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Robert Pondiscio: Building a better Edsel

May 20, 2011 By

Down the street on the Core Knowledge Blog, Robert Pondiscio reports on an email he received from a strong supporter of charters. She told him that she had visited a Big Name “no-excuses” charter school and discovered, to her dismay, that the curriculum was “all fuzzery all the time,” with minimal direct instruction:

Teachers aren’t allowed to use direct instruction for longer than a few minutes; then the students must repair to their pods and discover knowledge. After they discover knowledge, which means solving ONE problem, they return to the rug and explain their “strategies” to each other. Although the school prides itself on efficient use of time, the students I saw were spending a lot of time doing nothing at all while they waited for the other kids to finish so the whole group could migrate back to the rug.

And yet, as far as available data go, this school is doing “very, very well,” reports Pondiscio. What is going on here? Short-term data do not necessarily translate into long-term achievement. This seems to be the upshot of a recent report by KIPP, which states that “only 33 percent of students who completed a KIPP middle school 10 or more years ago have graduated from a four-year college.” That’s much better than the average rate for low-income minority students. All the same, Pondiscio notes, it shows how much work lies ahead.

Perhaps the data reflect temporary results, suggests Pondiscio, not the sort of learning that will last. Perhaps we’re putting all our energy into building the best possible Edsel–that is, bringing everyone up to a familiar level of mediocrity.

Pondiscio writes, “The long view may be slowly, quietly emerging–as it should and must–as the question in education reform.”

Read the whole piece.

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The prickly topic of “English only”

May 20, 2011 By

To begin with, this is strictly about “English only” in ESL (English as a Second Language) classes. It is not about “English-only” laws. It is not a commentary on bilingual education or language immersion programs overall.

Some six years ago, when I was taking education courses in preparation for teaching, I learned (or re-learned) about the abuse that many immigrants and Native Americans had suffered–how they were shamed and humiliated in school for speaking their own language, and how this affected their lives. These were serious stories, and I took them seriously.

We were told, over and over, that it was good to celebrate everyone’s language and that there was room for the native language in the ESL classroom.

Because I enjoy languages and speak Russian and Spanish fairly well, I did not mind this suggestion at first. Over time, I came to see it as bad advice–particularly in situations where students speak English in ESL class and nowhere else.

My school had a mixture of situations. The regular ESL classes had students from countries around the world. You could seat them with students who spoke a different language. They would make friends with each other and speak English with each other (and sometimes teach each other their native languages outside of class). In these classes, you could work in a Russian or Bengali phrase now and then without risking anything. The kids were immersed in English and learning it.

We also had two bilingual programs, for Spanish- and Chinese-speaking students. They were bilingual in name only, for the most part; the students generally spoke and read in their native languages except when they came to ESL class.

This was a much tougher situation. Here, the students spoke their native languages at home, with their friends, and at school. The only time when they had to speak English was in ESL class. Yes, the bilingual classes in the other subjects included some English, but not a whole lot. (These bilingual programs, which have since been abandoned, had some wonderful aspects, but English was not one of them.)

In such situations, an “English only” rule in ESL class was essential. Without it, students would rely on their Spanish or Chinese, would speak it to each other, and would not push themselves to learn English.

I see nothing disrespectful about “English only” rules in an ESL class. I see no reason for confusion over the matter. Such rules should really be the default. There are certain exceptions, of course. If a student arrives in the middle of the year and doesn’t speak a word of English, then it makes sense to have another student explain things to him or her at the outset. But only for a little while.

It’s great to enjoy other people’s languages; it’s great to show appreciation of them. But in ESL class, the students should be learning English. A teacher may make a reference to another language when explaining a grammatical or idiomatic point (especially with older students). But it gets slippery if the students realize the teacher speaks their language, and the teacher starts answering their questions in their language. Unless the teacher is very clear about when and when not to depart from English, it’s best to stick to English across the board.

Filed Under: Education Tagged With: ,

The exaggerated power of test scores

May 19, 2011 By

Test scores should be information at a teacher’s disposal, not information used to dispose of teachers.

The New York State Board of Regents passed the new regulations, which allow scores on state standardized tests to account for up to 40 percent of a teacher’s evaluation. Several researchers expressed concern about this, before the vote, in a letter. At least two board members spoke up against this change, and three voted against it. Kathleen Cashin said that this would lead to even more reliance on test prep. Roger Tilles pointed out that the districts that can’t afford to develop local assessments will be forced to use state assessments for the full 40 percent of the evaluation.

We need tests, including standardized tests. As a teacher, I want to know promptly how my students did on a given test. (Often the results don’t come back until the following year.) I would like to look at the questions and my students’ answers, instead of relying on diagnostic reports that tell me that such-and-such a student needs to work on “finding the main idea.”

The tests are one way of verifying that students have learned what they are supposed to learn. But they cannot be the only way, or even close. In English language arts, the tests can be especially misleading, as they are generally rather weak in “content.” That is, they do not presume that students have read anything in particular. They test generic skills–sometimes accurately, sometimes not.

They are even less reliable as indicators of teachers’ performance. For reasons that have been brought up again and again, reasons given by scholars, teachers, policymakers, and others, test scores should not decide a teacher’s fate or override human judgment. There are simply too many unstable factors–the tests themselves, the students’ lives, conditions on the day of the test–that make the scores inaccurate indicators of what a teacher is accomplishing.

In an op-ed in the New York Daily News, Arthur Goldstein points out that students’ efforts are not uniform: “For example, how much television does a student watch? … If my students don’t know how to read, haven’t been in school for the past six years or refuse to put a mark on a piece of paper, is it my fault? If a kid was dragged to the U.S. against his will and simply won’t learn English, should I be penalized?” (Having taught ESL, I have seen these situations.)

Value-added formulas are just as problematic as test scores, if not more so. They control for all sorts of factors, but the various controls create their own problems and distortions. Value-added ratings can provide useful information about schools, over time. But in teacher evaluations and tenure decisions, they should be regarded carefully and critically. And there should be room to “unpack” them–to figure out what a teacher’s rating might have been under this or that different condition.

All of this has been said, many times. Of course, human judgment is also fallible. “Multiple measures” can also be misleading. Don’t get me started on portfolios–it is often the teacher, not the student, who puts time and effort into these portfolios, and they may not reflect what a student can do independently.

What, then, should constitute teacher evaluations? Well, as in government, I prefer a system of thoughtful checks and balances. Consider test scores, but don’t give them too much power. Consider the principal’s judgment, but don’t let that override all else. Consider student work, but look carefully at it–don’t just check off items on a checklist. Consider a teacher’s lesson plans, assignments, and contributions to the school. Yes, this comes down to “multiple measures,” but the point isn’t just that they are multiple. The point is that each one is regarded carefully.

When one measure (not to mention a flawed one) is given too much power, it is bad for schools through and through. It tells teachers (and, indirectly, students) that excercising one’s judgment isn’t that valuable after all.

Filed Under: Education, Testing Tagged With: , , , ,

Learning from Jane Austen: a “real-life” reading

May 19, 2011 By

Yesterday evening I went to the Yale Bookstore to listen to a reading by William Deresiewicz, author of A Jane Austen Education: How Six Novels Taught Me About Love, Friendship, and the Things That Really Matter. I had been looking forward to this for a few weeks. Before it began, I was thinking about how great it was to attend a “real-life” reading and how strange it was to be thinking this. I walked around the campus and returned to the library; I saw the author walking down the street with someone. I went to the bookstore and looked around for a while, then found a seat and sat.

An audience had assembled; one of the staff went to get a few more chairs. Deresiewicz talked about his book and read passages from it as he went along. The book begins when he’s 26 and a grad student, and goes up to the time when he’s 32 and (he said to us, drawing a laugh) “a grad student.” But that’s an important aspect of the book. It isn’t about his move upward in the world, into some prestigious position. He’s in the same place, in one sense, but in another sense he travels a great distance.

Initially uninterested in Jane Austen, even scornful of her work (which seems to him, like other works of the period, stilted and trivial), Deresiewicz finds himself reading her after all, because he has to for a seminar. And then, to his surprise, Austen shows him things he hasn’t wanted to see, or things he has only started to see. He realizes, when reading Emma and Pride and Prejudice, that he is supposed to be scornful of the characters and their banalities at first. That is precisely what Austen intends. When she shows Emma’s cruelty and Elizabeth Bennet’s error, the reader is confronted with his or her own error. In the case of Emma, the author learns that the trivial things are in fact what matters:

By talking over their little daily affairs—and not just talking them over, but talking them over and over, again and again (the same story in brief, then in full, the same stories in one house, then anotther)—the characters in Emma were doing nothing less than attaching themselves to life. They were weaving the web of community, one strand of conversation at a time. They were creating the world, in the process of talking about it.

In his book, Deresiewicz continues reading Austen, and one lesson after another comes to him from her work—slowly, through attentive reading and rereading. He tells about this as he tells about the novels, about Austen, about her contemporaries, and about his own life again. Each of these lessons, each of these careful readings, changes how he sees and lives his life—and this is, indeed, real life.

I was skeptical when I began reading his book. I had some mild scorn for the idea that you learn “life lessons” from literature—after all, literature is full of contradictions, and to take a “message” from it is to misread it. But that’s only partly true. We thirst for lessons when we read. We want to be made aware of our mistakes. We want characters we can recognize. This is nothing pat or flat—it changes form over time. My initial skepticism allowed me to enter the book more fully, the author himself was skeptical before reading Austen’s work. Just as the author’s skepticism breaks down over the course of the book, so did mine.

At the end of the reading, Deresiewicz opened the floor for questions. The exchange was lively, and the event concluded with several rounds of applause. But rather than describe the event any more, I will touch on one of the most interesting parts of the book, which pertains to education. He describes his professor and mentor, who taught the seminar in which Deresiewicz first read Austen. [Read more...]

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Is nonfiction more important than fiction?

May 18, 2011 By

I often hear rumors that the Common Core State Standards require English classes to devote more and more attention to “informational text” as students advance through the grades–so that, by grade 12, 70 percent of their reading will be informational text and 30 percent literary.

This is not so; the percentages are for all the subjects combined, not for English class alone. Yes, English classes are supposed to include more “literary nonfiction” than they have in the past, but this is not supposed to eclipse the study of fiction, poetry, and drama.

This is what the Common Core State Standards for ELA say (on page 5):

Fulfilling the Standards for 6–12 ELA requires much greater attention to a specific category of informational text—literary nonfiction—than has been traditional. Because the ELA classroom must focus on literature (stories, drama, and poetry) as well as literary nonfiction, a great deal of informational reading in grades 6–12 must take place in other classes if the NAEP assessment framework is to be matched instructionally. To measure students’ growth toward college and career readiness, assessments aligned with the standards should adhere to the distribution of texts across grades cited in the NAEP framework.

Ah, a sigh of relief. So I don’t have to stop teaching Aeschylus after all. (I am not currently teaching, let alone teaching Aeschylus, but if I were, I wouldn’t want to stop.)

Even so, I wonder whether such heavy emphasis on “informational text” is wise. By all means, students should read more primary and secondary sources in history class. They should learn to write research papers that integrate information from numerous sources. In science class, where possible, they should read articles on current research as well as select works on the history of science. But is there any reason why the percentage of informational texts should come to 70 percent? [Read more...]

Filed Under: Education

A return to “Death and Life”

May 17, 2011 By

I have been enjoying my recent return to Diane Ravitch’s latest book, The Death and Life of the Great American School System (Basic Books, 2010). I have read the book many, many times; I edited it and was research assistant during the final stages of revision. After dozens of readings, the book remains absorbing, invigorating, and beautiful.

As I read it this time, it occurs to me that the central error of Balanced Literacy is very similar to the error of implementing Balanced Literacy (or any other model) across a system. Ravitch’s book draws an implicit and compelling parallel between the two errors.

Balanced Literacy makes the mistake of putting the “strategy” at the center of instruction. Ravitch describes the approach in chapter 3:

Teachers are supposed to teach the prescribed strategies and procedures, and the students (alone or in groups) are expected to practice their reading strategies and refer to them by name. A student might say, for example, “I am visualizing,” “I am summarizing,” “I am making a text-to-self connection,” “I am making a prediction,” or “I am making an inference.”

The emphasis on strategies is misguided (in my opinion). Reading strategies, taught and applied generically, can distract from the text and distort its meaning. What’s more, one learns much more about literature from close reading of specific literature than from instruction in the strategies themselves. The strategy approach is supposed to apply to all students and texts, but each text should be approached on its own terms. Of course, patterns and general practices do emerge, but they come out of the careful reading and attentive listening.

So there’s the central error: taking a so-called strategy, which is ill-defined to begin with, and applying it to an array of situations, without carefully considering the specifics.

A similar error can be found in the very act of mandating Balanced Literacy across a district. Ravitch describes how Balanced Literacy migrated from District 2 in New York City to the entire school system of San Diego and then back to New York City as a whole. [Read more...]

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Putting group work in its place

May 16, 2011 By

My book, Republic of Noise: The Loss of Solitude in Schools and Culture, will be released by Rowman & Littlefield in November and is already available for pre-ordering. In the book, I discuss group work, the folly of the “big idea,” pitfalls of “mass personalization,” and more, with references to literature, philosophy, and mathematics.

It is unclear what the future of group work holds, but I hope that it will be given its proper place–that it will be used when it actually serves the lesson and not when it doesn’t.

The Common Core State Standards seem ambivalent over the matter. The English language arts standards state, for instance, that third-grade students will “engage effectively in a range of collaborative discussions (one-on-one, in groups, and teacher-led) with diverse partners on grade 3 topics and texts, building on others’ ideas and expressing their own clearly.” The emphasis here could be either on clarity of expression or on the range of collaborative discussions.

Group work has its place, but its place has been greatly exaggerated by proponents of various “workshop models,” Balanced Literacy, “21st century skills,” and so forth. People often forget that its quality depends on the contributions of its members. To contribute something substantial to a group, you have to do a great deal of work alone.

Working alone is not merely individualistic or competitive. It allows one to sift through thoughts, absorb information, commit information or literature to memory, think about it in different ways, try out ideas, slow down, speed up, and return to something one has learned or read before. For many, it is the happiest and most fruitful part of learning, along with the instruction itself.

When group work becomes a mainstay of instruction, it can limit the lesson and even the subject matter. The most common complaint about group work is that some students do much more work than others. But there are many more problems.

First, because students lack perspective on the subject, they are likely to disregard opinions that don’t make immediate sense to them. They may focus on those points of view that help them finish the task quickly. If someone in the group sees a problem with the entire premise, that person will likely be ignored.

Second (and related), because group work tends to focus on a task, the group members may not take time with questions that require time. They may take the shortest route to the goal, which for some topics and subjects is not the best. [Read more...]

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Kundera, Rhinoceros, and group work

May 15, 2011 By

I have often thought about the classroom scenes in Milan Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. There’s a scene where two American girls, Michelle and Gabrielle, present their report on Eugene Ionesco’s Rhinoceros. They are enrolled in a summer school course for foreigners in a small town on the Rivera. They do their work dutifully, writing down every word that the teacher says. They have concluded that Ionesco has the characters turn into rhinoceroses in order to create a “comic effect.”

So now they’re about to give their oral report, and they don cardboard rhinoceros masks for the occasion. They let out “short, shrill, breathy sounds”; the teacher, Madame Raphael, answers these sounds with her own version.

Now an Israeli girl named Sarah takes this opportunity to come up and kick both of them from behind. The class starts howling. The two girls start crying. Madame Raphael interprets their crying as laughter and decides that the prank was part of a plan. She, too, starts laughing; the girls, hearing her laughter, cry all the harder and begin writhing. Madame Raphael takes this writing for a dance. She takes their hands, and the three begin dancing in a circle. Then something strange happens. They begin to rise up into the air, higher and higher as they circle around. Now the ceiling yields to them, and they rise through it. The chapter concludes (in the translation of Michael Henry Heim, Penguin, 1981):

First their cardboard noses vanished, then only three pairs of shoes remained, and finally the shoes vanished as well, leaving the stupefied students with nothing but the brilliant, fading laughter of the three archangels from on high.

What is going on here? First of all, the girls miss the point of Rhinoceros, because they are inexperienced and have no one to guide them to a better understanding. No one challenges the idea that the play’s main purpose is to be funny. (It is indeed a very funny play, but it is also a scary allegory of group conformity.)

Missing the point of Rhinoceros, they unwittingly reproduce it. Madame Raphael, whose goal is to affirm whatever they do (and thus to bring them over to her own beliefs) misses the point as well. She takes their tears for laughter, laughter that coincides with her own. She starts up a circle dance with them–and this great success, the success of agreement and ascension, results in their vanishing in the upper air, with only the traces of laughter remaining (like the Cheshire Cat’s grin).

In the name of creativity, the two girls are trying to do exactly what the teacher wants. Both they and the teacher miss the point of Rhinoceros, and the teacher misinterprets what is going on in their presentation. All these misunderstandings result in the upward-spiraling circle dance, which isn’t too different from a world of rhinoceroses. The laughter of the angels and the stampede of hoofs have something in common.

What does this have to do with education? A lot, but the lessons are not direct. It points to some of the problems with group work and the problem of reading something for what one wants to see in it, not what’s there. Perhaps these problems are related: Michelle, Gabrielle, and Madame Raphael join hands and make a perfect world of something disturbing–by misinterpreting it entirely. They rise up into the air because they are not grounded. There is nowhere else for them to go. They become angels of unavowed error.

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Big role of test scores in New York teacher evaluations

May 14, 2011 By

Last year, the New York State Legislature passed a measure that allowed 20 percent of a teacher’s evaluation to be based on students’ scores on standardized state tests.

Now student test scores will account for as much as 40 percent of the evaluations, according to an article in today’s New York Times. This means they will count more than any other single measure. The new regulations are expected to be enacted on Monday by the state’s Board of Regents.

This change is likely due to pressure from Governor Andrew M. Cuomo, who, according to the New York Times, said that a high-quality evaluation system had to be in place before he could support Mayor Bloomberg’s push to end seniority protection in layoffs.

But is this a high-quality evaluation system? It gives a great deal of power to tests that we don’t even have yet (as they are being revised) and to a value-added formula that has turned up many eccentricities, to put it mildly.

It is especially dangerous as a means of determining who should and shouldn’t be laid off. Teachers will be compared with each other by means of measures that haven’t stood the test of time yet (and that leave much to be desired). Principals will have little power to go against value-added ratings, even if they are clearly wrong.

New York State is still reeling from the disclosure that its state tests had gotten easier over the years. It is in the midst of revising its assessments and adopting the Common Core State Standards. The outcome of all of this is uncertain. In the meantime, the value-added formula used in New York City has numerous problems. Andrew Gelman, professor of statistics and political science at Columbia, demonstrates that when teachers are graded on a curve in this manner, a few students (in a large class) doing a little better on a test can bring a teacher from the 7th to the 50th percentile. (See all the comments on his post–they are interesting.)

Why, at this uncertain juncture, would the governor choose to make state test scores such a large part of teacher evaluations? Why the push for something clearly flawed?

Seems not only unwise and reckless, but weird.

Update: A few points of clarification:

The 40 percent would apply to those districts within the state that chose to use state assessments for the local-assessment portion of the evaluation. This would require the approval of the union in the district. So, on the one hand, it’s likely that many districts would choose to use local assessments for the local-assessment portion. On the other, the possibility of using state assessments would always be open, and districts might be under considerable pressure to take that route.

In New York Magazine, Chris Smith interprets this as a bargaining chip for Bloomberg: maybe the UFT will agree to a larger role for state tests if Bloomberg agrees to reduce the number of layoffs. It seems an ominous proposition, as the layoffs are (perhaps) a one-time deal, whereas the regulations will likely be in place for a long time.

Filed Under: Education, Testing Tagged With: , , , ,

What the heck is curriculum? Null’s book offers insights

May 14, 2011 By

In a recent blog, Catherine Gewertz points out that those arguing about curriculum aren’t in agreement about what it acually is:

The Gates-Pearson work certainly isn’t the first entree into common-core curriculum development and won’t be the last, even as folks disagree on what the heck “curriculum” means. The field is getting increasingly crowded. Who is crowding it and what they’re creating are sure to be topics of interest and argument for a good long while.

Yes, indeed, when people argue about curriculum, it often seems they’re arguing about many concepts at the same time (some of them compatible, some not). Now there’s a new book that can help us sort out these concepts.

In his new book, Curriculum: From Theory to Practice (Rowman & Littlefield, 2011), Wesley Null considers five traditions of curriculum: systematic curriculum, existentialist curriculum, radical curriculum, pragmatic curriculum, and deliberative curriculum. If they don’t sound familiar at the outset, they will as you start reading. I had the honor of reading the book at the manuscript stage, and I found it illuminating and enjoyable.

Null looks at each of these traditions in terms of their approach to the five “commonplaces” as defined by Joseph Schwab: teachers, learners, subject matter, context, and curriculum making. A tradition may emphasize one commonplace over another, but all of them are present.

Null argues that curriculum is an ethical and philosophical matter and that it is found at the center of education debates, even those that seem to skirt curriculum. He writes in the introduction: [Read more...]

Filed Under: Education Tagged With: ,
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