Transform Education

No Profit In Ending Poverty

2009-04-19T10:41:00.005-05:00

Here's an extremely sobering, depressing, thought-provoking interview with the creator of the acclaimed HBO series The Wire. David Simon was a crime reporter for twelve years with The Baltimore Sun before turning to a career in television. Here's an excerpt from the interview, conducted by the inimitable Bill Moyers.

DAVID SIMON: The people most affected . . . are black and brown and poor. It's the abandoned inner cores of our urban areas. . . . (E)conomically, we don't need those people. The American economy doesn't need them. So, as long as they stay in their ghettos, and they only kill each other, we're willing to pay a police presence to keep them out of our America. And to let them fight over scraps, which is what the drug war, effectively, is. . . (S)ince we basically have become a market-based culture and it's what we know, and it's what's led us to this sad denouement, I think we're going to follow market-based logic, right to the bitter end.

BILL MOYERS: Which says?

DAVID SIMON: If you don't need 'em, why extend yourself? Why seriously assess what you're doing to your poorest and most vulnerable citizens? There's no profit to be had in doing anything other than marginalizing them and discarding them.

Simon's solution?

I would decriminalize drugs in a heartbeat. I would put all the interdiction money, all the incarceration money, all the enforcement money, all of the pretrial, all the prep, all of that cash, I would hurl it, as fast as I could, into drug treatment and job training and jobs programs. I would rather turn these neighborhoods inward with jobs programs. Even if it was the equivalent of the urban CCC, if it was New Deal-type logic, it would be doing less damage than creating a war syndrome, where we're basically treating our underclass. The drug war is a war on the underclass now. That's all it is. It has no other meaning.

What Would Replace "Grade Level"?

2009-04-17T16:03:00.001-05:00

I think common sense says that any single measure that claims to assess something is always enhanced by a different kind of measure that attempts to corroborate its claims.

So if I want to know if my kid knows something about the Revolutionary War, I might give her a multiple-choice test. But I'd also want her write a 3-page paper on the cause of the war, give a presentation on the Battle of Bunker Hill, and write and act in a skit about George Washington. At the end of the unit, I'd want her to select items she worked on and place them in her portfolio and then write a meta-cognitive summary of what she learned, the challenges she faced in learning them, and how she overcame them.

Duh, right? Most good teachers do these sorts of things all the time. All of these assessments/measures focus on the question of what my kid knows. But each produces different information in different ways. And each involves different skills.

So go tell that to your state DOE. What will they say? Something like, "These classroom-based assessments are very nice, but they're certainly not reliable. We can't possibly accept your judgement about what students in your classroom know and can do."

THAT'S the problem.

Of course you can't accept the teacher's judgment if punitive high stakes are associated with the assessment, e.g., the teacher getting fired (thanks NCLB!) or the school getting shut down (thanks again, NCLB!) So there's an incentive (thanks Campbell's Law!) to cook the books and make things seem what they aren't.

It doesn't have to be this way. Ultimately, what we're really concerned about is (1) what do kids know? and (2) what can kids do? A single measure (usually a norm-referenced, multiple-choice test) that tells me if my kid is "at grade level" does not tell me what my kid knows and what my kid can do. It tells me if my kid's score is the same as her peers, below her peers, or above her peers. In short, it tells me zippety-doo-dah.

Multiple measures (such as the ones I mentioned above) are the evidence we need to answer the questions (1) what do kids know? and (2) what can kids do? These measures reveal nothing about "grade level," i.e., where these kids are "supposed" to be in relation to each other. Rather, these measures give a very real sense of where these kids ARE. Once we know where they are, we can help them get to the next place. How they get there and when they get there is an open question. But in the best circumstances, getting there is kind of fun. Anyone remember teaching and learning is supposed to be fun? It's different for each kid and for each teacher. It's what learning is all about, and what makes teaching a thrill.

Not On The Test

2009-04-17T00:33:00.002-05:00

Why We Need to Debunk "Grade Level"

2009-04-16T00:55:00.002-05:00

As we have seen from the Obama administration and so-called "progressives," NCLB is going to be tweaked, not fundamentally altered or discarded. I'd argue that it's being tweaked and not discarded because there is a very strong sense that there is a magical thing called "grade level." This magical thing called "grade level" is (1) very real, (2) can be measured empirically with a fine degree of validity and reliability, i.e., it really tells us something useful and is beyond repute, and (3) lots of low-income minorities are not at "grade level" and is therefore cause for concern, as it is our sacred duty to get them to this magical place.

But, as I have been discussing, we can show that "grade level" (1) is a phantasm, (2) cannot be measured accurately or reliably and does not yield any kind of useful information whatsoever, and (3) is therefore meaningless when we talk about the academic achievement of low-income minorities.

This is a foundational critique that, if successful, will raise the following questions:

1) If "grade level" is a phantasm and does not accurately measure what students know and can do, what are other means by which we can better understand what students know and can do?

2) If it's meaningless to say that low-income minorities are not "at grade level," then what is a meaningful way to talk about the disparity that exists between low-income kids and their more affluent peers?

If we get lots of folks asking these questions, then there's an opening for discussion of alternatives. But if folks are not asking them, then they still uncritically and unquestionably accept that "grade level" is real and will, therefore, always be caught in a box. They will design more assessments -- maybe even some pretty good ones -- but these assessments will all be for the purpose of determining if kids are at "grade level" or not. Ergo, we are still where we are now.

With all due respect to the work that everyone -- including me -- has tried to do on debunking NCLB, we have clearly not achieved our goals. So that's why I'm suggesting this tactic.

Is "Grade Level" a Load of Hooey?

2009-04-06T22:31:00.002-05:00

At the heart of the "achievement gap" is the contention that lots of low-income minority kids are "not at grade level" and are often said to be several "grade levels" behind.

But what do we mean by "grade level"? Grade level is the score of the average child in a particular grade on a norm-based test. But, by definition, 50% of all children are always below grade level. When using standardized, norm-based tests, you always guarantee that half of the students taking the test are below grade level. So when we say that low-income blacks, for example, are not at grade level, aren't we overlooking the rather obvious fact that LOTS of kids -- in fact, HALF of all kids by definition -- are below grade level?

Further, aren't we overlooking the fact that standardized tests are rather poor measures of what students know and can do? And as a colleague of mine reminded me recently, "Most kids need family and adult support to become readers. And as we know, many kids don't have that support. Thus the need for schools --in loco parentis." So aren't we also overlooking the fact that low-income minorities often don't have this kind of family support, so their being "behind" is not all that surprising?

So why not accept that lots of low-income minority kids do not read at the level of their white, affluent peers and -- instead of pathologizing them for this and then handing them a dumbed-down, See Spot Run curriculum with lots o worksheets -- work with them from where they are and at their own pace? In other words, why not just accept that all kids learn differently and at different paces? Would this just be too ridiculously practical? Instead of giving them the dumbed-down curriculum, you give them all the support and encouragements and structure they need without framing their development as "behind" or "slow" or "impaired." It's just where it's at. They are where they are. Don't sacrifice PE and art and music so they can do more phonics drills. Give them a broad-based experience of schooling that still makes it fun and interesting. They may not read Moby Dick -- ever. But they may not want to read Moby Dick, even if they could. (Confession - I tried to read it once and gave up because I found it lethally boring.) Am I missing something here?

In the end, here's what I think this would accomplish. We'd reframe the "achievement gap" and replace it with what we know to be true of all kids (actually, all people): a continuum. We know that ability varies greatly on everything, and that some kids are simply better at reading than others. There's nothing wrong with this, in the same way that there's nothing wrong with the fact that some kids are better communicators than others or better dancers or better weavers or better at computer games than others. Reading is tricky, though, because it's seen as so foundational, and there's a belief (probably romantic) that while it's OK for kids to be better at some things and not others, ALL kids have to be equally good at reading. Maybe they just aren't? And, since reading is so heavily affected by socioeconomic factors, it only makes sense that affluent kids will be slightly better at it than low-income kids.

Given all of this, we'd see growth measures in place for each student and completely get rid of norm-based standards and measures and only measure students in relation to their own growth and development.

Holt and Kohl on Reading

2009-03-29T20:12:00.003-05:00

Some further thoughts on kids being labeled "learning disabled."

John Holt, the homeschooling/unschooling advocate, wrote that once a child really wants to learn to read for his own reasons, it takes about thirty hours of focused help from someone who knows how.

Holt argues in Instead of Education that we can't fathom this because "S-chools and T-eachers believe, and soon convince the children, that everything that is learned must be T-aught. So the T-eachers must spend hundreds of hours trying to cope with and outwit the kind of children's evasive tactics I wrote about in How Children Fail. They make children anxious and dependent and then say, rightly, how hard it is to deal with their anxiety and dependency. None of this need be."

Herbert Kohl makes a similar argument in Reading, How To. He writes in the preface,

There is no reading problem. There are problem teachers and problem schools. Most people who fail to learn to read in our society are victims of a fiercely competitive system of training that requires failure. If talking and walking were taught in most schools we might end up with as many mutes and cripples as we now have non-readers. However, learning to read is no more difficult than learning to walk or talk. The skill can be acquired in a natural and informal manner and in a variety of settings ranging from school to home to the streets.

Later, in Chapter 2, he writes, "If a youngster fails to acquire the skill or comply with the rules of learning, he or she is considered retarded or criminal, that is, in more polite school language, a learning or behavior problem."

Stop Pathologizing Children

2009-03-29T19:43:00.003-05:00

Kids — in fact, everyone — develop according to their own timelines. Some are faster at learning some things than others. For example, my son learned to walk when he was 13 months old, but my daughter didn't walk until she was 20 months old. We knew that this was perfectly normal and didn't worry.

But in school, if you take more time to learn certain things, esp. how to read and write, then you are labeled as “developmentally delayed.” It’s important not to look at delays in development as signs that kids are broken and need to be fixed. If you look at people as though they are broken and need fixing, a profound disconnection emerges between you and them. This is disturbing in any context, but it’s especially disturbing in a school setting, much less the very first school setting that children have, i.e., pre-school (where the stage is often set for children who are not as fast as some of their peers.)

My wife and I found this out first-hand. We sent our daughter to our local neighborhood school for pre-K, a school considered "low income" because it receives federal Title 1 money. We were alarmed at how anti-child it was, esp. with regard to recess, free time, and testing. I met with the principal and with the classroom teacher and expressed my concerns about the overly-academic orientation of the curriculum. I noticed the effect the school was having on my daughter’s attitude towards school and learning. So we decided to look elsewhere, knowing that the Kindergarten curriculum at our neighborhood school was even more anti-child, overly-academic, high stakes, test-centric, and highly structured. As I wrote about here, my daughter’s experience with writing her name before she was able to or willing to do so had a profoundly negative effect on her, and I still harbor bad feelings towards the school for forcing kids to be at the same “grade level benchmarks” at the same time.

Her current school was a real life-saver for her because the school honors the fact that different kids develop at different paces. She is now thriving there and really likes it. And not only is she writing her name, but she’s actually copying text out of books on her own, writing stories (most of which she dictates to me), and writing words she sees on a daily basis.

Had she stayed at our neighborhood school, she would have been labeled “a slow learner.” She would have been put into a slow group. She would have known right away that there was something wrong with her (at least, from the school’s perspective.) Of course, I’ll never know what may have happened in the long run if she had stayed there. But it’s not too much of a stretch for me to imagine her hating school, hating the fact that she had to write anything, and generally feeling like she was a failure.

These are high stakes here. We are talking about paving the future for the lives of children. This is especially critical for low-income and low-income minority children, who are disproportionately labeled "learning disabled" and who typically do not have parents with enough social capital to fight the system on behalf of their children.

Over on another blog called PPS Equity, I wrote about a school in Portland, OR called Rosa Parks Elementary. 91% of the kids at Rosa Parks are eligible for free or reduced price lunch. The Kindergartners have 3 “specials”: drama, PE, and library. They are all 30 minutes each, and they are all offered back-to-back on Wednesdays. So for an hour and a half, the kids go from one to the other.

Then, on Mondays, Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays, they do nothing but the academic curriculum. No art, no music, no PE, no library, no nuthin’ for 4 out of 5 days.

They have a single lunch/recess period that lasts about 40 minutes. The kids eat lunch first and then go to recess. A Kindergarten teacher at Rosa Parks that I talked to estimated that recess was about 20 to 25 minutes long, depending on when the kids finish lunch. School starts at 8:30 and goes until 2:45. So that means for those 4 out of 5 days, they have 25 minutes to be goofy and run around and be little kids in a span of 6 hours. The rest is all business.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the tracks, students in the affluent neighborhood school of Ainsworth get not one, not two, but three recesses per day. At Ainsworth, Kindergarten kids get PE, music, art and singing once a week each. They get 30 minutes for PE and music and an hour for art. Singing happens every Friday.

5.9% (five point nine per cent) of the kids at Ainsworth are eligible for free and reduced lunch.

The upshot? Low-income students and low-income minority students are being given a qualitatively inferior education because they are said to be “behind” in reading and math.

We have to stop pathologizing children for being where they are in their development, stop robbing them of a broad-based educational experience in the name of raising their test scores, and stop punishing low-income kids for being at the effect of the ravages of poverty in the name of closing the so-called “achievement gap.”

Dumbing down the educational experience of low-income children does not help them in the long run. Pathologizing them as they're just beginning to take shape as learners virtually seals their fates.

Does KIPP Sanction Institutionalized Violence?

2009-03-24T15:30:00.002-05:00

If you're a KIPP fan, I'd like to know if you're following the story at KIPP Fresno. If not, check out Jim Horn's posts on this.

The experience at KIPP Fresno raises the specter of institutionally sanctioned violence, both physical and emotional. It also suggests a new tag line for KIPP: "Work hard, be nice . . . or else."

Is Poverty Just an Excuse?

2009-03-20T16:18:00.000-05:00

In the effort to fight the "poverty is no excuse" crowd, education researcher Dr. David Berliner reviews a half-dozen out-of-school factors that have been clearly linked to lower achievement among poor and minority-group students: birth weight and non-genetic parental influences; medical care; food insecurity; environmental pollution; family breakdown and stress; and neighborhood norms and conditions. Additionally, he notes a seventh factor: extended learning opportunities in the form of summer programs, after-school programs, and pre-school programs. Access to these resources by poor and minority students could help mitigate the effects of the other six factors.

Here's the link to the full policy brief. (712 KB PDF document)

Kindergarten Playtime Disappears, Raising Alarm About Children's Learning and Health

2009-03-20T16:10:00.002-05:00

A press release from The Alliance for Childhood.

Time for play in most kindergartens has dwindled to the vanishing point, replaced by lengthy lessons and standardized testing, according to results of three new studies released today by the nonprofit Alliance for Childhood. Classic play materials like blocks, sand and water tables, and props for dramatic play have largely disappeared in the 268 kindergarten classrooms studied. The findings are documented in Crisis in the Kindergarten: Why Children Need to Play in School.

Researchers from U.C.L.A. and Long Island University found that, on a typical day, children in all-day kindergartens in Los Angeles and New York City spend four to six times as much time in literacy and math instruction and taking or preparing for tests (about two to three hours per day) as in free play or "choice time" (30 minutes or less). A third research team, at Sarah Lawrence College in New York, found that most of the activities available to children during choice time (a popular euphemism for playtime) are in fact teacher-directed and involve little or no free play, imagination, or creativity.

Child development experts have been raising alarms about the increasingly didactic, test-driven, and joyless course of early childhood education. "These practices, which are not well grounded in research, violate long-established principles of child development and good teaching," states the Alliance report. "It is increasingly clear that they are compromising both children's health and their long-term prospects for success in school."

The report summarizes recent studies and reports showing long-term gains from play and focused, playful learning in early education. It also critiques kindergarten standards, scripted teaching, and standardized testing and makes recommendations for change.

David Elkind, author of The Power of Play, calls the research findings "heartbreaking." In a foreword to the report, Elkind writes, "We have had a politically and commercially driven effort to make kindergarten a one-size-smaller first grade. Why in the world are we trying to teach the elementary curriculum at the early childhood level?"

The full text of Crisis in the Kindergarten: Why Children Need to Play in School is available at www.allianceforchildhood.org.

Assessment On Planet Zarg

2009-03-04T18:25:00.005-06:00

I just came back from a visit to planet Zarg. We could learn a thing or two from these guys.

In the schools on Zarg, they measure kids, just like we do on Earth (well, in some places on Earth). The inhabitants of Zarg studied the views of former Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings. From her, the Zargians learned that "what gets tested gets taught." So, following her advice, they created assessments that measure all of these things:

curiosity
creativity
tenacity
honesty
compassion
ability to get along well with others

When parents meet with their kids' teachers on Zarg, they talk about test scores, just like we do here on Earth. But the tests aren't like the multiple-choice tests we use on Earth. Their tests ask students to work on projects, to create things of substance in collaboration with others, and then to report and reflect on the process they went through in creating them. The Zargians value curiosity, creativity, tenacity, honesty, compassion, and the ability to get along well with others. They believe that young people, endowed with these traits, stand a greater chance of being happy, successful, productive citizens. So they create measures to see how well students are acquiring these valued traits.

What do we on Earth value? No matter what we say we value, our tests speak louder than our words. So what values do our tests reveal? That learning can be reduced to a correct answer on a multiple-choice question.

Deep Knee Bends And Test Prep

2009-02-28T10:44:00.008-06:00

I understand the argument that "back-to-basics" supporters make: under-served kids have different academic needs, are further behind, and therefore need the extra time on reading and math skills. You don't have time to do everything, so you have to focus on the essentials because these kids need the essentials.

However, I don't buy this argument for two reasons:

short-changing these kids and depriving them of an experience that nurtures and develops their minds and bodies, as well as their creativity and passions, is not acceptable
there is no evidence that short-term increases in test scores is indicative of any deep or long-term learning

The so-called "nation's report card," the NAEP -- the National Assessment of Educational Progress -- reveals that test scores typically go up, plateau, and then fall around middle school. This is due to the fact that (1) basic skills drilled into kids when they are in the younger grades are not transferable because (2) the tests get more difficult as kids get older and the test prep they were given as younger kids no longer works.

Here's another way to look at it.

Imagine that a bunch of affluent kids and a bunch of low-income kids are training for a decathlon. The affluent kids eat a healthy variety of foods, get plenty of sleep and rest, and engage in a broad array of exercises and activities as part of their training regimen. The low-income kids focus on doing deep knee bends only. They don't eat healthy foods, and they don't get the amount of sleep and rest the affluent kids get.

Now, don't get me wrong. Deep knee bends are great. And they certainly help develop and strengthen leg muscles. But they don't do much for cardiovascular stamina, nor do they do anything for arm, back, and chest muscles.

Having a strong cardiovascular system as well as strong arm, back and chest muscles are crucial to ensuring success in a decathlon competition. Strong leg muscles are not enough.

So which group of kids is more likely to do well in the decathlon? The answer is obvious.

But now apply the analogy to the test-centric curriculum that low-income minorities are subject to. Loading up on academically-oriented tasks and discrete skill acquisition are the equivalent of doing deep knee bends. Eating well, resting, playing, and doing a broad series of exercises is the equivalent of a curriculum that exposes kids to art, music, drama, dance, and recess. The decathlon competition is the equivalent of life.

So which group of kids is more likely to do well in the decathlon of life? Unfortunately, for folks like Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and President Barack Obama, the answer is not obvious.

Let me give you a glimpse at what this looks like here in Portland, OR.

At Rosa Parks Elementary, Kindergartners have 3 “specials”: drama, PE, and library. They are all 30 minutes each.

But wait: here’s the ringer — they are all offered back-to-back on Wednesdays. So for an hour and a half, the kids go from one to the other.

Then, on Mondays, Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays, they do nothing but the academic curriculum. No art, no music, no PE, no library, no nuthin’ for 4 out of 5 days.

They have a single lunch/recess period that lasts about 40 minutes. The kids eat lunch first and then go to recess. The teacher I spoke to estimated that recess was about 20 to 25 minutes long, depending on when the kids finish lunch. School starts at 8:30 and goes until 2:45. So that means for those 4 out of 5 days, they have 25 minutes to be goofy and run around and be little kids in a span of 6 hours. The rest is all business.

91% of the kids there are eligible for free and reduced lunches. The school is right smack dab in the heart of a new public housing project.

Meanwhile, in a highly-affluent part of Portland called the West Hills, Kindergartners at Ainsworth Elementary School have three (3) recess periods per day: morning recess, lunch/recess, and afternoon recess. Kids get PE, music, art and singing once a week each. They get 30 minutes for PE and music and an hour for art. Singing happens every Friday. They are also taken to the library once a week.

5.9% (five point nine per cent) of the kids at Ainsworth are eligible for free and reduced lunch.

Rosa Parks is rated as a “satisfactory” school by the state. Ainsworth is given an “exceptional” rating.

Something stinks here.

The poor kids do deep knee bends while the rich kids sing every Friday.

She Did It!

2009-02-26T15:27:00.003-06:00

In my post from yesterday, I talked about how difficult and frustrating it is to give my daughter space to choose. This has been difficult and challenging in so many ways, but I've maintained my convictions because I want my parenting to be in synch with my values. In other words, being a parent is a way for me to act on my beliefs.

One of the things I believe -- and lots of research studies support -- is that children develop according to their own timeline. When they're ready to read, they read. When they're ready to write, they write. Etc., etc. Of course, as teachers and parents, we can prime the pump a bit. We can read to them and encourage them to experiment. But they have to decide when they're ready. Some teachers and parents describe it, literally, as a light going on -- the moment their kid or student realizes something and is ready to go.

Yesterday, I had such a moment.

As I've written about before, my daughter had a mixed experience as a pre-Kindergartner. She liked being with her friends, but she froze up when asked to write her name and do all the other skills-oriented tasks. Nevertheless, my daughter came to school five days a week for an entire school year, and the very first thing she did when she got there was write her name. She must have written her name -- "successfully" -- at least 100 times. But when she started Kindergarten this year and was asked to write her name, she couldn't do it. Or, more accurately, she wouldn't do it. Why not? I guess I'll never know for sure. But I don't think it's too much of a stretch to suggest that she was pushed too early to do something she wasn't ready to do. Ironically, although she had proven that she could write her name, she later decided that she could not.

Fortunately for her, we changed schools and enrolled her in a Kindergarten that did not push kids and did not hold random, norm-based standards above their heads. This school honors the fact that children develop at their own pace and need to be supported and encouraged, not pushed. I told her teacher about her not being willing to write her name, so he came up with the idea of giving her a bunch of stickers with her name on them. When she needed to give something to the teacher, she simply put a name sticker on it. Problem solved.

Now flash forward 5 months. After school, she came racing in with a big smile on her face and said, "Guess what, Daddy? I'm so clever. Look, I wrote my name and this, too. It says 'Mayan Pottery.'" I hugged her and congratulated her and told her I was very proud of her.

What if I had bribed her with candy and with gold stars when she told me she couldn't write her name? Would her smile have been as broad and as genuine? Or what if I had said, "Of course you can write your name. Now sit down young lady and write your name or else!" I didn't do either of these things because doing them would have been manipulative and coercive. I chose to let her take control of her own development. I let her be in charge of saying what she could and could not do. More importantly, she was in a classroom with a teacher who believed the same thing.

Of course, as a teacher and a parent, you're always wondering whether to push a student to try harder or go deeper. But when you push a kid, you have to be sure there's something there that can be pushed, that can respond to a push. Otherwise, the push becomes a shove. And when you get shoved and knocked down, sometimes you don't get back up again.

KIPP Revisited

2009-02-25T12:33:00.002-06:00

I think about KIPP a lot, so I write about KIPP a lot. My thoughts and writings are now part of a book by Washington Post reporter Jay Mathews. The book is called Work Hard. Be Nice.: How Two Inspired Teachers Created the Most Promising Schools in America.

Paul from Texas commented on my post called "Why KIPP Doesn't Serve as a Model for Urban Education." I responded to the post there, but I thought I'd post it as a new entry, too. So here is what I said.

Paul wrote, "As a middle class white, it is easy for Mr. Campbell to throw stones at the notion of punishments and rewards . . . No doubt, his children respond to the very system of incentives and consequences that any capable parent would provide."

So what does that mean?

Perhaps he's suggesting that I hang signs around my children's necks that say "Bench" or "Miscreant" if they misbehave? I don't. As a parent and educator, I find the notion of rewards and punishments to be extremely challenging. It's much, much easier to bribe kids with carrots and threaten them with sticks. But it also violates my own ethics and values, and it deprives kids and students of experiencing any sort of internal motivation.

In those instances when I've resorted to using bribes with my own daughter, I've always regretted it. Why? Because she's more interested in getting the goody for the behavior I'm trying to coerce her to perform. This also robs her of experiencing real consequences because she is not part of choosing the reward or the punishment. As much as I'd love, love, love to use time-outs as a way to punish her and manipulate her and coerce her to "be good"(or "work hard" or "be nice"), my wife and I don't use them because time-outs are . . . well, . . . manipulative and coercive. They also suggest that my love is conditional on whether or not I approve of her. Yuck.

As I say, I'd love to use them, though, because it would be SO much easier! But I choose -- perhaps masochistically -- to use other means. I talk to her. I explain what her choices are. I help her understand the consequences of her choices. And then I let her choose. I very often -- very often -- do not like the choices she makes. But she is a human being that is learning how to make good choices, so I allow there to be bumps in the road. Life is kind of like that -- bumpy.

But for the KIPP'sters and their ilk, there is only candy for good behavior and a sign around their necks for bad. Some choice . . .

Obama's Education Policy

2008-10-21T11:38:00.003-05:00

In the final debate between McCain and Obama, McCain brought up the issue of D.C. vouchers. It was embarrassing to watch Obama's response. He stood there in silence, looking down and nodding. It looked like he was being schooled. I fear that Obama will learn from McCain, and that the miniscule gap between their education policies will eventually close when Obama comes out in favor of vouchers. Hope I'm wrong. But I doubt it.

In the same debate, Obama pointed out -- as a way to give himself credibility -- his support of performance pay for teachers and said smugly, "This doesn't make me very popular with the teachers' unions." Obama believes in choice and competition, one of the major reasons why he wants to double the amount of charter schools. His support of vouchers would be consistent with his current beliefs, so don't be surprised.

Many edu progressives have said that vouchers would be a great idea if the amount of the voucher actually enabled a low-income family to attend an expensive private school. There is not a single voucher plan that I know of that does this. But even if there were, private schools can decide who they let in and who they decide to kick out -- with zero public accountability for either decision. And even if there were adequate funds to send every kid to Exeter and private schools were compelled to admit and retain a diverse body of low-income minority students, there's only so much room at the Exeters of the world. So when Exeter is filled to capacity, where do kids go to school? Vouchers feed the chasm that exists between have and have-not schools. If you're lucky enough to get into a choice school via a voucher, then God bless you. But if you're not so lucky?

The solution, of course, is to make every school a "choice" school. How do you do that? That's a tough question, but this is precisely the kind of tough question that Obama should be posing, not caving to a solution that only exacerbates the problem.

Accountability Meets the Corporate Achievement Gap

2008-08-15T09:45:00.006-05:00

The Associated Press ran a story on August 12, 2008, citing a report from the Government Accountability Office that revealed that two-thirds of U.S. corporations paid no federal income taxes between 1998 and 2005. About 25 percent of the U.S. corporations not paying corporate taxes were considered large corporations, meaning they had at least $250 million in assets or $50 million in receipts. And, according to the report, about 68 percent of foreign companies doing business in the U.S. avoided corporate taxes altogether over the same period.

How ironic in the age of No Child Left Behind that the GAO - the Government Accountability Office - would be the one that would point out corporate America's lack of accountability when it came time to paying the bills in this country.

It's clear to me that we have a Corporate Achievement Gap here. What is the Corporate Achievement Gap? The Corporate Achievement Gap is the difference between what taxpayers paid into the general coffers -- for roads and bridges, for schools and fire trucks -- and what 25 percent of U.S. corporations did not put in. This gap is an achievement gap because it underscores the potential for achievement if only these corporations would help fill this gap.

But they are simply not doing their part, not shouldering their load, not paying their dues.

Right now, the US federal government pays for between 7 and 10 percent of the total budget for public preK-12 education. The other 90 to 93 percent is paid for by state and local taxpayers.

Imagine, if you would, what kind of impact there would be if the US federal government doubled its current investment in public education from about 10 percent to 20 percent. Imagine the difference this could make.

In his amazing book Class and Schools, Richard Rothstein wrote:

All told, adding the price of health, early childhood, after-school, and summer programs, (the) down payment on closing the achievement gap would probably increase the annual cost of education, for children who attend schools where at least 40% of the enrolled children have low incomes, by about $12,500 per pupil, over and above the $8,000 already being spent. In total, this means about a $156 billion added annual national cost to provide these programs to low-income children.

These are 2003 - 2004 data, and they're probably not completely accurate. But these numbers at least give you an idea of what it might take to actually close the educational achievement gap. They give you the sense that closing the educational achievement gap might actually be something that could be done.

But before we can close the educational achievement gap, we must first close the Corporate Achievement Gap.

Teachers and schools are being held accountable. It's time to start holding corporations accountable, too. We must demand that they contribute to the health and well-being of the country by paying their fair share.

How "Choice" Is No Choice at All

2008-08-11T12:40:00.002-05:00

In a national school system that has worsened -- not improved -- under NCLB, there are a few schools where good teaching and learning practices are in place. The Portland public schools system -- like many others across the country -- holds these schools out to parents through a "choice" process that involves a lottery.

Most parents who know about these schools and can afford to transport their kids there want what these schools offer. They still have an extended recess. They still have art and music and see them as intrinsic to healthy childhood development, not as frivolous extras that can come or go depending on the budget or the latest test data.

This past spring, parents in Portland flocked to these kinds of schools. At Emerson Charter School, there were over 200 applications for 12 spots in the K-1 classroom. Similar numbers were seen at Trillium, Opal, and Portland Village School.

But the approaches these schools take are usually not offered to us at our neighborhood schools. They certainly aren't offered at my neighborhood school -- a school that voluntarily subjects children to the DIBELS test and limits 5 and 6-year-old Kindergarten children to 20 minutes of recess and a sprinkling of PE, art, and music here and there.

So here's what the "choice" for parents looks like: (1) we can roll the dice and hope that we get lucky and get in to one of these schools, or (2) we can enroll our children in schools that follow test-centric, developmentally inappropriate curricula. The former is a desired outcome. The latter comes with a great deal of anxiety, trepidation, and bitterness.

Of course, we can choose to withdraw our children from the school system and homeschool them. But this is not really a choice, given the options. It's really a matter of necessity. With some degree of sadness and a great deal of disappointment, my wife and I decided to homeschool our daughter this year. We believe we had no other choice. Homeschooling will be fun and rewarding, and we're looking forward to it. But it often feels like we're making lemonade from lemons.

So does making the "choice" schools available to all parents make the other schools better? Absolutely not. Do all parents and children benefit from the "choice" schools? Absolutely not. Rather, other parents and their kids become your competition as you scramble and beg for the few crumbs thrown out. It's a sickening and heart-breaking process. It is morally and ethically stinky. You know that if you are lucky and get in, your kid is going to make it. You know that other kids will not get in. You are aware of this. And still you participate in the "choice" process.

I never liked "choice" because it's no choice at all. What "choice" does is effectively defang the opposition, as the few most vocal opponents of the status quo branch off and start their own charters and then attract others. The kids that make it into these schools are lucky, indeed. But the rest are not so lucky and must play the hand they've been dealt. My wife and I are in a postion where homeschooling is possible -- this year. But who knows about next year? And most parents are not in a position to be able to homeschool. They are stuck with the test-centric schools and must choose between them and nothing at all.

Some choice . . .

What is good assessment?

2008-08-10T13:49:00.002-05:00

Good assessment begins with the end in mind, i.e., you start off with what you want students to know and be able to do. So let's imagine for a moment what that might look like. Here's a starter:

1) we want all students to be able to read and love doing so
2) we want all students to have a fundamental grasp of numeracy and mathematical thinking
3) we want all students to be able to write persuasively on a variety of subjects

You might also wish to nurture and develop certain qualities in students, e.g., curiosity, compassion, creativity, confidence.

So now the question becomes: how do we determine that students know these things, can do these things, or have acquired these qualities? The trick is to use assessment to help students know them, do them, and acquire them. In other words, good assessment is indistinguishable from good instruction. Good assessment drives instruction because it provides rich, meaningful information that both students and teachers can use -- teachers to improve their instruction and students to improve their learning.

So here's the litmus test for the current battery of assessments that have hijacked our curricula: do they provide rich, meaningful information that both students and teachers can use?

I would say the answer is "no" because most of the assessments in use today via "data-driven assessment" practices produce information that is shallow and disjointed. But even worse, some of the assessments used produce information that is simply wrong.

To make this case, let's consider the DIBELS test. The Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills (DIBELS) is a set of one-minute measures: recognizing initial sounds, naming the letters of the alphabet, segmenting the phonemes in a word, reading nonsense words, oral reading of a passage, retelling, and word use. The measures are used to assess phonological awareness, the alphabetic principle, accuracy and fluency in reading connected text, vocabulary and comprehension.

The DIBELS is used to assess more than 1,800,000 students from Kindergarten to grade 6. Students who do not meet the expected benchmark are given the DIBELS over and over, i.e., the test becomes the exclusive means by which progress in reading is measured.

Jay Samuels, a professor of education psychology and of curriculum and instruction at the University of Minnesota, served as a member of the National Reading Panel and coauthored the fluency section of the panel's report. The NRP's report has become the gospel on how reading is to be taught in this country, so Samuels' opinion carries some weight. Here is what he recently wrote about the DIBELS:

--begin excerpt from Reading Research Quarterly (2007-10-01)--

The DIBELS's battery of tests . . . aim to identify students who may be at risk of reading failure, to monitor their progress, and to guide instruction. With the widespread use of DIBELS tests, a number of scholars in the field of reading have evaluated them, and not all of their evaluations have been flattering. For example, Pearson (2006, p. v) stated,

“I have built a reputation for taking positions characterized as situated in 'the radical middle'. Not so on DIBELS. I have decided to join that group convinced that DIBELS is the worst thing to happen to the teaching of reading since the development of flash cards.”

Goodman (2006), who was one of the key developers of whole language, is concerned that despite warnings to the contrary, the tests have become a de facto curriculum in which the emphasis on speed convinces students that the goal in reading is to be able to read fast and that understanding is of secondary importance. Pressley, Hilden, and Shankland (2005, p. 2) studied the Oral Reading Fluency and Retelling Fluency measures that are part of DIBELS. They concluded that “DIBELS mispredicts reading performance much of the time, and at best is a measure of who reads quickly without regard to whether the reader comprehends what is read.”

If Riedel's conclusion that administration of subtests other than Oral Reading Fluency is not necessary for prediction of end-of-first- and second-grade comprehension, in combination with the critical evaluations of DIBELS by some of our leading scholars in reading is not enough to raise the red flag of caution about the widespread use of DIBELS instruments, I have an additional concern about the misuse of the term fluency that is attached to each of the tests. Because each of the tests is labeled as a fluency test, it is only fair game to see if that term is justified. I contend that with the exception of the Retell Fluency test, none of the DIBELS instruments are tests of fluency, only speed, and that the Retell Fluency test is so hampered by the unreliability of accurately counting the stream of words the student utters as to make that test worthless. Let us not forget that, in the absence of reliability, no test is valid.

Carl Chew's Statement

2008-05-02T11:59:00.002-05:00

Here is Carl Chew's statement on why he refused to administer the WASL, the state of Washington's standardized test used to measure AYP under NCLB.

On April 15, I refused to give the Washington Assessment of Student Learning to my sixth-grade students at a Seattle Public Schools middle school. I performed this single act of civil disobedience based on personal moral and ethical grounds, as well as professional duty. I believe that the WASL is destructive to our children, teachers, schools, and parents.

It is important for me to note that my disobedient action was not directed at any individual. I love being a teacher; my students are fantastic; my fellow teachers collaborate with and help me every day in numerous ways; and my school administration has always shown a willingness to listen to and support the teachers. I understand that my action has caused people pain, and I am truly sorry for that, but I could no longer stand idly by as something as wrong as the WASL is perpetrated on our children year after year.

Though my act of civil disobedience was individual, I do not stand alone in my strong beliefs. Any Internet search for high-stakes testing will reveal highly regarded educators, distressed parents and sensitive teachers with a wealth of thoughtful writing and case studies supporting my views.

The WASL is bad for kids.

To my mind the measure of successful childhood is that each child learns about who she or he is and how the world works, gains an assertive and confident self image and feels safe, well fed, and happy. Schools, along with parents and communities, need to contribute wisely to this goal. Unfortunately, the WASL creates panic, insecurity, low self esteem and sadness for our children.

It is written in the language of white, middle-and upper-class students, leaving all others behind.

It is presented to children in a secretive, cold, sterile and inhumane fashion.

There is no middle ground --children either pass or fail, which leaves them confused, guilty, and frustrated.

Numerous questions on the test are unclear, misleading or lacking in creativity.

It tests a very narrow definition of what educators know children need to become well-rounded human beings.

The WASL is given at a prescribed time regardless of a child's emotional or physical health.

The WASL is bad for teachers.

For meager pay, teachers are asked to work in extremely challenging situations, keep absurdly long hours and, when it comes to the WASL, function in an atmosphere of fear.

A majority of teachers loath the WASL but feel unable to speak out freely against it due to their fears of negative consequences for doing so.

Because administrators are constantly pushing to meet federal guidelines for yearly score improvements, their relationships with teachers can become strained and unpleasant.

Administrators and teachers suffer under the knowledge that if they do not achieve improvement goals (measured by WASL passage alone) they can be sent to retraining classes, lose their students to other schools, or have their "failing" school handed over to a private company.

Before administering the WASL teachers mandatorily sign a "loyalty" oath promising they will not read any of the test questions.

Teachers feel devalued by the amount of time most of them have to devote to test practice and proctoring --upwards of four weeks for actual testing and many more weeks for WASL prep in many cases.

Teachers feel used and depressed when, half a year after the test is given, they are presented with dubious WASL results --a mateurish and misleading Power Point charts and graphs telling them next to nothing about their students' real knowledge and talents.

Teachers' relationships with parents are compromised because they cannot talk freely with them about opting their child out or other WASL concerns.

The WASL is bad for parents and families.

Parents have been shut out of this costly process.

Most of them are misled by official statements about what the purpose of the WASL is.

Many of them do not realize that they have the right to opt their children out of testing with no consequences, though in practice schools have illegally put inappropriate pressure on parents and children who have opted out.

Many of them do not realize that teachers are, in many cases, not allowed to discuss any reasons why they might want to opt their child out. (Teachers in California went to court to secure the right to inform parents of their right to opt their children out of that state's testing.)

Like children, parents suffer from the same feelings of guilt and unhappiness when their children fail.

Parents are not informed that the test is biased, culturally insensitive and irrelevant and not a real measure of anything.

The WASL graduation requirement has kept thousands of families from knowing whether or not their students will be allowed to take part in graduation ceremonies and celebrations -- the culminating reward for 13 years of public school attendance and achievement -- with friends and families.

The WASL is bad for schools.

Even in the best of times purse strings are rarely opened adequately to public education. Where a private school needs to charge $20,000-$30,000 to educate a child well, public schools are given a third or less of that for each student. Simply, schools are strapped for cash, many of them struggling each year to fund their needs with an ever- shrinking pot of money.

While schools are generally underfunded, Washington will spend a projected $56 million in 2009 to have a private corporation grade WASL tests. These tax dollars are needed right in our schools providing more teachers, smaller classes, tutors, and diverse educational experiences for our students.

While the federal government requires that school districts use high stakes testing to qualify for federal dollars, tests are not fully funded by the federal government.

WASL is one of the most difficult tests used to fulfill the federal requirements, with one of the highest failure rates.

Instead of safe, exciting and meaningful places for our children to spend half of their waking hours, schools have become WASL or test mills bent on churning out students who are trained to answer state-approved questions in a state-approved manner.

The WASL is just bad.

Most, if not all, teachers will agree that assessment is vital. Wise teachers know that assessments which are also learning experiences for students and teachers are the best. The WASL categorically is not a learning experience.

I believe that individual students are entitled to their own learning plans, tailored to their own needs, strengths and interests. Teachers know it is definitely possible to do this in the context of a public school. The WASL categorically treats all children alike and requires that they each fit into the same precise mold, and state-mandated learning plans based on WASL scores fail to recognize individual strengths of students.

Passing the WASL does not guarantee success in college, placement in a job, a living wage or adequate health care.

WASL will decrease the high school graduation rate. Thousands of students who have completed all other requirements and passed all required classes will be denied diplomas because of WASL failure.

High-stakes testing has not proven beneficial to students, teachers, schools, or communities.

In the real lives of students, teachers, and parents the WASL is an ongoing disaster.

When I was a teacher at Graham Hill Elementary in Seattle, a number of my students received their WASL scores to find that they had "failed". When I looked at the notices being sent to their parents I saw that each student had come to within just a few points of actually passing and that their scores were well within the gray area, or "margin of error," for the test. The "test scientists" aren't sure whether the student passed or failed, yet the school tells the student he or she failed. These students cried when they saw the results.

When I first started teaching, Graham Hill could afford Americorps tutors, numerous classroom aides and had money for field-trip busses and ample supplies. By the time I stopped teaching there, Americorps was gone, there were no classroom aides except for parent volunteers, and everything else was in short supply.

Teaching and testing during my last year at Graham Hill was challenging. I was on my own in a room with 29 students, 10 percent did not speak English, 50 percent of them spoke another language at home, several of them were homeless, and many of them had severe emotional challenges due to parental pre-natal drug use, violence and abuse.

No one ever asked me or any of the teachers I know whether high-stakes testing was a good idea. In fact, we teachers are made to jump through seemingly endless hoops to prove our worthiness to be professional, certificated educators. Public school teachers are responsible for the educational lives of over a million students in Washington state, yet, in the end, no one actually wants to listen to what teachers have to say about what is best for the students in our care.

Carl Chew and Civil Disobedience

2008-05-02T11:38:00.003-05:00

"Every year, I said to myself this is the last time I'm going to do this."

Carl Chew

Carl Chew is a middle school teacher in Seattle. He was suspended in April for two weeks without pay for refusing to administer the Washington Assessment of Student Learning (WASL) in his classroom. This is Washington's state test that is used to determine adequate yearly progress (AYP) as part of NCLB.

Here is why he did it:

I performed this single act of civil disobedience based on personal moral and ethical grounds, as well as professional duty. I believe that the WASL is destructive to our children, teachers, schools, and parents.

What are teachers saying about this? Check out this very interesting discussion on the Teacher Leaders Network. Here's one post that really stood out for me. It's from Cindy, who teaches in the D.C. suburbs. She wrote:

For some time now, I have commented to others that “I used to be a better teacher than I am now.” This year, especially, we have bubble tested and online tested students constantly. These are not brief summative assessments; they are tests that take most students 50-70 minutes to complete. We are supposed to be making data-driven decisions based on the results of these tests. And guess what—the same students who did poorly in September are for the most part doing poorly now.

Sam, in my honors class, contributes brilliant insights during literature discussions, can tell you anything you want to know about World War II, asks for help whenever he needs it, and always is ready and willing to assist classmates in any way he can. But he has had trouble all year with multiple choice tests, usually scoring in the 60’s. In working with him one on one, I realized early on that he was over-thinking every question. He has extensive background knowledge. He reads all the time. So we have worked to minimize how much time he spends thinking about each question. Did I do Sam a favor by teaching him not to think? He was a much better student before he learned how to “take” multiple choice tests.

What do we owe to Carl Chew? How can we add to his act of courage? How can we encourage other acts of civil disobedience?

Leaving My Daughter Behind

2008-04-22T13:23:00.002-05:00

Last night, about midnight, I heard whimpering. I put my ear up to the baby monitor. It was coming from my two-year-old son's room. It didn't sound desperate, so I figured I'd let him try to settle down.

But the whimpering kept going, so I went to go down to check on him.

On the way downstairs to my son's room, I glanced in at my five-year-old daughter. She was gone.

Panicked, I rushed downstairs. She was sitting with her knees pulled up to her face outside my son's door, whimpering.

I said, "Sweetheart, oh my goodness, what's the matter?"

She said, "You left me behind."

I said, "Oh, no sweetheart. I didn't leave you behind. I had my door shut so I wouldn't wake you up with the light. I would never leave you behind."

I picked her up and tucked her into bed next to me. She was glued to me the whole night. I didn't sleep very well, but she did.

She had a tough day yesterday. Went over to a friend's house, where her friend's mom reported that the friend had a melt-down. When I walked in, it was clear that a good time was not being had. She said she never wanted to go over to her friend's house again.

She later asked, "Daddy, what if you die?"

A little later, she asked, "What if mommy dies?"

My little girl is growing up.

Most of us have already grown up. Most of us are alive, but most of us are alive while drowning. This is the human condition - to avoid drowning for as long as possible.

How to hold my little girl and keep her afloat in a world where so few are saved from drowning? How to trust that she'll learn to swim, that avoiding drowning won't be so scary, that she'll get used to it, like we all do?

Too Much Too Early

2008-04-20T12:48:00.002-05:00

I'm reading Dr. David Elkind's 1987 book Miseducated. I read his book from 1981, The Hurried Child, a while ago. I'll be reading his latest book, The Power of Play (published in 2007), next.

Elkind has an impressive background. He has written more than 400 book chapters and articles, and several stories for children. His numerous books include Reinventing Childhood (1998), All Grown Up and No Place to Go (1998), and Ties That Stress: The New Family Imbalance (1994). From 1964 to 1965, Elkind was a national Science Foundation Senior Postdoctoral Fellow at Piaget's Institut d'Epistemologie Genetique in Geneva, Switzerland. Much of Elkind's work can be seen as an attempt to duplicate, build upon, and more fully explore Piaget's theory and research. Elkind's research has focused on cognitive, perceptual, and social development in children and adolescents, as well as the causes and effects of stress on children, adolescents, and families.

Here are few key quotes from an article Elkind wrote in 2001 called "Much Too Early!"

The deployment of unsupported, potentially harmful pedagogies is particularly pernicious at the early-childhood level. It is during the early years, ages four to seven, when children's basic attitudes toward themselves as students and toward learning and school are established. Children who come through this period feeling good about themselves, who enjoy learning and who like school, will have a lasting appetite for the acquisition of skills and knowledge. Children whose academic self-esteem is all but destroyed during these formative years, who develop an antipathy toward learning, and a dislike of school, will never fully realize their latent abilities and talents.

Evidence attesting to the importance of developmentally appropriate education in the early years comes from cross-cultural studies. Jerome Bruner reports that in French-speaking parts of Switzerland, where reading instruction is begun at the preschool level, a large percentage of children have reading problems. In German-speaking parts of Switzerland, where reading is not taught until age six or seven, there are few reading problems. In Denmark, where reading is taught late, there is almost no illiteracy. Likewise in Russia, where the literacy rate is quite high, reading is not taught until the age of six or seven.

Rewriting the Script

2008-04-14T11:04:00.002-05:00

The current issue of Rethinking Schools is out now.

The eight essays that make up our special “Rewriting the Script” section offer a devastating indictment of the sorry state of teaching and learning that No Child Left Behind has wrought. There is also hope for the future.
Seeking changes within the NCLB framework is not the way to begin the next four-year term, says FairTest’s Monty Neill in the lead essay, “Beyond NCLB.” Neill urges progressive educators and activists to think outside the NCLB box, to be audacious, to search for new language and demands that more adequately reflect what we want rather than merely what we think they can get. The special section includes work from Rethinking Schools editors Linda Christensen and Wayne Au, as well as teachers, activists, and teacher educators.
Buy this issue right now for $4.95. Or subscribe online and we'll send you the current issue as a welcoming gift.

The issue includes a revised version of my piece, "The Scripted Prescription: A Cure for Childhood."

Please visit the RS web site. Better yet, subscribe. This is a fantastic resource for everyone concerned about social justice and public education.

Sit! Stay! Read! More Stupid Pet Kid Tricks

2008-04-11T12:50:00.006-05:00

The most important thing, I think, is to make sure that they know that I am in complete control of everything going on, that there's not a step that I haven't planned in advance.

Sarah Scott
Elementary School Teacher, Houston, TX

I assume they just don't know anything.

Mary Abdel Sayed
Elementary School Teacher, Houston, TX

Here's a good example of kids in training using Direct Instruction.

Vomiting

2008-04-06T00:13:00.003-05:00

The political mania for inflicting high-stakes tests on students has reached such insanity that a couple of years ago when a teacher revealed that Harcourt, publisher of the widely used Stanford 9 test, sends out instructions on what a teacher should do when nervous children vomit on the tests (soiled tests cannot be discarded but must be returned to Harcourt), it wasn't even a three-day wonder. No group stepped forward and demanded that schools discontinue practices that make kids vomit.

Susan Ohanian

For many students, these Stupid Pet Kid Tricks -- as inane as they are -- are not easy. So why might this be the case? As part of the focus on simple, measurable skills, 4 and 5-year-old children are being asked to perform their knowledge in an environment in which their performance on these measures bears an extraordinary weight. The vast majority of children have their fate determined by them. As Monty Neill noted,

The long history of tracking in the US also suggests that students who enter pre-K or K "behind" will be assumed to be less capable of learning and thus put in "slower" classes through which the gap in learning outcomes will expand. "Intelligence" tests have long played that pernicious role, complemented by "achievement" tests. Through these instruments, race and class effects are instrumentalized as "scientific" or "objective."

High-stakes assessment, indeed. Starting in pre-K.

As I noted here, a lot of kids are being asked to do things they simply can't do. My daughter is one of these kids. I don't know what it's like from her perspective, but I imagine she looks around and sees one or two kids rolling over, fetching, and playing dead rather well and perhaps thinking to herself that she will never be able to roll over, fetch, and play dead as well as some of her friends can. And -- since school is the place where you are taught to roll over, fetch, and play dead -- that school is not the place for her or, at the least, a place where she will never be good at what is valued there.

For the students that don't excel at high-stakes displays of intellectual acumen/precociousness, learning and schooling become synonymous with anxiety. Reading becomes synonymous with anxiety, as does writing, math, etc., etc. But this is true even for the students who do excel in this context: reading becomes synonymous with anxiety, as does writing, math, etc., etc.

In other words, anxiety becomes the driver of learning even for those that excel in such a context, where the goal is to roll over, fetch, and play dead even better than you currently can.

And for those that do not excel, the physical expression of this lack of achievement comes in the form of the vomit they expel onto the bubble sheet of the standardized test they're forced to take.

Roll Over, Fetch, Play Dead - Stupid Pet Kid Tricks, Part 2

2008-04-02T22:55:00.003-05:00

A: My ~~dog~~ kid is smarter than your ~~dog~~ kid.

B: Oh, yeah. How do you know?

A: My ~~dog~~ kid can roll over, fetch, and play dead. Yours can't.

B: Wow. Really?

A: Yeah.

B: But that doesn't mean your ~~dog~~ kid is smarter than my ~~dog~~ kid. It just means that your ~~dog~~ kid was trained to roll over, fetch, and play dead. You have a well-trained ~~dog~~ kid. That's what rolling over, fetching, and playing dead shows.

Stupid Pet Kid Tricks

2008-04-02T15:41:00.003-05:00

Let's not forget the "edge," the "upper-hand," the "head start" that kids get through the developmentally inappropriate practice of pushing down the curriculum. What kind of advantage are they being given?

They're being taught to concentrate on those things which can be most easily measured. So "reading" is not really reading at all, but rather discrete skills like sound and letter recognition and recall skills involving regurgitation from short-term memory.

Here's a passage from my district's Comprehension Scoring Guide on how to use the DRA (Developmental Reading Assessment) in response to the question, "What is the benchmark level on the Comprehension Scoring Guide?"

Before moving to the next assessment level students are to not only read accurately (90%-100%) and fluently but also to score in the “Adequate” to “Very Good” range on the Comprehension Scoring Guide.

Note that "accuracy" has a specific quantifiable value. Note also the expecation that (1) all kids are supposed to be at the same level at the same time and (2) that something as complex as comprehension can be reduced to either "adequate" or "very good" via a generic scoring guide that asks children to do things like recall events from a story, recite key details, answer literal questions, and make inferences. They are given points for each correct answer. Note also that "fluency" is defined as being able to read quickly without making mistakes.

So do these assessments inform instruction? Or do they determine instruction? In other words, are some kids being taught how to read and write based exclusively on these data?

I spoke to the principal at my daughter's school about assessment. She claimed that the DRA and the DIBELS (they use the DIBELS at the school in addition to the DRA) are just one form of measurement, and that they use others. But when I asked her what measurements they used, how often they were used, and how they improved instruction, she had no answer. She just kept insisting that these practices were in place.

I'm reminded of something that Seymour Papert wrote regarding fluency, something that provides a stark contrast to this incredibly mechanized, utilitarian notion of fluency. Papert worked with Jean Piaget in the 1960's and developed complex notions of how children think and learn. He was also a pioneering force in developing links between learning and technology. In "Technological Fluency and the Representation of Knowledge," Papert and his colleague Mitchel Resnick wrote,

What does it mean to use technologies fluently? To be truly fluent in a natural language (like English or French), you need more than phrase-book knowledge; you must be able to articulate a complex idea or tell an engaging story -- that is, you must be able to make things with language. Analogously, fluency with new technologies involves not only knowing how to use technological tools, but also knowing how to construct things of significance with those tools.

Needless to say, these reductive measurements do not determine how well children can construct things of significance. Rather, they tell you how quickly and accurately children can perform Stupid Pet Kid Tricks.

This IS a Test, Part 2

2008-04-01T15:42:00.004-05:00

Monty Neill, Deputy Director of FairTest, is a friend and colleague of mine. He had this to add to my last post on the trend towards the widening gulf between the haves and the have nots, starting in preschool.

The long history of tracking in the US also suggests that students who enter pre-K or K "behind" will be assumed to be less capable of learning and thus put in "slower" classes through which the gap in learning outcomes will expand. "Intelligence" tests have long played that pernicious role, complemented by "achievement" tests. Through these instruments, race and class effects are instrumentalized as "scientific" or "objective."

What Finland suggests is that there is simply no need to cram pre-reading "skills" down the throats of unready little children, or to turn kindergartens into drill sites. But that is precisely what is happening in the US, accelerating a trend that began some time ago. Deborah Meier, for example, has been traveling around the country, sadly noting the disappearance of 'play' in kindergartens. (As Peter noted, read David Elkind on this.)

The tracking effect will compound early differences. Parents often grasp these realities, and so see the "need" to push their children into these academicized programs - a need based not in real learning or in whether kids could rapidly 'catch up' at say age 7 (as in, effect, Finnish youth do), but in the tracking that will make it ever more difficult for those deemed behind to catch up.

Of course, NCLB was going to end that. For those still willing to believe that illusion, read the consequences of high stakes testing in Texas in Linda McNeil et al's probing analysis. They focus on high schools, but voluminous literature shows the effects of high stakes testing and tracking.

The FairTest website has many articles and links on our K-12 pages.

This IS a Test

2008-03-31T13:06:00.002-05:00

The test that my daughter was asked to take in the week before she started pre-Kindergarten was a recognition of the huge gulf that separates the haves from the have nots in this country. The district would argue that this wasn't a test per se, but rather a "benchmark," a means by which the teacher could identify what students' strengths and weaknesses were.

But what 4-year-old enters pre-Kindergarten knowing how to write his or her name?

The answer: probably not many, but there's an increasing likelihood that some will. And, given the trends, more and more will.

So what will the socioeconomic profile be for these extremely precocious children?

The answer: not hard to guess. Parents that can afford to send their kids to academically-oriented preschool will have "the upper hand," they'll have "the edge" over the other kids. Their kids will have been given "a head start."

What are the implications of this?

The answer: also not hard to guess. Parents will be expected to to teach their children to acquire these precocious skills themselves or they will be expected to pay others to do it for them. Those parents that cannot do this themselves or that cannot afford to pay someone to do it for them will be regarded as deficient if not negligent.

Low-income parents are already sufficiently vilified in our society. Now they are being cudgeled even further. As the saying goes, "The beatings will continue until morale improves."

10 Signs of a Good Kindergarten Classroom

2008-03-21T16:42:00.002-05:00

Here are 10 signs of a good kindergarten classroom, courtesy of the National Association for the Education of Young Children:

Children are playing and working with materials or other children. They are not aimlessly wandering or forced to sit quietly for long periods of time.
Children have access to various activities throughout the day, such as block building, pretend play, picture books, paints and other art materials, and table toys such as legos, pegboards, and puzzles. Children are not all doing the same things at the same time.
Teachers work with individual children, small groups, and the whole group at different times during the day. They do not spend time only with the entire group.
The classroom is decorated with children’s original artwork, their own writing with invented spelling, and dictated stories.
Children learn numbers and the alphabet in the context of their everyday experiences. Exploring the natural world of plants and animals, cooking, taking attendance, and serving snack are all meaningful activities to children.
Children work on projects and have long periods of time (at least one hour) to play and explore. Filling out worksheets should not be their primary activity.
Children have an opportunity to play outside every day that weather permits. This play is never sacrificed for more instructional time.
Teachers read books to children throughout the day, not just at group story time.
Curriculum is adapted for those who are ahead as well as those who need additional help. Because children differ in experiences and background, they do not learn the same things at the same time in the same way.
Children and their parents look forward to school. Parents feel safe sending their child to kindergarten. Children are happy; they are not crying or regularly sick.

Individual kindergarten classrooms will vary, and curriculum will vary according to the interests and backgrounds of the children. But all developmentally appropriate kindergarten classrooms will have one thing in common: the focus will be on the development of the child as a whole.

Tracing the Roots of "Kindergarten Readiness"

2008-03-18T16:20:00.013-05:00

Imagine this. You want to learn how to play the piano. So you sign up for a class for beginners. You show up for day one of your piano class. The teacher gives you a test on how well you can play scales, finger dexterity, and how well you can read music. You don't know how to do any of these things. You say to the teacher, "Hey, I can't do any of these things. I thought this was a class for beginners!" She replies, "Yes, it is a class for beginners. But all beginners are expected to know how to do these things." You reply, "But I'm a beginner. You know, a beginner. As in I'm just beginning. As in I don't know how to do these things because I'm a beginner."

Seems crazy, right? So does "Kindergarten readiness." As I've been saying over and over on this blog, 4-year-old children are said to be "behind" on the first day of pre-K. I find this mind-numbingly idiotic and oxymoronic. How ironic that a policy called "No Child Left Behind" can define 4-year-olds as "behind" on day one of the grade BEFORE Kindergarten. Arrrggh.

Go to this list of reviews of the book Let's Get Ready For Kindergarten! and see what I mean. Here's a good example:

In a kid-friendly format with engaging illustrations, Let's Get Ready for Kindergarten! has dry-erase pages where children can practice again and again the skills they are learning. Children can practice their alphabet, numbers, rhyming, time, calendar, seasons and much more.

Huh?? 4-year-olds practicing telling time??? When did the giant stone tablet drop down from the sky and declare that little kids were supposed to know all this stuff before they even start school?

So if this is so crazy, then why is it the common stock of the land? Why do so many people buy this line of thinking?

Betty Jones, PhD -- a member of the faculty of the school of education at Pacific Oaks College -- wrote this narrative account in a personal e-mail communication to me (my emphasis added):

Through the 50's the emphasis in university lab schools, parent co-ops, and other good preschools (serving primarily middle and upper-class children) remained comfortably on play and social-emotional development, on setting up an appropriate environment, and on observing and responding to child behavior. (I was a grad student in Child Development at University of Wisconsin in the 1950's and that's what I learned; Erikson's developmental theory was basic to our work.) There wasn't a push for standardizing curriculum or teaching basic skills; this was preschool, nursery school. (I wrote an article and gave the name to an early NAEYC publication, Curriculum is What Happens. The editor added the rest of the title :Planning Is the Key. Several decades later, writing Emergent Curriculum, I was still making the same point.)

Head Start and accountability required that programs adopt a curriculum. There were 10 approved models, ranging from strict behavioral (Bereiter and Engelmann) to very open (Bank Street and Education Development Corp in Newton, MA). There were comparative studies of their effectiveness. Bereiter and Englemann asserted that poor children didn't have time to play; they needed to catch up. That idea has continued to influence funding and politicians, reaching its zenith in No Child Left Behind and increasingly pushing down elementary curriculum into kindergarten and preschool.

Here is my effort to add to her explanation.

Head Start

Head Start was created in 1965. It was designed to help end poverty by providing preschool children from low-income families with a program that would meet emotional, social, health, nutritional, and psychological needs.

But the term "head start" suggested that raising children was essentially a race. Very young children could be given a leg up -- literally a "head start" -- in the race to whatever the intended prize was: admission to an Ivy League school, preserving the family's prestige, or simply being able to survive in the future. So if low-income kids could be given a head start, why shouldn't all kids be given a head start? The logic seemed (and still seems) unimpeachable. Not giving children every advantage has become unimaginable, and being a "good parent" is measured in terms of how many enrichments activities each child is engaged in.

Of course, what this "head start for every child" approach overlooks is the fact that kids who already had a head start are given an even bigger lead. So instead of narrowing, the achievement gap widens.

Markets and Marketing

As dual-income families became the norm in this country's professional class, there arose an unprecedented problem: who was going to raise their children? The extended family had all but vanished, replaced by the much more "efficient" nuclear family. There were no in-laws or grandparents to assist in child-rearing. The only thing these middle to upper-middle-class nuclear families with two working parents could do was pay someone to do it for them.

So we witness the tremendous growth of daycare facilities, where children typically start at the age of 2 or 3 months. These children are essentially raised by paid professional surrogate parents. Places like KinderCare began to see this market as in need of some tapping. They, and others like them, developed marketing plans to attract parents, saying they did more than "just play." They offered a leg up to their clients, giving very young children not just blocks to play with, but exercises in math and reading. Anxious parents responded. KinderCare Learning centers comprises approximately 1,900 community-based centers in 38 states and the District of Columbia serving more than 200,000 children and employing approximately 41,000 people. Note this observation from a marketing trade magazine, Direct:

The benefits pitched on [KinderCare's marketing] pieces has changed . . . , reflecting parents' expressed desire for a learning environment, even more so than a loving environment, or a convenient location -- or even a low-cost care option, as reasons for enrolling their children.

Sales in 2005 topped $16 billion.

Other markets serving anxious parents have also erupted. Kumon was started 50 years ago in Japan by Toru Kumon, a teacher and parent who wanted to help his son do better in school. According to their web site, "The unique instructional method he created was so successful that his son was able to do calculus by the time he was in the sixth grade." Kumon has more than 1,500 Kumon Centers in North America alone. With centers in 44 countries, Kumon "has helped more students succeed worldwide than any other after-school program."

Fear Is U.S.

We are afraid in this country. We've been ginned up by stories of child predators and gang-banging, of al Quaida, toys from China, and the health effects of mold. Despite the fact that I never wore a seatbelt -- much less rode in a car seat -- as a child, I simply cannot imagine not strapping both my kids in tight to their car seats, even if it's only a couple blocks away. And despite the fact that I never wore a helmet to ride a bike or a skateboard, I would never for a moment not demand that my kids wore helmets -- always.

Our actions are practical and they make sense, but they also serve as daily practices that ingrain in us the uncontested notion that life is a very dangerous place. Yet we do all of these things -- buckling our seatbelts, donning our helmets -- not merely unconsciously, but as default actions. We literally do not think of these things as we do them or think them, yet they frame our perception and, thus, our reality.

We're also afraid that we're not going to make it as a country. Just look at the rhetoric surrounding public education. The key rationale for public education -- as it is currently framed -- is to "compete in the global economy," i.e., beat the Chinese and the Indians at the game of global domination and "maintain our current high standard of living." Look at the speech of every major U.S. politician in the last 5 years -- with the exception of Kucinich and Nader -- and you'll see the meme "to compete in the global economy" or some version of "preparing our children for the 21st century economy" in every proclamation on the purpose of education.

We talk a lot about this as a country because there's concern that we're going to lose the game of global domination. But we talk about this -- to ourselves, mostly -- as parents because we're afraid that our kids are not going to make it. Make it out of high school. Make it into college. But also make it in life. Make it past drug addiction, pregnancy, sexually transmitted diseases. Make it past the all-consuming doubt of their teenage years and into somewhere called "happy" or perhaps "fulfilled."

So take an anti-poverty program for inspiration, throw in some anxious, over-achieving parents who have outsourced childrearing to professionals, and now add a dash of fear about the future of the planet and you have the noxious cocktail that gives rise to such nonsense as "Kindergarten readiness." It's nonsense, but it makes perfect sense.

When Rigor Turns to Rigor Mortis

2008-03-18T12:04:00.000-05:00

We're either serious about keeping kids in school and raising graduation rates -- esp. for low-income minority kids -- or we're not serious.

If we're serious about wanting to keep kids in school, it's vital that school be fun, interesting, and relevant from the very beginning of the school experience. It matters not a whit if there is rigor, rigor, rigor starting in pre-K. When this rigor turns to rigor mortis, kids will drop out of school in even larger numbers than they currently are. I think people either get this or not.

I got this after watching my daughter in her pre-K class during the academic/rigor portion of the class. She, along with most of the other 4 and 5 year olds, were very quiet, very still, and behaving very well. They also looked catatonic, a rather shocking site when observing groups of very young children.

If people don't get the rigor mortis/catatonia thing, then they're clearly not serious about keeping kids in school and raising graduation rates -- esp. for low-income minority kids.

I think it would be helpful to make this argument as clear as possible as part of our strategic communication on this issue.

What if the purpose of education was not to beat the Chinese?

2008-03-18T11:28:00.002-05:00

I've been wondering what it would take to actually prepare children for the future.

The key driver for public education -- as it is currently framed -- is to "compete in the global economy," i.e., beat the Chinese and the Indians at the game of global domination and "maintain our current high standard of living." Look at the speech of every major U.S. politician in the last 5 years -- with the exception of Kucinich and Nader -- and you'll see the meme "to compete in the global economy" or some version of "preparing our children for the 21st century economy" in every proclamation on the purpose of education.

But what if there were no global capitalist economy to compete in?

Here's a snippet from today's NY Times:

Specialists say their biggest worry now is not whether the economy is already or will soon be in a recession. Far more fundamental and troubling is the health of the financial system that greases the wheels of capitalism.

“Recessions come and go — that is something investors can deal with,” said Marc D. Stern, chief investment officer at Bessemer Trust, an investment firm in New York. “The bigger issue is, Can our financial system be restored to a sense of normalcy? In recent weeks we have been moving away from that, which is potentially very serious.”

The Case for the Scripted Prescription?

2008-03-18T00:19:00.003-05:00

I'm trying to be sympathetic to the proponents of the heavy cognitive/academic approach for pre-K and K children. They say that 4-year-old children are "behind" on the first day of pre-K. I find this mind-numbingly idiotic and oxymoronic. How ironic that a policy called "No Child Left Behind" can define 4-year-olds as "behind" on day 1 of the grade BEFORE Kindergarten! But I'm trying to understand. Really. It's not easy. But I'm trying.

Take a look at this. Here's the language used by Missouri Senator Jeff Smith, a Democrat, in promoting a bill to provide free preschool in St. Louis:

"The facts are depressingly clear: more neurological development occurs by the age of 4 than in the rest of a person's life - and impoverished toddlers are at special risk of receiving limited brain stimulation. Children unable to read by third grade are unlikely to graduate high school, and will cost society dearly in increased social service costs. Our proposal will help kids come to kindergarten ready to read, and set them on a path to success."

In an effort to counter this logic and provide a counter to this cancerous meme, let's break this down, piece by piece:

Claim 1 - "more neurological development occurs by the age of 4 than in the rest of a person's life"

I've heard this cited over and over and am skeptical of its relevance. Might neurons be developing more rapidly in response to learning how to walk? how to speak? developing immune system? Our bodies are pretty busy when we're brand new, so you'd expect the brain to be equally busy. Yet we equate "neurological development "with a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to make our kids geniuses. You remember the scene from the movie Parenthood, where Steve Martin and Rick Moranis are discussing kids' cognitive ability?

Rick Moranis (Nathan): Our children are more capable of absorbing information than we are, yet we insist on treating them like adorable little morons.

Steve Martin (Gil): Are you saying Patty can learn things l can´t learn?

Rick Moranis: (holding up a flashcard with red dots) Patty, which one of these is the square root of 8649?

Patty: Ninety-three.

Rick Moranis: They´re like sponges, Gil, just waiting to absorb.

So we use flashcards, enroll them in ballet, and sing lullabies in Swahili every night. We know our kids have these spongey brains, so if we do nothing to take advantage of this, we're negligent as parents. So whether you accept this belief about neurological development or not, this belief creates a kind of frenzy on the part of parents. Like Rick Moranis's character, we go a little nutty. We forget that neurological development might also benefit from playing dress-up, pretending to be a pony, or just staring at a cloud. We equate parenthood with filling kids up, and we see our kids as empty receptacles into which knowledge is poured. Raising little kids is about getting them ready because they are, by default, not ready. It's our job to get them ready. This makes parenting a lot like a job with a set of tasks and milestones. It makes parenting pretty depressing. And not much fun.

Claim 2 - " impoverished toddlers are at special risk of receiving limited brain stimulation"

If you believe that "impoverished toddlers are at special risk of receiving limited brain stimulation," then how do you go about stimulating their brains? In my daughter's pre-school, there's a lot of emphasis on letter recognition, graphing, tracing, sorting, initial sound recognition, recall of details from a story, etc. There's no time at all devoted to unstructured, whole-body play of any kind. Everything is provided for the kids and is supervised -- closely -- by the adult(s) in the room. For 45 minutes each day, the children sit at the teacher's feet and listen to her read. She asks them a series of questions and then calls on children to respond. They either get it right or they get it wrong. I do not see this as terribly stimulating. I have observed my daughter at these times. She sits there, very quietly, and says nothing. She does not raise her hand. She waits for the lesson to be over.

Claim 3 - "Children unable to read by third grade are unlikely to graduate high school"

While I have no doubt there's a correlation between being unable to read by 3rd grade and dropping out of school, the way this statement is framed suggests that not being able to read by 3rd grade CAUSES kids to drop out. I suspect that kids drop out for lots of reasons, chief of which is the fact that school is boring and irrelevant. Making schools more academically oriented at the expense of other subjects (like art, music, drama, foreign languages) is not going to help. It will only serve to make the problem worse because it will make schools that much more irrelevant and boring.

Claim 4 - "will cost society dearly in increased social service costs"

At least we can be clear about why Smith is doing this. Like his neoliberal kin, he wants to save money. Saving kids is more cost effective.

Claim 5 - "Our proposal will help kids come to kindergarten ready to read, and set them on a path to success."

In my local school district in Portland, OR, free half-day pre-K is offered to a handful of schools (8 out of the 73 elementary schools). The district hasn't quite figured out the impact of its policy. If the intention is to get these kids ready for Kindergarten (whatever the hell that means) because they are behind, then the policy creates its own achievement gap between the kids in the 8 pre-K schools and the other 65 schools. After all, the kids from the 8 pre-K classes will be "ready for Kindergarten." The other 65 won't.

Finally, what would it mean to get low-income minority children "ready for Kindergarten"? I think we get a glimpse of this from Linda Perlstein's extraordinary book, Tested. Perlstein painfully documents the dumbed-down, test-centric path that a Title 1 school in Maryland follows to make AYP. In reading this book, I was saddened, enraged, and disgusted. After being exposed to a constant regimen of "BCR's" (brief constructed responses), decoding drills, and endless test prep, it's amazing that any of these children would ever want to read anything ever again.

Of Cash and Cookies

2008-03-05T12:07:00.002-06:00

The NY Times has a story today on cash rewards given to 4th grade students in New York City:

The fourth graders squirmed in their seats, waiting for their prizes. In a few minutes, they would learn how much money they had earned for their scores on recent reading and math exams. Some would receive nearly $50 for acing the standardized tests, a small fortune for many at this school, P.S. 188 on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. When the rewards were handed out, Jazmin Roman was eager to celebrate her $39.72. She whispered to her friend Abigail Ortega, “How much did you get?” Abigail mouthed a barely audible answer: $36.87. Edgar Berlanga pumped his fist in the air to celebrate his $34.50.

I've always loathed explicit rewards and punishments with my five-year-old daughter. I know that once you start down the road of side-stepping intrinsic motivation and feeding extrinsic factors through chocolate and swats to the behind, it's hard to reverse course. So my wife and I have refrained, often to our short-term chagrin because patient parenting is so much more difficult than simply controlling and manipulating your children's behavior. My brother has his kids on a short leash. They do whatever they are told. They have been sufficiently trained to listen to him, fearing the lash or coveting the candy bar. I don't blame him for raising his kids this way. I get it. I see how much easier it is. Sometimes I wonder if I should raise my kids this way . . .

But then I'm reminded of why we do it the way we do it. I got a taste of the poisonous effects such Skinnerian techniques have with my daughter's theatre class. The teacher told the kids that if they learned their lines, she would give them candy. So when practicing with her the other day, my daughter said, "When I learn my lines, I will get candy!" I said, "Yeah, but if you learn your lines, you'll also be able to have fun in the play." She said nothing. Did she understand what I was saying? Or was she too busy thinking about what kind of candy she would get?

I admit that it's a hard thing to get, to see that practicing and memorizing your lines will eventually lead to an as-yet unexperienced joy -- the thrill of performing live in front of an audience, being in character, flowing with your fellow actors, pretending to be sad or angry or -- in my daughter's case -- a flying taco. But I would ideally like her to get this, to understand that practice and hard work and being involved in a play are their own rewards.

Ultimately, I'm not worried. She'll probably get it. The candy reward will be a nice treat, and it probably won't snuff out her nascent intrinsic motivation. But that's because there are so few external factors in her world right now that manipulate her choices, affect how she views herself in relation to a world of possibilities.

Not so with these 4th grade kids at P.S. 188. For them, and for lots of other kids, there's an inextricable link between learning and external rewards (or punishments). It might seem like an insignificant thing, and many would argue, "If the reward or punishment gets them to do SOMETHING, isn't something better than nothing?" But if you peel it back far enough for each kid, if you undo all the decisions these kids made because they were rewarded for approved behavior or punished for bad behavior, what would be left? I suspect you'd have a kid that would experience the same sense of joy I wish for my daughter -- the joy of practice and hard work and being involved in something challenging as their own rewards. But because the sugar-coated behaviorist tactics have been laid on so thick, have been applied so consistently and so relentlessly, there's little chance this will happen.

This means these kids have been short-changed, robbed of something I'd consider to be one of the main benefits of our species. Apologists claim it's done on their behalf. It's done to help them. But, really, it's done to them because it's so much easier to control them this way. Allowing kids' intrinsic motivation and inherent curiosity to flourish would be rather messy. It would be hard to do with classes of 25, much less 30 or 35 students. So, for the sake of efficiency, we give them cash and cookies in exchange for their cooperation.

Beating the Dead KIPP Horse

2008-02-20T12:40:00.004-06:00

In the Bronx KIPP (Knowledge Is Power Program) charter schools, a greater proportion of entering fourth graders passed the New York state reading test than was the case for nearby public elementary schools. (One comparison found a 42%-25% difference, respectively.) This advantage is significant because it has been asserted that KIPP students enter with the same preparation as public school students but still manage much higher test scores.

Source - The Charter School Dustup

More fuel for the fire that KIPP students are more advantaged than their regular school peers.

More On the Scripted Prescription

2008-02-19T00:23:00.002-06:00

In the context of the educational assessments that children like my five-year-old daughter are subject to, we see a diagnostic model that specializes in both quantifying educational deficiencies in very young children and providing an antidote that meets the needs of the diagnosis. We see the emergence of large publishing companies that are allowed to control the definition of the symptoms as well as prescribe and furnish the cure – for a hefty price. We see the emergence of the scripted curriculum, where “scripted” means an explicit formula to cure what ails them, as in “prescription.”

At my daughter's school, the prescription comes in the form of Scott Foresman’s Reading Street. Scott Foresman is a division of publishing giant Pearson Education. My daughter's school enrolls about half white children and half children of color and qualifies for Title 1 funds, so it might be logical to infer that this prescription is aimed at “those kids,” i.e., low-income minority children. But the same kind of prescription is being handed out everywhere in the district, not just at my daughter’s school. And it’s being handed out all across the country. The prescription goes by various names, but they all have this in common: invent, identify, and remediate deficiencies, all in one slick package.

In the context of the psychiatric medication that children like my five-year-old daughter are subject to, we see a diagnostic model that specializes in both quantifying behavioral abnormalities in very young children and providing an antidote that meets the needs of the diagnosis. We see the emergence of large drug companies that are allowed to control the definition of the symptoms as well as prescribe and furnish the cure – for a hefty price. We see the emergence of the prescription as the cure for childhood.

Here's a nice passage from Thomas Armstrong, “Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder in Children: One Consequence of the Rise of Technologies and the Demise of Play,” in Sharna Olfman (ed.) All Work and No Play…How Educational Reforms Are Harming Our Preschoolers. Westport Ct.: Praeger, 2003, pp. 161-176. . Online at: www.thomasarmstrong.com/articles.

Research studies have demonstrated that children's ADHD symp toms decrease under a variety of environmental conditions, including when they are engaged in one-on-one learning experiences, when they're being paid to do tasks, when they have access to novel or highly stimulating activities, when they're in control of the pace of learning experiences, and when they're interacting with male authority figures (Barkley, 1990; McGuinness, 1985; Zentall, 1980; Sykes, Douglas, & Morgenstern, 1973; Sleator & Ullman, 1981). From this we can infer that symptoms of ADHD in children might increase when the oppo site environmental conditions pertain, such as when they're perform ing in boring or low-stimulation environments, when they're not receiving a meaningful reward for their efforts, and when they're powerless to control the pace of learning tasks. Indeed, if these con ditions are present in a child's home environment from birth, it is rea sonable to suspect that they could lay the groundwork for the disorder itself.

and another

In a survey of ADHD-diagnosed and "normal" children aged six to seventeen, the odds of a child being diagnosed with ADHD increased in proportion to the extent that they came from a family characterized by adversity, including severe marital discord, low social class, large family size, paternal criminality, maternal mental disorder, and foster care placement (Biederman et al., 1995). Other studies have demon strated that the quality of caregiving in early childhood predicts dis tractibility (a key symptom of ADHD) better than early biological markers or temperament, and that a strong overlap exists between symptoms of ADHD and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) in children, suggesting that early sexual, physical, and/ or emotional abuse may play an important role in the origin of ADHD symptoms for some children (Carlson, Jacobvitz, & Sroufe, 1995; Weinstein, Staffelbach, & Biaggio, 2000).

The KIPP Virus Spreads

2008-02-13T10:55:00.002-06:00

The chilling piece from this week's EdWeek makes it clear that the KIPP model has taken hold and is spreading. KIPP'sters are now collaborating with others, e.g., Uncommon Schools and Achievement First, to grow the model, including Hunter College's teacher ed program:

"Now several of the teachers . . . are earning their master’s degrees from a new program at Hunter College, where . . . David Levin of KIPP and Norman Atkins of Uncommon Schools, serve as instructors."

Note the acknowledgment of the fact that these ventures are dependent on private funding and cannot grow, "so the new elites must build durable avenues of support within the public sector." Translation: take dollars away from regular public schools and funnel them towards McCharters like KIPP.

Note this, too: "although they have grown rapidly, all of the high-performing networks still face the challenge of achieving quality at larger scale. Traditionally, quality and scale in education have been inversely related: As initiatives get larger, fidelity to the elements that made them effective in the first place is compromised."

Prediction: as KIPP gets bigger, it will lose the only things that make it worth taking seriously, i.e., a lack of a top-down, standardized approach to education. As it expands, look for it to become more standardized, more cookie-cutter.

---

Published Online: February 11, 2008
Published in Print: February 13, 2008

Commentary
A Defining Moment for Charter Schools?
How Networking Best Practices May Revolutionize the Movement, and Reshape Urban Education
By Richard Whitmire & Andrew J. Rotherham

Many who bought early personal computers fired them up, wrote a few paragraphs, played some Tetris, and then asked: What’s the big deal?

Then came the Internet.

You might want to think of the charter school movement in a similar way. Since the first charter opened in 1992 in St. Paul, Minn., they have grown quickly, passing the 4,000-school mark. Now there are some outstanding ones and some lemons, but charter schools overall are not proving to be radically dissimilar to other public schools. So what’s the big deal?

Call it the “New York effect.”

It started four years ago, when New York City Schools Chancellor Joel I. Klein attracted a few of the most successful charter networks (the Knowledge Is Power Program, or KIPP; Achievement First; and Uncommon Schools) with dollar-a-year rent offers. All three accepted, but they did more than that: Rather than compete, they engaged in what could be called “coopetition,” often holding hands as they expanded in the city.

“Instead of fighting each other for resources, we ended up trying to figure out how we can deepen the pool and work together to make resources available for all to grow,” says John King from Uncommon Schools. “Each of us visited each other’s schools when we were starting up and learned tremendously important lessons.”

The intermingling, which began with shared “lessons learned” and expanded into shared training and more, could yield the “Internet” era of charters, a time when the real impact of the idea manifests itself, as the best schools get even better and the low-performing charters (and low-performing public schools and districts) face increasing pressure to improve or close. Powerful, yes. And also a long way from the early vision of charter schools, championed by many on the left as a way to launch more authentic and mom-and-pop public schools, and by many on the right as a way to introduce the relentless pressure of competition into ossified public school systems.

Consider Jabali Sawicki, the principal of the 4-year-old Excellence Charter School in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn. Sawicki began his career in charters teaching at Boston’s strikingly successful Roxbury Preparatory Charter School. He was tapped by leaders at Uncommon Schools (the Roxbury charter’s founders) to run the new Bedford-Stuyvesant school. Then, he received training from KIPP’s widely admired school leadership program.
As the elite networks create an even bigger footprint on the urban education landscape, some hard conversations about race and class are inevitable.

Now several of the teachers in Sawicki’s school are earning their master’s degrees from a new program at Hunter College, where the founders of all three charter groups, famous names in the charter movement and proven educators such as David Levin of KIPP and Norman Atkins of Uncommon Schools, serve as instructors. And when Sawicki’s students reach high school age, many will attend one of the two new high schools now under design for students from these three charter groups. Quarterbacking the new high schools, expected to open in 2010, is the Robin Hood Foundation, the hedge-fund-fueled financial muscle behind this intermingling experiment.

The significance of the cooperation is seen in Excellence Charter’s first test scores. Here is a startup school in a poor neighborhood with an all-minority student population, and it is hitting home runs in math and reading. That often doesn’t happen with new schools, and yet it is happening, not only with Excellence but with the other startup charter schools being spawned by these groups.

Perhaps the most striking payoff from the cooperation is the two-year master’s-degree program at Hunter College, which got off the ground when the charter founders discovered their ideal education school dean in the maverick education school reformer David M. Steiner. Led by Steiner, the Hunter faculty embraced the charter founders and this past summer launched a trial version of a program expected to expand rapidly to include not only teachers from other charter schools, but also hundreds of teachers bound for traditional New York City public schools. ("College and Charter Groups Team Up to Train Teachers," Feb. 6, 2008.)

The goal was to teach the strategies that make these schools effective. As Uncommon Schools’ Atkins explains, planners wanted to “find the best people to teach content, and model and present the methodologies we use most successfully in our own schools.” As a result, a class led by this hybrid team looks nothing like a traditional education class. Here, the teachers and students bore in on the little things that define the tenor of the highly structured school day and intensive instruction that mark all three of these schools.

KIPP’s co-founder Levin says the goal is to have the expanded Hunter College program replicated in education schools across the country. “This is not about the success of one organization,” he says. “It’s about sharing what works for kids.”

That’s a critical goal, but one that in the past has proven elusive in education, where isolated successes rather than systemic improvement is the norm. Meanwhile, the challenges facing these elite schools and their leaders remain as substantial as the opportunity they have to reshape urban education.

For starters, all these initiatives remain heavily dependent on philanthropic dollars. Right now, a core group of funders is committed to the ventures, helping them leverage public spending. But philanthropic priorities can change, so the new elites must build durable avenues of support within the public sector.
The challenges facing these elite schools and their leaders remain as substantial as the opportunity they have to reshape urban education.

In addition, although they have grown rapidly, all of the high-performing networks still face the challenge of achieving quality at larger scale. Traditionally, quality and scale in education have been inversely related: As initiatives get larger, fidelity to the elements that made them effective in the first place is compromised. Yet it’s not an iron rule. Teach For America, for instance, bucked this trend by growing and maintaining (if not improving) its effectiveness and supplying hundreds of teachers and leaders for the elite networks. KIPP, the largest of these, has expanded and maintained high quality as well. But despite deliberate attention to the key elements of quality, as the networks try to move from impacting thousands of students to millions, the quality-scale challenge will be a test.

The strategy of addressing human capital internally, rather than expecting traditional avenues for teacher and school leadership preparation to do the job, will help. It’s also a model that can be replicated elsewhere by reform-oriented superintendents or other networks of high-performing charter schools. And if the elites can help close the gap between teacher preparation and effective practice, that will move the field forward. But David Steiners are in short supply, and it seems unlikely that teacher preparation will dramatically change without a fight.

And, as it often does in education, race is apt to play a role, too. The leadership of many elite initiatives does not look like the students being served. So far, the desperation for better schooling options in many communities has papered this over. But as the elite networks create an even bigger footprint on the urban education landscape, some hard conversations about race and class are inevitable. To their credit, the elites are trying to broaden the pipeline of diverse talent for leadership roles. Still, despite their efforts, an uncomfortable reality lurks just below the surface today.

Finally, and most importantly, these initiatives must show that they, and by extension charter schooling, can substantially move the needle on student achievement overall. As Matt Candler, the chief executive officer of New Schools for New Orleans, has remarked, no one wants to be part of a movement whose claim to legitimacy is that it “sucks less” than the other schooling options out there. But if they can get it right, the elites have the potential not just to substantially change the facts on the ground about urban education, but also to earn standing to set the standard for quality overall within public education.

That’s a long way from what was launched in Minnesota in 1992, and it could revolutionize American public education.

Richard Whitmire is an editorial writer for USA Today and the president of the Education Writers Association. Andrew J. Rotherham is a co-director of Education Sector and a member of the Virginia state board of education. He writes the blog Eduwonk.com.

The Definitive Response to KIPP Hype

2008-02-09T15:23:00.000-06:00

At some point in your life, you're probably going to encounter a KIPP'ster -- someone who went to school at or teaches at one of the Knowledge Is Power Program charter schools -- who will tell you some rather amazing things about KIPP. Or you may read about KIPP in the newspaper or see something on TV. The best way to counter support for KIPP is to point out the following obvious points:

All KIPP schools are very small. According to Steve Mancini, public affairs director for KIPP schools, the average student-to-teacher ratio at KIPP is 16 to 1.
All KIPP teachers are highly motivated and really want to teach at the schools where they work.
KIPP students -- well, those that are not forced to repeat a grade or who are not "counseled out," i.e., encouraged to drop out of KIPP -- are all highly motivated and want to go to school.
KIPP parents are all highly motivated and go to great lengths to support their kids at KIPP.
KIPP enjoys lots of private financial support, including support from the Gates Foundation, the Broad Foundation, and the Walton Family Foundation (Wal-Mart).
KIPP is widely celebrated in the media.

If you gave me any ONE of these factors with a low-income population of students, I could virtually guarantee you that student achievement would improve. Give me any TWO of these factors and my confidence of success would raise by an order of magnitude.

But KIPP enjoys ALL SIX.

In other words, if you have a small school with highly motivated teachers, students and parents that enjoys the benefits of private financial support and the accolades of the local and national press, you will be a great success.

Ergo, if all schools were small, had highly motivated teachers, students and parents, enjoyed the benefits of private financial support and the accolades of the local and national press, they would all be a great success.

But not all schools can do this. It simply is not possible, given the current paucity of funding and the current mindset that blames low-income people for their own dire straits. So why can't every school repeat KIPP's success?

If we can look at these factors -- (1) student, teacher, and parent motivation, (2) private financial support, (3) small class size, and (4) media celebration -- as goals and try to increase the likelihood of their occurring elsewhere with greater regularity, we might have a worthwhile project on our hands. But to consider KIPP a scalable, reproducible model is silly. Worse, because it attracts the conservative "if they can do it, anyone can" types, KIPP effectively derails substantive dialogue about how the factors that most contribute to its success can be reproduced in other schools.

For example, what policies can be created to increase student, parent, and teacher motivation? What factors decrease motivation? For low-income families without adequate healthcare, living in squalid conditions does not a motivated person make.

What policies can be created to decrease class size? What can be done to provide ongoing high-quality professional development and support to teachers so their desire and ability to teach is lifted up, not smashed down?

Let's have serious discussions about these questions. Let's not be distracted by talk of KIPP and its "magical solution," its hyped stats about its college matriculation rate, and its extraordinarily misleading claim that it helps ALL children learn. KIPP is not the cause of its success. Small class sizes, motivated teachers, motivated students, motivated parents, and tons of private financial support are.

Engaging Students Through Technology

2008-01-28T12:51:00.000-06:00

Sufficient resources have not been allocated to instructional uses of technology because technology has largely been viewed as an afterthought, an add-on, something to give students to play around with if they finish their in-class assignment early. I argue for making technology central to teaching and learning, which means rethinking the relationship between what happens in class and what happens at home. It also means rethinking how technology funds are allocated. If students don't have access, then provide the means for making access possible, i.e., spend the money to wire and outfit homes and spend less money wiring and outfitting schools. The typical model of tech use in K-12 is a couple really old computers sitting in the corner of the classroom and a computer lab, which is often mobile. Of course, there's the other extreme -- giving each student a laptop -- but this gets expensive and hard to maintain. I think you target low-income families and give them free or very low-cost computers and Internet access through state or federal dollars.

Equitable access to technology resources is one of the most pernicious issues in our society today: students who cannot afford computers cannot participate in the information revolution that so many of us take for granted. While students without their own computers can go to a computer lab or to a library, this requires extra time and effort on their part.

While some students are able to make the time, they are not willing to do so. In other cases, students are willing to take the time and make the effort but simply don’t have the time because of work/life commitments that demand them to do something other than prepare for class. So what to do?

In the end, students are going to spend time outside of class doing something. The trick is to find ways to make what happens outside class relevant to what happens inside class, to make it intellectually stimulating, and to make it worth the effort. In other words, it produces tangible, measurable evidence of learning that both the student and the instructor can see.

For the majority of students, learning outside of the classroom occurs in the context of two things: studying (usually for a test, quiz, or exam) and homework. The accepted notion about homework is that it gives students an opportunity to practice and apply what they are learning in class. The accepted notion about studying is that studying for tests, quizzes, or exams gives the student the opportunity to coalesce and organize what they have been learning. The test, quiz, or exam provides a performance context in which the student demonstrates his/her mastery of the subject matter.

Despite the best intentions behind the idea of homework, most of it turns into mindless, purposeless busywork. The homework is done at home, handed in the next day, and returned to the student the following day (or later) with a grade on it. Sometimes it’s a number grade; sometimes it’s a letter grade. But more often than not, it’s a “Good job!” or a check plus. There’s no connection between what was done in class, outside class, the next day in class, and the following day when the homework is returned. There’s no opportunity to apply what was covered in class and then get timely, rich feedback from the teacher and peers on this application of the new knowledge or information. The reason is quite simple: there is no way to connect what happened in class with what happens outside, and there is no way to connect what happened outside with what happens in class the next time.

Studying implies that you have already learned the material beforehand, and that studying will simply call to mind what you have already learned. But as the performance on the assessment clearly shows, this is often not the case. So if learning never happened to begin with, what good is studying? In these cases, the student might be forced to learn the material that he or she neglected to learn, either via a homework assignment or some other means. But being forced to learn something is probably not the best way to instill a love of learning!

Nevertheless, we have all engaged in this process at some point in our lives: we cram. We take huge amounts of information, store it in short term memory, and then regurgitate it for the purposes of the test, quiz, or exam. And once that’s over, we promptly purge it from short-term memory and go on with our lives.

For a disturbingly large number of students, the process below is synonymous with learning:

engage in mindless homework exercises
receive no rich, timely feedback on the homework
have little or no sense of what you know and what you can do throughout the learning experience
cram for tests the night before you take them
promptly forget what you studied

This is a highly dysfunctional system, and yet it passes as the norm. Given this perspective, it’s amazing that students can learn anything at all. But it’s also little wonder that so many students struggle in school and eventually drop out. Typically, we blame them and label them “bad students.” But if we look critically at our most basic operations, we can see that we are part of the problem as well. Is it any wonder why students spend so little time preparing for class?

Here's what I imagine as the ideal:

engage in rich homework exercises that connect directly to what happens in class
receive rich, timely feedback on the homework
have a strong sense of what you know and what you can do throughout the learning experience
engage in a mixture of on-going assessments that promote self-directed learning and encourage self-confidence
deeply ingrain what you studied and make meaningful connections between yourself and different subjects such that learning becomes a form of self-expression

As an instructional design goal, I advocate using technology tools like discussion forums, blogs, wikis, and online formative assessments to make studying, doing homework, and other forms of preparation outside of class synonymous with the kind of engagement listed above if for no other reason than to get students to do the work, to get them to want to make the time and the effort, to motivate them to go the extra mile to go to the computer lab or the library so they can access a computer. In so doing, students can engage in meaningful, purposeful intellectual activity that produces tangible, measurable growth and learning. They won’t have to waste so much time “doing homework” or “studying for a test,” activities which have limited intellectual value and little relevance to their very busy lives.

For my presentation on formative assessment using web-based teaching and learning tools, follow this link.

Note - it's about 55 minutes long and works best on a Windows machine using Internet Explorer or on a Mac using Safari. You can skip ahead to different sections and go back to different sections using the links on the left.

The Faustian Bargain of School Choice

2008-01-26T14:11:00.000-06:00

I went to an open house for a public charter school today. I love this school. I really want to be a part of this community of teachers, students, and parents. The curriculum is inspiring. The way the school views childhood development is refreshingly different from the mainstream schools that emphasize academics and sacrifice social and emotional development, as well as "extras" like art, music, PE, drama, etc. There is something palpably different about this school: everyone likes being here. The teachers, the students, the parents . . . the place just wreaks of excitement. Apparently lots of other folks feel the same way that I do: the place was literally packed.

But I have mixed feelings about charters. There’s a big difference between locally-controlled, parent-run, not-for-profit charters like we see in Portland and corporate, for-profit charters like Edison Schools, Inc. and McCharters like the KIPP schools. You can read about Edison here and KIPP here.

Ideally, charters were envisioned as institutions that would offer alternative approaches to education and would actively involve parents and the community. I think this model is very useful, especially in light of the top-down, cookie-cutter approach we see in Portland and elsewhere today.

But there's a dark side to this school - all charter schools for that matter.

The Lottery

In the system here in Portland, if there are more applicants than spaces available, everyone's name is put in a hat and students are selected randomly through this lottery process. Those lucky enough to have their names drawn get in. The unlucky ones . . . well, they're SOL.

I can't quite get over how odd this lottery business is. It seems fair on the surface . . . except for the ones that don't win. What's odd is that we're talking about a kid's future -- including my kid's future -- that is literally subject to the luck of the draw, the roll of the dice.

School choice proponents here in Portland and elsewhere crow about the virtues of being able to choose which school you send your kids to. But if you don't win the lottery, what choice do you actually have? You're stuck with the school you don't want your kid to attend.

This being stuck'edness is no place that anyone wants to be. If you "choose" another school but are not lucky enough to have your "choice" granted, you can't help but feel a little downtrodden. You can't help but feel a little angry, a little desperate. But perhaps you dutifully send your kid to this school anyway. Hell, what "choice" do you have? Can't afford private school. And homeschooling? Who can afford to quit their job and teach their kids? So you send your kid to this school that you have not chosen. You meet other parents who have not chosen this school. You feel their stuck'edness, their downtrodden'ness, their anger, and their desperation. This is the climate of the school, a school that no one has chosen.

A good chunk of research suggests that parental involvement is one of the keys to student success in school. But it's hard to get excited about a school that you didn't choose. It's hard to want to volunteer in a place where you don't belong.

In the later years of their lives, my parents were pretty destitute. My father lost his job and my mom worked for minimum wage with no health insurance for a giant hotel chain. As religiously as rain, they would buy lottery cards each time the jackpot went over a few million. It was heartbreakingly pathetic to watch them eagerly buy their miserable lottery ticket and wait, praying for a miracle to happen.

I suppose I can't shake this association between a jackpot lottery and a school choice lottery. What's common to both is a certain kind of hopeful hopelessness, a quiet desperation mixed with a belief in a better life. But when you don't hit the jackpot, your own dire straits are made that much more apparent.

Diversity

In the crowd at the school today, I saw exactly one black kid and his mother. The rest were white, clearly middle to upper income whites.

While charters are technically open to everyone, the truth of the matter is that Portland charters tend to draw a disproportionate percentage of middle-class white people.

Unlike the local neighborhood school, charters are not the default schooling option for students and parents. So parents have to find out about the charters in their district. This winnows the field of applicants down considerably. Once they find out about the charters in their district, parents have to attend an informational meeting about the school. This further winnows the field down. Charters often require parents to sign some kind of agreement, e.g., to help at the school, to help with their kids homework, etc. This winnows the field down even further. Then, because the charters are often not in the neighborhood, parents and students have to travel — some times long distances — to get to the school. You guessed it: this winnows the field down still further.

So although charters are technically open to everyone, the way they are set up tends to limit the field of applicants to parents who have extra time on their hands and who are very motivated, involved, mobile, and informed. And parents who are very motivated, involved, mobile, and informed are disproportionately middle to upper income, often with one parent (usually the mom) designated as the full-time caregiver. How many low-income families can afford to have one of the parents not work? Give me a bunch of parents who have extra time on their hands and who are very motivated, involved, mobile, and informed and I will show you a good school.

So, yes, charters are open to all. But not all come.

I don’t blame the charters for this. They are simply filling a need, responding to this desperate need that some parents have for a choice, something other than what they are given.

But wouldn't it be great if all schools could be like charters, i.e., schools that parents would want to send their kids to? Sound like a naive pipe dream? Perhaps. But why can't this be a reality? What's actually stopping us from accomplishing this?

Extraordinary Video on Creativity

2008-01-21T12:57:00.000-06:00

Set aside 20 minutes and prepare to be delighted and inspired by Sir Ken Robinson's talk at the TED conference.

Cheezewhiz and the Value of Play

2008-01-01T21:10:00.000-06:00

When I worked at the University of Missouri-Columbia, I co-created a pilot program called "Expressive Media." The program involved pairing a technology workshop with a discipline-specific course such as English, journalism, or anthropology. Instead of writing traditional academic papers, students in the course created web sites, interactive CD-ROMs, or other forms of technology-based projects. The idea was to expand the notion of writing to include other forms of media and to move beyond print/text as the sole means of writing, thinking, and communicating.

When teaching the technology workshop, I emphasized two basic principles: (1) teach yourself what you need to know about the technology tool to be able to accomplish the goals of your project and (2) play with the tool -- as much as possible. Trying to learn something as complicated as Photoshop is extraordinarily daunting. But learning how to create web-based graphics in Photoshop for a piece on journalistic ethics was more focused and, therefore, more doable. The students ate it up.

As far as play is concerned, here's my favorite anecdote from that class.

When learning how to use a sound editing tool called SoundEdit, one of my students recorded himself saying the word "cheesewhiz." He then took the recording and then played it backwards over and over again. He wanted to learn how to say the word "cheesewhiz" backwards. Once he learned how to say "cheesewhiz" backwards, he recorded himself saying it. And then, magically, when he played himself saying "cheesewhiz" backwards backwards, there it was: "cheesewhiz." Everyone in the room laughed for a good 5 minutes. It was an unforgettable moment.

There was nothing I could have done to promote this kind of adventurous learning other than to let it happen.

What Is Eczema?

2008-01-01T16:27:00.000-06:00

The kick continues. Now it spills over into my personal life. My 18-month-old son has eczema. Or, as I like to refer to it, "eczema." I call it "eczema" because I want to highlight the notion of "eczema" as a phenomenon that occurs not only on my son's skin, but also in language and in scientific discourse.

So what is eczema? And, more importantly, what causes it? And even more importantly, how do you cure it?

Take a spin around Ye Olde Internette and you'll see lots of people offering lots of opinions. My wife and I did some research and then went to see a homeopathic doctor. Two remedies later, and my son's skin was still itchy and red. So we went to a naturopathic doctor. Several avoided foods later, my son's skin was still itchy and red. So we went to a pediatric dermatologist. One corticosteroid cream later, my son's skin is red and itchy, then it's not red and itchy for 3 days, and then it's red and itchy again. So went to a pediatric allergist. One scratch test and one blood test later, we are holding out hope that my son's "eczema" is really an allergic reaction to dairy and wheat. So far, so good. We stopped giving him dairy and wheat and . . . duh . . . his skin looks a lot better.

What amazes me about this whole episode is that neither of the two homeopathic doctors we went to nor the pediatric dermatologist said anything about getting an allergy test done. According to the homeopaths, there was something in his system that was out of balance and could be cured. According to the pediatric dermatologist, "eczema" was an utter mystery: we aren't really sure what causes it, the doctor said, invoking the omniscient "we," and we have no way to cure it.

So many trained experts. So much talking. So much naming. So many nods and assurances that "we know best." So many studies. So many data. And all my son had to do was stop eating cheese and crackers.

So what does this have to do with education, and how does it relate to my rants against the basics and the nuggets o' facts approach to learning?

Think about it: here are these so-called "experts" in their little silos of facts. A homeopath knows about a certain set of things, as does a pediatric dermatologist, as does a naturopath. The pediatric dermatologist, courtesy of his extensive training, was absolutely adamant -- ADAMANT -- that eczema had nothing -- NOTHING -- to do with food or allergies. Yet the pediatric allergist, courtesy of his training, instantly associated my son's "eczema" with what he was eating.

If we had listened to the pediatric dermatologist, if we had chosen to believe him, if we had invested trust in his professional opinion, my son's skin would still be red and itchy. He would still be eating the things that were causing his skin to react, and we would still be putting on a steroid cream designed to mask the symptoms of his eating things that made his skin red and itchy. Fortunately, we chose not to believe him. But I can't imagine how many kids and parents have listened to him.

It's not just memorized nuggets o' facts. It's which nuggets count as "the truth," as real, as relevant. It's how the nuggets function in relation to other nuggets in what Michel Foucault called "the economy of knowledge."

Bottom line: the truth is often an act of faith, and knowledge -- or the lack thereof -- can be harmful.

How Do Airplanes Fly?

2008-01-01T13:38:00.000-06:00

OK, I admit. I'm on a bit of a kick here. I started with my diatribe against "the basics." I followed with the post on Oprah. Now, today, I'm inspired by what Ira Flatow had to say. In case you've never heard of him, he is the NPR science correspondent and anchor of Talk of the Nation: Science Friday, and author of Rainbows, Curve Balls and Other Wonders of the Natural World Explained and They All Laughed.

In the 9/11/07 broadcast of The Diane Rehm Show, Flatow discussed the issue of how planes fly. According to Flatow, the way we were all told is wrong. We were all told that planes could fly according to the Bernoulli effect, i.e., the shape of an airplane wing is such that air flowing over the top of the wing must travel faster than the air flowing under the wing, and so there is less pressure on the top than on the bottom, resulting in lift. Rubbish, says Flatow -- as does every other expert in the field of aerodynamics.

But wait a minute! Mr. Johnson, my 10th grade physics teacher, said it was due to pressure. He was a disciple of Bernoulli - how could he have been wrong? And can I file a law suit against him?

As Flatow reminds us, "science is a moving target."

So not only is education an issue of memorizing useless bits o facts, it's also frequently an issue of the bits we've committed to memory being entirely untrue, inaccurate, and otherwise wrong. And if you don't believe me, let me ask you this: how many planets are there? 9 or 8? Is Pluto a planet or not?

Moving target, remember?

So how would we approach this reality in our classrooms? How do we teach "facts" while at the same time underscoring their provisional status as "the truth"?

You Mean Oprah Doesn't Know?

2007-12-21T16:23:00.000-06:00

I was at the gym on Wednesday, doing my hamster wheel thing on the elliptical trainer. One of the 74 televisions had Oprah on. The show, which originally aired on 1/19/06, was called "Things Oprah Wants You to Know and You Do, Too!" The tag for the show:

She's done thousands of shows on thousands of topics. This time, Oprah and 84 percent of the audience are clueless! You'll feel smarter after this show…Oprah knows she does!

The show explained things like how e-mail works, how television works, and how telephones work. Now, I'll confess something here. I have an extremely vague idea how some of these things work. But I'd probably lump myself in with Oprah and the other 84 percent of the audience.

The show reminded me of a documentary where 21 of the 23 randomly selected students, all of whom were either students, faculty, or alumni of Harvard University, revealed misconceptions when asked to explain either the seasons or the phases of the Moon. An excerpt from the documentary:

Graduate 1: O.K. I think the seasons happen because as the Earth travels around the Sun, it gets nearer to the Sun, which produces warmer weather and gets farther away which produces colder weather. And thus the seasons.

Graduate 2: How cold it is or how warm it is in any given time of the year has to do with the closeness of the Earth to the Sun during the seasonal periods.

Graduate 3: The Earth travels around the Sun, and it gets hotter when are closer to the Sun, and it gets colder when we are farther away.

Narrator: These graduates, like many of us, think of the Earth’s orbit as a highly exaggerated ellipse, even thought the Earth’s orbit is very nearly circular, with distance producing virtually no effect on the seasons. We carry with us the strong, incorrect belief that changing distance is responsible for the seasons.

Now, admittedly, 23 people is not exactly a statistically significant sample size. But ask yourself now. Go ahead. How does a TV work? Why do we have seasons? What the heck makes a microwave tick?

Which brings me to the point of this post: who cares? Who cares if Oprah doesn't know how a television works? Who cares if graduates from Harvard don't know how the seasons happen? The answer: seemingly everyone should. After all, most of these folks are extremely well educated. They learned these things in school! These things were on the mid-term, for chrissakes!

I, too, learned most of these things. But I, too, remember almost none of them. I covered this in this post. But here's the even larger point: in this day and age of information at your fingertips courtesy of Ye Olde Internete, how important is it to commit large chunks o' facts to memory? If it was not so pedagogically valid 30 years ago, it is certainly even less so today.

Which, finally, brings me to the 50,000 foot point: why are most schools still in full coverage mode, committed to The Bunch O Facts curriculum with its mile wide and inch deep approach to learning?

The Scripted Prescription: A Cure for Childhood

2007-12-20T21:55:00.000-06:00

A few days before my daughter started pre-Kindergarten, she was asked to come in and be tested. As part of the test, the teacher asked my daughter to write her name on a piece of paper. My four-year-old daughter looked up at me with huge, puzzled eyes. I looked at the teacher with equally huge, puzzled eyes. Write her name? On the first day of pre-Kindergarten? My daughter didn’t know how to hold a pencil, much less write her name.

My elementary school colleagues have told me that this first meeting has traditionally been a time for the new student and the teacher to get to know each other. But there was no conversation about what my daughter liked to read, what she liked to do, or anything else that might have told the teacher who she was. It didn’t seem to matter who my daughter was. Rather, the issue was – how well can she do on this test?

It saddened me to think that my daughter’s very first impression of school was based on taking a test and failing it.

Since that time, my daughter regularly brings home worksheets that she did in school. They’re photocopies of activities like sorting, graphing, letter tracing, letter recognition. While she’s at school, she’s very busy. The teacher has them working in “centers.” Each center is focused on a specific task, usually associated with a literacy skill. According to the teachers that I’ve spoken to, these skills were the sorts of things that six and seven year olds used to do in first grade. Now four and five year olds are being asked to do them in pre-Kindergarten.

Next year, if my daughter stays at this school and attends Kindergarten there, she will be in school all day. As a Kindergartner, she will be very busy. She will have exactly 20 minutes of recess, and then she’ll get back to work.

I met with the principal and with my daughter’s teacher. I expressed my concern that this practice might not be developmentally appropriate. The principal looked at me, rolled her eyes, and said calmly and confidently, “Well, it’s not going to do them any harm.”

But I’m not so sure. Should we place such a heavy emphasis on academic skill development at such an early age? Is this a developmentally appropriate practice? The truth is, we don’t know. None of us know. That’s because this heavy skills-based, academic approach has never been taken before in pre-K and Kindergarten classrooms in this country. Ever. So there simply are no long-term data.

But what little data there are point to the fact that this practice simply isn’t working: if heavy skills-based instruction were working, we’d see a rise in scores. But the average 8th-grade reading score on the 2007 NAEP was below the level of achievement shown in 2002. In addition, researchers at Stanford University have joined with principals and administrators from 45 middle and high schools across the country to form S.O.S. – Stressed Out Students. The group was formed four years ago by Denise Pope, a lecturer at the Stanford University School of Education and author of the book, “Doing School: How We Are Creating a Generation of Stressed Out, Materialistic and Miseducated Students.” Pope and her colleagues point to the rise in recent years in the number of students seeking mental health services, an increase in cheating behavior in school, and students' consistent worry about academic achievement.

Paul Richards, the principal at Needham High School located in the affluent suburbs of Boston, joined SOS four years ago after four of its young people — one in college, two in high school, and one in middle school — committed suicide. Even before the suicides, Needham school officials had established an initiative, starting in elementary school, to help students develop better emotional and social skills after youth surveys indicated disturbing rates of alcohol and drug use and depression.

Yet the lack of data on long-term effects, the clear indication that this practice is not having the desired effect, and the disturbing rise in stress-related behavior in young people have not stopped us from forging full steam ahead. We think this emphasis on academic achievement is good for very young children. We think it will benefit them. But we don’t actually know what effect it’s having, nor do we know what effect it will have 5, 10, or 15 years from now.

Where I’m from, we call this “driving with your eyes closed.” Others call it hoping. Call it what you will, but the fact of the matter is that our children in public schools – my daughter included – are participating in a giant experiment that none of us agreed to. Our children are guinea pigs, to put it nicely. Others might call them lab rats.

My daughter came home the other day in an incredibly grumpy mood. “How was school today?” I asked. “Terrible,” she answered. “Why? What happened?” “I want to play with my friends,” she said. “Don’t you get a chance to play with your friends?” “No,” she replied.

To be honest with you, it’s not so much the addition of academics that worries me as it is the subtraction of everything else. We seem to have lost the balance here. What are we getting rid of to make more time for all this skill building? Art, music, foreign languages and – yes – recess are being cut to make more time for skills, specifically math and reading skills. Starting in pre-K.

So I met with a district administrator at the Office of Teaching and Learning. I said to her, "Ideally for me, pre-K can be about play, socialization, and fun. I think we can introduce some early literacy and numeracy in Kindergarten, but let's wait until first grade to get into formal instruction." She replied, "Oh, no. That would be too late." "Too late?" I asked. “Too late for what?”

The truth is, I’m not in a hurry. Neither is my daughter. But kids are being pushed to be little grown-ups at earlier and earlier ages. The rush to make adequate yearly progress – AYP – under No Child Left Behind has only exacerbated this trend that Dr. David Elkind chronicled in his 1981 book The Hurried Child.

Dr. Elkind showed that in blurring the boundaries of what is age appropriate, by expecting -- or imposing -- too much too soon, we force our kids to grow up far too fast. He referred to it as nothing less than an assault on childhood.

I’m worried that we’re setting kids up to fail. We may succeed in getting some of them to read, write, and complete math equations precociously. But we may also be creating a cohort of four and five-year-old children who look at school as a place where they simply don’t belong. As a place that is devoid of fun. I'm concerned that children like my daughter are forming a negative self-image when asked to perform cognitive tasks when they are clearly not able or not comfortable doing so. Children may not only form negative self-images and develop negative self-esteem, but they may also form negative impressions about school, e.g., it's too competitive, it's too stressful, etc.

Competition and stress may or may not be something we want kids to learn to deal with. And I'm not one of those parents that wants to shield my little shnoogums from nasty people who don't think she's as marvelous as I do. But do we really want 4-year-olds to deal with these things in pre-kindergarten, in the grade BEFORE the beginning grade of elementary school? When are children ever allowed to be beginners? Surely PRE-Kindergarten is a good place for kids to be beginners. Or so we used to think.

The notion of children being "kindergarten ready" is extraordinarily bizarre oxymoron. It's like saying you have to know how to play the piano before you can learn how to play the piano. But if you are not "kindergarten ready," then you are considered “behind." How odd that a policy called “No Child Left Behind” can define children as “behind” on their very first day of school.

Children learn to play together by playing together. They learn how take turns by taking turns, how to share by sharing, how to resolve conflicts that come up by resolving conflicts that come up. In order to learn how to do these things, children need to experience them firsthand. They need to DO these things. But if they are not being given the time to do them, then how are they supposed to learn them?

I understand the need to close the achievement gap. I understand the need to do this sooner rather than later, and to target young children just entering school to make sure they don’t fall behind.

But as we try to correct one problem, we are unknowingly creating another.

Which leads me to wonder: who would benefit from the creation of a problem while also creating a solution to the same problem?

My friend Bill told me a story which helped me understand this phenomenon a bit more. When he was a young man, he worked with his father hauling bags of mortar. As he crossed the street one day, he dropped a bag right in the middle of the road, spewing its contents everywhere. He tried his best to clean up the mess, but had to run out of the road as cars passed by. He noticed that as the cars passed, they got covered with white dust from the mortar. So, being an enterprising young man, Bill set up a car wash just down from where he dropped the bag of mortar. He made a killing.

Kindergarten guru Vivian Paley notes the earlier we begin academic instruction, the more problems are revealed. But, she wonders, are there problems actually there? Or are they instead waiting to be discovered by the external diagnostic tool that invented them? Paley argues that the premature introduction of academic skills-based lessons causes the problems. She writes, “Expectations for incoming first graders are quite precise, and the tension begins even before the teacher and student meet. The potential for surprise is largely gone. We no longer wonder ‘Who are you?’ but instead decide quickly ‘What can we do to fix you?’”

In the context of the educational assessments that children like my daughter are subject to, we see a diagnostic model that specializes in both quantifying educational deficiencies in very young children and providing an antidote that meets the needs of the diagnosis. We see the emergence of large publishing companies that are allowed to control the definition of the symptoms as well as prescribe and furnish the cure – for a hefty price. We see the emergence of the scripted curriculum, where “scripted” means an explicit formula to cure what ails them, as in “prescription.” In my daughter’s school, the prescription comes in the form of Scott Foresman’s Reading Street. Scott Foresman is a division of publishing giant Pearson Education. But the same kind of prescription is being handed out everywhere in the district, not just at my daughter’s school. And it’s being handed out all across the country. The prescription goes by various names, but they all have this in common: invent, identify, and remediate deficiencies, all in one slick package.

Now, I’m not a conspiracy theorist. But it’s useful to engage in some big picture thinking that is often considered conspiracy theory or chicken littleism. Who benefits from such a diagnostic model, apart from the companies that benefit financially from selling the model and its cure-all materials? Who would benefit from labeling children as “behind” before they even start school? Who would benefit from a system that rank-ordered children, starting at the age of four, into norm-based clusters of low, middle, and high-achievers? Who would benefit from such a classification system that virtually guaranteed that a large percentage of children would forever see themselves as incompetent, as “not meeting standards”? And who would benefit from the fact that a very large percentage of these children would be low-income minorities?

So what do I want? I want what my daughter wants: to be able to spend time with her friends, playing and being a little kid. She doesn’t have any kids to play with on her block, so school is the only place she has any chance to socialize and interact with her peers. I want her to have the chance to make friends. I want her to be given the opportunity to play. I want her to learn how to share and solve problems with her peers. I want this more than I want her to be phonemically aware. There will be time for such academic pursuits when she's a bit older. But there's only so much time she's allowed to be a little girl.

Lest you think this sounds a bit touchy-feely and out of synch with today’s calls for accountability, let me remind you of this. The Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development did a study in 2004 looking at literacy and reading skills for 15-year-olds. You know which country was the top-ranked producer of readers in the world? Finland. Of the 30 countries studied, the United States placed 15th.

So what does Finland do? Children in Finland start learning to read in the first grade. At the age of seven.

The Fins believe that play is the most effective learning tool in the early years and sets the stage for a lifelong love of learning.

I want this for all young children, not just my daughter. I want all children to have the opportunity to develop intellectually, socially, and emotionally. But most importantly, I want children to be allowed to have childhoods.

Democracy in Education

2007-12-18T17:16:00.000-06:00

We as a country broadcast the idea that our system works the best. But only roughly 50% of voters vote in any election. Less in most local elections. We say that our government is a democracy, a rule of the people, by the people, for the people. But who votes? And who influences the votes? What are we voting for? Who are we voting for? Are we given choices, or are we given variations on a theme?

The real question is, why do we have this situation? And what can be done to fix it?

While there are many reforms that could work, where we need to start is in our schools.

As students, we’re told all the stuff that we don’t need to know, like who signed the Declaration of Independence, where the White House is located, and how many senators there are.

So what do we need to know? Here are some ideas:

Newspaper stories are written by people; they are not “the truth” – we forget this fact; we need to know who the writer is, what they’ve written before, and what their angle is (BTW – everyone has an angle.) At best, we are taught to be critical of newspapers and not believe everything we read. But which newspapers do we believe? And why?

How do bills really get passed?

How does political change happen?

What can average citizens do to affect change?

How do think tanks work?

How and why do politicians decide to support the things they support?

What role does the media play in shaping policy? In advancing or preventing change?

If these questions and issues were part of the public school curriculum, perhaps we’d create citizens who not only knew what a democracy was, but also knew how to participate in one and desired to make it work. But maybe this is precisely the problem. Maybe there really are forces at play in our society – people and institutions – who really don’t want the people of this country to be engaged in the political process at this level. After all, if we really did have a democracy – a government of and for the demos, the people – things might be different. A small percentage of extremely wealthy special interest groups would not dominate and control policy and how decisions were made.

The great challenge for schools is not just to politicize education and to make education a relevant, even crucial part of how our society operates, but to make sure that students are educated to be able to make tough decisions within the infrastructure of the political process. In other words, we can’t just graduate a bunch of stupid political radicals. We have to make sure that there is a broad-based education that will ensure that students participating in the political process can understand and analyze the issues and then participate in ways to meaningfully and effectively enact these changes and analyses.

I Can Read, But I Don't Want To: The Dumbed-Down Path to Aliteracy

2007-11-19T23:38:00.000-06:00

There's a difference between being able to read and reading. Most kids can read by a certain age. But, according to a recent report from the National Endowment for the Arts, most choose not to.

"Many still read, and read well," NEA Chairman Dana Gioia said, "but we are at a delicate point, and the trends are toward the negative. Americans are reading less and, therefore, less well, and so they do less well in school, in the economy and in civic life."

Nearly half of those ages 18 to 24 who were surveyed read no books for pleasure at all. Those ages 15 to 24 who read voluntarily did so for only seven to 10 minutes a day.

So why are kids who can read choosing not to read?

In his book titled Reading the Naked Truth, Gerald Coles writes,

"Putting an excessive emphasis on word skills might result in beginning readers not achieving competence in a variety of additional strategies of reading, strategies especially necessary for high-level material in later grades. An excessive skills emphasis that encourages children to see reading as 'word work' rather than as an experience that informs and excites them and fires their imagination could discourage enthusiasm for reading and thereby encourage aliteracy, that is, students who know how to read but have no interest in reading."

In low-income classrooms I've visited, I see this deadening effect at work. Low-income minority children are being given the lowest of the low when it comes to a rich curriculum. The reading program is designed for one thing: to help kids pass the state standardized test. The rationale is understandable: these kids need help in "the basics" because they don't get it at home. But this then leads to the creation of a curriculum that is nothing but the basics.

To see this phenomenon of "nothing but the basics" in sharp detail, read Linda Perlstein's extraordinary book, Tested. Perlstein painfully documents the dumbed-down, test-centric path that a Title 1 school in Maryland follows to make AYP. In reading this book, I was saddened, enraged, and disgusted. After being exposed to a constant regimen of "BCR's" (brief constructed responses), decoding drills, and endless test prep, it's little wonder why no one would ever want to read anything ever again.

Educational Frankenstein: Collateral Damage on the Way to AYP

2007-11-07T11:37:00.000-06:00

I am now seriously considering homeschooling. I'm not so much attracted to homeschooling as I am repulsed by traditional education. I support public schools, but not in their current bastardized form under NCLB.

I’m an example of how the system works and yet doesn’t work. I’m part success, part failure.

Kids can be educated in the basics, but the basics is not the solution. It’s part of the problem. Critics charge that the basics were good enough for them, why aren’t they good enough for everyone else? The basics seemed to work for me. After all, by almost any measure, you might say that I’m a successful product of a basic education. I graduated from Princeton University, went on to get my master’s at New York University, and now work as an instructional designer at a state university. But I achieved all these things DESPITE my education, not because of it. As a student, I valued winning above all else. “Learning” was a means to an end, not an end in itself. Sure, I learned a thing or two along the way, but the underlying message was always “Prove that you are better than others.” So I did.

Upon reflection, I feel like I was robbed of the kind of education all children deserve. In an extraordinarily twisted way, I turned out to be a success in a dysfunctional system, an educational Frankenstein. I suspect that many people are also educational Frankensteins, monsters that were taught to compete, to win, to value grades, to do just enough, to seek praise, to read to pass a test, to memorize Spanish vocabulary words to pass a test, to memorize state capitals to pass a test, to memorize the preamble of the Constitution to pass a test. I memorized the Spanish vocabulary words – every one. I got a perfect score on almost every test I took. But can I speak Spanish? No. I studied the names of Roman senators and the symbols for all the chemicals, but I can remember neither senator nor symbol.

As a student, I was passive. Or, more precisely, the educational context governed by the basics put me in the role of a passive learner. Teachers did the teaching. Students did the learning. Or, again more precisely, students were taught AT by teachers. So I sat back and took hundreds and hundreds of pages of notes. From about the 6th grade until my second year in graduate school, I sat and listened and took notes. And took more notes. And still more notes. Because the basics assumes I am an empty receptacle into which knowledge is poured, I sat and let knowledge be poured into me. In grades 6-11, I’d go home, read my notes, memorize my notes, and come back the next day and regurgitate the contents of my notes onto a multiple choice or short answer test. And I would do well, every time. I was good at regurgitating information from short-term memory. But after I had taken the test, I would promptly purge my short-term memory of all that information. Well, not all of it. I pride myself in my ability to recall trivial bits of information about geography. I know that Burma is now called Myanmar, and that the capital is Rangoon. I know that Ho Chi Minh City was once called Saigon. And I know that the Nile flows north. So, as you can see, my basic education has prepared me well to be a contestant on Jeopardy and to impress people at parties.

We have to ask ourselves: do we want our children to grow up to be contestants on Jeopardy? Or do we want something else for our kids?

Even at such an impressive school as Princeton, I sat and I sat and I sat and I took note after note after note and I regurgitated, regurgitated, regurgitated. I wrote paper after paper after paper. I don’t remember any of it, none of it, not a lick. I go back to my old files and read papers that I wrote and think to myself, “Wow – I used to know this???? Gee, I used to be smart!” Oh, sure, I definitely became a better writer as a result of all the papers I wrote. I’m not saying there was absolutely NO benefit to it. But much of the value – most of the value – was and is lost. It’s not about the Nile flowing north or Burma changing to Myanmar or the mitochondria – “the powerhouse of the cell” – or “to find the percent of a number, change the percent to a decimal and multiply” or the storming of the Bastille in 1789 or the fact that the Battle of Bunker Hill was actually fought on Breed’s hill. It ain’t about none of that. But that’s what it was for me. And that’s what it is for most kids. This is the basics. And there could be nothing more antithetical to learning than the basics.

And why? Because under these terms, you are either good at the basics or you are not good at the basics. I was good at the basics because I liked winning and I was good at memorizing. So I got all A’s. From the time I was in the 4th grade, I was on the Headmaster’s List at my school. I worked hard – very hard – to stay on the list. Was I driven to learn? No. Was I driven by a burning curiosity? No. I was driven to be better than everyone else. And by George I was!

Talk about a monster. So here’s a success story. A kid who gets all A’s. A kid who goes to Princeton and NYU. A kid who has this impressive vocabulary. But it’s also a kid that hates reading books. I abhor novels. Reading was never something I did for pleasure. From the very earliest age, I had to read a book and write this thing called a “book report” to prove that I had read the book. So reading was all about writing a report that showed I had done the reading. There was nothing – NO THING – that was inherently interesting, challenging, or valuable about writing the book report. For the most part, book reports were about summarizing the plot. So the little voice in my head kept asking, “If I read in order to write a plot summary, what inherent value is there in reading?” The answer: there is none.

Now, mind you, I could prove that I had read books. I wrote book reports until they were coming out of my ears. I read lots and lots of books and wrote lots and lots of book reports. And guess what? Every single book report got an A. Every one. But in getting an A on all those book reports, my love for reading was destroyed. Like “gone.” As in “I don’t have a love for reading.” Reading is about proving that you have read. While reading, I felt this pressure to remember everything that happened because, if I forgot, how could I ever write the book report? And if I bomb the book report, I won’t make the Headmaster’s List! But that can’t happen! I’ve ALWAYS made the Headmaster’s List! What would people think of me if I didn’t make the Headmaster’s List?

Now imagine all the kids who are not good at the basics. Not only do they get to have their love of reading destroyed, they also get the distinction of being labeled “slow” or “needs improvement.” They’re not so good at memorizing Jeopardy-style nuggets o’ facts, so they can’t walk into a test and regurgitate the contents of their brains onto the page. So they fail these tests. The teacher calls them “average” or “not too bright.” Their parents call them “good kids.” They call themselves “stupid.”

What kind of future do these kids have? And what kind of future would I have had? Sure, I’m “successful” by most measures. But how much more successful could I have been? More importantly, how much more fulfilled would I be as a person? Living a life where learning was synonymous with self-expression, not competition? Living a life where reading was a joy, not a burden? Living a life where I didn’t have to live in fear of failure, having to prove that I was smart, fearing that I really wasn’t?

So, for me, educational reform is inextricably linked to my desire to seek revenge. I simply cannot imagine what my life would be like or who I would be now if I had received a truly extraordinary education. Nor can I imagine what the planet would be like if the millions and millions of kids who have been chewed up and spat out by the basics had had a truly extraordinary educational experience.

In me, there is a profound need to make things right. Because what we have today is not right.

So is homeschooling the answer? For me and my kids, perhaps. But I shudder to think about the other kids, the kids who will continually be ground up and spat out, collateral damage on the way to AYP.

Waging a battle on standardized tests

2007-11-06T11:47:00.000-06:00

Here's a very strong piece from Dan Brown, a former teacher in New York City and author of "The Great Expectations School: A Rookie Year in the New Blackboard Jungle." This piece appeared in the 11/03/07 Boston Globe.

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Waging a battle on standardized tests

By Dan Brown | November 3, 2007

TEACHERS NEED to pick their battles. I scanned my fourth-grade students in the Bronx and considered several battles in my mind.

Battle Number One: Manolo arrived in my classroom determined to fight the world. His mother had died when he was in second grade and he had to repeat the year. However, Manolo took substantial steps when he began to write creative stories, favoring historical fiction in which he inserted himself into a famous event. His writing revealed great imagination and interest, but his spelling and mechanics remained poor, and state exams continued to label him a failure.

Battle Number Two: Sara entered my classroom leaps ahead of her peers. She wrote hilarious, irreverent poetry and had already mastered grade-level math. She fired off endless questions about current events. Sara was a dream student, hungry to be challenged. However, the administrators at my school discouraged creative lesson planning in order to cram in endless "drill-and-kill" packets of basic skills test-taking strategies.

Battle Number Three: Eddie was in his fourth year in fourth grade because of absences and test failures. It seemed impossible to get him engaged in class. However, he loved to draw and showed a remarkable, natural talent for perspective sketching. Tragically, my class was deprived of all arts in order to allot more time for standardized test preparation.

How could I help these children face their challenges? Every moment, I felt pulled in 26 directions, invariably drawn to the louder children who act out. And then there was the ever-looming Test.

Everyone involved in education policy claims to be on the side of students, yet I quickly learned that the needs of my students fell quite low on the school's priority list. Nearly six years into the No Child Left Behind era, American public schools have more money than ever, but students are still widely denied the most crucial tools for their success: individual attention and specialized support.

In a more rational, equitable system, Manolo would have access to small-group tutoring, Sara could flourish in a challenging, high-level classroom environment, and Eddie could explore his artistic inspiration in school. They would meet with guidance counselors (my school had a ratio of 550 students per counselor) and mentors. Knowing their school supported their individual needs would further engage these children.

However, the resources that my students badly needed were being spent elsewhere; the money was going into high-stakes testing.

We have entered a dangerous era in which the fad for education policy is to import statistics-driven paradigms from the business sphere. These mechanistic models are an ill fit in education, a wholly human institution. Testing may provide easy-to-crunch metrics, but it creates a negative, all-consuming test culture, and does not paint a comprehensive picture of students' abilities.

Under No Child Left Behind, schools, particularly in high-poverty areas, are under intense pressure to meet quotas on one-size-fits-all standardized tests. Prepping for the test and getting a well-rounded education are not the same thing, but there is not room in the school day for both tasks.

The suffocating squeeze that my students and I felt was not a case of a few rogue administrators misunderstanding the law, as Assistant Secretary of Education Doug Mesecar has said. A recent report by the Center of Education Policy discovered that 44 percent of schools have reduced instructional time in untested subjects (social studies, science, art and music, physical education, lunch, and/or recess).

It's not just the government trumpeting high-stakes testing as the way to get "accountability" from schools. The media have largely gone along for the ride as well, trumpeting minute shifts in test score graphs as headline-worthy successes or failures.

We have taken our eye off the ball on what is most important in schools - students' needs. Senator Edward Kennedy, chairman of the Senate committee overseeing the creation of a new No Child Left Behind bill, has an opportunity to recommend changes to the sweeping law.

Manolo, Sara, Eddie, and every other child, parent, and teacher in America are counting on him.

Why not let kids be kids?

2007-11-05T15:40:00.000-06:00

I'm worried that kids are not allowed to be kids any more. I'm worried their lives are either too scheduled and overly structured, or they are left on their own to vegetate in front of the TV set or their video game consoles. We have an achievement gap, yes. But what's the best way for schools to participate in bridging that gap?

I keep coming back to the issue of harm, i.e., the evidence that an emphasis on academic instruction in pre-K and K (esp. an emphasis on phonics and decoding at the expense of socio-dramatic play and hands-on, experiential activities like art and music) causes both short-term and long-term harm. The Alliance for Childhood makes a strong case for a correlation between the lack of play and aggressive behavior, as well a possible connection between the absence of play and mental illness in children. Of course, play is getting a lot of attention due to an increase in childhood obesity. But it seems that folks like Vivian Paley are being completely ignored. I think this is largely due to NCLB and the recognition that low-income kids need help to close the gap. But the Alliance for Childhood handles this really nicely, arguing, "While low-income, at-risk children need and deserve special attention to close the gap, there is no evidence that current methods will do that."

Most disturbing are the reports from teachers that if they give five-year-olds time to play, the children literally do not know what to do. “They have no ideas of their own,” reported experienced kindergarten teachers in an Alliance for Childhood pilot study in Atlanta.

Note - the list of people who signed the Alliance for Childhood's call to action include such heavy-hitters as Howard Gardner, Linda Darling-Hammond, Jonathan Kozol, Mel Levine, Deb Meier, Sam Meisels, Vivian Paley, and George Wood. Pretty powerful group!

The National Association for the Education of Young Children has a strong position statement on school readiness. It's really quite good. Very concise.

Here's a particularly good/relevant excerpt:

"A prevalent, fundamental misconception is that children's learning occurs in a rigid sequence and that certain basic skills must exist before later learning can occur. In fact, much of children's learning is from whole to part. Children's acquisition of higher order thinking processes and problem- solving abilities occurs in tandem with and may outpace acquisition of "basic" skills. For example, children are able to comprehend far more complex stories than they can produce. While the beginning acquisition of basic literacy and numeracy skills is important, these abilities are unlikely to flourish when presented out of context as isolated skills. To focus only on sounding out letters or forming letters properly on the lines ignores children's complex language capabilities, often squelches their burgeoning interest in reading and writing, and deprives children of the meaningful context that promotes effective learning."

Consider also what's happening to recess in public schools.

The timeless institution of recess is in jeopardy. A survey by the American Association for the Child's Right to Play shows that about 40% of public schools have already cut, or are planning to cut, at least one recess period from the school day.
Since the birth of the American schoolhouse, children have enjoyed regular breaks from textbooks and classroom routines. Teachers 100 years ago knew what modern research studies prove today: Recess provides the means for fidgety students, especially boys, to expend their energy and refresh their minds. As Time.com put it: "Multiple studies show that, when recess time is delayed, elementary-school kids grow increasingly inattentive. Goodbye recess, hello Ritalin."
New elementary schools in Atlanta have been built without playgrounds, and recess has been curtailed in other Georgia school districts as well. Schools in Pennsylvania, Illinois, Texas, New Jersey, Florida, and California have all jumped on the eliminate-recess bandwagon. "This is an example of good intentions gone awry," Paul Houston, executive director of the American Association of School Administrators, told the Chicago Tribune (9-27-01). "There's huge pressure these days on superintendents and boards to show that they're serious about achievement, so they do something symbolic - they get rid of recess."

So what does this mean? We honestly don't know what the long-term effects and the possible harm that an over-emphasis on developmentally inappropriate activities can cause. Some kids -- my pre-K daughter included -- might even appear to have fun doing worksheets and seem like they are learning something. Maybe. But my daughter, in her free time, has never asked me to create a worksheet for her. She has, however, asked me to bark at her toy dog, pretend I'm Miss Piggy, dance, sing, and look for buried treasure. If she wasn't doing these things with me, and if she's being given fewer and fewer opportunities to do this at school, and since she doesn't live near any of her classmates, what would happen to her imagination, that one thing that childhood is supposed to be synonymous with?

We look at the huge percentage of children that drop out of school each year and we wonder why they drop out. So policy makers decide to make school more about school and less about fun. And they're starting in the year BEFORE Kindergarten. I don't know about you, but I suspect this will create more drop-outs, not fewer. School is clearly not working for these kids. It is clearly irrelevant. It clearly has nothing to do with them. The way to keep kids active and engaged in school is to make school a place where kids want to be and want to stay. School should be fun. Kids should be allowed to be kids.

If you don't buy this argument, then consider this: in the absence of open, unstructured play, when will children learn to share? When will they learn to cooperate? When will they learn how to make friends? When will they learn how to resolve conflicts? When will they be able to develop their own interests in things that stimulate their curiosity? When will they develop their own identities? It's these very things that form the core of childhood. And it's these very things that are slowly disappearing from our classrooms.

I Love the Free Market!

2007-10-16T23:01:00.000-05:00

You hear lots of folks extol the virtues of the free market. From the trickle-down economics of Ronnie Reagan to neo-liberals like Clinton, all we have to do is let market competition take over and the cream will rise to the top, all will be well, etc., etc.

You hear the same kinds of arguments about school choice. Let schools compete with each other, and the best ones will survive.

Well, here's a gentle reminder to all of you free market fans: it don't work that way, folks.

Case in point: consider recent developments in the home insurance industry.

--from the 10/16/07 NY Times--

Companies including Allstate, State Farm and Liberty Mutual have “nonrenewed” policies not only in hurricane-battered places like Florida and Louisiana, but in New York and other Northern states that have not seen hurricanes in years. Since last year, those three companies and others have turned down all new homeowners’ insurance business in New Jersey, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Maryland, Massachusetts and the eight downstate counties of New York.

An independent insurance agents’ group puts the Grays among about 50,000 residents of the New York metropolitan area — and about one million homeowners in the Mid-Atlantic and New England states — whose policies have been canceled since 2004. While most homeowners have been able to find coverage with other major insurers, or with smaller companies, in most cases it is at higher rates and with larger deductibles.

Translation: it ain't in the interests of for-profit insurance companies to lose money. So what do they do? They simply stop insuring homes that are risky. And what do these homeowners do to protect their homes? Who cares.

Linda Darling-Hammond's Testimony

2007-09-12T16:28:00.000-05:00

This is Linda Darling-Hammond's testimony before the House Education and Labor Committee on the Re-Authorization of NCLB.

Notice that she focuses on competitiveness as the lynchpin of her argument.

So does this indicate that anti-NCLB'ers like Darling-Hammond accept the competitiveness rationale? Or is this Darling-Hammond being cagey, knowing that the only thing that will get the attention of politicians is to couch everything inside of the competitiveness frame?

If the former, it reminds me of Lakoff's point about "tax relief."

We don't question the whole notion of "competitiveness" as a ridiculous canard.

St. Louis Schools Taken Over By State

2007-03-26T21:25:00.000-05:00

The publicly-elected school board for the city of St. Louis has been completely stripped of power. A three-member board will take over the schools on June 15th. Of the three members, one is appointed by voucher-loving and pro-privatization Republican governor Matt Blunt. Another is appointed by voucher-loving and pro-privatization Republican mayor Francis Slay.

Current St. Louis Public Schools Board member Peter Downs wrote an eloquent history of the current situation and a powerful defense of the democratically-elected board. Find it here.

A lot of people framed this issue as one concerning a dysfunctional board, i.e., it was largely a matter of personalities and people not being able to get along. What they forget is that the board was in the middle of regaining control from Mayor Slay. They forget the havoc that Slay had created in bringing in Bill Roberti and his crew and dismantling the board once before. (Roberti and his company are now at work in New Orleans, doing to it what they did to St. Louis) They forget that it was going to take a long time to undo what Slay and Roberti had done. But they were making slow, steady progress. Had the board not been rendered powerless by the state's usurpation, the elections in April would doubtless have completed the process. The people of St. Louis spoke last year and kicked two of Slay's candidates off the board. They would have completed that work this year, leaving Slay with no more puppets on the board.

Rather than risk this, Slay helped to orchestrate this coup d' etat. This is naked political aggression, pure and simple. It's framed as an attempt to help the schools. But when any attempt runs directly counter to the expressed will of the voters, one has to wonder about the real motivations behind these actions.

What troubles me most about these attempts to "help" -- in St. Louis, in Philadelphia, in Chicago, in Oakland, in New York City -- is the extent to which they mirror the racist prejudices seen in "the white man's burden" typical of colonial rule. The British colonialists of the 19th and early 20th century were not explicitly racist in their beliefs and practices. Far from it. But their actions belied their inherently patronizing and self-serving ideology that consciously and unconsciously framed "the colonial other" as inferior. Clearly, in the eyes of the state board and everyone who supports this take-over, the people of St. Louis are incapable of governing themselves and solving their own problems. It just so happens that the majority of people in the city of St. Louis are black, and the vast majority of students affected by this decision are black.

Such an act would be literally inconceivable in a district where the majority of students were white.

Jeff Smith and the Neo-Liberal Assault on Public Education

2007-03-03T17:52:00.000-06:00

In announcing his support for pay-based teacher incentives, recently-elected Missouri state senator Jeff Smith (a Democrat) at last showed his true colors. The fact that he is a co-founder of Edison-run Confluence Academy and serves on its board certainly gave me pause. But he's so nice, his supporters said. And cute! And funny! And he likes gay people! And he worked to raise the minimum wage! So surely he's not really that bad, right? Well, welcome to the wonderful world of neo-liberalism.

Ever wondered what happened to what Howard Dean called "the Democratic wing of the Democratic party"? It was replaced -- sold out, some might say -- by a guy named Bill Clinton. Clinton was a "new Democrat." A neo-liberal. He could support socially progressive issues while minding the books and bills. He seemed like the ideal compromise between the left and the right: he could be pro-choice, but he could also be pro-trade and pro-big-business.

The hallmark of neo-liberalism is the complete and utterly unquestioned faith in "the free market" to correct the ills of society. In the realm of education, neo-liberalism shows up around vouchers, "school choice" debates, charter schools, and market-based logic and incentives to fix what's wrong with schools. We see "good Democrats" like Smith, Eli Broad, Hillary Clinton, and Barack Obama doing some inexplicable things. They're inexplicable to us because we normally associate the Democratic party with the public good. We associate things like public schools, public health clinics, public transportation, and public housing with the folks that were largely responsible for bringing these things into existence, i.e., Democrats.

But here's what we need to get: the old Democrats were about defending the public space. The new Democrats -- the neo-liberals -- are about turning the public space over to private, for-profit forces that will leverage the power of "the free market" to bring about effective and efficient change. This is the newer, fresher, smarter side of "progressivism."

Except what, exactly, made Clinton a progressive? Remember the way he handled the issue of gays in the military? The "don't ask, don't tell" policy he implemented is a perfect metaphor for Clinton's brand of "progressivism": acknowledge there is an issue, but make it official policy to ignore it. In ignoring it, it will surely go away, so the belief goes. So we can look at other Clinton accomplishments through the same lens. He "ended welfare as we know it" and accomplished the rather astonishing task of removing the goal of eradicating poverty from the national agenda. It wasn't until Hurricane Katrina that the country remembered that poor people still exist, that they are disproportionately black, and they are sequestered in squalid ghettos all across the country. It was Clinton who preached the idea of high educational standards and gave pretty speeches about Goals 2000. Again: acknowledge there is an issue -- e.g., there is an achievement gap between the haves and the have nots -- and make it official policy to do nothing about it. And in doing nothing about it, the problem will go away.

So now neo-liberals like Jeff Smith, Hillary Clinton, and Barack Obama want to do something about education, which is to say they want to do nothing about it and therefore hope the problem will go away.

Smith and Obama are talking from the same play book. Obama also wants to pay teachers more based on performance: "High-performing teachers would be eligible for pay increases of 10 to 20 percent of their base salary. These innovation districts would be required to implement systemic reforms and show convincing results."

The idea seems plain enough, almost common sense: give teachers an incentive to teach better. If they are rewarded for working harder, then they will work harder. And if they work harder, all of the problems associated with public education will magically disappear.

But we all know that teachers can work 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year to close the achievement gap and still come up short. We know that there is only so much a gifted -- even a highly-paid -- teacher can do.

What's insulting about this proposal is that it assumes that most teachers are not working hard, that they are holding back on their students. It assumes that teachers are not motivated to do well, but if they were offered more cash, then suddenly they'd start putting in the hours and the effort. This simply does not square with the teachers that I know that are already working 60 to 80 hours per week. They are not motivated by the pay, for God's sake. If they wanted to make more money, they would have left the profession long ago and gone into investment banking.

Most teachers I know don't want to make more money. They want to make a difference. In order to make a difference, they have to have the partnership of local, state, and federal government to provide essential social services to families in need, to provide the funds to reduce class size, to provide ongoing professional development and support in every school, as well as a host of other policies. These policies will actually DO something about the problem.

Of course, the most damaging part of this plan is that it continues to lay the blame for the problems of public education at the feet of teachers. There is no other employment sector that gets bashed so consistently and so viciously. Yet teachers, afraid to "politicize" their classrooms, largely stand on the sidelines and wait for the neo-cons and the neo-liberals to decide their fate for them.

The days of passive inaction and appeasement have got to end. As my colleague Bill Bigelow from Rethinking Schools reminds us,

"Teaching is political. In the classroom teachers make dozens of daily decisions that affect whether students accept the status quo or choose to work for a more just society. From the books we select, to the history we teach, to the way we 'correct' our students’ papers, we not only offer them content, we also promote a particular view of the world."

If opportunists like Smith weren't so serious and so widely celebrated, we could all have a good laugh at their idiocy. But his proposal has the potential to become local, state, and federal policy -- a policy which does nothing and hopes the problem will go away.

One last observation. According to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch story on the Smith plan, "The justice center was chosen for the press conference to symbolize the connection between student failure and the crime rate." As with other neo-liberal propaganda, the consistent motif is not to appeal to our sense of justice, but to whip us into panic states of fear. Forget the idea that public education is about creating greater opportunity. Public education, in the eyes of neo-liberals, is a way of preventing crime. High crime rates dissuade investors from investing in places like downtown, inner-city St. Louis. Better to incarcerate students in chain-gang schools like Edison-run Confluence, which Smith helped to found. I can attest to one thing at this school: the children certainly do as they are told, march in orderly lines, and do not speak out of turn. Such schools are the absolute antithesis of democracy. But for neo-liberals like Smith, that's just fine.

The Dark Side of Outcomes Assessment in Higher Education

2007-03-01T22:00:00.001-06:00

Students enrolled in colleges and universities want service. They want a result. They want 42" plasma TV's. They want to learn as little as they need to learn so they can acquire stuff. Sure, there is a micro market of whizz kids who want to learn, but the vast majority of kids are dying to slop at the trough of consumer culture. Forget learning. Forget studying. "Gimme my degree. My Jag is waiting for me."

Faculty rail against these lazy, consumer-oriented students ad nauseum. But you cannot beat them. They have already won. So if faculty members want to keep their jobs, they better get on the customer service bandwagon pronto. Otherwise, there are plenty of raw, hungry, recently-graduated PhD's from State U. who will gladly replace them as adjuncts.

These green labor cogs know not of the tony, tenured world of pensions, stipends, sabbaticals, and 3-martini lunches paid for on the department charge card. As grad students, they know hourly wages. They know large lecture classes. They know what it means to work as a knowledge WORKER. Assuming a position as an adjunct WORKER in one of the myriad institutions out there is simply more of the same. Hey, they have $79,000 worth of student loans to pay for. They're desperate. They're just looking for a way to maintain (or sanitize, as the case may be) their credit rating score, the contemporary version of Debtor's Prison.

In the end, I recognize this process as an inexorable change in the institutional arrangement of labor in the higher education market. In short, union members may bitch today. But they are old and getting older. They will go away, as unions continue to lose power in this country. Those that replace them will be eager to serve as "Learning Service Managers." (For a glimpse of the future, check out Western Governors University -- wow. Scary.) Truth be told, their eagerness will not be a choice. It will be a requirement of the job.

I recognize that, for this market, the purpose is not really "enhanced teaching and improved learning outcomes." There is no demand for this product in this market. The K-12 market does demand this. But in higher ed, what is required is SERVICE. Those of us in my position, it seems, are to help our institutions SERVICE their markets. Higher ed will work even more directly than it already is with corporations, business interests, etc., in producing products they are looking for, i.e., trained workers ready to hit the ground running. The students in the higher ed market want the same thing, i.e., to be trained enough to get the job to get the stuff.

So there are 2 customers in this market: students and corporations. The entire higher ed experience is becoming increasingly synonymous with job training and preparation. Therefore, the student asks, "What can I do now while at this institution of higher ed to increase the likelihood that I will land the job that will get me the stuff?" The corporations ask, "What indication is there that this student has been sufficiently trained and prepared to hit the ground running as an employee in my business?"

So here's the question: what products and services can fulfill this need for (1) the student to prove his/her mettle and for (2) the employer to evaluate the mettle of this student?

Answer: an electronic portfolio tied to specific, measurable goals/outcomes.

The spectacular irony here is that, even though students could currently give a flying #$@* about learning and instructors could give a fruitless #$@* about teaching, both will have to focus on improving their learning and teaching (respectively) to satisfy their own personal interests. And why? Because now that the student's accomplishments, worth, mettle, know-how, and abilities are subject to scrutiny by an outside entity for real purposes, i.e., by the prospective employer who either will or will not hire this student, the student actually has to accomplish something that can be tangibly demonstrated and proven. The instructor has to be able to help the student accomplish this or will be fired and replaced by yet another cog fresh from grad school. In other words, the instructor has to provide a service which can be tangibly and demonstrably measured or be terminated.

Inside this environment lies the heart of new products and services for higher ed. So while there are those in this field that are committed to using technology to enhance teaching and learning, and while there are others that are focused on forming a conduit between what happens in the classroom and what happens outside the classroom, there are still others committed to developing a profitable business. They believe that they can enhance teaching and learning in higher ed by leveraging the nascent labor market forces currently at play and by tapping into the unspoken role that higher ed has played in the last two decades, i.e., as the primary entity charged with preparing students to enter the work force.

In the end, I believe the following:

students will learn more and will learn better under this scheme
students will have a more satisfying experience in higher ed because it will directly serve their needs and desires
instructors will become more effective in teaching students what they need to know
institutions of higher ed will develop mechanisms for assessing instructor effectiveness and student preparedness
corporations and other business interests will have confidence that graduates from these institutions are well-prepared
citizens will have greater confidence that funds spent on higher ed are well spent
all participants in the domain of higher ed will enjoy a greater degree of transparency and accountability

In serving these interests, there will be highly profitable ventures that generate significant value for all stakeholders. And which will also simultaneously burn in hell.

Does KIPP Push Students Out? Too Soon to Tell in New York

2007-02-22T23:58:00.001-06:00

The data from NY apparently contradict what you see in CA. Maybe NY KIPP schools don't have the attrition problem that most CA KIPP schools do? In the end, there simply aren't enough data to come to a conclusion about NY and KIPP, i.e., it's too soon to tell.

There are enrollment data for 3 of the 6 KIPP schools in New York. According to these data, there is no large-scale attrition of the kind we see in California.

But we don't know if these are the same students from year to year. It's possible that a number of students left and were replaced by others, masking the fact that there was an exodus from the school. Such an exodus might be the result of students moving, students being "counseled out," students choosing to leave, or students being expelled. This is complicated by the fact that drop-outs, or at least transients, are a common phenomenon in low-income schools, even good ones. So attrition numbers would not be surprising if they were associated with your average public school. But KIPP is not your average public school. Many supporters of KIPP see it as the answer to the problems that vex inner-city schools. But from what we can tell from the California enrollment data, even KIPP cannot solve the drop-out/transient problem. And from what we can tell from the NY data, KIPP may simply be better at filling the spots left by students who leave. This would be consistent with what we know about KIPP and its "creaming" and recruiting practices.

KIPP enrollments, New York State (2004-2005 span is the most recent data)

KIPP Sankofa Charter School, Buffalo (opened in 2003)
5th grade (2003-2004) - 84
6th grade (2004-2005) - 85
0% decrease in enrollment in one year

KIPP TECH VALLEY, Albany (opened in 2005, so no data available)

KIPP Success Through Teamwork, Achievement and Responsibility College Preparatory Charter School (KIPP S.T.A.R.), Manhattan (opened in 2003)
5th grade (2003-2004) - 87
6th grade (2004-2005) - 84
.03% decrease in enrollment in one year

KIPP Always Mentally Prepared Charter School, Brooklyn (opened in 2005, so no data available)

KIPP Infinity Charter School, Manhattan (opened in 2005, so no data available)

KIPP Academy, Bronx (opened in 1995)
5th grade (2002-2003) - 69
6th grade (2003-2004) - 65
7th grade (2004-2005) - 63
.08% decrease in enrollment over three years

Oh, You Poor Dear

2007-02-21T13:25:00.001-06:00

Gloria Ladson-Billings, in a recent presentation to the North Dakota Study Group, cited several myths that go along with teaching low-income minority children. One of these myths she labeled "Oh, you poor dear." Here's how it goes:

A low-income minority student doesn't want to do something the teacher asks her to do. "Oh, you poor dear," says the teacher. "Maybe you'll feel like doing it tomorrow."

Ladson-Billings points out that this response, ostensibly a caring, empathetic gesture on the part of the teacher, serves only to create a self-fulfilling prophecy for the student. She argued that an affluent white student in the same position would be challenged by her teacher and encouraged -- maybe even pushed -- to do as she was told.

Or maybe not.

I'm a middle-class white male. I know that with my middle-class, white 4-year-old daughter, I allow space in my parenting. I don't make her do everything I want her to do because I believe it's important to allow her voice to develop.

In some democratic, progressive classrooms, students are often allowed to develop their voices, too. In such an environment, saying "Maybe you'll feel like doing it tomorrow" is not such a bad thing. In fact, saying "Maybe you'll feel like doing it tomorrow" is quite a radical thing to say, especially compared to classrooms where students are thoroughly disempowered and silenced into passive submission.

So when does "Maybe you'll feel like doing it tomorrow" make sense? And when does it serve, as Ladson-Billings noted, as a way to reproduce the status quo? Does it suggest that "tough love" or "cruel to be kind" pedagogy is effective, maybe even necessary, with low-income minority students? I hope not. But it may help to contextualize why such pedagogical approaches seem to be so popular these days, from Edison to KIPP and their ilk, and why so many "liberals" endorse such approaches.

The implicit message seems to be, "We have to push these kids." And while there might be truth in this, I worry what pushing them looks like --- and what happens when a push becomes a shove. Of course, a good teacher would be able to tell the difference between the two. But if the teacher's judgment is taken away and replaced with the kind of institutionalized forms of "pushing" we see at KIPP and Edison, perhaps we see a different kind of reproduction of the status quo, one that punishes "miscreants," rewards the compliant, and encourages those that do not make it to blame themselves for their shortcomings.

Does Segregation Matter?

2007-02-14T11:52:00.000-06:00

As I said in this post, A Vision Statement, we need to spend more time together with people who are not like we are. We need to combat the paralyzing, dangerous stereotypes that the media passes out like candy at an Easter parade. How do we do this? As I said, there are very few -- if any -- non-commercial spaces where people can do this, except one: public schools.

Public schools today are largely segregated on the basis of the socioeconomic context of their surroundings. So, inner-city schools are made up largely of low-income minority students and rural and suburban schools are made up of white students. But rural and suburban schools often have large populations of low-income children, the majority of whom are white. And rural and suburban schools are undergoing rapid change, as new waves of immigrants flood into the country and move into the zone between the suburban and rural areas (often referred to as "the exurbs" or "exurbia"). For the first time, these school districts are faced with the challenge of educating children who do not speak English as their first language and who do not share the same cultural associations as their native-speaking peers.

So we have two things going at the same time:

rural, suburban, and exurban schools are becoming increasingly diversified
inner-city schools are becoming increasingly segregated

For the rural, suburban, and exurban schools, there is no choice about dealing with difference and diversity. The growing difference and diversity in their schools is right there in front of them.

And for the inner-city schools, there seems to be no choice either about dealing with the lack of difference and diversity. The growing homogenization in their schools is right there in front of them.

So is that a problem? In other words, is there something inherently wrong with low-income minority children, i.e., blacks and Latinos, going to school with other low-income minority children and never going to school with any other child from any other socioeconomic strand?

Yes, there is.

It's wrong because these children never get a chance to interact with anyone outside their socioeconomic realm. They have no knowledge of white people outside what they see on TV.

Many people in public school reform reject this isolation. They say there's nothing that any of us can do about it, that we can't just make these neighborhoods into something they aren't, and that we can't force white students to go to school there. They cite the experiments with desegregation programs and mandatory busing programs that moved white and black kids all over the place and conclude, "We tried that and it didn't work. So now we have to make the best of it."

In short, life has given these children lemons. The best we can do is make lemonade.

Schools like KIPP and Edison have a nifty way of justifying the fact that they make segregated schools work and continue to support their existence. They say, "Our schools serve the population of students who live in the area." Nice. Clean. No edges. It's not their problem. They simply serve the children who are there.

But why are these children there? And what are the odds that they will make it out of there? Why are their parents there? And why were their parents and their parents' parents there?

"Saving" a few kids does not make the pernicious cycle of poverty and misery go away. It simply sugar-coats it. It makes it more palatable to once guilt-ridden policy-makers who can now blame all those inner-city children for not pulling themselves out of the ghetto through their own efforts. These policy-makers and educational reformers now have license to abandon efforts to eradicate systemic poverty and inequality and proclaim instead, "If they can do it, why can't you?!?!"

Segregation matters because it serves to remind us that we have a long, long way to go on the path to social justice. Any effort that takes our focus off this problem leads us off the path. We must not be distracted.

The ABC's of Global Competition

2007-02-14T10:09:00.001-06:00

DaimlerChrysler's long-term commitment to China - a key part of the Company's Asia strategy - is evident in its extensive history in China as well as its future plans. The Company started its business in China in the 1930's by setting up offices and sales networks, and through the years it has continued to increase its presence here. Despite increasing competition, DaimlerChrysler Northeast Asia increased retail passenger car sales by 37% in the first three quarters of 2006, compared to the year before.

In an effort to cut costs, DaimlerChrysler AG today announced it would eliminate a production shift at the North assembly plant in Fenton, Missouri next year. The Chrysler restructuring plan also calls for the closure of the Newark, Del., assembly plant in 2009 and the reduction of its North American work force by 13,000 employees over the next three years, according to a press release. That is more than 10,000-job figure that the company had indicated earlier.

"American workers are the most productive workers in the world. They demonstrate daily the initiative, creativity and energy that have made American companies competitive and American manufacturing a model for the rest of the world. Unfortunately, as recent surveys show, many workers are doing so with inadequate support and eroding skills. To remain competitive in the global economy, America needs to do more -- both publicly and privately -- to educate and train the workforce of today and tomorrow."
National Association of Manufacturers' Statement on Education and Workforce Readiness

"We can't let these trade problems lead to retaliation and counter-retaliation that could do irreparable harm to the entire trading system and the enormous gains it has brought the American companies, workers and consumers over the years."
National Association of Manufacturers President John Engler
quoted from a letter sent to US senators in opposition to a bill imposing trade tariffs on Chinese goods

KIPP's Reply Raises More Questions Than It Answers

2007-02-13T15:41:00.001-06:00

Based on their non-answers to my questions (which are on their FAQ page), here is what I have concluded about KIPP so far:

1 - KIPP benefits from enrolling already high-achieving students and their parents.

2 - KIPP tacitly yet powerfully promotes the existence of segregated schools by making them "work." Whether this is a good thing or bad thing remains to be discussed. But it should at least be acknowledged. To paraphrase my friend and colleague Jim Horn, you can call a spade a spade, or you can call it a goddamn shovel.

3 - KIPP has not subjected its achievement data to a rigorous statistical analysis that would determine the standard deviation of the scores; therefore, there is no way to determine if the high scores are the result of a relatively small number of high achieving students or if the scores are representative of the majority of KIPP students (this phenomenon is complicated by KIPP's large attrition rate, which exaggerates the effect of these high scores on the overall averages).

4 - KIPP's rigorous approach contributes to its attrition rate, yet this high attrition rate helps KIPP by making the scores look better than they actually are.

5 - There is no evidence of a broad-based curriculum in place at KIPP schools other than what KIPP claims.

Global Collaboration, Not Competition

2007-02-13T12:20:00.001-06:00

Here's a simple but unorthodox question: what would our schools look like if we designed them to foster global collaboration, not global competition?

Implicit in all the rhetoric about the goals of education today is the notion that "they" are after "us," and if "we" don't do something drastic, "they" will eat our lunch -- maybe even eat us FOR lunch.
As I've been posting lately, this makes zero sense. And most large US companies know this. According to CNN, the National Association of Manufacturers, the trade group whose members include the large multinationals doing business in China as well as smaller U.S. manufacturers, was more active than any other trade group pushing against a Senate proposal to impose trade tariffs on Chinese goods imported into the US.

"We can't let these trade problems lead to retaliation and counter-retaliation that could do irreparable harm to the entire trading system and the enormous gains it has brought the American companies, workers and consumers over the years."
National Association of Manufacturers President John Engler
quoted from a letter sent to US senators in opposition to a bill imposing trade tariffs on Chinese goods

So if it's already the case that our countries are collaborating to enhance each other's economies, why do we cling to this silly notion that we are competing against one another?

What if our schools collaborated on a similar level to ensure the greatest benefit to everyone involved?

5 More Bullets on Global Competition

2007-02-12T23:15:00.001-06:00

According to a 2005 study from Duke University, the numbers are wrong. It's not 70,000 US engineering undergraduates vs. 600,000 Chinese engineering undergraduates. The real figures: China, 341,000; India, 112,000; United States 131,000 — more per capita than either of the others.
The comparisons with students from other countries are meaningless - the students I taught in Japan were not getting pregnant, doing drugs, and joining gangs; kids who enter into the top levels of schools in Germany, for example, are there through an elitist gate-keeping system; are we surprised that the chosen few score better than the average scores of US students???
Some like to look at Finland as a model for teaching and learning. FINLAND???? How much ethnic, racial, economic, and linguistic diversity do the Finns have to deal with? How many Finnish schools simultaneously serve as healthcare centers, suicide preventers, and drug counselors in the way that many US schools do?
We need to focus on the global classroom, not as a Pollyanna thing but as a reality that Little Johnny and Little Wen Lei are not competing against each other; they need each other, if only to buy each other's crap.
We keep talking about the US as this economic powerhouse on the world stage, but our global trade deficit has got dry drunk, binge-eater written all over it; is this what we aspire to? buying exponentially more than we make? and then expecting that to be sustainable???

Global Competition and Education: Codependency Meets Xenophobia

2007-02-12T15:36:00.000-06:00

I found this piece last night.

It's the testimony before the House Committee on Science from January 2004.

Here is an excerpt that captures the essence of the argument put forward there:

"As the number of U.S. science and engineering students declines, our dependence on foreign students grows. According to the National Science Foundation's Science and Engineering Indicators (2002), the percentage of foreign-born individuals among scientists and engineers in the U.S. is growing at all degree levels, in all sectors, and in most fields. Especially high percentages are found in engineering (45 percent), computer sciences (43 percent) and mathematics (30 percent). At the same time, other nations are aggressively acting to stem their own ''brain drains'' and entice citizens trained in the U.S. to return to their native countries, and many are succeeding. The Council of Scientific Society Presidents estimates that by 2010, if current trends continue, over 90 percent of all physical scientists and engineers in the world will be Asians working in Asia. New opportunities to do high wage, high value work without immigrating to the U.S. may reduce the net ''brain gain'' that has been so critical to our historic economic success."

Translation: it's codependency meets a curious form of xenophobia, Yellow Peril meets What Have You Done For Me Lately? meets You Don't Bring Me Flowers Anymore.

So let's see: there are lots of Asians in the US now, and they are principally the reason why we have such a great standard of living. But in the very near future, these Asians will not stay in the US after they finish their degrees here. They will move back to their home countries and transform those countries into economic and innovation powerhouses.

Hmmm . . . But perhaps these Asians will not move back to their home countries. Perhaps they will have grown accustomed to the niceties of a (relatively) free press, (relatively) free elections, 573 cable channels, and no whip skinny soy lattés. After all, you can still surf the 'Net in the US without being put in jail. Not so for some Chinese dissidents.*

Then again, maybe these Asian engineers, mathematicians, and computer scientists will forego the relative freedoms they experience in the US in exchange for vast sums of cash and the possibility of riding the next wave of technological innovation. How do you say "Faustian bargain" in Mandarin?

For what it's worth: even if it were the case that (a) the success of the US economy is due largely to the contributions of non-US Asians and (2) future non-US Asians will flock back to their home countries in huge numbers, this does not mean ruin for the US economy. It means ruin for everyone. The success of the global economy is based on the following conditions: (1) plentiful amounts of cheap Asian labor and (2) inexhaustible demand for goods and services, primarily from the US. So if all these physical scientists and engineers stay in Asia, their economies will heat up, costs will go up, and the cost of production will go up. So good-bye to cheap Asian labor. At the same time, if the US economy tanks because Little Billy can't compete with Little Shunfa or Little Sanjiv, say good-bye to inexhaustible US demand. Since the US imported more than $263 billion in goods from China in 2006 and $20 billion in goods from India in 2006, the end of US demand means curtains for India and China.

Think they can somehow make up those lost dollars with another country? Think again. The fall of the US economy would set off a global domino effect, a catastrophe that would make 1929's Black Monday look like a day at the beach.

Bottom line: there is no "us" and "them" any more. There can be no "success" in a globalized economy at anyone's expense. We all succeed together, and we all fail together. Unless somebody changes the game from global capital, the accumulation of wealth, and individual gain at the expense of the common good, this will always be the case.

*"The journalist, Shi Tao, was an editorial department head at the Contemporary Business News in China's Hunan Province. He was arrested in 2004 after sending an e-mail to a New York-based Web site advocating democracy in China. The e-mail contained information regarding a Chinese government warning for its officials, urging them to be vigilant ahead of the 15th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre and to watch out for dissident activity. It was posted on the site under the alias 198964, the date Beijing crushed the student-led democracy movement, June 4, 1989. With the information provided by Yahoo, Shi was arrested and convicted of divulging state secrets by a provincial court in April 2005, according to information from several sources, including Reporters Without Borders."

Find the story here.

References for Rebuking 2014's 100% Proficiency Goal

2007-02-08T21:11:00.000-06:00

Shaded areas are passing percentages. Setting the passing score at level 1 produces a gap of 34 points. At level 2 the gap shrinks to 14 points.

For those of you looking for ways to explain why NCLB's goal of 100% proficiency for all subgroups by 2014 is wholly impossible and designed only for the citizens of Disneyland (or Lake Wobegon), here are some tools for your rhetorical toolkit:

"Acid Tests" by Charles Murray - an unlikley ally in the war against NCLB, but Mr. Bell Curve makes a great case for why NCLB is both inane and deceptive.

"Closing the Racial Learning Gap" by La Griffe du Lion - this funny, witty piece expands on the statistical arguments put forward by Murray.

"'Proficiency for All' — An Oxymoron" by Richard Rothstein, et al - No Child Left Behind (NCLB) requires that all students be proficient by 2014. But some policy makers think that this goal can be achievable if only schools had more time to improve. This paper by Richard Rothstein, Rebecca Jacobsen and Tamara Wilder concludes that there is no date by which all (or even nearly all) students in any subgroup can achieve the NCLB requirement of proficiency on "challenging" standards, because no goal can simultaneously be challenging to and achievable by all students across the entire achievement distribution. The authors show that even the highest scoring countries in the world cannot meet this standard, nor could they meet a standard that required only basic skills of all students.

Why We Still Need Public Schools: Public Education for the Common Good

2007-02-04T13:00:00.001-06:00

It's nice to be reminded some times . . .

This report highlights the history and importance of public education in the United States, dating back to its establishment as a necessary institution for the young republic and Horace Mann's efforts to promote a common school for all. The report focuses on how and why the U.S. system of public education came into being; the six core public missions that public schools have been expected to fulfill, such as unifying a diverse population, preparing people for democratic citizenship, and ensuring equal opportunities for all children; and why these missions are relevant today and why the nation must maintain them while pursuing reforms to help all schools live up to these core ideals.

Class and the Classroom

2007-01-27T21:07:00.001-06:00

For an incredibly concise, powerful prescription for what ails US public education, see Richard Rothstein's essay "Class and the Classroom." This piece is based on Rothstein's extraordinary book from 2004, Class and Schools. In both this essay and the book, Rothstein addresses the real causes of the achievement gap between the haves and the have nots. Of particular relevance is Rothstein's insistence on looking at the material conditions of suffering and deprivation that low-income people are confronted with on a daily basis:

Overall, lower-income children are in poorer health. They have poorer vision, partly because of prenatal conditions and partly because, even as toddlers, they watch too much television, so their eyes are poorly trained. Trying to read, their eyes may wander or have difficulty tracking print or focusing. A good part of the over-identification of learning disabilities for lower-class children may well be attributable to undiagnosed vision problems that could be easily treated by optometrists and for which special education placement then should be unnecessary.

Lower-class children have poorer oral hygiene, more lead poisoning, more asthma, poorer nutrition, less-adequate pediatric care, more exposure to smoke, and a host of other health problems. Because of less-adequate dental care, for example, they are more likely to have toothaches and resulting discomfort that affects concentration.

Because low-income children live in communities where landlords use high-sulfur home heating oil and where diesel trucks frequently pass en route to industrial and commercial sites, they are more likely to suffer from asthma, leading to more absences from school and, when they do attend, drowsiness from lying awake at night, wheezing. Recent surveys in Chicago and in New York City's Harlem community found one of every four children suffering from asthma, a rate six times as great as that for all children.

In addition, there are fewer primary-care physicians in low-income communities, where the physician-to-population ratio is less than a third the rate in middle-class communities. For that reason, disadvantaged children—even those with health insurance—are more likely to miss school for relatively minor problems, such as common ear infections, for which middle-class children are treated promptly.

Each of these well-documented social class differences in health is likely to have a palpable effect on academic achievement; combined, their influence is probably huge.

Why Multiple Choice Tests (Even "Good" Ones) Tell Us Nothing

2007-01-27T14:56:00.001-06:00

Recently, on the Assessment Reform Network list, Richard Hake cited evidence for the use/value of multiple choice tests (MCT's). The evidence came from studies of high school and college students.

I would be rather surprised if there were any studies that have been done that show any value for younger kids, especially when you consider the kinds of MCT's that young kids are exposed to. For example, here's a real question from Tennessee's 2005 state test in Governance and Civics given to students in Grade 3:

"Which of these is an example of someone being a good citizen?"

a) A girl steals candy from a store.
b) A boy puts his litter in a trash can.
c) A man lets his dog run loose on the street.
d) A woman drives faster than the speed limit.

I think this is what most people (including me) have in mind when we criticize MCT's. If there are lots of really good MCT's that are out there right now in grades 3-8, for example, I'd love to know about them.

Here's the thing: students that are not pigeon-holed, tracked, labeled "LD," counseled out, or otherwise have their love of learning obliterated by such asinine tests and their associated test prep regimes are lucky.

Sorry. I don't like MCT's, even the so-called "good ones." Here's why: I am a terrible test-taker. When I took MCT's in the past, I got extremely anxious. I thought to myself, "One of these answers might not be the RIGHT response, but one of them is supposed to be the BEST response." So I tended to over-think and over-analyze each question. Of course, none of the analysis I performed counted towards anything, especially if I chose the "incorrect" response. Not one shred of the process I underwent to arrive at my choice was recorded. I took too long. I didn't answer enough of the questions. As I was taking the test, I was aware that I was taking too long. So this increased my anxiety. I kept hearing my teacher's advice: "Remember - don't take too long on each question; if you don't know the answer, just eliminate the most obviously bad choice and then guess among those that remain." Good advice, certainly, prior to taking the test. But not very effective while in the heat of MCT battle.

Hake argues in response to the question, "Why MCT's?", "So that the tests can be given to thousands of students in hundreds of courses under varying conditions in such a manner that meta-analyses can be performed, thus establishing general causal relationships in a convincing manner." I'm not convinced by anything other than the fact that the students who did well were good at taking MCT's.

What makes the example I gave above from Tennessee's 2005 state test in Governance and Civics both tragic and comic is that it's intended -- with no irony or humor involved -- to measure the extent to which 3rd graders have met the following standard:

"3.4.spi.2 Determine the representative acts of a good citizen (i.e., obeying speed limit, not littering, walking within the crosswalk)."

So, presumably those third graders in Tennessee who chose Answer B - " A boy puts his litter in a trash can." - are now able to determine the representative acts of a good citizen. The most offensive aspect of this is that measuring citizenship is reduced to a multiple choice question that students either get right or wrong. In addition, the students could have easily ruled out the other choices as being obviously wrong and were left with only one answer - B. So what this means is that students may not know what "the representative acts of a good citizen" ARE - they simply know what they are NOT. Of course, because these tests are standards-based, Tennessee officials can sleep at night (and get re-elected), knowing they have definitive, psychometrically-backed proof that their state's 3rd graders are good citizens.

The assumption/assertion about the MCT's that assess higher-order thinking is that the results show "general causal relationships in a convincing manner" is misleading because it overlooks the experience of taking these tests, i.e., that students either stress out, over-think, etc., while taking them or they don't. This means that the results must first be analyzed through this lens. In other words, you would have to be able to measure the students' affective response to test-taking first and then, for those students who have a negative affective response, be able to account for that in some way. Personally, the way I would account for that is to throw out the results and look at other measures. For those students who had a positive or neutral affective response to test-taking, you would then have to determine the extent to which this affective disposition to test-taking skewed the results and, ultimately, make these students seem "smarter" than they might actually be -- and certainly much, much "smarter" than the students who have a negative affective disposition.

Have any studies ever been done that controlled for this affective disposition to test-taking?

The only thing that I know of that comes close is the studies that Claude Steele did RE: "stereotype threat." (Here's a quick overview here.)

What's interesting in light of Steele's research is that minority kids might actually deal with a double-dose of affective dispositions to test taking that negatively affect their results, i.e, they might -- independent of their race -- feel apprehensive and anxious about taking tests and not test well AND also experience this "stereotype threat."

A Vision Statement

2007-01-26T14:43:00.000-06:00

OK, it's time for the vision thing. I'm prompted to write this because I was just chastised by La Maestra in my post on Why Schools Should Not Be Run Like Businesses. She said I complained a lot and that she didn't know where I was coming from. I think that's a fair criticism.

Part of the challenge of being a public school advocate and activist is to do two things simultaneously: (1) critique the status quo and (2) uphold a vision of something worth working towards. I absolutely agree with her that I have not done enough of the latter. So, here we go . . .

I live in the suburbs, so there’s not a lot of common space here. There’s no city center. There are very few sidewalks. People don’t walk much. In truth, you rarely see people at all, just the outlines of their heads as they whiz by in their cars.

The vast majority of Americans are like me, i.e., they live in rural or suburban areas. Like me, they also have little experience of common space.

We don’t see each other much, we Americans.

Oh sure. There are exceptions to this. We see Bill and Steve and the rest of the crew at the office. We sometimes bump into neighbors as we shop at the grocery store. And we see lots of people as we parade through the mall.

But each of these examples has one thing in common: people gathered together in shared space for commercial purposes. In fact, if you think about it, almost everywhere you go, someone wants us to buy something or produce something for them that will make money. Even on 5th Avenue in New York City, perhaps one of the most diverse streets on the planet, people are there not to be with each other but to gawk at the goods displayed in those famous windows. And those that are not window-shopping are on their way to or from work.

So without working and buying things, I wonder if we’d ever see anybody. Our chance interactions are almost always sponsored by someone or something: “This brief encounter with your cousin Steve brought to you by Macy’s” or “This experience of seeing people of a different race brought to you by The Mall of America.”

You could say, “Well, thank goodness that we do have these opportunities. Without them, we’d never see anybody.” And while this is hard to argue, I’m not terribly happy with this conclusion. I don’t want to have to my experience of democracy brought to me by a commercial sponsor. I don’t want to have to buy a pair of shoes to see other people. And, somehow, I want that experience of other people to be more than just staring at them as they pass by in frozen foods or looking at the backs of their heads as we stand in line to buy gum.

Of course, we see each other on television – in movies and in sit-coms and on the news. And, based on my experience of others on television, I know that most Asians are very quiet and work in laundries, that women on crime shows have large breasts and wear short skirts and tend to over-react when under pressure, that young black men are very angry and sing a lot about bitches and hos, that Muslims wear scarves over their heads and carry Kalashnikov machine guns, and that white men are smart and usually in charge.

Yes, those of us who go to churches spend time with each other in a non-commercial space. But people in most churches aren’t exactly open to a diversity of views and opinions, much less a diversity of race, ethnicity, and social class. Most of the time, when we go to church, we hear what we’ve already heard and see who we’ve already seen.

In fact, the only place where people can go and share common space inside non-commercial venues is a public school. (Channel 1 tried to change that, but – fortunately – it recently reported financial problems and looks like it’s going to be gone forever. Good riddance.) In our society today, public schools are the only place where we have a chance to see and talk to people who are not exactly like us, maybe even get to know them a bit. For those of us who have already graduated from public high schools, it’s too late. There is really no other place to go.

Look, I know. It’s not like there was a time when this did happen, back in the good old days when people of different racial, ethnic, religious, and social backgrounds got together and held hands and inter-related. Rich people have always stayed around rich people, whites have pretty much always stuck to whites, blacks to blacks, etc., etc. And, of course, this is the case today. And it was certainly not the case with public schools either, certainly not before Brown v. Board, and certainly not today. A large number of suburban and rural schools are virtually devoid of any kind of diversity, whether economic, racial, ethnic, or religious.

In acknowledging this, we should not conclude that since most public schools are devoid of diversity, we should give up on the vision that diversity entails. Rather, it’s a reminder that we have to fight for what little diversity there is, where people of different backgrounds can share common space. It’s also a reminder that we have our work cut out for us to extend the democratic commons, to find new ways for diversity to be nurtured or, at the very least, to be experienced on a more substantive basis beyond merely passing each other at the food court.

You see, there was recognition in Brown, albeit a tacit one, that getting young people together who were not like each other was a good thing. If you think about it, it was an extraordinarily visionary thing to say: students segregated on the basis of race were inherently disadvantaged EVEN IF the facilities and material conditions of their schools were the same as their all-white counterparts. To the Warren court, race mattered. It made a huge difference. The Court argued that segregation in public schools deprived black children of the equal protection of the laws. In writing the majority decision, Chief Justice Warren asked, “Does segregation of children in public schools solely on the basis of race, even though the physical facilities and other ‘tangible’ factors may be equal, deprive the children of the minority group of equal educational opportunities? We believe that it does.” Most powerfully, Warren wrote, “To separate (black children) from others of similar age and qualifications solely because of their race generates a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the community that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone.”

Segregation affects their hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone. So Brown gave us an extraordinary opportunity. It laid the foundation for a free, open, non-commercial democratic commons.

Yet segregation in public schools persists to this day. In Chicago, by the academic year 2002-2003, 87 percent of public-school enrollment was black or Hispanic; less than 10 percent of children in the schools were white. In Washington, D.C., 94 percent of children were black or Hispanic; less than 5 percent were white. In St. Louis, 82 percent of the student population were black or Hispanic; in Philadelphia and Cleveland, 79 percent; in Los Angeles, 84 percent, in Detroit, 96 percent; in Baltimore, 89 percent. In New York City, nearly three quarters of the students were black or Hispanic.

I’m reminded of an analogy that a black conservative commentator made. He said that you can walk by fresh fruits and vegetables at the grocery store, but that exposure is not going to make you healthy. By the same token, you can fill schools with a whole variety of different kinds of kids from different backgrounds, but that exposure is not going to stop you from being a racist.

I certainly do not see integration as our ultimate goal. After all, a school that appears "integrated" on the surface invariably conceals the vast disparities that exist between its students, largely drawn along racial lines. There's the automatic assumption that throwing kids from different economic and racial backgrounds together somehow leads to racial and class harmony. There is rarely any mechanism in the school to talk about race or class or difference of any kind. There is no means by which race and racial integration could be discussed or promoted, even questioned. It is simply taken as a given that kids of different races and classes, in close physical proximity to one another, are coexisting openly and peacefully. Unfortunately, whatever racist or classist ideas the kids had formed at an earlier age are too often reinforced in an institution that -- ironically -- is committed to undoing these kind of beliefs.

So what do you DO about that? I think you do what people have always done when faced with something they find intolerable: work to change it by upholding a vision of something worth fighting for.

For me, one vision worth fighting for is one where public schools foreground the democratic commons, i.e., bring children and parents of different races, classes, and beliefs together to facilitate dialogue and inquiry among them. In the simplest terms, it's better that we know about each other, that we interact with each other, if only to increase the likelihood that we can undermine (or at least weaken) the crippling stereotypes that cause us to hold each other in suspicion or contempt. If we make no such attempt, we increase the likelihood that these stereotypes and misunderstandings will continue, will worsen with time, and will eventually destroy us.

We have to do more than this. I'm encouraged by the efforts of programs like Anytown USA and the Dismantling Racism Institute for Educators, both sponsored by The National Conference for Community and Justice.

This might actually be the most important work our public schools do. This might be enough. If they do this well enough, perhaps the rest is gravy.

So when you hear supporters of public education decry high-stakes standardized tests, NCLB, prepping kids for work in the 21st century, etc., we do so because we’re concerned that the things that we most care about and think that public schools should focus on have not even been tried yet. We were just getting started with Brown. It took schools all over the south decades to conform. But now, look at the state of segregation in our schools. The project has been lost. We’ve given up, it seems.

Hey, I’m with Lincoln. In the Gettysburg Address, delivered in November 1863 when our country was mired in the worst war it has ever known, Lincoln said that America was “dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” Putting aside the historically specific language, recognize that Lincoln -- the same man that issued The Emancipation Proclamation -- was saying that our country is dedicated to a PROPOSITION – not a fact – that all people are created equal. A proposition. What does that mean? It means that we are a work in progress. Our foundation is not a fact, it’s a proposition. We as a social entity have proposed to organize our society around a belief – a proposition – that everyone is equal. Lincoln proposed this vision of equality just as the country was literally falling apart. We’re still working on it.

In fact, we’ve been working on a similarly vast and unreasonable vision since the very beginning of this country. Just listen to the foundational document of this country, the Constitution:

"We the people, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, ensure domestic tranquility, . . ."

The Founders were not about creating a perfect union; they were about creating a more perfect union, one that was better than the one they started with. Each day, more perfect, but not perfect - not completely. Each day - progress. Each day - closer to perfect, but not perfect. A never-ending work in progress. A proposition worth working towards. It goes without saying, then, that the Founders were progressives.

At the heart of what progressives stand for is the word "progress." But is progress possible? Is history the story of progress? And how can progress be possible in light of the results of recent elections, where states defined marriage in their constitutions as between a man and a woman? How can we say that we believe in progress in light of Auschwitz, the killing fields of Cambodia, the prisoner abuses at Abu Ghraib, pandemic poverty, AIDS, racism, global warming, and a litany of seemingly endless and seemingly insurmountable problems and atrocities?

Because progressives believe that it's the project of human beings to create a more perfect civilization – a more perfect union – and that it takes a long time to accomplish this. We believe that human beings have the ability to rise above their animal instincts. We believe that it is the destiny of human societies to be open to diverse ways of living and being in the world, that diversity is as beautiful and magical as the diversity of a coral reef, and that diversity is to be nurtured and celebrated.

We also recognize that these beliefs run counter to what our animal natures tell us, that we should be afraid of things that are not like us, that we should horde our resources in case the winter is longer and harsher than anticipated, that it makes more sense to kill someone to get his bone and to give the scraps only to those in our den, that we should attack the weak to improve our species' chances of survival, and that we should growl and show our teeth when we are most afraid.

But we also recognize that our beliefs are bigger and more powerful than these instincts, and that they call to what Lincoln called “the better angels of our nature.”

MO State Board of Ed Poised to Recommend Takeover of City Schools

2007-01-25T12:00:00.001-06:00

The situation in St. Louis is absolutely horrendous. The State Board of Education is poised to recommend (they're meeting on February 15th and 16th and could make a final decision at this meeting) that the St. Louis school board be disbanded and replaced by a three-member commission. Of the three members, one will be appointed by Republican Gov. Matt "I Never Met a Voucher I Didn't Like" Blunt (son of U.S. House Republican Roy Blunt) and another by Republican Mayor Francis "Privatize The Whole Village" Slay. Gee, I wonder what direction this new triumvirate would take RE: the St. Louis public schools.

The State Board will be acting on a recommendation from the Danforth Commission, put together at the request of State Dept. of Ed Commissioner Kent King.

Current SLPS Board member Peter Downs wrote an eloquent history of the current situation and a powerful defense of the current democratically-elected board. Find it here.

If the State Board recommends a take-over, it will radically undermine the free and fair elections that took place in April 2006, when Mayor Slay's incumbent candidates were soundly defeated by Downs and Donna Jones. It would also mean that Slay would regain de facto control over the schools despite the fact that voters overwhelmingly rejected the puppets he had on the board doing his bidding.

The Few, The Proud, The KIPP'sters

2007-01-24T20:50:00.001-06:00

My brother-in-law is a student at West Point. It's hard to get in to West Point. But it's also hard to stay in once you get there. According to this report, of the 1,197 cadets who entered West Point in the summer of 2002, 904 remained by the end of August. The loss rate of 25 percent is greater than the previous five classes, which averaged a 20 percent loss rate.

West Point makes it clear that it's a very rigorous program, and that not everyone will make it because not everyone is cut out for it.

That's OK with me. They let it be known ahead of time that not everyone can be trained to be a US Army officer. Not everyone is cut out for it.

KIPP, on the other hand, says they can take every kid and make him or her a college-bound high-school graduate. No matter who they are or what their background, KIPP says their program can work for everyone. The truth is that KIPP works for those for whom it works. As it turns out, KIPP does not work for a very large number of its students.

If KIPP could just admit that it was more like West Point and less like a community transformation center, I would be somewhat assuaged. But then KIPP would have to drop such hyperbolic statements as this from its web site:

"While fewer than one in five low-income students typically attend college nationally, KIPP’s college matriculation rate stands at nearly 80 percent for students who complete the eighth grade at KIPP. In addition, KIPP alumni have earned over $12 million in college scholarships."

Reading the statement again, you notice this phrase standing out: "KIPP’s college matriculation rate stands at nearly 80 percent for students who complete the eighth grade at KIPP." In other words, 80% of those that make it through KIPP go on to college. But how many make it through KIPP?

How To Improve Your School Without Improving Your School

2007-01-22T09:52:00.001-06:00

There were nine KIPP schools in California as of the 2005-2006 school year. Six of the nine schools saw decreases in enrollment as their 5th grade kids moved up from the 5th grade to the 7th grade (the 8th grade at one school).

KIPP Academy Fresno went from 60 to 48 kids from 5th to 6th grade, a 20% decrease in enrollment.
KIPP San Francisco Bay Academy in San Francisco went from 73 to 56 kids from 5th to 7th grade, a 23% decrease in enrollment.
KIPP Academy of Opportunity in LA went from 88 to 66 kids from 5th to 7th grade, a 25% decrease in enrollment.
KIPP Bayview Academy in San Francisco went from 81 to 55 kids from 5th to 7th grade, a 32% decrease in enrollment.
KIPP Los Angeles College Preparatory in LA went from 88 to 57 kids from 5th to 7th grade, a 35% decrease in enrollment.
KIPP Bridge College Preparatory in Oakland went from 87 to 36 kids from 5th to 8th grade, a whopping 59% decrease in enrollment.

These decreases in enrollment were especially noticeable for African-American boys at four of these schools. Enrollment of African-American boys went from 35 to 23 at KIPP Academy of Opportunity in LA, a 34% decrease in enrollment; 19 to 10 at KIPP Academy Fresno, a 47% decrease in enrollment; 24 to 12 at KIPP Bayview Academy in San Francisco, a 50% decrease in enrollment; and 35 to 8 at KIPP Bridge College Preparatory in Oakland, an extraordinary 77% decrease in enrollment.

Drop-outs, or at least transients, are a common phenomenon in low-income schools, even good ones. So these numbers would not be surprising if they were associated with your average public school. But KIPP is not your average public school. Many supporters of KIPP see it as the answer to the problems that vex inner-city schools. But it seems, at least from what we can tell from the California enrollment data, that even KIPP cannot solve the drop-out/transient problem.

But then you start to wonder: is KIPP causing this high drop-out rate? If it's not causing kids to drop out, then there might certainly be a correlation between KIPP's "unique approach to educating low-income kids" and the fact that so many of them, at least in California, don't make it out of KIPP.

Consider what we know about KIPP:

KIPP students are required to go to school Monday to Friday from 7:30 in the morning until 5 in the afternoon.
They go to school on Saturday from 9 in the morning until 1 in the afternoon.
They are required to complete two hours of homework every night.
They are required to attend an extra month of school in the summer.
They are required to wear a uniform.

All told, KIPP students spend about 70% more time in school than their regular public school peers. KIPP students are subject to a strict code of discipline that punishes offenders by forcing them to wear a sign around their neck that says "bench" or, according to one source, "miscreant." So it seems reasonable to ask this question: is KIPP contributing to this drop-out/transient problem? I doubt rather seriously that anyone at KIPP wants any of their students to drop out. But declining enrollments actually benefit KIPP by making their achievement data look better than it might actually be.

Now it gets even more complicated. According to a recent SRI report, Bay Area KIPP schools in California are attracting already high-performing students from local schools. Some KIPP principals expressed concern about “creaming” these already high-performing students from other schools when there remains a large number who are low-performing and underserved. One principal expressed dismay with the school’s struggle to enroll Title I students, whom she considered to be her target population. (see p. 18 of the report)

So it seems reasonable to ask this other question: how much is KIPP actually contributing to the achievement of these already high-performing students? As class numbers decrease, the performance of these high-achievers shines brighter and brighter. Supporters claim this is due to KIPP's unique approach. They might be right, but not for the reasons they suspect. It might be possible that KIPP's unique approach forces enough of the low-achievers out to make the achievement of those that remain seem better than it really is.

In part 1 of a Hedrick Smith piece on KIPP, a Latino boy named Ray, a 16-year-old 8th grader enrolled in KIPP 3D Academy in Houston, talks about his first experience at KIPP.

At 3 minutes, 14 seconds into this video segment, there is a glimpse into how KIPP achieves its results.

Here's the transcript:

Hedrick Smith (voiceover) - At the start of school, Ray had his first confrontation with 3D Academy's principal, Dan Caesar.

Ray: We were going over our chants, and -- just being myself, still trying to figure out how this school works and everything . . .

Dan Caesar - We say, "Is 3D in the house?!?!" and all the kids raise up their hands and say, "YES!" and Reynaldo raised up his hands and said "NO!"

Ray: I waved my hand. I said, "No." And then he looked at me and he said it a second time. And I said "No" again.

Dan Caesar - I knew right then, "Here's the first test, the first person testing our culture." So I let him know in front of everybody in the room that that's not going to be tolerated. We all want to be here. We chose to be here. If you don't want to be here, find the door.

So much for KIPP's motto, "No excuses."

Not to beat a dead horse, but . . .

2007-01-21T00:26:00.001-06:00

Couple more thoughts on KIPP and decreasing enrollments.

1) The most sure-fire strategy to improve scores at your school is to decrease enrollments. All the push-outs in Florida and New York City can tell you that. NOTE - these students do not drop out. They are "counseled out," according to some, pushed out according to others. What's at stake are high-stakes test scores. So a few kids' lives get ruined. Collateral damage on the road to closing the achievement gap.

2) If the SRI reports about KIPP and creaming are to be believed, then one very bizarre and incredibly twisted conclusion about KIPP is revealed: KIPP, with its 10-hour days, class on Saturdays, and extra month in the summer might be designed simply to push kids out, to break them, to leave only "the strong and the deserving." And who are the strong and the deserving kids? As the creaming stories and data emerge, we see a correlation between the already high-achieving students who are recruited or attracted to KIPP and KIPP graduates. Put simply, KIPP may not actually do anything to improve the academic achievement of its already-successful students. Rather, it makes way for them by clearing out all those who are less deserving, the detritus who get in the way of those impressive-looking test scores. It may very well be that KIPP, with its chanting and clapping and extraordinary success story, is simply a kind of academic obstacle course, an amusing yet ineffective gimmick.

Clarification on KIPP Achievement Data

2007-01-20T23:24:00.001-06:00

In November 2006, I wrote to Steve Mancini, Director of Public Affairs at the KIPP Foundation, and asked him to address the questions/concerns I have about KIPP. He wrote back and turned me over to one of his colleagues. Despite assurances they would answer my questions/concerns, they have yet to do so. As you might recall, I am interested primarily in tracking data and score analysis. One of my colleagues uncovered enrollment data at KIPP schools in California which corroborated much of the anecdotal information that is said about KIPP and "creaming." According to 2005-2006 school data, KIPP Bridge College Preparatory in Oakland had 35 African-American boys in 5th grade, but only 8 of these kids remained in 8th grade. Despite whatever the intentions of the parents, 27 out of these 35 kids -- about 77% -- did not make it.

I asked Mancini for a statistical analysis of KIPP achievement data in order to determine the standard deviation of the scores. The obvious problem with averaging anything is that the average often does not depict the typical outcome. If there is one outcome that is very far from the rest of the data, then the average will be strongly affected by this outcome. In short, some really high achievers will make the others look pretty good, even if these others are not doing so well.

For example, let's say there were 5 students taking a test. The scores (out of 100 possible points) were as follows: 45, 47, 52, 98, 99. The average of these five scores is 68.2 So you could truthfully and accurately say, "Student scores were near the 70th percentile." But how many students scored a 70? None. If you look at the scores, 3 out of the 5 did really badly. But 2 of the 5 did really, really well. The result? It looks like great things are happening when, in fact, they are not.

This is especially relevant to the issue I mention above, i.e., the ever-shrinking number of kids at KIPP as they move from 5th to 8th grade. For example, let's say there are 20 kids at KIPP in the 5th grade. Two of the kids score really high - 98 and 99 out of 100. But the other 18 score either 47, 45, or 52. This results in an average of 51.5. The next year, in the 6th grade, there are only 15 kids left -- 5 dropped out, were "counseled out," or simply are no longer there. Same scenario: two of the kids score really high - 98 and 99 out of 100. But the other 13 score either 47, 45, or 52. But this results in a slightly higher average of 53.4. In the 7th grade, only 8 kids are left. Same scenario: two of the kids score really high - 98 and 99 out of 100. But the other 6 score either 47, 45, or 52. But this results in yet another higher average: 59.75. And by the time they reach 8th grade, there are 5 kids left. Now the 2 high scorers really skew the average, all the way up to 68.2. But the other 3 are still scoring 47,45, and 52.

What's going on here? KIPP is getting statistically better because more kids are dropping out. So should we blame KIPP for pushing them out or praise them for raising the scores of the two that remain?

KIPP needs to come clean and reveal what actually happens to its enrollments and whether or not the scores are skewed by a small number of high achievers.

Check this blog out

2007-01-20T21:43:00.001-06:00

Just discovered this blog called The EdWahoo. Looks like it's now defunct, but there is some great stuff there. Well worth reading.

Here are some of my favorite posts:

On standardized tests - gives examples of MC questions that rely primarily on recall skills

"Assessing Rigorously" - shares information about a study that revealed that kids can answer the equivalent of 2+3 = 5, but not be able to answer 3+2 = 5.

Lauren Resnick on "Higher Order" Thinking Skills

2007-01-20T21:00:00.001-06:00

I came across this excerpt from some piece by Lauren Resnick of the University of Pittsburgh. Not sure where it's from. But it really speaks powerfully to the notion that children, esp. low-income children, have to start with and focus on "the basics."

--begin excerpt--

The most important single message of modern research on the nature of thinking is that the kinds of activities traditionally associated with thinking are not limited to advanced levels of development. Instead, these activities are an intimate part of even elementary levls of reading, mathematics, and other branches of learning -- when learning is proceeding well. In fact, the term "higher order" skills is probably itself fundamentally misleading, for it suggests that another set of skills, presumably called "lower order," needs to come first. This assumption -- that there is a sequence from lower level activities that do not require much independent thinking or judgment to higher level ones that do -- colors much educational theory and practice. Implicitly at least, it justifies long years of drill on the "basics" before thinking and problem solving are demanded. Cognitive research on the nature of basic skills such as reading and mathematics provides a fundamental challenge to this assumption.

Indeed, research suggests that failure to cultivate aspects of thinking such as those listed in our working definition of high order skills [nonalgorithmic, complex, yielding multiple solutions, involving nuanced judgment, uncertainty, imposing meaning, etc.] may be a source of major learning difficulties even in elementary school.

Cognitive theory... suggests that processes traditionally reserved for advanced students -- that is, for a minority who have developed skill and taste for interpretive mental work -- might be taught to all readers, including young children and, perhaps especially, those who learn with difficulty. Cognitive research suggests that these processes are what we mean by reading comprehension. Not to teach them is to ignore the most important aspects of reading.

KIPP School in Buffalo Fails to Make AYP for 2nd Year In a Row

2007-01-20T15:36:00.000-06:00

Low test scores still plague city schools
Buffalo schools among those cited

By PETER SIMON and MARY PASCIAK
News Staff Reporters
1/11/2007

More than half of Buffalo's public schools were cited by the state Wednesday for poor student test scores, and district officials urged the public to have patience and faith in Superintendent James A. Williams' academic improvement plan. The state Education Department's annual report which is prompted by federal law - named 35 Buffalo schools as subpar, leaving just 24 in good standing.

Locally, the list of low-performing schools is dominated by Buffalo, where nine schools have been cited as "in need of improvement" for at least six years and therefore are in various phases of restructuring.

But nine suburban and rural districts also were cited for different levels of poor performance, along with two Buffalo charter schools.......

Enterprise Charter School and KIPP Sankofa Charter School, both in Buffalo, were listed for the second year and - theoretically at least - have to offer students the opportunity to transfer to higher performing schools in the district.

Story here.

Great documentary on public education

2007-01-20T10:00:00.001-06:00

To counter the kind of pablum that comes out of Hollywood about inner-city public schools, check out the 1993 Oscar-winning documentary I Am a Promise: The Children of Stanton Elementary School.

Here's a description from Docurama:

Directed by the innovative, award-winning team of Alan and Susan Raymond ("An American Family"), I AM A PROMISE paints an unflinching verité portrait of the children of Stanton Elementary School in North Philadelphia, an inner-city neighborhood where 90% of the students live below the poverty line. As seen through the viewpoint of devoted principal Deanna Burney, the film shows Stanton as underfunded, understaffed, and filled with children struggling to overcome their difficulties. For these at-risk kids, the only hope for their future survives only in the success of their education.

Astoundingly relevant today, I AM A PROMISE imparts a poignantly captivating series of vignettes concerning children growing up outside the American dream, echoing current urban-education issues in our country's ongoing political discussion.

Public Education Does Not Need Heroes

2007-01-19T23:49:00.001-06:00

NY Times
January 19, 2007
Op-Ed Contributor

Classroom Distinctions
By TOM MOORE

Tom Moore, a 10th-grade history teacher at a public school in the Bronx, is writing a book about his teaching experiences.

IN the past year or so I have seen Matthew Perry drink 30 cartons of milk, Ted Danson explain the difference between a rook and a pawn, and Hilary Swank remind us that white teachers still can’t dance or jive talk. In other words, I have been confronted by distorted images of my own profession — teaching. Teaching the post-desegregation urban poor, to be precise.

Although my friends and family (who should all know better) continue to ask me whether my job is similar to these movies, I find it hard to recognize myself or my students in them.

So what are these films really about? And what do they teach us about teachers? Are we heroes, villains, bullies, fools? The time has come to set the class record straight.

At the beginning of Ms. Swank’s new movie, “Freedom Writers,” her character, a teacher named Erin Gruwell, walks into her Long Beach, Calif., classroom, and the camera pans across the room to show us what we are supposed to believe is a terribly shabby learning environment. Any experienced educator will have already noted that not only does she have the right key to get into the room but, unlike the seventh-grade science teacher in my current school, she has a door to put the key into. The worst thing about Ms. Gruwell’s classroom seems to be graffiti on the desks, and crooked blinds.

I felt like shouting, Hey, at least you have blinds! My first classroom didn’t, but it did have a family of pigeons living next to the window, whose pane was a cracked piece of plastic. During the winter, snowflakes blew in. The pigeons competed with the mice and cockroaches for the students’ attention.

This is not to say that all schools in poor neighborhoods are a shambles, or that teaching in a real school is impossible. In fact, thousands of teachers in New York City somehow manage to teach every day, many of them in schools more underfinanced and chaotic than anything you’ve seen in movies or on television (except perhaps the most recent season of “The Wire”).

Ms. Gruwell’s students might backtalk, but first they listen to what she says. And when she raises her inflection just slightly, the class falls silent. Many of the students I’ve known won’t sit down unless they’re repeatedly asked to (maybe not even then), and they don’t listen just because the teacher is speaking; even “good teachers” are occasionally drowned out by the din of 30 students simultaneously using language that would easily earn a movie an NC-17 rating.

When a fight breaks out during an English lesson, Ms. Gruwell steps into the hallway and a security guard immediately materializes to break it up. Forget the teacher — this guy was the hero of the movie for me.

If I were to step out into the hallway during a fight, the only people I’d see would be some students who’d heard there was a fight in my room. I’d be wasting my time waiting for a security guard. The handful of guards where I work are responsible for the safety of five floors, six exits, two yards and four schools jammed into my building.

Although personal safety is at the top of both teachers’ and students’ lists of grievances, the people in charge of real schools don’t take it as seriously as the people in charge of movie schools seem to.

The great misconception of these films is not that actual schools are more chaotic and decrepit — many schools in poor neighborhoods are clean and orderly yet still don’t have enough teachers or money for supplies. No, the most dangerous message such films promote is that what schools really need are heroes. This is the Myth of the Great Teacher.

Films like “Freedom Writers” portray teachers more as missionaries than professionals, eager to give up their lives and comfort for the benefit of others, without need of compensation. Ms. Gruwell sacrifices money, time and even her marriage for her job.

Her behavior is not represented as obsessive or self-destructive, but driven — necessary, even. She is forced into making these sacrifices by the aggressive neglect of the school’s administrators, who won’t even let her take books from the bookroom. The film applauds Ms. Gruwell’s dedication, but also implies that she has no other choice. In order to be a good teacher, she has to be a hero.

“Freedom Writers,” like all teacher movies this side of “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie,” is presented as a celebration of teaching, but its message is that poor students need only love, idealism and martyrdom.

I won’t argue the need for more of the first two, but I’m always surprised at how, once a Ms. Gruwell wins over a class with clowning, tears, rewards and motivational speeches, there is nothing those kids can’t do. It is as if all the previously insurmountable obstacles students face could be erased by a 10-minute pep talk or a fancy dinner. This trivializes not only the difficulties many real students must overcome, but also the hard-earned skill and tireless effort real teachers must use to help those students succeed.

Every year young people enter the teaching profession hoping to emulate the teachers they’ve seen in films. (Maybe in the back of my mind I felt that I could be an inspiring teacher like Howard Hesseman or Gabe Kaplan.) But when you’re confronted with the reality of teaching not just one class of misunderstood teenagers (the common television and movie conceit) but four or five every day, and dealing with parents, administrators, mentors, grades, attendance records, standardized tests and individual education plans for children with learning disabilities, not to mention multiple daily lesson plans — all without being able to count on the support of your superiors — it becomes harder to measure up to the heroic movie teachers you thought you might be.

It’s no surprise that half the teachers in poor urban schools, like Erin Gruwell herself, quit within five years. (Ms. Gruwell now heads a foundation.)

I don’t expect to be thought of as a hero for doing my job. I do expect to be respected, supported, trusted and paid. And while I don’t anticipate that Hollywood will stop producing movies about gold-hearted mavericks who play by their own rules and show the suits how to get the job done, I do hope that these movies will be kept in perspective.

While no one believes that hospitals are really like “ER” or that doctors are anything like “House,” no one blames doctors for the failure of the health care system. From No Child Left Behind to City Hall, teachers are accused of being incompetent and underqualified, while their appeals for better and safer workplaces are systematically ignored.

Every day teachers are blamed for what the system they’re just a part of doesn’t provide: safe, adequately staffed schools with the highest expectations for all students. But that’s not something one maverick teacher, no matter how idealistic, perky or self-sacrificing, can accomplish.

Bloomberg's New Vision for NYC Schools

2007-01-18T09:46:00.001-06:00

NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg unveiled his new plan for the city's public schools. Below, just for fun, I replaced all references to teachers and schools with references to police officers and crime. Imagine holding a police precinct captain's feet to the fire for not reducing crime in the precinct. Imagine firing a veteran police officer because he had fewer drug arrests. Imagine rewarding "police officer excellence" and eliminating "police officer mediocrity." Imagine police precincts issuing "user-friendly report cards" to community members on the status of crime in area neighborhoods.

Seen though this lens, it becomes comically and tragically clear that such an approach is sheer idiocy writ large.

--begin parody of Bloomberg plan as reported in the 1/17/07 NY Times (changes in bold italics)--

The 32 community police precincts will report directly to the chief of police, he said, and “each precinct will be able to pick the path that’s best for its citizens and community members. The money we save by downsizing our bureaucracy will go directly back to the precincts.”

He also said that police precincts would be required to issue annual “user friendly reports” that will be sent to members of the community, grading each precinct with a grade of A to F “to hold the precinct captains’ feet to the fire.”

With the help of the powerful police union, the United Federation of Police Officers, Mr. Bloomberg said he would put into place a new system of police officer evaluations that would allow officials to “reward police officer excellence and begin to eliminate mediocrity."

The current tenure system, he said, rewards longevity over police officer performance.

“We must do a better job of keeping police officers who are effective crime preventers but at same time we must make sure that ineffective police officers are not awarded the privilege of tenure and the near-lifetime job security that comes with it.”

---original text from the NY Times--

The 32 community superintendents will report directly to the chancellor, he said, and “each school will be able to pick the path that’s best for its students, parents and teachers. The money we save by downsizing our bureaucracy will go directly back to the schools.”

He also said that schools would be required to issue annual “user friendly reports” that will be sent to parents, grading each school with a grade of A to F “to hold the principals’ feet to the fire.”

With the help of the powerful teachers union, the United Federation of Teachers, Mr. Bloomberg said he would put into place a new system of teacher evaluations that would allow officials to “reward teacher excellence and begin to eliminate mediocrity."

The current tenure system, he said, rewards longevity over teacher performance.

“We must do a better job of keeping teachers who are effective instructors but at same time we must make sure that ineffective teachers are not awarded the privilege of tenure and the near-lifetime job security that comes with it.”

Racial Tensions in L.A. Escalate

2007-01-17T21:09:00.001-06:00

Today, The NY Times reports the following:

This month, the authorities reported that crimes in [Los Angeles] motivated by racial, religious or sexual orientation discrimination had increased 34 percent in 2005 over the previous year. Statistics for 2006 have not yet been compiled.

Rabbi Allen Freehling, executive director of the Los Angeles Human Relations Commission, a group created after the 1965 riots, said the recent growth in hate crimes reflected a failure by government and community leaders to prepare residents for socioeconomic changes in many neighborhoods, “and therefore people have a tendency to lash out, out of desperation.”

What can public schools do to quell this kind of tension? And what can racially segregated public schools be expected to accomplish, where low-income minorities are jammed together in appalling conditions, left to act out their frustation and desperation?

The "School Choice" Myth

2007-01-15T22:47:00.001-06:00

Boy, it doesn't sound any better: low-income parents are given the option to choose whatever school they want to send their kids to. Unfettered by the single monopolistic government school they've been handed, parents are given vouchers or a menu of charter schools, private schools, or parochial schools to choose from. Wow. With so many choices, some parents might think they were at McDondald's.

But imagine if every parent in an inner-city neighborhoood exercised their choice to transfer to a “good” school. Private and parochial schools get to choose who attends their schools, so it's not really much of a choice at all. They choose you. The remaining public charter schools would quickly fill up, so they would have to turn students away. Just look at the waiting lists at KIPP and Edison schools. Because money and other resources are diverted from the “bad” schools in "school choice" systems, the inequities in the distribution of resources become greater. Ultimately, these “bad” schools won't be able to recover.

This process gets worse as “bad” schools get even worse, driving more and more parents away from these schools to the few "good" schools. But because these schools will be fillled to capacity, they will be forced to turn these desperate parents away. This will be the case in any and every "school choice" scenario. While this would be fine if you and your children attend the “good” school, it would not appear to be such a great solution if you were stuck with one of the losers.

The solution? Make every school a "choice" school, i.e., one where parents would want to send their kids.

How do you do that? Well, it would take a lot of money. Lots of funds from local, state, and federal government. And the schools would have to be free so low-income children could attend. And they would have to acccept all kids who applied, not just the "desirable" students.

Gee, that sounds an awful lot like public education to me.

KIPP, Segregation, and Sinking Ships

2007-01-15T21:58:00.000-06:00

Over at Edspresso, there's a commentary on my piece, "What if KIPP worked?" You can find the commentary here.

The blogger who wrote the piece complains,

So because school choice might harm others in some nebulous way, it should be withdrawn? . . . Is this writer suggesting that said students are faking it, or that their academic achievements are somehow counterfeit?

I've made it clear in my recent posts -- here and here -- that KIPP's "success" is, at best, open to some skepticism. I wish only to foreground the possibility that KIPP is not successful in ways that we might assume they are. It all depends on what we mean by "success."

And over at another blog, there is this gem:

It's very hard to shake the feeling that there are some who truly wish for equality... equality of failure. I have used the argument in the past, but I will use it again. These are the sort of people who would let everyone drown on a sinking ship, because they couldn't save everybody. To them it's not about excellence, it's about equivalence. They have already given up on success, and now they just want to drag everyone down to the lowest level.

The sinking ship analogy is a good one. It would seem that this is precicsely what I am supporting, i.e., it's best that everyone on the ship drown rather than saving a few.

But this is, of course, absurd. And argument by analogy is the lowest form of logic.

But I'll offer my own argument by analogy.

Imagine we are in early 20th century America. There are no child labor laws. It is a common sight to see 10-year-olds working in factories for next to nothing. Along comes a reform movement that provides comfortable shoes for the children. They can now stand at their assembly line positions for 8 hours at a stretch and feel considerably less pain. Many people are relieved by this intervention. At last, they say, we have done something to help these poor children.

Providing comfortable shoes doesn't undo the injustice of children working in these conditions. Providing questionable schooling for an infinitesimally small population of poor black and Hispanic children doesn't undo the injustice of segregation.

Why not? Because these schools are not, as some would have us believe, segregated "naturally." Do you think the people want to live together under these conditions? That this is a choice? If segregation just meant that children had different skin color, it might be different. But the segregation of these children creates a self-fulfilling prophecy for most of them. It is a cycle of desperation that gets repeated with astonishing regularity.

We can't make "improving segregated schools" our goal. If we do this, we accept as a fait accompli that segregation is an immutable reality. The Brown decision said it is NOT an immutable reality. We must work to honor the legacy of that decision.

Does this mean that all schools have to be integrated? No. It may very well be that urban schools that are TRULY on the level of their suburban counterparts (as far as educational quality goes) can accept their segregated status. But, as I said in the "What if KIPP Worked?" post, I fear the consequences of this level of acceptance, of this kind of abdication of a vision. We will accept our separation from each other. We will very seldom encounter each other.

Of course, we see each other on television – in movies and in sit-coms and on the news. And, based on my experience of others on television, I know that most Asians are very quiet and work in laundries, that women on crime shows have large breasts and wear short skirts and tend to over-react when under pressure, that young black men are very angry and sing a lot about bitches and hos, that Muslims wear scarves over their heads and carry Kalashnikov machine guns, and that white men are smart and usually in charge.

The only place where people can go and share common space inside non-commercial venues is a public school. (Channel 1 tried to change that, but – fortunately – it recently reported financial problems and looks like it’s going to be gone forever. Good riddance.) In our society today, public schools are the only place where we have a chance to see and talk to people who are not exactly like us, maybe even get to know them a bit. For those of us who have already graduated from public high schools, it’s too late. There is really no other place to go.

Look, I know. It’s not like there was a time when this did happen, back in the good old days when people of different racial, ethnic, religious, and social backgrounds got together and held hands and inter-related. Rich people have always stayed around rich people, whites have pretty much always stuck to whites, blacks to blacks, etc., etc. And, of course, this is the case today. And it was certainly not the case with public schools either, certainly not before Brown v. Board, and certainly not today. A large number of suburban and rural schools are virtually devoid of any kind of diversity, whether economic, racial, ethnic, or religious.

In acknowledging this, we should not conclude that since most public schools are devoid of diversity, we should give up on the vision that diversity entails. Rather, it’s a reminder that we have to fight for what little diversity there is, where people of different backgrounds can share common space. It’s also a reminder that we have our work cut out for us to extend the democratic commons, to find new ways for diversity to be nurtured or, at the very least, to be experienced on a more substantive basis beyond merely passing each other at the food court.

One more problem with the sinking ship analogy. Nothing can be done to save a sinking ship. The only thing that can be done is to try and save as many people as possible from drowning.

Social justice is not a sinking ship. There is a lot we can do to bring it about. To call it a sinking ship is more than just inaccurate. It is immoral. It means we are abdicating. It means we are giving up.

Saving a handful of kids is to accept this inaccurate and immoral analogy. Saving a handful is to give up.

NCLB and the Dumbing Down of America's Schools

2007-01-13T20:22:00.001-06:00

A study released in March 2006 by the Center on Education Policy found that since the passage of NCLB in 2002, 71 percent of the school districts surveyed reported that they have "reduced elementary school instructional time in at least one other subject to make more time for reading and mathematics—the subjects tested for NCLB. In some case study districts, struggling students receive double periods of reading or math or both—sometimes missing certain subjects altogether." The study was conducted as part of a four-year study of NCLB and appears to be the most systematic effort to track the law's footprints through the classroom. The findings were based on (1) a survey of all 50 states, (2) a nationally representative survey of 299 school districts, (3) case studies of 38 geographically diverse districts and 42 schools, (4) six special analyses of critical issues in implementing NCLB, and (5) three national forums.

The full report can be found here.

In the report, “Academic Atrophy: The Condition of Liberal Arts in America’s Public Schools” (Von Zastrow & Janc, 2004), the authors describe how the arts, foreign language, and elementary social studies are being squeezed out by a focus on the two subjects tested under NCLB. The Council of Basic Education’s report discussed results from a survey of 956 principals in four states - Indiana, Maryland, New Mexico, and New York. The researchers found evidence that the narrowing was most severe in schools with higher numbers of minority and low-income students. “We saw ample evidence of waning commitment to the arts, foreign language, and elementary social studies. What’s more, we found that the greatest erosion of the curriculum is occurring in schools with high minority populations – the very populations whose access to such a curriculum has been historically most limited.” According to the study, 47% of high-minority elementary school principals reported decreases in social studies instruction.

The full report can be found here.

Public Education and The Commons

2007-01-05T22:12:00.001-06:00

My colleague Jerry Bracey pointed out that Brown v. Board was not supposed to "end segregated schools in America." It negated only de jure segregation, not de facto. He's right actually. The Court acknowledged that its decision applied in cases where there are "state laws permitting or requiring such segregation."

Jerry went on to say this:

But that is not my major problem with your cri de coeur. My major problem is that I can't get anywhere beyond it. OK, so what next? In The Shame of the Nation Kozol describes schools that haven't seen a white kid in years. What would you do about that? If anything. On NPR not too long ago, kids in an all-Hispanic high school in LA thought that was fine. They didn't think it would be good if black or white kids came. Clarence Thomas has argued that all-black schools can be models of achievement (while reaffirming Brown in terms of legal segregation). Did the kids in KIPP schools attend more racially integrated schools in the earlier grades? If not, why do you make the segregation in KIPP an important issue in and of itself?

But the Warren court made it clear that segregation of children in public schools on the basis of race "denies to Negro children the equal protection of the laws guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment -- even though the physical facilities and other 'tangible' factors of white and Negro schools may be equal." The Court also clearly stated, "Where a State has undertaken to provide an opportunity for an education in its public schools, such an opportunity is a right which must be made available to all on equal terms."

The examples Jerry cites -- kids in an all-Hispanic high school in LA who thought that segregation was fine, KIPP kids attending segregated schools prior to enrolling at KIPP -- are symptomatic of the problems we face regarding race and class and the larger issues of social and economic injustice. But they are certainly not justifications for these problems and these injustices. Rather, they strike me as signs of just how we resigned we have become and how much we have lost the vision that the Warren court provided for us.

What is that vision? I certainly do not see integration as our ultimate goal. After all, a school that appears "integrated" on the surface invariably conceals the vast disparities that exist between its students, largely drawn along racial lines. There's the automatic assumption that throwing kids from different economic and racial backgrounds together somehow leads to racial and class harmony. There is rarely any mechanism in the school to talk about race or class or difference of any kind. There is no means by which race and racial integration could be discussed or promoted, even questioned. It is simply taken as a given that kids of different races and classes, in close physical proximity to one another, are coexisting openly and peacefully. Unfortunately, whatever racist or classist ideas the kids had formed at an earlier age are too often reinforced in an institution that -- ironically -- is committed to undoing these kind of beliefs.

So what do you DO about that? I think you do what people have always done when faced with something they find intolerable: work to change it by upholding a vision of something worth fighting for.

For me, one vision worth fighting for is one where public schools foreground the democratic commons, i.e., bring children and parents of different races, classes, and beliefs together to facilitate dialogue and inquiry among them. In the simplest terms, it's better that we know about each other, that we interact with each other, if only to increase the likelihood that we can undermine (or at least weaken) the crippling stereotypes that cause us to hold each other in suspicion or contempt. If we make no such attempt, we increase the likelihood that these stereotypes and misunderstandings will continue, will worsen with time, and will eventually destroy us.

I'm clear that the above vision is grossly impractical, slightly misty-eyed, and kumbaiyah'ish. But it's a vision, not a policy plan. Policies need to follow a vision. The bigger -- i.e., more impractical -- the vision, the better the policy. The vision is meant to inspire us to do great things.

If KIPP is the vision, then God help us all.

The common good.
The common man.
Common space.
Common goals.
"We all have this in common."

There is nothing common about the commons. It is an extraordinarily idealistic vision. It is worth fighting for, as starry-eyed as it may be.

What if KIPP "worked"?

2007-01-04T22:04:00.001-06:00

What are the implications of KIPP "working," i.e., the consequences of KIPP being successful at what it claims to do?

KIPP schools are made up almost entirely of black or Hispanic students. KIPP's success undergirds the recent law passed by the Nebraska legislature, allowing for segregated schools in Omaha. In other words, looking at KIPP as an example, the argument could be made that while segregated schools might seem bad, they actually "work." Of course, what they work at doing is the question.

Why should this matter to us? After all, proponents of KIPP argue, "these children" need the basics in fifth grade because NO ONE TAUGHT THEM WELL ENOUGH BEFORE! If the school system they were in beforehand hadn't been so screwed up and awful, they could start where they're supposed to, with fifth grade material. And maybe they wouldn't all have to spend 70% more time in school just to catch up.

But let's not forget Brown v. Board, the Supreme Court decision that was supposed to end segregated schools in America:

"Segregation of white and Negro children in the public schools of a State solely on the basis of race, pursuant to state laws permitting or requiring such segregation, denies to Negro children the equal protection of the laws guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment -- even though the physical facilities and other "tangible" factors of white and Negro schools may be equal."

Think of it. The Court said that segregation denies to low-income minority children the equal protection of the laws guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment EVEN THOUGH the facilities of these segregated schools may be equal. So if we look at KIPP from the perspective of the Brown decision, we can see that KIPP denies to low-income minority children the equal protection of the laws guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment EVEN IF these segregated schools raise their achievement. So EVEN IF KIPP lived up to all its praise -- which I have shown it does not -- it would still be unconstitutional. As the Court argued in the decision,

"Segregation of white and colored children in public schools has a detrimental effect upon the colored children. The impact is greater when it has the sanction of the law, for the policy of separating the races is usually interpreted as denoting the inferiority of the negro group. A sense of inferiority affects the motivation of a child to learn. Segregation with the sanction of law, therefore, has a tendency to [retard] the educational and mental development of negro children and to deprive them of some of the benefits they would receive in a racial[ly] integrated school system."

The decision, delivered by Chief Justice Warren, took this view on the importance of public education:

"Today, education is perhaps the most important function of state and local governments. Compulsory school attendance laws and the great expenditures for education both demonstrate our recognition of the importance of education to our democratic society. It is required in the performance of our most basic public responsibilities, even service in the armed forces. It is the very foundation of good citizenship. Today it is a principal instrument in awakening the child to cultural values, in preparing him for later professional training, and in helping him to adjust normally to his environment. In these days, it is doubtful that any child may reasonably be expected to succeed in life if he is denied the opportunity of an education. Such an opportunity, where the state has undertaken to provide it, is a right which must be made available to all on equal terms."

Maybe KIPP is all we can hope for. Maybe we have to throw up our hands and say, "We can't beat racism, so let's join it." Maybe we have to face the facts and say, "Poverty will always be with us, so we just to have to make the best of it." Maybe we have to admit that KIPP is not as great as it claims to be, but -- because it works for some kids -- then that is enough.

Imagine if we said the same thing about world hunger. Maybe we we have to throw up our hands and say, "We can't beat world hunger." Maybe we have to face the facts and say, "Hunger will always be with us, so we just to have to make the best of it." Maybe we have to admit that current solutions are not as great as they claim to be, but -- because not all children end up starving to death -- then that is enough.

Gee. Come to think of it, that IS what we say about world hunger. In fact, it's also what we say about AIDS. It's what we say about homelessness. It's what we say about drug addiction. It's what we say about global poverty. In fact, it's what we say about other people's suffering as a whole. We accept, in full self-fulfilling prophecy mode, that these problems can never be solved. We accept that the best we can do is make something intolerable a little more tolerable. The question is, tolerable for whom?

For all the kids that are not "lucky" enough to get a place at KIPP, it is not tolerable. For all the kids that do make it into KIPP but are not able to endure the 10-hour days and two hours of homework every night and who eventually drop out or are "counseled out," it is not tolerable. And even for those kids who do make it into KIPP and make it out of KIPP, their "success" is not tolerable because it comes at a price, a price that is too high to pay.

How is a 400-student lecture hall not like a Tyson chicken farm?

2006-12-29T11:28:00.000-06:00

Views Differ on Defining College Prep

2006-12-29T11:25:00.001-06:00

According to a 4/26/06 Education Week article titled "Views Differ on Defining College Prep,"

One of the overarching goals of the national push to redesign high schools is increasing the number of students who graduate ready for college. Yet pinning down what people mean by "college readiness" and how to measure it is no easy task.

So what does "college readiness" mean? Here are the crucial aspects:

willingness to amass colossal debt - according to an Associated Press story, nearly two of every three undergraduate students are going into debt to go to college, owing an average of more than $19,000, most often to the government. About 65 percent of students who graduated in the 2003-2004 school year did so after getting student loans, according to the Department of Education's National Center for Education Statistics.
willingness to attend lecture-driven courses with 400 or more other students
capacity to sit passively and take notes for hours
ability to accurately guess what will be on the test or quiz and then study the night before to engorge the short-term memory on those items which are most likely to be on the test or quiz
ability to fully purge short-term memory during the test or quiz
capacity to forget what was studied for the test or quiz
capacity to manage time and assignments in order to do the least amount of work possible
ability to binge drink on the weekends
tendency to view college as a means to acquire a high-paying job
cultivated interest in material acquisition and consumption, with a special emphasis on 42" plasma screen TV's and Hummers

And what about measuring "college readiness"? How about this? Why don't we ask for a federal law that focuses on superficial learning of only a couple subjects, e.g., reading and math? Forget about all the others. Let the students start practicing short-term memory stuffing, purging, and voiding in the 3rd grade by taking as many tests as they possible can. Starting in Kindergarten, tell them that getting into college is the most important thing in the world. Tell them the reason they are in school is to get into college. We can measure their "college readiness" by looking at their test scores. If they score badly, we punish them by not letting them go to college and encouraging them to cut grass or pick oranges. Those that do well on the tests will be ready for what lies ahead.

Preparing Our Young

2006-12-29T11:09:00.001-06:00

SOURCE: 2005 Skills Gap Report. The National Association of Manufacturers, The Manufacturing Institute, and Deloitte Consulting

It seems we are not prepping the kiddies well enough. What, then, do our Manufacturing Brethren want?

Our Manufacturing Brethren said nearly half of their current employees had inadequate basic employability skills, such as attendance, timeliness, and work ethic. Forty-six percent reported inadequate problem-solving skills, and 36 percent pointed to insufficient reading, writing, and communication skills.

And what is this? It is an agenda from our Manfacturing Brethren, The National Association of Manufacturers.

It seems that our Manufacturing Cousins have interests other than deriding public schools. For example, they understandably crow . . .

"total manufacturing output and productivity are at record levels, capital investment is rising, and product quality has never been higher."

Yet they also express concern that "U.S. manufacturers face rising production costs and intense foreign competition" and warn that without policies to help bring costs under control, "manufacturers will be stuck in a cost-price squeeze that slows growth and job creation and impedes our ability to prevail against unprecedented global competition."

Holy smokes! This is indeed cause for concern. So what, then, do our Manufacturing Brethren urge us to do? Aside from training students how to show up for work, show up for work on time, and work really hard and really well and enjoy working really hard and really well, our cousins urge us to do the following:

drill for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) to be rid of those pesky moose
take away the rights of indivduals to bring lawsuits involving asbestos and medical litigation because these lawsuits are, by definition, frivolous
encourage the growth of business-oriented options for health care such as Health Savings Accounts (HSAs) and Health Reimbursement Arrangements (HRAs) so that healthcare is for the privileged, not the sick
support the President's Clear Skies initiative so that we will have more pollutants to inhale

Rest assured that with fewer moose, no frivolous lawsuits, health savings accounts, and more pollutants to breath, our youngsters will be prepared to go to work . . . and they will be happy!

Another poll last year sponsored by the Business Roundtable found that 62 percent of the public thought public high schools were not doing a good job “adequately preparing graduates to meet the demands they will face in college and the world of work.” Our Manufacturing Brethren have shown us what the world of work should look like. But who, pray tell, are these Business Roundtable'ians? And why might they be interested in preparing our youth for the world of tomorrow?

What's this? A list of members of the Business Roundtable. And who is there? Why it's my friend E. Neville Isdell from the child-friendly Coca-Cola Company. What magic sweet liquid candy syrup they make for those precious little ones! No wonder they are so concerned with children!

And who is this? Why it's my good buddy Peter R. Dolan from the Bristol-Myers Squibb Company. What a wonderful drug they make -- ABILIFY -- a prescription medicine indicated for

the treatment of acute manic and mixed episodes associated with Bipolar I Disorder,
maintaining efficacy in patients with bipolar disorder with a recent manic or mixed episode who had been stabilized and then maintained for at least 6 weeks.

I'm sure that if our youngsters did not want to show up for work one day, they could take one of Peter's magic pills and wash it down with one of E. Neville's delicious drinks and they would be right as rain.

KIPP on "Making Schools Work," Part 2

2006-12-28T10:15:00.000-06:00

Here's the last of the video segments on KIPP.

KIPP on "Making Schools Work," Part 1

2006-12-28T09:03:00.000-06:00

Here's part 1 of the Hedrick Smith piece on KIPP. It begins by focusing on a Latino boy named Ray, a 16-year-old 8th grader enrolled in KIPP 3D Academy in Houston.

At 3 minutes, 14 seconds into this video segment, there is a glimpse into how KIPP achieves its results.

Here's the transcript:

Hedrick Smith (voiceover) - At the start of school, Ray had his first confrontation with 3D Academy's principal, Dan Caesar.

Ray: We were going over our chants, and -- just being myself, still trying to figure out how this school works and everything . . .

Dan Caesar - We say, "Is 3D in the house?!?!" and all the kids raise up their hands and say, "YES!" and Reynaldo raised up his hands and said "NO!"

Ray: I waved my hand. I said, "No." And then he looked at me and he said it a second time. And I said "No" again.

Dan Caesar - I knew right then, "Here's the first test, the first person testing our culture." So I let him know in front of everybody in the room that that's not going to be tolerated. We all want to be here. We chose to be here. If you don't want to be here, find the door.

So much for KIPP's motto, "No excuses."

KIPP on 60 Minutes, Part 2

2006-12-28T09:01:00.000-06:00

Here's part 2.

KIPP on 60 Minutes, Part 1

2006-12-28T08:51:00.000-06:00

Here's part 1 of 4 video segments on KIPP. Parts 1 and 2 are from the CBS news show 60 Minutes. Parts 3 and 4 are from PBS reporter Hedrick Smith in a series called "Making Schools Work." All 4 segments show KIPP in a very positive light.

It's hard to imagine what might possibly be wrong about KIPP if these videos were your only source of information. More comments later.