Certifiable?

The summer institute of the Northern Virginia Writing Project draws to a close, and next week I will be the last presenter from our group of nearly thirty teachers. Being on staff this year has rekindled the transformative enthusiasm I experienced when I was a fellow here in 1997, at that time wondering if this was really the job for me after four years in the classroom. Now, after thirteen years there, both my presentation topic and my relationship to the profession have changed.

The first time my project was called “Jazz Is... Writing Three Ways With Jazz.” I remember best an experimental choral writing activity during which notebooks were passed as each teacher in the “jam session” tried to fill the role of one instrument in a poetry combo: keeping time like a drummer, marking changes like a bassist, providing harmonic structure like a pianist, or soloing like a horn player. I’m not sure how well it worked but at the end of the summer we titled our writing anthology Equinox, the name of a Coltrane tune I’d played during my presentation.

This time around, my project is called “From Query to Clip: Publishing Teacher’s Tales from the Classroom.” I’ve molted from a journeyman with musical aspirations (and the spare time to play in weekend rock bands) to a veteran with a mission to engage in the public debate about education (and two young boys who only see my saxophone come out of its case to play them happy birthday). Here’s the planned introduction to my presentation, answering the question, “Why Publish?”:

You and I are in the classroom every day, doing arguably the most important job in the world. At the same time, there is a large group of people out there in the media who are writing about what we do: “education reporters.” Sometimes, they even get it right. Frequently, we read their stories and grimace, or maybe work up a head of steam and bitch about it in the lounge. If that were all there was to it, there would be no need for this presentation.

Simultaneously, however, these stories are read by the non-teachers of the world-- our kids’ parents, politicians, realtors-- who tend to believe what the “experts” report. And there’s the rub. As the real experts in the room, we need to show people what we know is true about education: how it happens, why it’s so messy, and what real learning looks like.

In this presentation, on the last day of the summer institute and the first day of the rest of your teaching life, I ask you to think of yourself not just as a teacher of writing but as a writing teacher. In today’s educational climate, somebody’s got to teach the world what teaching and learning is all about. I think it should be us.

I’m still tinkering with the choreography for the rest of the presentation. I know I want to wave around a copy of the Writer’s Market, cover the basics of a query, and explain how getting into print is like a Rube Goldberg machine. I’ll leave the rest up to the experts; I can’t wait to hear what my colleagues have to say.

Posted by Emmet Rosenfeld at 9:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

When I was growing up, the goal with your records was to not scratch them. I learned how to hold the black orbs by the edges between my palms as soon as I started raiding my older brother’s Who collection. Billy Joel smiled at me from the Italian restaurant on the cover because I cleaned lint from the needle before I spun The Stranger. I might have worn a groove in Give Me Three Steps, but there was never an unwanted pop or hiss on either disc of my first double album, Lynyrd Skynyrd’s Gold & Platinum.

At some point along the way, the not scratching thing changed. I know it was well after MTV appeared, forcing its way into our TV diet alongside and eventually replacing half hour episodes of The Love Boat and Three’s Company. It was probably not too long after the time that my older sister started walking around reciting lyrics from “Rapper’s Delight,” like “Have you ever been over to a friend’s house to eat and the food just ain’t no good?/ The macaroni’s soggy, the peas are mush and the chicken tastes like wood...”. Whenever it actually happened, I remember the practice actually had an onomatopoetic word associated with it for about fifteen minutes: “wiki-wiki.”

Some musicologically astute reader out there may remember the tune in which this word first appeared, or even know whether it preceded or imitated the actual sound made by DJ’s half-wearing big head phones who flopped back and forth between records. In fact, I bet I could find more on this on Wikipedia. (But I’m getting ahead of myself.) Whatever its origins, the “wiki-wiki” sound, now called mixing and scratching, has come a long way. The once forbidden act of dragging a record needle across vinyl in the wrong direction is today ubiquitous in musical genres from hip hop to pop.

I offer this admittedly imperfect history of a particular sound as an example of how an aspect of technology, through culture, art, and big sisters, gets folded into the mainstream. And also, because the word “wiki” has been stuck in my head ever since last Tuesday, when I heard a presentation by NVWP tech guru and Woodbridge High School English teacher Eric Hoefler about “Web 2.0” and its applications in my classroom.

I know even less about the frontiers of today’s world wide web than I do about the history of DJ’ing, but for those as clueless as I was before Eric’s dynamic presentation (if you’re over 25 that means you), “Web 2.0” is a current philosophy about how the internet should be used that promotes collaboration, free sharing of ideas and “code,” and generally thumbs its nose at proprietary software peddled by blood-sucking corporate giants like Microsoft.

You may not know about the revolution, but by now you’ve probably heard of or looked something up on Wikipedia, an increasingly referenced online encyclopedia (at least by our students) and the largest wiki in the world. And by wiki I don’t mean the funny sound, I mean a collectively authored website. Eric told us some cool stuff about Wikipedia: a recent article in Nature says it’s more or less as accurate as Encyclopedia Britannica; and, they did a study showing that “wrong information” put up on the more trafficked entries of Wikipedia lasts only about 5 minutes before someone out there in cyberspace corrects it. (By the way, here's Brittanica's snarky response and Nature's rebuttal.)

The rub? I want to make a wiki with my students this year to chronicle our canoe project. This may be as foolhardy as wanting to make the canoe itself, something else I know virtually nothing about. But since when has that stopped me. I already had the idea of a website to scrapbook the process. A wiki, a website we make as we go, is a better tool for the job. What makes me think we can pull it off? None of the kids I’ll be working with remember a time when records weren’t supposed to be scratched.

Posted by Emmet Rosenfeld at 2:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

The NVWP Summer Institute is in full swing, and in this post I want to tell you about Jessica’s presentation, create the inaugural post for the institute’s blog (I’ll post this entry there, too), and pick up again with Entry 4 by considering the institute as an “achievement.”

As you may recall, the SI is a five-week intensive program for teachers of all grade levels and subject areas to study their craft and work on their own writing. We study our craft by making presentations about some aspect of the teaching of writing for an audience of other teachers, and also by reading and discussing professional literature. We work on our own writing in groups that meet several times weekly, during which we practice the workshop skills that we will use with our students during the school year.

We learn by doing, not just by watching-- engagement is at the heart of the institute, contrary to the more typical training model practiced by many school districts, which involves passive teachers having inservice done to them. This experiential approach reveals an underlying goal: to move from a teacher-centered to a student-centered style of teaching.

After completing the institute, teachers are transformed from run-of-the-mill educators to “Teacher/Consultants,” familiar with current best practices in the teaching of writing and charged with acting as agents of change when they return to their base schools. T/C’s may be asked to present at “695’s,” for-credit professional development classes that school districts contract with the project to provide throughout the year.

Jessica Gladis is a young teacher of 7th and 8th grade ESOL (English speakers of other languages) at Hayfield. She began college with the intent to study piano but ended up in education while DJ’ing for her college radio station on the side. Last week, Jessica presented on “Developing Language Through Music,” leading us through activities inspired by Howard Gardener’s theory of multiple intelligences that included musical parts of speech, writing scenes from soundtracks, and a listening comprehension quiz based on a Bob Marley’s “Three Little Birds.”

To teach grammar to non-native speakers, Jessica plays a song and has them brainstorm nouns, then verbs, and last adjectives. After, they write a story using the lists of words. For us she played Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue.” We know parts of speech already, of course, but in doing the activity we considered ways to adapt it to the populations we teach. I could ask freshman at TJ to brainstorm sights, smells and sounds to teach the use of sensory imagery. Or, maybe I could modify the activity to help teach tone. In addition to getting lesson ideas, we generated writing of our own. I played with a film noir/ Maltese Falcon feel in my journal:

“The last I saw of her was a calf clad in fishnet stockings flexing as it ground the cigarette butt of our love into the puddle-dotted street. She left that cone of light from the street lamp the same way she left my life: with high heels clicking against the pavement in a rat-a-tat-tat that mowed me down quicker than the tommy guns would have that suddenly appeared out of the windows of the big black car that came careening around the corner the moment she was gone.”

Great prose? Dashiell Hammett has nothing to fear. But it was fun to write. And it put me in my students’ shoes as I figured out what works or doesn’t work in ways that will energize my teaching when I’m back at school this fall on the other side of the desk.

Will this have an impact on student achievement? Without a doubt. Lessons from Jessica’s presentation and others this summer, as well as my experiences in the reading and writing workshop, will filter into my teaching from the first day. The trick will be for me to explain clearly to the board how the institute and my students’ achievement connect. I’ll give further thought to what sort of evidence will clearly show this link. Luckily, I’ll be in a room for the next few weeks with 25 dedicated teachers who can help me figure it out.

Posted by Emmet Rosenfeld at 10:22 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

(or whatever World Cup game you happen to be watching) to bring you breaking news. Okay, so it started last May, when Newsweek came out with a list of America’s 100 best high schools based on Washington Post journalist Jay Mathew’s Challenge Index. Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, where I teach and widely considered one of the best schools in the country, didn’t crack Newsweek’s list.

I wrote a reply to the list which appeared in Education Week’s June 14 issue under the headline, "Ranking America’s High Schools: A Few Quibbles on What Constitutes ‘Best.'" I argued that the Challenge Index is not an accurate tool for determining the best schools because it measures only how many kids take hard classes, but not how well they do. Moreover, an unintended result of the success of Newsweek’s list is that many kids are shoved into advanced classes just so schools can boost their scores in hopes of making the list: this isn’t always what’s best for kids.

In an upcoming issue, Edweek will print a letter from Jay Mathews answering my riposte. (An extended version of his response is included after the jump-- in this blog only!) In his rebuttal, Jay suggests that I have been lured into deserting the progressive ship on which I’ve sailed thus far in my career by the siren call of a wealthy high-scoring school. Not so! I’m still strapped to the mast, and will explain my position at greater length later this month, when Jay and I engage in a dialogue to be featured on Teacher online.

With apologies to those who have been holding their breath as I mountaineer the crevasses of portfolio Entry 4 along the path toward board certification, and because I feel a little guilty at all the homework I’m assigning here (you are to read both my response to Newsweek and Jay’s response to me, with extra credit if you want to look at the Top 100 list itself), I will keep this post brief. I’ll return soon to Entry 4, which-- believe me--isn’t going anywhere.

For now, here's Jay Mathew's unexpurgated response to my article:

I am always delighted to see Emmet Rosenfeld’s pieces in Education Week and Teacher Magazine. He is one of the most talented young teachers in the country, and is well on his way to becoming the best teacher/journalist/commentator we have. He starred in several chapters of my book Supertest, about the rise of International Baccalaureate in American schools, because of his innovative work at Mount Vernon High School in Fairfax County, Va.

His commentary in the June 14 Edweek, “Ranking America’s High Schools,” was particularly interesting to me because it is one of the few fresh and original critiques of Newsweek’s America’s Best High Schools list, based on the Challenge Index formula I came up with in 1998. So it saddens me to see that in this piece Rosenfeld, usually on the side of the newest thinking, has donned some very rusty armor and joined the throng defending one of the worst aspects of the ancien regime in American education, the centuries-old notion that the best schools are those with the fewest low-income students.

Many of us agree that the Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, where Rosenfeld now teaches English, is the best high school in America when measured by the old standard, test scores, which is pretty much the same thing is measuring schools by average parental income. Jefferson’s average SAT score the last time I looked was a phenomenal 1468, higher than any public high school I have found so far. It is no surprise to anyone familiar with the connection between scores and family incomes that Jefferson’s percentage of low-income students hovers around 1 percent. It also had the fewest black or Hispanic students for any county high school in 2005.

If people want to measure high schools on this test score-family income scale, that is their right. It is likely to continue to be the favorite yardstick because money is the way we judge so much in a free economy. Go into any neighborhood and ask the first person you see about the local high school, and invariably if it has many poor kids you will hear it is a bad school, and if it has few poor kids you will hear it is good.

I invented the Challenge Index because I had stumbled across several schools full of low-income students where the quality of the faculty, as measured by their efforts to help average and below average students improve and prepare for college, was better than several schools I studied in good neighborhoods where the teachers were either afraid of or discouraged from giving even their most eager average students a chance to try an Advanced Placement or International Baccalaureate course.

The editors at Newsweek liked the idea of measuring schools in a different way. Each year we add some new features, such as the equity and excellence rating in response to the complaint from Rosenfeld and others that we don’t say how well students are doing on the AP and IB tests. Rosenfeld’s former school Mount Vernon High, where 36 percent of the students are low income, was on the Newsweek list because of its impressive IB participation rate, but we also noted that its equity and excellence rate, the portion of all seniors who had at least a 4 on one IB exam, was 33.8 percent, more than twice the national average.

A top 100 high schools list based on SAT or AP scores, as Rosenfeld appears to favor as the best definition of the word “best,” would have no schools that had even as many as 30 percent low-income students. Newsweek’s top 100 list has 29 such schools, including a few with more than 70 percent low-income students. The great teachers and administrators at those schools deserve recognition for believing in their students and doing some of the hardest work known in American education. The teachers at Rosenfeld’s school are excellent also, but the nature of their jobs is different because their students cannot attend Jefferson if they do not do very well on an entrance exam, so Newsweek recognized Jefferson on its “public elites” list of schools with few or no average students.

Rosenfeld argues that a school could do well on the Newsweek list if it gave hundreds of AP or IB tests to ill-prepared students who all got the lowest possible scores. Theoretically, that is true, but it is impossible for such a thing to happen in an American public school. Students, parents and teachers simply would not stand for it, and those schools still building their AP or IB programs and producing nothing but low AP or IB scores never have enough tests to make the Newsweek list. The Prince George’s County high school Rosenfeld cites that gave a hundred AP tests a year with no passing scores came nowhere near to making the Newsweek list, and ranked 154th out of all 174 schools in Washington area.

In his piece, Rosenfeld is being true to his school, and I admire that, but he has to be careful not to judge the world with a Jefferson mindset. He has somehow gotten the idea that, because of the success of East Los Angeles calculus teacher Jaime Escalante, the man who inspired the Challenge Index, there is now a “widespread notion that urban educators who can’t make kids succeed simply lack the force of will to help their students defy society’s low expectations.” Believe me, this idea is not even close to being widespread, and anybody who teaches in inner city schools or visits them regularly can tell you that.

But those few who have followed Escalante’s example have found that he was right. They do not believe, as Rosenfeld puts it, that “just putting kids into hard courses makes them smarter.” But they do believe, as Rosenfeld demonstrated with many low-income and minority students at Mount Vernon, that putting kids in hard courses and giving them extra time, encouragement and good teaching does in many cases lead them to reach levels of achievement they never thought possible, and changes the atmosphere of the school.

Simple measures, like body temperature or barometric pressure, can be useful. It surprised me that an indicator as rudimentary as the level of participation in college-level tests helped reveal which high schools were making these unusual efforts, and which were not. But it turns out to be true, and worth doing, even if rankles the most affluent schools to find a few of their poor cousins from the wrong side of the tracks sitting next to them on the same list.

—Jay Mathews

Posted by Emmet Rosenfeld at 12:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (11)