hard to understand why such hardball tactics were needed, and makes me wonder what cost we pay when people's livelihoods are threatened.

In Los Angeles no such accord has been reached at Fremont High, where some of the strongest teachers in the school are the most resolute in their determination that they should not have to reapply for their jobs. The school is only a few weeks away from a major restructuring, one that will leave the staff decimated and divided.

The solutions on that short list of restructuring options do not show much imagination, and the test scores used to judge schools to be in need of restructuring show even less. California Congresswoman Judy Chu today released a proposal designed to enhance flexibility and local control. Strengthening Our Schools is the title, and it states in part:

Systemic rebuilding cannot be done with school personnel alone. Parents, community leaders, businesses, and other stakeholders represent essential human and social capital that needs to be brought in and leveraged. Greater flexibility must be given to districts and schools to maximize their effective use of resources. It is essential to:

• ensure schools can use allocated funds flexibly
• enhance administrator recruitment, induction, mentoring, professional development and retention
• foster a sense of collaborative ownership by prioritizing buy-in from teachers,
• specialized instruction support personnel, principals, parents, and the community
• ensure multi-year investments to fully fund and sustain real reform

In Oakland, the Board of Education will hold a hearing tonight to deliberate the fate of the schools on the state's bad list. Two of the schools have no good options. They can fire their principals and get much-needed improvement funds, or they can defy the rules and make their own way without federal support.

I agree with Congresswoman Chu's proposals. We need to look at school improvement as an extended project, based on carefully built relationships between teachers, administrators, parents, students and the broader community. As our experience in Oakland shows, this does not often happen as the result of dramatic interventions that magically replace ineffective burnouts with bright newcomers. We need to build stability by investing in these schools, and nurture rather than undermine the often-heroic teachers who work here.

What do you think? How should schools in need of improvement be identified? What should be the key elements of an improvement strategy?

Posted by Anthony Cody at 1:41 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

In Arizona, state legislators recently passed SB 1070, which requires law enforcement officers to investigate the citizenship status of everyone they suspect might be "illegal," and arrest those lacking proof of their legal status.

In Texas, some people are filing lawsuits seeking to bar undocumented immigrants from qualifying for in-state tuition at state universities. A 2001 law made this possible if the student attended school for at least three years in Texas, and graduated from a Texas high school.

And now, again in Arizona, conservative lawmakers have taken aim at Ethnic Studies, passing a law that will fine any school district that "offers classes designed primarily for students of particular ethnic groups, advocate ethnic solidarity or promote resentment of a race or a class of people." This law is targeting the Tucson Unified School District's successful Mexican American Studies Department. Fortunately, the schools there intend to continue their course offerings, because they do not believe they are teaching resentment towards anyone. The state Department of Education is also putting pressure on Districts to reassign teachers with accents so that English learners will learn the language properly.

My first experience with ethnic studies was as a student at Berkeley High in the 1970s, where I filled my US History requirement with a class in Chicano history. I also took a class called "What is White?" where we looked critically at the nature of European-American identity. I later attended Laney college in Oakland, where I took classes in African American history, and UC Berkeley, where I once again studied Mexican American history. In spite of all this exposure to American history through the lens of these often mistreated peoples, I never came to resent myself, nor did I feel resented by my fellow students - no matter their ethnicity.

Clearly some people in our society are feeling threatened by the number of Latinos now living in many of our states. Census projections predict that whites will be less than half of the population by 2050, and Latinos - now about 50 million in number, will grow to 133 million. These numbers may explain why a majority of Arizonans support the recent laws targeting immigrants.

Our public schools are obliged to respond creatively and constructively to the challenge of a changing student population - as they have done in Tucson. There, the Mexican-American Studies department has sought to create a culturally relevant curriculum that responds to the needs and experiences of their students.

We are also seeking to prepare as many students as possible for the opportunity to attend college. We know that some portion of our students are here without documents. Many came as young children with their parents, and have attended our schools for more than a decade. They may speak perfect English, and share the same aspirations as any other student. But their futures may look very different, especially if the sentiment against immigrants continues to grow.

As a teacher, I want what is best for all my students. I would never check their immigration status before I taught them. I want them to know the history of their own people, as well as the history of the US as a whole. The economic forces that draw immigrants across our borders are not likely to be overcome by political or legal repression. Our schools can be a way that diverse groups of students come together and learn about one another, so as to work to build a common future. This takes real thought and conscious effort. An incident in Morgan Hill, California, shows how fast these conflicts can arise. Five students there wore American flag shirts to school on Cinco de Mayo, and were sent home by school administrators because of a fear of conflict.

Schools are drawn into these issues, even if we would rather just focus on teaching science or math. Our students need to learn their history, and ways to creatively resolve conflicts between one another. One great resource for schools doing this work is the Challenge Day program, which comes to schools and works with a team of students to create an event that builds dialogue and caring between different individuals and groups of students. Courses that teach students about the particular experiences of various ethnic groups are also of great value -- and not only for the students of whatever group is the focus of the class. I believe all students should learn about the history of the diverse people of our country. That is what gives beauty and complexity to our nation. The end result would be more understanding, not resentment.


What do you think? Should our schools teach courses in ethnic studies? How should teachers respond to recent anti-immigrant laws?

Posted by Anthony Cody at 8:57 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

What defines a great teacher? How do we know which ones are great and worthy of emulation?

Doug Lemov thinks he has the answer, and has written a book, Teach Like a Champion: 49 Techniques that Put Students on the Path to College, with methods that mark the difference between the great and the not-so-great. I have not read the book yet, so I will hold my comments about the specific recommendations.

A report on his work appeared in the New York Times magazine two months ago, and this week he appeared on NPR's Talk of the Nation to discuss it. I was intrigued by the following exchange. A caller named Scott, said:

The premise is that the scores are what make the teacher great. The entire premise seems to be that the scores are the judge of a good teacher.

And I've got tell you from personal experience, I've taught at Hillsborough School District, now I'm teaching at San Mateo, and Hillsborough is always one of the top economically performing or I mean SAT-performing schools in the country, and I would challenge anyone to say, okay, take that entire staff and put them over to Hunters Point in San Francisco and have them teach over there - which is one of the consistently low-performing schools - and see if they can bring up the scores. Because I've got to tell you, it's socioeconomics that make the student, not the scores.

Mr. LEMOV: Sure, two things. The data set that we looked at to determine the teachers who we thought were game-changers controlled for socioeconomic factors. So we basically, we geeked out on a big regression set where we put -we plotted every school based on the percentage of kids in that school living in poverty on the X-axis, percentage of kids proficient on the state tests on the Y-axis, and we looked for schools that were in the upper right-hand corner, schools that had 90 percent of their kids in poverty and were still finding a way to work the magic.

And, in fact, one of those schools is in Hunters Point. It's Kipp Bayview Academy. It's an incredible school. It was founded by Molly Wood, who is someone I've had the luck to learn a ton from.

And the other you know, the thing I would say about that school is if go into any one of those neighborhoods - and I don't want to underestimate how incredibly challenging it is to teach or to try and run a school in those neighborhoods - there is always one teacher who's a champion. There's always one teacher who can do it, and that proves that it can be done.

Do you notice anything about this response? It actually only responds to the second point the caller made, that socioeconomics is the primary determinant of student success. Mr. Lemov skips right over the big question the caller posed. Is greatness defined by the ability to raise test scores? Until we answer that central question, we cannot really determine the value of these techniques.

Mr. Lemov is a bright individual. I can understand the drive for improvement and excellence that compels him. Under Bush's (now Obama's) NCLB, excellence is clearly defined for us all - the ability to move test scores upwards. This greatly simplifies the discussion. But there is one problem - this focus does not always serve our students.

I became National Board certified while teaching science at an urban middle school in Oakland. This process required me to carefully examine how my students were learning, and provide evidence in the form of student work over time, my feedback to them, and videos of my instruction. I had to write about how my instruction had moved them forward, and reflect on what I might do differently. We do need to pay attention to what our students are learning, and test scores are one form of data that should be heeded. But I think we oversimplify our task when this becomes the definition of greatness.

But I also must say I appreciate the idea that we can learn by watching effective teachers. While I may not agree that high test scores should be the only definition of effectiveness, that does not mean the techniques are all bunk. Classroom procedures may seem trivial, but they can make the difference between a quick-paced engaging lesson and a dull one.

The second issue, which Lemov actually does address, is whether socioeconomics determines the success of a school. The schools he cites in his book are charters, and that seems to be his primary reference point, which raises some questions about the broader application of his ideas.

There are two Facebook groups related to this project. The first is the official one, Teach Like a Champion, which features video clips of teachers demonstrating the techniques. The second one is Teach Like a Champion, Really? which asks members who are teachers in "regular" schools to share their experiences applying techniques from the book. It will be interesting to see how teachers respond to this challenge.

What do you think? How should we define (or measure) great teaching? What is the role of socioeconomics in student achievement? And how valuable are techniques like these?

Posted by Anthony Cody at 10:29 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Dr. Stephen Krashen is a professor emeritus at the University of Southern California. He has written numerous books on his research into literacy and language acquisition. In recent years he has emerged as a persistent voice pointing towards the basic steps we should take to build literacy and strong academic skills for our students. He also points out the flaws in many of the premises of the "school reform" movement. This week, I asked him to share some thoughts with us on where things are headed. He offers us his views in this guest post.

What single strategy would you suggest to improve education in the US?

Here is a single strategy that has a long-term and short-term component.

The long-term part is to eliminate or at least drastically reduce poverty in the US.

How poverty hurts children

Decades of research confirm that poverty has a huge impact on student learning. Many studies show that more poverty means lower scores on all measures of school achievement. There are also many studies that show us just how poverty negatively impacts school performance. Here are the results, in brief:

• Children of poverty are more likely to suffer from "food insecurity," which means slower language development, and behavioral problems.
• High-poverty families are more likely to lack medical insurance or have high co-payments, which means less medical care, and more childhood illness and absenteeism, which of course negatively impacts school achievement. School is not helping: Poor schools are more likely to have no school nurse or have a high ratio of nurses to students.
• Children of poverty are more likely to live in high-pollution areas, with more exposure to mercury, lead, PCB's (polychlorinated biphenyls) and smog, all of which impact health and learning, and often impact behavior as well.
• Children of poverty also have very little access to books at home and in their communities, with less access to good public libraries and bookstores. Once again, school is not helping: Children of poverty attend schools with poorly supported classroom libraries and school libraries. Studies confirm that less access to books means lower reading achievement, which makes sense in view of findings that show that self-selected reading is a powerful predictor of reading achievement.

Poverty is the only serious problem

One of the reasons, we are told, that we need Race to the Top and other reforms is because our students do not do well on international tests, which indicates that there is a problem with education in America. The only serious problem is poverty.

American students from well-funded schools who come from high-income families outscore all or nearly all other countries on international tests. Only our children in high poverty schools score below the international average. The US has the second highest percentage of children in poverty of all industrialized countries (22.4%, compared to Sweden's 2.6%) which of course pulls down our overall average. The success of American children who are not in poverty shows that our educational system has been successful; the problem is poverty.

When the problem of poverty is solved, all children will have the advantages that right now only middle-class children have. This will close the "achievement gap" between children from high and low-income families.

What school can do

Until poverty is drastically reduced or eliminated, school needs to defend children against the effects of poverty. This means providing nutrition, health care, a clean environment, and books. For policy, this means continued and expanded support for free/reduced meal programs, increased school nursing care, and, of course, improved school and classroom libraries.

We have good evidence that quality school libraries can mitigate the effects of poverty. Two recent studies, one in California and another involving students from 40 countries, have shown that access to a good school library has a large positive effect on reading test scores, about as large as the effect of poverty.

To summarize: What should schools focus on first? Food, health care, and books. Not on new standards and tests.

A modest proposal

It's never a good idea to propose a program without talking about how to pay for it and I have a suggestion: Drop all standardized testing, with the exception of one test, an improved NAEP.

There is no strong empirical evidence to continue, let alone expand our testing program. In fact, the available evidence suggests that standardized tests do not do any good. Nichols, Glass, & Berliner found no relationship between testing "pressure" in 25 states and achievement on NAEP math & reading. Two different studies found that high school grades were a good predictor of college success, and that adding SAT scores did not improve the predictive power of grades.

Teacher evaluation does a better job of evaluating students than standardized testing does: The repeated judgments of professionals who are with children every day is more valid than a test created by distant strangers. Moreover, teacher evaluations are "multiple measures," are closely aligned with the curriculum, cover a variety of subjects, and are "value-added," that is, they take improvement into consideration.

For those who argue that we need national standardized tests in order to compare student achievement over time and to compare subgroups of students, we already have an instrument for this, the NAEP.

The NAEP is administered to small groups of children who each take a portion of the test every few years. Results are extrapolated to estimate how the larger groups would score. No test prep is done, as the tests are zero stakes: There are no (or should be no) consequences for low or high scores. Our efforts should be to improve the NAEP, not start all over again, and go through years of fine-tuning with new instruments.

If we are interested in a general picture of how children are doing, this is the way to do it. If we are interested in finding out about a patient's health, we only need to look at a small sample of their blood, not all of it.

The money saved from eliminating standardized tests should be invested in improved libraries in high-poverty areas: If we do this, we will be investing in solving the problem, not just measuring it.

The cause of the problem: Isn't it all because of corrupt capitalism?

Yes, this is a factor, no doubt. Publishers make a lot of money on tests and on the accompanying materials and texts. But this isn't the whole story. Another important factor is the public's personal theory of how language acquisition and literacy development take place. The public believes in Skill-Building.

The public assumes that students first need to consciously learn their "skills" (phonics, grammar, vocabulary, spelling), and only after skills are mastered can they actually use these skills in real situations. This assumption, the "Skill-Building Hypothesis," insists on delayed gratification. Only school-work counts, only what you learn consciously and deliberately and then practice counts. Only after hard and tedious work do we earn the right to actually read and write and enjoy the use of language.

There is an alternative. It hypothesizes that mastery of the components of language is acquired as a result of understanding what we read and hear. It claims that grammatical competence and vocabulary knowledge are absorbed as a result of listening and reading, and that writing style and most of spelling competence is the result of wide, self-selected reading.

The Comprehension Hypothesis does not require delayed gratification. It claims that we can enjoy real language use right away: We can listen to stories, read books, and engage in interesting conversations as soon as they are comprehensible. The Comprehension Hypothesis, in fact, insists on pleasure from the beginning, on acquirers obtaining interesting, comprehensible input right from the start.

There is, in my opinion, overwhelming evidence that the Skill-Building hypothesis is wrong and that the Comprehension Hypothesis is right. My work shows this, the work of Frank Smith and Kenneth Goodman shows this, as well as hundreds of studies by others. But for the public, the Skill-Building hypothesis is not a hypothesis, it is an axiom. Most people, even many education professionals, are unaware that the Comprehension Hypothesis even exists.

Until the public understands that Skill-Building is incorrect, we have little chance of getting rid of massive testing and dry lessons based on skills. Until the public understands the Comprehension Hypothesis, there will be little support for libraries and self-selected reading, and little understanding of the problem of lack of reading material for self-selected reading. And little chance of closing the achievement gap.

What do you think? Is poverty the culprit for most of the problems in our schools? Would a clear focus on comprehension make instruction more meaningful and successful?

Image provided by Stephen Krashen

References:

Poverty has a huge impact: White, K. 1982. The relation between socioeconomic status and academic achievement. Psychological Bulletin 9: 461-81.

How poverty negatively impacts student achievement:
Berliner, D. 2009. Poverty and Potential: Out-of-School Factors and School Success. Boulder and Tempe: Education and the Public Interest Center & Education Policy Research Unit. http://epicpolicy.org/publication/poverty-and-potential
Coles, G. 2008/2009. Hunger, academic success, and the hard bigotry of indifference. Rethinking Schools 23 (2). http://www.rethinkingschools.org/archive/23_02/hung232.shtml
Martin, M. 2004. A strange ignorance: The role of lead poisoning in "failing schools." http://www.azsba.org/lead.htm.

Poverty and access to books:
Di Loreto, C., and Tse, L. 1999. Seeing is believing: Disparity in books in two Los
Angeles area public libraries. School Library Quarterly 17(3): 31-36.
Duke, N. 2000. For the rich it's richer: Print experiences and environments offered to
children in very low- and very high-socioeconomic status first-grade classrooms.
American Educational Research Journal 37(2): 441-478.
Feitelson, D. & Goldstein, Z. (1986). Patterns of book ownership and reading to young children in Israeli school-oriented and nonschool oriented families. The Reading Teacher, 39, 224-230.
Neuman, S.B. & Celano, D. (2001). Access to print in low-income and middle-income communities: An ecological study of four neighborhoods. Reading Research Quarterly, 36, 1, 8-26.

Less access means lower achievement:
Lance, K. 2004. The impact of school library media centers on academic achievement. In Carol Kuhlthau (Ed.), School Library Media Annual. 188-197. Westport, CT: Libraries Unlimited. (For access to the many Lance studies done in individual states, as well as studies done by others at the state level, see http://www.davidvl.org/research.html).
McQuillan, J. 1998. The Literacy Crisis: False Claims and Real Solutions. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

Self-selected reading and reading achievement:
Krashen, S. 2004. The Power of Reading. Second edition. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann Publishing Co. and Westport, CT: Libraries Unlimited
McQuillan, J. 1998. The Literacy Crisis: False Claims and Real Solutions. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

American students outscore ...:
Bracey, G. 2009. The Bracey Report on the Condition of Public Education. Boulder and Tempe: Education and the Public Interest Center & Education Policy Research Unit. http://epicpolicy.org/publication/Bracey-Report
Payne, K. and Biddle, B. 1999. Poor school funding, child poverty, and mathematics achievement. Educational Researcher 28 (6): 4-13.

Child Poverty:
See nationmaster report at: http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/eco_chi_pov-economy-child-poverty. Other reports arrive at similar figures using different methodologies, e.g. UNICEF, 2007. An Overview of Child-Well Being in Rich Countries. UNICEF Innocenti Research Centre, Report Card 7. The United Nations Childrens Fund.

School libraries can mitigate:
Achterman, D. 2008. PhD dissertation, http://digital.library.unt.edu/permalink/meta-dc-9800:1
Krashen, S., Lee, SY, and McQuillan, J. 2010. An analysis of the PIRLS (2006) data: Can the school library reduce the effect of poverty on reading achievement? CSLA Journal, in press. California School Library Association.

Effect of standardized tests:
Bowen, W., Chingos, M., and McPherson, M. 2009. Crossing the Finish Line: Completing College at America's Universities. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Geiser, S. and Santelices, M.V., 2007. Validity of high-school grades in predicting student success beyond the freshman year: High-school record vs. standardized tests as indicators of four-year college outcomes. Research and Occasional Papers Series: CSHE 6.07, University of California, Berkeley. http://cshe.berkeley.edu
Nichols, S., Glass, G., and Berliner, D. 2006. High-stakes testing and student achievement: Does accountability increase student learning? Education Policy Archives 14(1). http://epaa.asu.edu/epaa/v14n1/.
See also: Kohn, A. 1999. The Schools Our Children Deserve. Boston: Houghton Mifflin; Kohn, A. 2000. The Case Against Standardized Testing. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann. www.fairtest.org is a rich source of information on this topic.

Arguments for The Comprehension Hypothesis and against Skill-Building.
Krashen, S. 2003. Explorations in Language Acquisition and Use: The Taipei Lectures. Portsmouth: Heinemann.
Krashen, S. 2004. The Power of Reading. Second edition. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann Publishing Co. and Westport, CT: Libraries Unlimited
Smith, F. 2003. Understanding Reading. Erlbaum.

Posted by Anthony Cody at 10:36 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Two weeks ago, I posted a public survey for the 1800 members of Teachers' Letters to Obama, to find out the issues and questions of greatest concern to the group. A much smaller group of representatives will be holding a phone conference soon with Education Secretary Arne Duncan soon, and we want to carry the messages from all. The response has been profound. Two hundred and sixty-nine teachers have taken the survey, and a week ago I posted some of the responses. Since then another batch of responses have come in. They are unfiltered and unedited. Here you have window into the concerns of America's teachers.

1. Why do you think telling children a multiple choice test is the most important part of school (which is what we do with high stakes tests, no matter what anyone says) will prepare them for a 21st century world where critical thinking and creativity will be the most valuable skills?


2. Why aren't teachers valued as professionals in this system that has been created by politicians? We have earned the respect of our students and their parents, yet those we elect to govern the education system fails to take into account the expertise and talent we put into our work and the qualifications we have earned through our work with children to ask us how to improve the system we work with every day. We have so much to offer, and know what works, but no one takes us seriously. It is frustrating, to say the least. I have been to national conferences and have spoken to groups of as many as a thousand elected officials about education, and have been often one of only a handful of educators in the meeting called to discuss education and its future. What is wrong with this picture is that we would never do the same thing if we were discussing law or medicine, agriculture or sports, yet we do it consistently when we talk about the future of our children. We fail to include the most valuable input available from the most talented and experienced people over and over again. Is it because we are overwhelmingly female? Another horrifying questions that begs a response. Dr. Michelle Ivy, National Board Certified Teacher, Social Studies, Jacksonville, FL 1999-2019


3. In a historic decision, the Connecticut Supreme Court ruled that all Connecticut public school children have a constitutional right to a good education and that the state has the obligation to provide the resources. The Connecticut Coalition for Justice in Education Funding (CCJEF) brought this lawsuit on behalf of more than 100 cities and towns and boards of education, professional education associations, unions, students and their parents - including our Bridgeport community. However, this will take years to litigate, with CT fighting it all the way. Does this administration intend to address this issue?


4. How do we engage the whole child and his or her family in the journey of lifelong, self-directed education?


5. The achievement gap by the time a student reaches 8th grade keeps increasing. How are we preparing students for high school and beyond if we allow them to advance to the next grade level when they are not meeting the standards? Does a college student earn a degree without accomplishing the requirements of the degree? Why does our education system insist we need to change the assessments or get rid of teachers when the bar is lowered so low for the students? Currently, students do not have to do much and they will be passed to the next grade level. Raise the bar on student accountability!


6. In evaluating a teacher or school, how do you determine what knowledge a student has learned fron the teacher and what knowledge the chid has acquired from parents, peers, tutors, or self determination?


7. Is the overreliance on standardized tests and what is called "backwards planning to prepare students for these high stakes tests really educating our students for the real world?


8. Why are teacher expected to do so much, but receive so little pay?


9. How can teachers be responsible for the learning of a "drug" baby or a child with disabilities to the point of pay loss? Not all children are ready to learn just because they turn a certain age. When will we get out of the antiquated way of teaching children by age rather than by readiness?


10. I often get a class where at least 1/3 of my fourth graders are reading at a second grade (sometimes lower) reading level. I often have to plan 3 different lessons to accommodate the different levels within my classroom. As you can imagine, this requires a tremendous amount of time and effort compared to a class that is more "uniform" in performance level. How can you justify paying me according to their performance?


11. The current trends from the Federal Government are putting education for all in a box. There needs to be flexibility so that the needs of each student can be addressed. Teachers are professionals and must be accorded respect and trust because if they are empowered to make professional decision as they teach specific students and classes, the education is at its best.


12. The current approach to accountability focuses primarily on outputs -that is test scores. This puts the onus primarily on students and teachers, those with the least power in the system. Wouldn't a fairer approach to accountability take into account inputs such as funding or facilities, in order to put equal onus on those with the most power who's decisions not only fail to address equity but exacerbate inequality?


13. One of my biggest frustrations as an educator is working with highly capable Hispanic students who can earn scholarships, but because they or their parents are illegals they have to back out of the scholarship process. How can we continue to support our illegals who need to go to college but cannot get support? These students are giving up at about 5th grade and dropping out in high numbers in high school. My school is then "punished" for the drop out rate for kids who can't go on to school.


14. What public schools did Duncan attend? How many years has Duncan taught full time in low income schools?


15. Why, in the face of evidence that charters are no better than their public school counterparts, are you still emphasizing them?


16. Why should teachers' worth and success be measured by students' performance on single standardized tests that fail to adequately capture real educational growth?


17. How do you plan to address the extreme variations of state standards and criterion when determining the status for AYP?


18. Will you teach for one year in a low performing school and allow your salary to be linked to tests made by outside sources?


19. How do we refocus our resources, energy, and efforts from testing skills to rich curriculums that include science and social studies and art and music? And, why are teachers and schools being measured based on one test, doesn't that create unethical behavior and failure instead of success?


20. Why are middle schools taking such a beating when brain development says that the students brains are in their second fasted growth spurt of their lives and affect the students frontal lob and emotional control? It is amazing when we can hold on test scores. This is a world wide event, not just the USA.


21. I am a NBCT who works in a high need inner city school. 98% of my students are living in poverty, a majority of them are living in single parent households, and their neighborhood is plagued by drugs, violence, and gangs. 88% of my students who entered my classroom this year (3rd grade) were reading at a beginning 1st grade level. How can I get my students to succeed on the state test, within 6 months, without waving a magic wand? Why am I being held accountable for something I can't control when my students go home? Why should my career be jeopardized because my school is deemed inadequate, shut down, and everyone is fired because of factors out of my control? I am good at what I do. I go above and beyond and love working with this population, but why would I want to continue to work in an inner city school if I'm backed up against a wall and set up for failure? Furthermore, I see the "value added" score as an irrelevant measurement approach if the students being compared actually CANNOT read the test. How will you address the reliability & validity of the "value added" scores? If the students are simply guessing on the test (because they can't read it) then aren't we simply comparing who guessed the best, despite taking into account all the factors that the "value added" system does? Please explain.

What do you think of these questions and concerns? What would YOU like to say or ask Secretary Duncan?

Posted by Anthony Cody at 10:33 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

A second year teacher and I began our meeting last week by looking at some student work. This teacher is a solid instructor with a good grasp of his subject, and strong rapport with his students. His high school chemistry students had drawn diagrams of what was happening when salt is added to ice. Their sketches showed small circles representing the water molecules, connected by straight lines in a rectangular grid pattern. Then when the salt was added, another drawing showed this pattern disrupted as the salt, represented by an X, was drawn in between the water molecules.

"Is this how the salt works in the water?" I asked. "Well," he said, "Actually, the salt dissolves to form sodium and choride ions. But I didn't think that was important and I wanted to keep it simple."

I started thinking about how I would want to help students understand why ice melts more quickly when you add salt, and this is what I came up with:

Water is an amazing thing. Every tiny water molecule has a positively charged end where the Hydrogen atoms live, and a negatively charged end where the Oxygen atom lives. Water molecules are like tiny little magnets, each one with a positive pole and a negative pole - that is why water is called "polar."

This makes water behave so differently from almost everything else - water is so special. We know opposite charges attract, and so the positive end of one molecule is attracted to the negative end of another. That is why the molecules stick together on the surface of a glass of water, forming weak Hydrogen bonds, which create surface tension that can float a steel needle. And when water forms a crystal, we don't get a regular pattern like a brick wall. We get these angles formed by the angles the water molecules form as they arrange themselves - a sort of tetrahedron. So if we look at ice crystals - like snowflakes for example - we do not see a brick wall. We see all these beautiful patterns created by these angles.

And what happens when SALT is put into water? First of all, it dissolves. Salt is a compound made of Sodium and Chlorine atoms bonded together. When they dissolve in water, they form ions, Sodium ion with a positive charge, and Chloride ion with a negative charge. What do we know about a water molecule? It has a positive (Hydrogen) end, and a negative (Oxygen) end, right? So what end will the positive Sodium ion be attracted to? To the negative end of the water molecule.

So when we add salt to water, it is not just acting like a solid grain of sand between the water molecules. It is actually breaking down into two parts, and each part is attaching to opposite ends of the water molecule - and breaking the weak bonds connecting one water molecule to another - and that means the ice melts.

I shared this story I thought was hidden within the melting ice with this teacher, and he said "Yes, but I don't think surface tension is included in the CST (California Standards Test) so I don't think I would want to include that." He said he tries to make sure his instruction focuses on the things that will be on the CST, so that he does not lose too much time over-complicating things with material the students won't need for their tests.

For me, the melting ice cube is a dramatic tale. This is why I love science - to actually have some glimmer of understanding of WHY snowflakes form such lovely shapes and patterns. Each one is unique, but they share some key features that can be predicted and explained. And when I grasp this story, then I can understand other things about how water behaves. Why does ice float? Why is water so good at dissolving other things?

We can begin to stoke this passion with our students by giving them some things to wonder about. Share photographs of ice crystals and salt crystals. Look at different crystals under a microscope. How are they similar? How are they different? What story might explain this difference? What about other crystals?

What is the story of water? This substance behaves like nothing else on earth. Once we begin to understand water, when we encounter other liquids, we can see how they are different or similar. All these behaviors are caused by what is happening beneath the surface, hidden by the tiny size of the molecules. But we can understand, when we have a story and some visual models to help us. And when we get that understanding, there is a thrill of discovering a hidden secret -- of possessing special knowledge. That is the alchemy of learning, the magic of the mind that drives us to keep on investigating and learning more -- not because it is on the test, but because it is a beautiful thing to understand!

For me, this is one of the tragedies of our test-driven educational culture. Teachers who are coming of age in our classrooms are under intense pressure to produce better test scores. They come to believe that if knowledge is not going to be on the test, it will not help their students, and it is a waste of the limited time we have to learn all the things that WILL be on the test. It is a long list, so we do not have time to waste on irrelevant material. But what is lost, I am seeing, is the narrative thread that holds these discreet bits of knowledge together. That narrative is a story with great detail, and each detail illustrates and allows us to understand why water behaves the way it does, and exactly how the ions from salt interact with the water crystals. When we strip our lessons of these details, we lose the storyline, and we end up trying to get our students to remember basic facts that lack coherence and beauty.

What do you think? Have we lost the storyline as we pursue better test scores?

Here is more information about water if this has whetted your appetite.

Snowflake image is shared under Creative Commons license, byYellowcloud:

Salt crystal is also Creative Commons, by Gurdonark:

Update: A bonus video for science lovers:

Posted by Anthony Cody at 11:10 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

This accountability idea that No Child Left Behind (and now Race to the Top) has brought us is so fantastic! It is a great way to get our students performing better and get our schools all performing above average. Clearly we have had poor performance in the past because teachers figured why put much effort into getting the kids to do well, when we get paid for showing up, and they can't fire us anyway! That is why so many of us became teachers. That and the summers off! But if you pay us a bit extra, or better yet, base half our salary on the kids' test scores, I am sure the scores will go through the roof.

And if it works for teachers, it ought to work for other jobs as well. I know many people in sales are already paid on commission - that is a sort of accountability, isn't it? You don't sell, you don't eat - simple as that! Now that is motivation for you!

But we are missing the trick big time on other social problems that could easily be solved if only we applied this simple logic! For example, we can solve the crime problem by holding cops accountable. We can pay police officers based on the crime rates where they work. Research has shown that crime rates are very low in some neighborhoods. In fact, in some gated communities the crime rate is near zero. But in other neighborhoods, crime is rampant! If the police can be so effective in one area, there is no reason they should be any less effective in another, right? The trouble is clearly many of our police officers have low expectations, and this sends the wrong message to citizens, who become criminals as a result.

Our health care system also suffers from low expectations. Doctors are always looking for sickness - is it any wonder their patients get ill? We can solve the health crisis by making doctors accountable for the health of their patients. This will get them out there making sure people are healthy, instead of waiting around in those hospitals with all those deathly ill patients. Set your expectations high - no reason we cannot all live at least the average age. Any of your patients who get sick or die before that, sorry, it will come out of your check.

Have you ever noticed how the clients seen by social workers have so many problems? Drug abuse, alcoholism, unemployment - it is terrible - and society pays the price! We need to hold these government employees accountable for results! We should set high expectations for all their clients, regardless of their history or circumstances. Everyone can get a job and be productive - if they don't have skills, enroll them at a four-year college. If we can get everyone to be college educated, the middle class will swell, the economy will grow, and our nation will beat the rest of the world with the ingenuity of this very simple concept of holding people accountable.

What do you think? Are there other problems we can solve with this astonishing accountability approach?

Posted by Anthony Cody at 11:04 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend