The
use of military and sports metaphors to describe teaching and learning makes me
crazy. I hate it when teachers say they're "in the trenches." Calling
common standards "goalposts" grates on my sensibilities, as do drills,
recruits, maneuvers, tactics and racing to the top. I can never figure out who's
fighting--or who's winning--or why we're at war to begin with.

And
now we've been advised to develop instructional "platoons" in
elementary school, the better to lock and load, pinpointing our achievement targets
with more precision. We can become an elite teaching force, a well-oiled
instructional machine, mowing down mathematical skills like Sherman marching to
the sea, and all that.

In
2005, I was teaching music in a K-4 building. I ate lunch with the three fourth
grade teachers, all of whom were smart and hip. I was consistently impressed
with their ongoing conversations about How to Make Things Better for Fourth
Graders.  They shared everything--lesson
planning, materials, moments of instructional illumination, things kids said in
class. In the fall, they started dividing up the lesson creation process, with
each teacher going deeper into one of three subjects in the fourth grade
curriculum--math, science and social studies. They all taught reading at the
same time, using the assigned building-wide program, but they were
experimenting with flexibly sharing their students for mini-lessons around
particular skills and topics.

There
were about 85 kids in the 4th grade, and their rooms were side by side. By the
end of September, the teachers knew all the 4th graders--and were convinced
that they could do a better job of instruction if they specialized in teaching one
subject, and ran the 4th grade reading program collaboratively, as well. They
drew up an elaborate plan--they called it "switching"--detailing
the benefits.

They
didn't make it past the first 15 minutes with the principal, who emphatically
said that parents preferred a single teacher for their young children--a teacher
who would be responsive to a particular child's unique needs. It would also take
valuable instructional time for the kids to move to a new class; when the
teachers explained that the kids would sit tight, and that it would take approximately
30 seconds for teachers to move next door, the principal got huffy.

She
said there was research showing that elementary students achieved more when
they stayed with the same teacher all day. At the time, the K-8 movement (a
reactionary response to the maligned "middle school concept") was taking
root in urban districts, keeping kids together all day. And finally, she shot
the plan dead by telling them that she was the decision-maker, and she was
convinced that their plan was nothing more than a sneaky way to make their
lives easier and reduce their personal workload.

They
had a second meeting with the principal, and this time the union representative
came, but no dice. Further--the principal had now noticed that the teachers
were occasionally switching kids for reading and put the kibosh on that as
well. One teacher, 28 kids, no switching--and that was that. Because I got to
hear lots of lunchtime exasperation about this situation, I did a quick scan of
research and found one or two old studies that supported the principal's position,
and a couple that supported the teachers' position. What all the research does
say is that the quality of teaching matters a great deal--and that teachers'
relationships with students are all-important. No surprises. But no research slam
dunk for either side of the issue.

Of
course, that was just switching, not platooning, which suddenly seems to be all the rage.
There is now a widely accepted theory that elementary teachers' lack of
mathematical knowledge is the cause of our failure to rout and crush the
international competition on math battles--I mean tests. It's worth pointing
out that the research on this is mixed, too--but we're already on the march, strategically
selecting a few good teachers to lead the charge.

In
the end, it's just another example of our national faith in tools and
levers--rather than people--to solve problems. The fourth grade teachers in my
school were willing to lead and invested in the outcomes of their simple plan.
That should count for more than snappy language.

Let’s
get biases and politics out of the way first. I am a big fan of the charter
school concept—defined as the rich idea that when it comes to schooling, one
size does not fit all, and big monolithic districts do not and cannot serve diverse
children as well as site-directed, purpose-driven, innovative schools. If I
lived in Detroit, I would choose a magnet school or charter school for my
children—and even though I live in a district with fine public schools, one of
my children attended a public school and the other attended a private school. Ideologically,
I’m with Dewey on this one: I want the best possible education for all
children, the kind of carefully chosen options my own children had.

One
more thing: I think that positioning charter schools as the opposite of public
schools, rather than a necessary supplement to public education, has poisoned
the discourse. And—it goes both ways. It’s not just public schools and public
school teachers being skeptical (or downright nasty) in their remarks about
charter schools.  Public school academies—charters—seem
to be bent on repeating the worst sound bites about public schools, whether
they’re strictly true or not, thereby displaying the aphorism that your mother
repeated when you were seven years old: you don’t make yourself look better by
tearing someone else down. 

I
have a number of friends now working in the charter school movement in Detroit,
a city where a handful of good charter schools have begun to flourish and bear
fruit. Last week, they invited me to attend a showing of “The Providence Effect,”
a full-length film depicting a school success story: Providence St. Mel, a K-12
Catholic school on Chicago’s tough west side.

Providence
St. Mel has accrued considerable recognition after parents adamantly refused to
close it on Diocese recommendation, 30 years ago: President Reagan visited,
around the time the “Nation at Risk” report was being crafted, and Oprah
Winfrey has taken a personal interest (and contributed more than a million
dollars). Providence’s outcomes—an average ACT score of 23, and 100% college
admission for graduates—resemble those of well-heeled suburban public schools.
Now, there is an attempt to replicate the “Providence effect:” a charter school
in Englewood, led by Providence graduates and veteran teachers, and based on
programs and principles at the original PSM.

The
screening was part of a two-day professional conference for charter school
proponents and teachers, and featured a panel discussion with Big Names in the Michigan
charter school movement, a State Board of Education member, various business-leadership
types, and the principal of the new Providence charter school. The room was set
up for hundreds of people, but I’m sure the attendance numbers (perhaps 60
people) were disappointing to the organizers. As I was parking on the rooftop
of Cobo Hall, charter school teachers wearing conference badges were flooding
out of the building, recognizable as teachers by their youth, their post-collegiate
dress and willingness to carry a tote bag—plus their “let’s go get a beer”
demeanor.

Impressions
from the film and the panel discussion:

• The
  movie has a campaign-film aura—gauzy graduation footage with students
  inexplicably wearing white gloves, bits of talking-head rhetoric, quick-cut
  black and white shots from Chicago’s troubled past, backed by a vocal track of
  adolescents singing. It’s impressive, all right, especially their catch phrase:
  It’s not rocket science. The
  lingering message: anybody with high expectations and tight rules can turn around
  kids destined for the dumpster.

• There
  is curiously little about instruction in the film; we do see a few examples of
  very traditional classroom teaching. There is a clip of first-graders in a race-to-the-board
  competitive spelling game (the teacher assigning points to teams, a la
  Professor Dumbledore), and a HS math lesson where the teacher puts an equation
  on the board and announces “No calculators!” (which drew a spatter of applause
  from the audience). An elementary teacher models a familiar and effective
  questioning strategy but then suggests that nobody in his circle believes that
  second graders can do work at this level.

• Among
  the panelists, the principal of the new Providence charter school was most
  grounded in reality. She admitted that while they were on a strong upward curve,
  test scores were still mediocre. Asked how they deal with discipline, she said
  that students were put on a “three strikes and out” contract—if they couldn’t
  abide by the rules, they held a conference with parents to decide if the child
  was a “good fit” for Providence. According to the principal, every child, even
  kindergarteners, has a grade point average (another murmur of approval from the
  audience). Nobody asked about parents who never bothered to come to school, the
  advisability of a five-year old having a GPA before he understands cumulative
  averaging, or where the kid who is not a good fit ends up.

• There
  was a kind of professional pep rally atmosphere. The panel moderator took
  questions from people who seemed pre-selected, often acknowledging the “great
  work” Joe was doing or the “outstanding leadership” of Mary. There was an angry
  question on why charter schools get less money than public schools, on average,
  from the public coffers. Reginald Turner, the State Board member, clarified:
  charter schools get the same per-pupil allowance as other public schools in the
  surrounding area. And guess what? There aren’t many charter schools in Grosse
  Pointe, where the funding level is high; charter schools are generally found
  where there is dissatisfaction with public education and not much money. And
  they get the same public monies as the other schools nearby—you might even call
  that equitable.

• When
  asked what Detroit could do as a first step to fix its failing public school,
  the business folks agreed: get new teachers, preferably from Teach for America
  (which one panelist described as “the Peace Corps of teaching,” an unfortunate
  metaphor in a city trying to pull itself out of devastating depression). A
  woman asked what special training Teach for America corps members got that
  would make them particularly effective in Detroit. The panelist replied that it
  wasn’t a matter of training—it was a chance to get “graduates of the top
  colleges” into the classroom.

If you believe U.S. News and World
Report, two of the top twenty Schools of Education are right here in Michigan,
including the long-running #1 in Elementary and Secondary teacher preparation,
Michigan State University, and the #4 public university in the country, the
University of Michigan. There is also a strong network of regional teacher
preparation programs. There is no shortage of highly qualified and skilled teachers
here in Michigan.

Michigan is a teacher-exporting state.
About three-quarters of our best and brightest would-be teachers go to work in
other states (when they can get jobs). Of those who remain in Michigan, a
significant segment gets jobs in newly formed charter schools—because there are
no jobs in public schools. The best new teachers in Michigan? They’re the folks
who went streaming out the door to grab a beer with their teaching colleagues
as I was parking my car.

When
it comes to evaluating charter schools, the key question is always: Compared to
what? Charter schools in Detroit have many potential resources that public schools
do not, beginning with positive public assumptions and PR.

Charter
World is an interesting place, with different beliefs, incentives and catch
phrases than Public School World. It would be a shame to lose the opportunity
to do something truly different with charter schools, relying instead on rhetorical
flourishes and empty myths.

For
the past six months, looking at the big picture in education policy has felt a
bit like this photograph, shared by Stories
from School blogger Travis Wittwer. Wittwer and his family are avid bikers
(socially-conscious bikers, not Hells-Angels bikers), and his son Soren is a frequent
passenger in a Bakfiets (a Dutch-made bike adapted for kids and cargo). Soren's
handmade version of his Bakfiets is beyond charming. I stuck the shot on my
desktop, and every time I looked at it, I thought--this is what we do with
schools. Every time things look shaky in education policy, we just add more
masking tape (and rhetoric) and keep smiling.

But...

Is
it just me--or is there a subtle shift in the education policy wind? Nothing
like a sea change, yet--more like ripples on the surface, a tiny drift in
course.

Item:
Jay Mathews opens a column with the following: If the No Child Left Behind law, focused on raising test scores, proves
to be a dead end, what do we do next? Why do those of us who care about schools
keep bickering over the current system, rather than expand the debate to
realistic alternatives?

Item:
Linda Darling-Hammond writes: Why don't
people demand an excellent teacher in every classroom? We have behaved for a
very long time as if that is not something to be expected, in contrast to
high-achieving nations that have put in place an infrastructure for producing
high-quality teaching. She then goes on to outline precisely how America
could, in fact, create that infrastructure. Here's the best part--the article
appeared in the very heartlandish Des Moines Register.

Item: Alexander Russo asks: What current
beliefs about schools and education do you think will no longer dominate, say,
a generation from now?  Education mandatory for 12 years? Student learning
organized by chronological age? Government grants only for higher education?
Schools organized and funded by obscure geographic entities (districts)? (It's
well worth following this link back to Reddit to see which current beliefs web-riders
think will be embarrassingly outdated in a generation.)

Item:
Today, in the Washington Post, Marc Tucker, Ray Marshall and William Brock propose
a National World Class Schools Act, ten interdependent and aligned proposals
that, taken together, form a coherent, systemic school reform package that
might actually do what NCLB was supposed to: seriously address the achievement gap,
and use economic incentives in smart, non-punitive ways to cultivate educational
improvement for every child in America.

I. Set higher standards
for licensing teachers. Recruit purposefully from only the top tier of college
graduates. Raise teachers' pay significantly, and use financial bonuses to
build teacher capacity in hard-to-staff schools.

II. Get the brightest
students to pursue teaching. Treat teachers like professionals, not blue-collar
workers. Put teachers in charge of their schools.

III. Reward schools
that exceed expectations, with a bonus representing 10% of their budget. The
faculty decides how to spend the money. Forget paying individual teachers for
increased test scores, as the measurements are suspect, and team spirit is more
important in building a good school.

IV. Take over every
school or district that cannot meet the following standard: three-quarters of
the schools in the district are able to get 90 % of their students
college-ready. Void all employee contracts in these schools.

V.  Fix the way we measure student performance. Dump
current statewide assessments, and replace them with examinations based on rigorous
course content. Using cheap, multiple-choice, computer-scored tests does not lead
to applied knowledge, imagination or innovation.

VI.  Let parents choose which public schools their
children attend. Information on student and school performance should be easily
accessible to parents, students and teachers.

VII. Help every
school whose students are not successful. Most struggling schools don't know what
to do to improve. The federal government can provide proven training and
assistance.

VIII. Limit differences
in state-provided per-pupil funding to 5 percent, between schools (with the
exception of expenditures for students with disabilities).

IX. Offer a selection
of social and health services to low-income children, coordinated with school
facilities and programs.

X. Begin dropout
prevention early, with high-quality early-childhood education for all
4-year-olds and all low-income 3-year-olds.

I opened the
"World Class Schools" piece this morning prepared for more of the
same blah-blah dominating the edusphere lately: the seduction of data analysis,
the appeal of paternalism, the necessity of accountability and sanctions, the
laziness of teachers--and let's standardize everything in sight.

But
no. I recognized--again--the stirring of hope (an audacious feeling). Maybe
we can solve these problems in a generation. Maybe the paradigm is shifting--or
lifting.

The
last word really should go to Brock, Marshall & Tucker:

We have the most unequal distribution of income of any
industrialized nation. If the problems posed by students' poverty are not dealt
with, it may be nearly impossible for schools to educate the students to
world-class standards.

Amen. And thanks,
Soren, for the wonderful pictures!

                                                                                                                                                Remember
transactional analysis? "I'm OK--You're OK" (or not, as the case may be)?

When
this newsy little tidbit popped up in Blogworld last week, I figured it would
be just a matter of hours until the usual blog suspects trotted out a
full-scale assault on any researcher (in this case, Geoffrey Cohen of
CU-Boulder) daring to suggest that kids perform better when given simple tools by
their teachers to re-affirm their competence:

If
a student starts off the year feeling more stress due to negative stereotypes,
and then performs poorly during the first few weeks of school, this can
establish a downward cycle of increasing stress and poor performance that is
hard to break. The self-affirmation exercise, by reminding students about what
is really important to them, could help reduce that stress, the researchers
suggest.

Like
TA, Values Clarification and polyester Saturday shirts, self-esteem as a
workable premise for improving student learning is seriously out of fashion
these days. Mostly, we see articles like "Are We Good-Jobbing Our Kids to
Pieces?"--followed by 186 comments from people who are convinced that
while they're OK, other people's children have been given way too much empty
praise causing their egos to blow up like fraudulent balloons. Use the word
"self-esteem" in any educational context, and you're likely to be hit
with a barrage of low-information platitudes about grade inflation, college
admissions based on the wrong stuff, and our miserable international test-score
standings.

The
concept of self-esteem is pretty squishy, involving considerable latitude of opinion
around ego health and evaluating achievement, when you deconstruct it.
Policymakers who believe that American kids are wallowing in unsubstantiated self-esteem
still believe it's a good idea to pay them for grades and test scores. Coaches
who declare that it's good for kids to lose occasionally still schedule extra practices
on Sunday mornings to prevent that from happening. We idolize Susan Boyle, the
modest, mousy Scottish lady who apparently kept her singing talents hidden for
50 years--but we don't want our children to be silenced by their own personal
Simon Cowell when they subject their early work products to scrutiny. That's
why refrigerator magnets were invented.

Every
first-rate classroom teacher understands the paradox here: you have to have a
base of self-esteem to withstand and benefit from honest and productive
criticism of your own work.  And
sometimes, kids come to school with very little sense of their own worth. The
research on self-esteem and social learning is pretty consistent: you need to
feel OK in order to learn effectively.

There
is also plenty of research showing that people running successful drug rings
and beating up their spouses have high self-esteem.  Teachers don't want to be nurturing the next
generation of narcissists. Self-esteem
in isolation can become a psychological defense for anti-community behaviors.
One of the most chilling and sordid examples of this was the HS athletes in
Glen Ridge, New Jersey, who raped a mildly retarded 8-year old girl with a
baseball bat, detailed in Our Guys by Bernard Lefkowitz. Plenty of self-esteem
there--plus a healthy dose of disgusting entitlement.

Most
of the people railing against the excess of self-esteem in American schools
aren't thinking about our national adulation of sports heroes or entertainers.
They're pushing to keep "standards" in place--to hold teachers and
students accountable, to increase rigor, to raise the bar--plus a couple dozen
other academic clichés.  If students feel
too good about themselves and their work, the reasoning goes, they will not see
a need to try harder to compete against our economic competitors. The problem
with this get-tough rhetoric is that students won't produce more if they feel
bad about themselves, either. It's a balancing act between sincere encouragement
and honest critique. And it happens in the classroom, not in Policy World.

 I
really appreciate what Marjorie Larner wrote in the previous blog. Deciding
what to measure without first establishing a set of outcomes and aims is
lunacy. When you cede power to standardized test creators to determine what all
students should know, you give away a lot of other things that are central and
valuable in the education process. 
Teacher judgment and discretion, for example. Learning goals should be
set in the district and classroom, not in Washington D.C., and certainly not by
a commercial test developer.

There
are really only two things that standardized test data can tell us. The first
is what kids reliably
know and are able to do, relative to a selected set of
skills and knowledge. The second is how one child--or one school, state, or
nation--compares to another. 

The
first reason for testing is, IMHO, a no-brainer. It doesn't hurt students to
take the occasional test, especially if there is no manufactured anxiety around
the process. A good test should tell everyone involved what to do next, what's
been mastered, and where the weak spots are--useful information. Every teacher
in America should be able to construct valid tests that accurately measure what
their students are learning. And every teacher should be skilled in analyzing
the information generated by standardized tests linked to curricular goals--and
using those statistics to determine next steps. 

It
drives me crazy when teachers push up the panic and aversion level around
testing. I am a staunch advocate of performance-based assessments and using
real student work to measure growth--but I also understand that often, a criterion-referenced
test is the most efficient way to find out what students know.

Unfortunately,
your average citizen--let's call him Joe the Talker--is clueless about the difference
between tests that measure the things we have decided are essential knowledge
and skills, and the norm-referenced tests designed to sort kids into quintiles,
prescribe their futures, or compare students in the Mississippi Delta to
students in Singapore. If Joe understood how testing worked (and who really benefits
from developing stockpiles of standardized tests, and vast banks of data on
young children), he might be more willing to care more about what his kids have
learned and less worried about whether the United States is "ahead"
of the Czech Republic on the PISA. Here's an unnamed Joe, speaking his mind on
international testing, in an HBO "Real Time" Forum:

How many of those
countries ranked higher than the US use test scores on students to direct them
in to different programs?  Seems
that a few of us in here have already stated that they should use the test
scores to realize which kids they should educate and which kids they should
give job training to. Throwing more money at a poor scoring student seems like
a waste, put more money in to the better performing students education and
train those poorer performing students to do something else. You can take my
gun after I empty the clip into you.

I
have never understood the devotion of policymakers, economic analysts and
journalists to comparing  international
test data as rationale for launching massive school reforms in the United
States.  We clearly are not in a cutthroat
economic rivalry with Finland. And it must be obvious to anyone (even Joe) that
schools in other countries are incalculably different from American
schools--their size, demographics, curriculum, annual days of schooling, teacher
preparation, funding, and cultural emphasis on the importance of education,
including who actually gets to go to school.  It's equally obvious that Americans have no
intention of adopting "reform" practices from higher-scoring
nations--we're not about to add five weeks to the school year, eliminate expensive
competitive sports programs in favor of cram-school tutoring, or wait until
kids are seven years old before teaching them to read.  

Instead,
we use international testing as a rhetorical bludgeon--proof that our schools
are dreadful and we're falling further behind. "Public schools are incompetent"
has become our conventional wisdom over the past decade. The worst aspects of
this sad refrain: #1) it's not really true and #2) it makes people feel
hopeless about a system that could be greatly improved, should we decide as a
nation to invest, rather than score political points in the media.

A
must-read article on international testing, by Hal Salzman and Lindsay Lowell,
in Nature, makes several cogent points:

• Average
  test scores are irrelevant; what matters most in economic development and
  innovation is the numbers of highest-scoring students, and the United States
  has by far the greatest share of those, nearly twice as many as second-place
  Japan.

• National
  rankings are based on statistically insignificant differences. When nations are
  clustered into similar groups, the United States falls into a middle group in
  Math and Science, and in the highest group in Civics. Generally speaking, about
  one-fifth of nations rank above the United States, and two-fifths below.

• Comparisons
  of education as economic indicator between the United States, with a gross
  domestic product of $14 trillion, and nations like New Zealand, with a GDP of
  $124 billion, are meaningless. It makes more sense to consider individual state
  economies and industries as competitors with countries whose students take
  international tests.

•  Historically,
  creating policies to emphasize math and science instruction and increase the
  numbers of technology and engineering graduates has led to an oversupply and high
  unemployment in those fields. We appear to be heading in that direction at the
  moment.

•  The
  disaster that we should be paying attention to is the one million
  low-performing students we produce every year. These students do more than drag
  down our average. They represent the dangerous gap between educational haves
  and have-nots. 

And
if we don't believe that gaping disparity between the successful and the
disadvantaged is socially treacherous, we ought to be reading history--or
watching the protests at the G-20 Summit.

From
the estimable Deborah Meier, in Bridging Differences, best education blog on the planet:

The tendency to fit our facts to our biases
is inescapably part of our competition with each other. I suspect there’s a
purpose in this constant reiteration of bleak facts and non-facts. (Otherwise,
why is there no cheering over our incontrovertible high international test
score standing in literacy, or why is the NAEP data on pre- and post-NCLB so
rarely made public?) Hopefully, during the coming four years...we can see
“reform” as something beside a horse race or marketplace with winners and
losers.