One Of These Things Is Not Like The Other (Sort Of)

Earlier this summer I got to be part of the beta test team for a MOOC here at the College of Knowledge titled Thinking Like A Writer. It was developed by the Writing Rhetoric and American Cultures Department and as far as I know was their first foray into electronical pedagogtiatin' in a massively multiplayer format.. Our job was to walk through the first assignment and make sure all the pieces worked, the flow made sense and developed in a way that was supportive of the process. The assignment itself was to think about a skill we've developed and to think about how we learned to write and see where it went from there.

It was a good assignment because it had just enough structure at the beginning to support writers initially, but was vague enough at the end to allow for built up momentum to take you wherever it would. It was also nice to write in a group (which I seldom get to do these days) and ping pong ideas and suggestions back and forth in those little instant communities that develop around a common goal and a common interest. Comfortable maybe is a better word. That's good for students writers...well, all writers really. Anyway, a good time was had by all and I was kind of pleased with the results, even though it was just a toss off exercise to test the system. I hope I didn't disappoint my group and without further ado, I present Fred the student writer:

The first thing that comes to mind is learning to ride motocross was a lot more painful than learning to write, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say they were painful in different ways--for me anyway. People think learning to ride a motorcycle in the dirt is like learning to ride a bike, and I suppose that’s true—if you learned to ride a bike by being strapped to the seat and pushed down a hill with a 30 degree slope. Then, when you were about halfway down your instructor shouted, “Hey, forgot to tell you how to brake. My bad.”

Learning to write, on the other hand, is injurious only to your mental health. First, of course, are all the rules, many of which I didn’t even know were rules until after I broke them. I’m not talking about spelling and grammar, those two spinster sisters of writing that used to scowl at me from their perch on the classroom bookshelf between Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary and Strunk and White’s Elements of Style. No, I’m talking about the whole point. I mean, thesis, topic sentences, the sacred five paragraphs and the holy 500 words. What’s it all for? It seemed to me purpose of writing was so we would be quiet while our teachers read the paper.

When learning to ride motocross, each lesson has immediate implications. Don’t want crash in that turn? Better learn how to decelerate correctly. Learning to write was much more amorphous, much more diffuse. Want to get a good job some day? Better learn what a summary close is. I never saw the point of the “you’ll thank me for this in twenty years” pedagogy.

However, there comes a point in the acquisition of any new skill when it suddenly makes sense, a sort of eureka moment, and you think “I’ve got this.” That is a very dangerous time.

In motocross it’s called muscle memory when you finally stop thinking about what you are doing and just feel it. That’s when you become one with the bike, and the course. For me that happened on brilliant June day at a place called Red Bud Trails in Buchanan, Michigan. The Red Bud track was a fairly complex one with a lot of hills, twisty terrain, woods and even a small creek. It had been kicking my butt for months, but that day I was on fire. I went through the turns like I was glued to the track. On the straightaways I could feel the front wheel coming off the ground, a sure sign I was a rocket. The trees that lined the track became a green blur as I tore past them.

Now, they say we all have a dual nature which is usually characterized as good and evil—angel and devil if you will, sitting on opposite shoulders, but I think it’s more basic than that. I think our natures are made up of the part that thinks we’re going to live forever and the part that knows we’re going to die. It was probably that latter aspect of my nature that wrested control away from the former long enough to inform me as I sped down the track that mere inches from my body were FREAKIN’ TREES, MAN!

And that’s when I had another eureka moment. I had convinced myself I was an expert at something, but had failed to factor in the price of this new found confidence in the face of the unyielding laws of physics. Additionally, I learned that muscle memory is also about my body carrying a grudge when I treated it disrespectfully.

There comes a point when you feel one with writing as well. When you stop thinking and just feel the piece, a time when the trees become metaphorical, but no less painful. I learned that in my 12^th grade literature class, presided over by one Otto L. Holt Jr. a classical scholar of Jamaican heritage who sometimes became so overwhelmed with the beauty and majesty of the literature he would stand on his desk and “declaim” Homer from memory.  Junior (we called him Junior because we were a bunch of incredibly sophisticated and urbane 17 year olds) was diligently trying to teach us to write like the masters, and we were resisting him with equal fervor. It was during the unit on Donne that I decided rhyming was no big deal and attempted to join the pantheon with my own version of Ode To A Flea.  As I had been one with my bike that day on the track, now I was one with the muse so I knocked that baby off in about three minutes. On a whim I passed it to Elizabeth Arden with whom I was deeply, passionately, eternally in love that semester. She read it and she laughed…she laughed! And suddenly I knew what writing was for. It was for impressing girls.

The jocularity attracted the attention of Junior who confiscated my effort, glowered his way through it, then ordered me to the front of the class to “perform” my piece. One didn’t simply read out loud in Junior’s class, one “performed” the piece one was assigned. After five or six attempts, during which Junior’s face, as I was to learn in another English class, “could not unfrown itself,” and my classmates became increasingly raucous, he was finally satisfied I had given the piece an appropriate delivery and I was dismissed to the Principal’s office to repeat my performance.

Later, in detention, as I was reflecting on the wide range of responses to my poem, from Elizabeth’s encouraging giggle to the Principal’s stern lecture on the seriousness with which I obviously was not taking my studies, it occurred to me that just as I had overlooked the inviolable laws of physics that day at Red Bud, I had overlooked an important element of writing when I had come to the conclusion that I knew what it was for, and that element was audience. It was at that moment that I became a rhetorician, which in the long run proved to be a much better choice than motocross racer.

 

Welcome To The Republican Utopia

There really can’t be much of a question anymore as to the real purpose of educational reform in this country. Despite all the lip service paid to the good of the children and the country’s economic competitiveness it should be apparent, even to those with only passing knowledge of what goes on in America’s public schools, we’ve been conned, lied to, sold a pig in a poke as my father used to say.

Of course there were some people who from the beginning  saw through the bafflegab thrown up by supporters of rapacious capitalism looking for new markets. Alfie Kohn for one, Gerald Bracey before he passed away, George Hillocks, Denny Taylor, Elaine Garan, Gerald Coles, all of whom wrote books detailing the real agenda of the corporate pirates who were preparing  to pillage education under the auspices of Competitiveness and The Free Market. Even Diane Ravitch, an early supporter of the neoliberal model eventually saw through the dissembling and has since become one of the most vocal critics of education as a commodity.

They were ignored for the most part, marginalized and like the proverbial prophet in his own country, left talking to the wind. Unfortunately for a whole generation of children they were right and the true agenda of the “reformers” is becoming clearer and clearer with each new revelation.  A good example of that is right here in Michigan where Highland Park Public Schools were taken over by a state appointed Emergency Manager. For those of you unfamiliar with the concept, an Emergency Manager is a person accountable only to the Governor who has the authority to suspend contracts, fire, hire, disband locally elected boards and committees and generally do whatever he or she feels like doing to “fix” the struggling district or municipality. In Highland Park the Emergency Manager’s name is Donald Weatherspoon and here’s how his tenure is going so far.

The emergency manager appointed to oversee the Highland Park School District’s finances denied Tuesday that a large collection of black history books, tapes, film strips and other materials were deliberately discarded into Dumpsters last week from the district’s high school library.

Well, mistakes happen, apologists might say. Incompetence can be found in many districts, but some may wonder what workmen were doing taking books off the shelves in the first place.

The recovered materials will be sorted and those that have historical value, Weatherspoon said, would go to a library or a museum that would agree to keep them. He said none of the materials would be sold. Weatherspoon said the district can’t afford to secure the collection. The Leona Group, the charter management company that began operating schools in the district a year ago, was offered the books. Weatherspoon said they took what they wanted.

You read that correctly. The collection was being given away. This in a district that has been accused of violating students’ right to read as described in state law, and where teaching assistants were ordered to falsify student records. If I may offer a bit of advice to Mr. Weatherspoon: it’s going to be a lot harder to convince people reading scores are improving if there are no books for the students to read.

Defenders of the corporate model of school reform would probably argue that this is an isolated case, confined to a local area and in no way does it reflect the values of the movement as a whole—the so called “bad apple” defense. That may be true, but Mr. Weatherspoon is certainly not the only rotten apple in the bushel, nor is he the biggest.

Two Indianapolis Public Schools might never have been taken over by the state if then-Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Bennett had offered the district the same flexibility he granted a year later to the Christel House Academy charter school. In the case of Christel House, emails unearthed by The Associated Press show Bennett’s staff sprung into action in 2012 when it appeared scores from the recently added grades could sink the highly regarded school’s rating from an A to a C. Ultimately, the high school scores were excluded and the school’s grade remained an A.

Mr. Bennet left Indiana to become superintendent of Florida schools before news of his favoritism became public. He has since been forced to resign. When news of the impropriety reached Governor Mike Pence, he acted immediately.

 Gov. Mike Pence said Wednesday he is standing by Indiana’s system of assigning “A-F” grades to schools based on their performance despite reports that the state’s former schools chief worked to change the grading formula to ensure a top GOP donor’s school received an “A.”

Mike Pence—it will come as no surprise—is a Republican. The real tragedy here is the fact that children’s futures are being stolen from them. Because these free market raiders go after the most vulnerable schools, and because those schools tend to be the ones serving the most disadvantaged populations—populations for whom education is even more crucial to upward mobility—an entire class of children is being consigned to economic destitution.  Thanks to the greatest income disparity since the gilded age, climbing the economic ladder has become difficult even for those who have access to what remains of the benefits of the middle class. Take those few advantages away and these children become a generation born into poverty and sentenced to die there while the Weatherspoons and the Bennetts and the Pences of the world profit from their suffering. Welcome to the Republican utopia.

Dr. Duncan Misdiagnosis The Patient

I’ve been watching reruns of the television show House recently.  Patients come into Princeton-Plainsboro hospital in varying degrees of ill health. Dr. House prescribes a bunch of tests and treats the patients based on those tests. The patients get worse. More tests, more treatment, more declining patients. This goes on until the last 15 minutes when Dr. House—usually without the benefit of more tests—finally figures out what is really wrong, gives the patients a pill or a shot and voilà! Health restored.

This strikes me as a good metaphor for educational reform.  The “patient” has been in poor health—depending on who’s doing the diagnosing—for 10 years, 30 years, or since the particular diagnostician making the claim graduated. Interesting side note: cuneiform tablets from around 3000 BCE have been found in which the writer complains about students’ lack of skills. 

Like Doctor House, our educational reformers prescribe a battery of tests, but unlike Doctor House, these tests aren’t supposed to provide information leading to the cure, they’re supposed to be the cure. Strangely, the patient gets sicker. Diagnosis: More testing. The patient declines further, so even more tests are called for.

Well, since this is my analogy I get to play the role of Dr. House and tell you that there is no need for further  testing—especially since it seems to be making the patient worse. I know what the disease is, or at least a major component of a multi-faceted, multi-level disease. It’s poverty, and much as I’d like to take credit for that diagnosis, as a profession we’ve known about this disease and its effects on the educational achievement of students for a long time. I did a brief, informal review of the literature on poverty and educational achievement and found research going back into the 70’s that indicated the longer children live in poverty, the lower their educational  achievement.

Recently, there was an article that appeared  in the Post Tribune about the effects of poverty on school achievement which, for the purposes of my analogy can serve as a description of symptoms for this national disease.  Patients suffering from this malady often share the following history:

In a recent report by Cornell University, “The Role of Planning Skills in the Income-Achievement Gap,” researchers used longitudinal data from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development’s Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development to establish a significant link between early childhood poverty and weak math and reading achievement in the primary grades, regardless of IQ.

Previous research has shown that income-related gaps in academic achievement start as early as kindergarten and continue through high school. Those gaps are amplified by low levels of intellectual stimulation and few healthy relationships with adults in the home. But this is the first time the income-achievement gap has been explained with the behavioral measurement of ability to plan efficiently, from such a young age.

Now, I think that even though Dr. House is a medical doctor and not an educational specialist even he could see that kids who suffer from “low levels of intellectual stimulation and few healthy relationships with adults in the home”  don’t need more tests to learn better, nor are you going to improve the skills of students who come from an environment  “which includes constant high levels of background noise, the overvaluation of entertainment as a respite from the exertions of survival, a strong belief in destiny or fate because choices are in low supply, and polarized thinking in which options are hardly ever examined (again, because so few tend to be available)”  by subjecting them to high stakes exams, wouldn’t you agree  Arne Duncan, Secretary of Education and head diagnostician for America’s schools?

Today is a great day! I have looked forward to this day for a long time--and so have America's teachers, parents, students, and school leaders. Today is the day that marks the beginning of the development of a new and much-improved generation of assessments for America's schoolchildren. Today marks the start of Assessments 2.0.

 

Oh. Well, uh…guess the only people getting healthy around here are the ones that own test making companies.

When Is A School Not A School? When It’s A Profit Center

Privatization  \pri·vat·i·za·tion \prī-və-tə-zā-shən\ n: The process by which a public good is dismantled and sold for private gain. See also: commodification. 

OK, so that’s not the definition you’ll currently see in your Webster’s, but if the education reformers have their way it soon will be. No matter what direction the so called reform comes from and no matter what level it’s aimed at, all the solutions to what ails education in America today have one thing in common: taking money from public institutions and putting it in private pockets.

Giving up on public schools altogether? Let’s open some privately owned ones—funded with taxpayer’s money of course. Want more accountability? Need more tests. Someone has to produce those tests and score them of course, and for that they’ll want to be paid—handsomely. Oh and by the way, you’ll need to buy some programs linked to those tests so you can prepare students to take them. And don’t forget to buy the latest textbooks that coordinate with the new curriculum.

And the latest iteration: Want to know if a new teacher should be licensed? Don’t ask the university that trained him or her, pay us to decide.

The idea that a handful of college instructors and student teachers in the school of education at the University of Massachusetts could slow the corporatization of public education in America is both quaint and ridiculous. Sixty-seven of the 68 students studying to be teachers at the middle and high school levels at the Amherst campus are protesting a new national licensure procedure being developed by Stanford University with the education company Pearson.

And for those of you who may be naive enough to assume that because Stanford University is involved the resulting process will have a degree of educational validity—fuhgeddaboudit. I’ve been invited to participate those types of “partnerships” and mostly teachers are brought in for cover, and their input, while effusively appreciated, is largely ignored. I was part of the team that created the original state writing assessment here in Michigan. We put together an instrument that we felt reflected best practice in the field. When we weren’t being told our suggestions were too expensive we were being told what we were attempting to measure couldn’t be measured, which brings up an interesting subtext to all this and that is the rather unexamined premise that if it can be measured it has value, along with a coda, if it can’t be measured it doesn’t have value. Might be worth looking into a little more thoroughly, but that’s a post for another time. As for the high stakes writing test here in Michigan, within about five years, almost all of the recommendations we did manage to get through the process had been abandoned.

Want more proof?

Pearson advertises that it is paying scorers $75 per assessment, with work “available seven days a week” for current or retired licensed teachers or administrators.

That’s right teachers, your career has a market value of $75. Puts all those years taking classes, doing internships and student teaching in perspective doesn’t it, knowing that after all that somewhere a person will be paid less than $100 to decide if you're qualified to teach or not.

It is an essential aspect of the commodification of education that teachers be devalued. After all, in order for "educational entrepreneurs" to sell their products a need has to be created--that's just Marketing 101. Since teachers are such an visible part of the process it's only logical that this need be created by convincing the customer that teachers are ineffective, inefficient and may actually be destructive--as least as far as they take money from the kids by wanting things like salaries and benefits. It is also important that the fix for this need come from outside the schools, that's why teacher training has to be attacked as well. After all, if we supported teachers, and the training of teachers, there would be no reason to buy teacher proof curricula; no reason to buy tests from outside vendors, or  software programs that take the place of classroom instruction.

On a more fundamental level, this switch from the democratic values that created public education to the priorities of the market economy means the long term goal of education in creating skilled, literate citizens capable of maintaining and improving our democracy has been replaced by the short term, myopic goal of improving the quarterly balance sheet.

In a larger sense, capitalism has become cannibalistic and is devouring the very body that created it, or perhaps it is more accurate to say what used to be a symbiotic relationship between our economic and political structures has become parasitic and what Franklin Roosevelt called the "real safeguard of democracy" (education) is being slowly bled away.

Get Better Teachers With One Weird Trick

When I was younger I was a sucker for those short cut programs you see advertised all over the place. Learn Chinese in three weeks! Lose ten pounds a week with this five minute workout! Earn thousands from home with this three step plan! Of course the only thing I really learned was I was going to lose some weight in my wallet and someone else was doing all the earning.

Eventually I figured out that if I wanted to take on a complicated task it meant investing real effort, paying attention to my results over a long period of time, perhaps the rest of my life, and adjusting my plan based on my changing goals. In other words, it had to become a part of the way I did things, not just something I paid attention to for a few weeks out of the year.

I mention this because when I look at the latest efforts of our educational betters to identify and measure teacher effectiveness I see the same sort of short cut thinking that used to drain my bank account. Need to determine if teachers are any good? Just give them this test before they graduate. No wait, give their students this test, then use it to evaluate the teachers. Want better schools? Give teachers the educational version of piecework. Hey, it works for manufacturing. The thinking that underlies these programs is the same as those that promise to reduce belly fat with “one weird trick” and that is, if we can just find that one test, or that one measure we can apply it to all teachers everywhere and forever, then all our problems will be solved.

I should mention here that I never learned Chinese, I could stand to lose a few pounds, and I’m not rich.

The National Education Writers Association has an interesting compilation of what current research in the measures du jour say about teacher effectiveness and they aren’t exactly what you might call a slam dunk. Value added your cup of tea?

Value-added models appear to pick up some differences in teacher quality, but they can be influenced by a number of factors, such as the statistical controls selected. They may also be affected by the characteristics of schools and peers. The impact of unmeasured factors in schools, such as principals and choice of curriculum, is less clear.

Not a rousing vote of confidence. What about testing for “content mastery,” or programs that provide “board certification?”

Characteristics such as board certification and content knowledge in math sometimes are linked with student achievement. Still, these factors don’t explain much of the differences in teacher effectiveness overall.

Everyone knows teachers go into the profession for the money, so what if we just paid them more to do a better job?

 In the United States, merit pay exclusively focused on rewarding teachers whose students produce gains has not been shown to improve student achievement…

Well, at least we know that it’s teachers who hold the key to student success or failure, right? That’s why we need all these measurements.

Research has shown that the variation in student achievement is predominantly a product of individual and family background characteristics. Of the school factors that have been isolated for study, teachers are probably the most important determinants of how students will perform on standardized tests.

OK, so if we want an educational system that values teachers who teach kids how to take standardized tests, it certainly looks like we’ve found our measures of “teacher effectiveness.” Trouble is, as Matthew Di Carlo, writing at Shankerblog points out:

"[O]nly about 25-40 percent of the top quintile (top 20%) teachers in one year were in the top quintile the next year, while between 20-30 percent of them ended up in the bottom 40%," of which volatility "a very large proportion was due to nothing more than random error."

“Volatility” and “random error.” To borrow a phrase from Prince Hamlet, “Ay, there’s the rub.” Education is a dynamic, complicated slippery little beastie and just when you think you’ve got a handle on her, she goes tumbling off in a wholly unexpected direction leaving you measuring smoke and thinking you know where the fire is. My own opinion is this is because human beings are dynamic, complicated slippery little beasties and when you factor in the type of human being education deals with, namely kids growing up, maturing and changing, well you’ve got basically a Rubic’s cube of “volatility” to solve before you can have any confidence in your measures.

This is why static, universal, external attempts at measurement have failed and will continue to fail. There are no short cuts. If you want effective teachers, you have to start by paying attention to those teachers. You have to support them by first of all listening to them and inviting them to participate in developing meaningful, flexible, appropriately focused measures. That’s hard work. It takes time, commitment and yes, money. Effort in other words, something we’re always telling students they need to have more of. Well, until they grow up and become teacher effectiveness experts at least.