My favourite part is a short but vivid description of a teacher who breaks her class apart for math instruction:

The first group to approach her half-moon table sat down with small whiteboards and markers. The five students drew pictures to help them think through the subtraction problem in front of them. Using squares, lines and dots to represent hundreds, tens and ones, they solved the problem by crossing out the symbols that corresponded to the number.

Rather than teaching formulas, the curriculum emphasizes lessons on place value and number sense so students can learn why formulas work. Students often use blocks, number lines and charts to solve problems and talk through the answers.

The second group, a little more advanced, practiced a different strategy. They broke each number into hundreds, tens and ones and solved it in three steps.

The third group moved on to practicing multiplication tables. Carter also squeezed in a short lesson from the third-grade curriculum on how to round numbers up or down.

I can’t help feeling that what’s going on is just a less efficient, less effective form of tracking.  Bottom line: it’s still separate classes — they’re just in the same room with the same teacher.  Galway Elementary, where this is taking place, has seven second grade teachers.  So instead of having seven different teachers each teaching a separate math class (imagine seven different levels of differentiated instruction!) and giving those tightly defined groups their full attention, what we apparently have is seven different teachers each teaching just three separate math classes, with each class necessarily getting one third of a teacher’s attention.

In what universe is the latter considered the superior option?

The real issue here (of course) is race, which does indeed get passing mention:

The shift in math instruction in Maryland’s largest school system is the latest example of a move toward more mixed-ability classes that is mirrored in Fairfax and Arlington counties and across the country, with greater inclusion of special education students, more open enrollment in Advanced Placement classes and the elimination of some honors-level courses.

It’s all part of an effort to lift the performance of all students and overturn a legacy of sorting children into perceived ability tracks that often divided along racial lines.

That last sentence is a masterpiece of misleading rhetoric — both halves of it.  Sure, it’s an effort to “lift the performance of all students”, but from where to where are we “lifting” performance?  One might think that student performance will improve without schooling at all, as their brain matures.  It may not improve very much, but it will improve.  So what, exactly, is the goal here?  It doesn’t seem to be maximizing every student’s performance, because if it were you’d split the classes up so that every teacher was giving a group of students their full, undivided attention working through math that falls directly in their ZPD (or which is appropriate to their ability, if you disdain technical jargon).

Maybe what we want is to lift everyone to some level of parity… but as nice as that might sound to some people, it’s simply not going to happen; the variety of human capability is simply too great.  I ask again, to where shall we “lift the performance of all students”?  There’s no real answer, of course, because it’s not a real goal: it’s a political slogan.

It’s also impressive how the reporter sneaked the word “perceived” into there, qualifying the terrible legacy of tracking, as if to imply that in that vague, mistaken past of ours, we were filled with folly and illusion to think that some kids were smarter than others.  Yet I wonder if Michael Alison Chandler (the reporter) thinks that Elise Carter — the heroine of his story — is breaking her class up, if she is “differentiating”,  based on “perceived” mathematical skill, or whether she’s actually latching on to real distinctions between her students.  Bets, anyone?

Of course the teacher is recognizing real ability differences.  No one (except perhaps the most extreme sort of communist conformists) really cares if we track students by ability, at least within subjects.  After all, even the people who seem to be against it seem to be for it, as the article demonstrates; and it’s intuitively the best way to teach a subject.

But people care tremendously what we call it, and what it looks like from a distance.

Chicago employers who hire City Colleges graduates will get the first month of salary free.

Out here in California, Students Matter has launched a lawsuit to strip away many of the institutional protections that teachers possess.  Howard Blume tells us all about it:

A Bay Area nonprofit backed partly by groups known for battling teachers unions has filed a lawsuit seeking to overturn five California laws that, they say, make it too difficult to dismiss ineffective teachers.

The suit, filed on behalf of eight students, takes aim at California laws that govern teacher tenure rules, seniority protections and the teacher dismissal process.

* * * *

The group behind the legal action is the newly formed Students Matter. The founder is Silicon Valley entrepreneur David F. Welch and the group’s funders include the foundation of L.A. philanthropist Eli Broad.

The suit contends that teachers can earn tenure protections too quickly — in two years — well before their fitness for long-term employment can be determined. The suit also seeks to invalidate the practice of first laying off less experienced teachers during a budget crisis, rather than keeping the best teachers. And it takes aim at a dismissal process that, it alleges, is too costly, too lengthy and typically results in ineffective teachers holding on to jobs.

I’m uneasy about litigating what are essentially public policy questions in courts.  It’s not really what they’re designed to do, and they generally don’t do a good job of it.  (See, e.g., the consent decree for San Francisco public schools.)  But at the same time, sometimes it’s the only option left to people.  It’s difficult, if not impossible, to push too heavily against public employee union interests here in California.

Blume does an able job in his article tying this lawsuit to the overarching issue of teacher quality, and implying (correctly, I think) that this is part of a larger pushback against unions in general.

It’s not clear to me that these sorts of protections are going to help with teacher quality, though.  Procedural changes will only get you marginal improvements here and there.  If teacher quality is a serious concern (and I’m not 100% sure it’s a problem, though it seems plausible) then what you should really do is address the substantive issue: get a different sort of teacher ex ante.  To use an analogy: if the cars you build are not loved by the consumer, you have two options: increase your quality control, or design a better product.  And the unions wouldn’t have as much political leverage if you tried to tighten up teacher qualifications — indeed, they might support it so long as you grandfathered in all the existing teachers.  I’ve never met a union that didn’t like barriers to entry.

“Pay[ing] attention moment-to-moment” is a renunciation of the critical temper. The pure present is for infants and mystics. The serenity that Meng teaches is a go-along, get-along quietism, an organizational submissiveness—a technique designed to strip the individual of any internal obstacle to the ungrumbling execution of his tasks. … Meng and his authorities—“happiness strategists,” “leadership scholars”–insist upon the “non-judgmental” character of the mindful ideal. This is one of the great American mistakes. Instead of teaching people how to judge, we teach them not to judge—but there is no circumstance or context in which the absence of judgment is not a judgment, specifically one of accommodation and acquiescence.”

In other words, mindfulness of this sort amounts to abdication of mind. Read the whole piece.

I see this play out in school curricula and policy: ”Instead of teaching people how to judge, we teach them not to judge.” We give judging a bad name, equating it with knee-jerk reaction. At its best, judgment is anything but knee-jerk. In fact, if we do not know how to exercise judgment well, we are all the more susceptible to impulsive reactions, both our own and other people’s.

I have attended PDs where everyone was supposed to create quick “art,” put it up on the wall, and then take a “gallery walk” around the room, writing ”nonjudgmental, observational” comments on Post-its and placing them upon the rushed piece in question. Nonjudgment of this sort should have its own circle or pouch in the Inferno. My guess is that Dante would have included it in Malebolge, the Eighth Circle, which has ten pouches for ordinary fraud.

The most interesting thing about the report is its taxonomy of plagiarism — ten tidy little categories that neatly lay out various ways that students academically misbehave.  We’re told which are the most common and which are of the most concern to educators.

The conclusion of the report is a little underwhelming — teachers should be clear about their academic standards — but the taxonomy is a neat way of thinking about the issue.

It’s not the only way, of course, and it’s a little cartoonish, but if you’re not going to sit down and do semi-rigorous conceptual analysis of academic dishonesty, it’s a great place to start.

Within the field of education, Ed.D. programs had for a long time been assumed to be inferior to Ph.D. programs, and only marginally useful to the improvement of educational practice, policy, and administration. That is, until Vanderbilt University, the University of Southern California, Harvard University, and a few other institutions revamped their doctor in education, or Ed.D., programs within the past decade (with Harvard creating an Ed.L.D. in educational leadership), emphasizing practice over scholarship and school-based improvement over university-level teaching.

And all was well with the world. Until…

Just recently, however, the Harvard Graduate School of Education, home to one of the most influential Doctor of Education programs in the nation, was granted permission by the university to offer its first Ph.D.; further, its Ed.D. will eventually be eliminated. For many decades, the university did not see the field of education as worthy of the Doctor of Philosophy degree. Times have changed, of course; the Ph.D. appears to look better to Harvard applicants, and the university has recognized the need for and the interdisciplinary nature of educational research.

The question to be asked, then, is supposedly this:

What impact does the elimination of a practice-related doctoral degree have on the prospects of educational professionalism?

Purinton seems worried that education’s professionalism will suffer as its primary doctoral-level degree becomes more removed from applied practice, that the more practical sorts of degrees (such as the Ed.D.) are part of a structure that generates a sort of working professional knowledge. I suspect that this worry might be misplaced, in part because of the structure of education in this country, and in part because of more philosophic considerations.

Purinton is aware that the Ed.D. is of somewhat questionable utility, at least compared to something like the M.D. and the J.D. The difference, of course, is that the J.D. and the M.D. are, in addition to being practical doctorates, baselines for the professions. There are para-professionals, of course — nurses, paralegals, legal secretaries — whose work and expertise help create the totality of valuable professional service; but the basic degree which all professionals have is the doctorate-level degree, backed up by a (usually) rigorous examination process.

That model simply does not exist for teachers — at all. Nor is there any chance of it existing any time soon. The basic teaching degree is the bachelor’s, with a one-year credential tacked on that usually requires very little in the way of either academic achievement or practical expertise. The examinations that teachers in, say, California have to take are either entirely optional (e.g., the subject-specific CSETs which are often bypassed with much, much easier coursework) or a bit of a joke (e.g. the CBEST, which is essentially an 8th grade skills exam).

Let’s assume that the Ed.D. could be improved to the level of something approaching the M.D. or the J.D. — that it can be structured to reflect a sort of applicable, valuable professional expertise. In such a model, teachers are, essentially, the paraprofessionals of the education world, not the professionals.

In a professional model, when you go to get professional services, you are serviced by the professional. The nurse might draw your blood, perform tests, and perform other vital task in the delivery of services, but the diagnosis and prescription for cure is in the hands of the professional. Your will might be physically drafted by a paralegal, but (assuming you’re not scammed) it will be reviewed and approved by your attorney.

There aren’t enough Ed.D.’s right now to make this a viable model.

The disjunction between the education model and the professional model probably won’t be fixed by simply requiring all full-time teachers to get Ed.D.s. That would likely result in one of two problems: either (1) the degree would be devalued even further to ensure a viable workforce (and its status is already precarious as it is); or (2) the number of actually qualified teachers would be reduced so greatly as to make operating the nation’s schools impossible. We don’t get our institutions by accident: as we try to educate the whole of our populace (something that’s never been tried before in human history) we need a LOT of teachers. The institutions we have exist because they are fitting that need.

Even if these two unfortunate horns of the structural dilemma could be avoided — by increasing resources, changing conditions, or some other means — it’s not really clear, though, that education is the sort of field that is amenable to the same sort of professionalization as law and medicine. (Let me caveat: I’m not arguing that education isn’t that sort of field — I happen to think it is when approached properly; I’m just pointing out that it’s not clear.)

Medicine and Law are fields that lend themselves to obviously right and wrong practice. The goal in medicine is the health of a very specific sort of biological system with its own laws, rules, and regular structuers. And the law is a very specific, more or less settled body of knowledge. There is a science to medicine, and — although it’s a little more fluid — a science to law as well.

Education generally, and teaching specifically, may not have that sort of objective foundation, not because education’s ends are harder to know (though they are that) but because education’s ends may not be stable the way the ends of medicine and law are.

Perhaps if we artificially limited the goals of education to the mere transmission of a body of knowledge (let’s call it the “Core Curriculum” for now), measured by performance on a test, we might be able to construct a model where there is a firm, certain “best practice” for ensuring transmission and retention of that knowledge.

But a LOT of people — myself included — think that this is too limited a view of the role of education. I’m not saying that we should go the whole Plato, but there is a role in defining the ends of education for things like human flourishing, social communitarianism, practical excellence, and so forth, which do not lend themselves to certainty and perfection. There are many ways to flourish, many ways to exercise one’s vital powers, and many ways to function in a society.

There are not many ways to remove a spleen. (Well, there probably are many methods, but the end is still the removal of the spleen.)

So I worry that the Ed.D. may be a practical doctorate in search of a mythical subject matter, and that it might not matter whether or not it’s kept around as a marker of or tool for developing professionalism.

So maybe — just maybe — it doesn’t matter whether colleges scrap it or not.

Also on Community College Spotlight: Texas community colleges have adopted a radical redesign of remedial math.

The Danielson Framework (created by Charlotte Danielson, an education policy adviser and consultant) is now the standard teacher evaluation rubric in New York and many other states and districts. It will be used with  a point scale, Danielson’s discomfort notwithstanding. (She told Peter DeWitt in an interview, “In general, I don’t like numbers of any kind. Teaching is enormously complex work and it is very hard to just reduce it to a number of any kind. However, it’s important to capture, in a short-hand manner, the relative skills of different teachers, so I suppose numbers or ratings of some kind – are inevitable.”)

As reading material, the Framework generally preens my feathers instead of ruffling them (though the two are not necessarily at odds). It consists of 22 components, which are distributed across four domains: Planning and Preparation, Classroom Environment, Instruction, and Professional Responsibilities. The explanatory text fills in some of the subtleties and caveats.  As a rubric, though, it affects not my feathers but my gut; some of its key premises seem shaky at best. For instance, it assumes that student “engagement” is essential to learning and that students manifest such engagement overtly through initiative and leadership. The first part makes sense; how can you learn unless you put some effort into it? It is the second part that leaves me uneasy.

Let us consider the Framework’s third domain, “Instruction,” and the domain’s third component, “Engaging Students in Learning.” In order for a teacher to attain the highest rank, “Distinguished,” for this component, most of the following must hold true (emphases added):

All students are actively engaged in the activities and assignments in their exploration of content. Students initiate or adapt activities and projects to enhance their understanding.

Instructional groups are productive and fully appropriate to the students or to the instructional purposes of the lesson. Students take the initiative to influence the formation or adjustment of instructional groups.

Instructional materials and resources are suitable to the instructional purposes and engage students mentally. Students initiate the choice, adaptation, or creation of materials to enhance their learning.

The lesson’s structure is highly coherent, allowing for reflection and closure. Pacing of the lesson is appropriate for all students.

Why does Danielson equate the engaged student with one who takes overt initiative? This equation does not necessarily hold. You can have a geometry class where the students do their homework, think about their homework, come in with questions, pay attention to the lesson, and participate in class discussion. Is there any reason why, on top of this, a student should initiate and adapt classroom activities? Sure, a student might say, “Hey! Let’s have a school event on geometry in our daily lives!” But such an initiative is in no way superior to pondering a proof that has been assigned.

What about grouping? I am wary of having students regulate their own grouping, except in extraordinary circumstances. For one thing, it’s a setup for ostracism and social chatter; for another, students rarely have adequate perspective on the lesson or unit. Of course, if a student is unhappy with a given grouping, he or she should be at liberty to discuss this with the teacher. But should a teacher receive fewer points because his first-graders are not selecting their own groups, or because her orchestra members do not choose where to sit? I don’t think so.

Let’s consider, finally, the issue of choosing materials. There is certainly a place for this: for instance, when students choose essay topics and conduct research on their own. But is there any reason why students should choose daily materials in, say, an introductory U.S. history course? They are just starting to get their bearings in the subject. The teacher (or school) should select a good textbook and supplement it with primary and secondary sources. She might also direct them to online resources: photographs, recordings, manuscripts, and so on. Some assignments should involve a degree of choice. But overall, there is no shame in guiding the students through the subject and selecting materials for them. It allows them to focus on what they are learning.

What’s especially troubling is the Framework’s implicit preference for the overt “Hey! Let’s start a club! Let’s make a bulletin board display!” form of engagement. Does engagement always take the form of initiating projects, adjusting one’s groupings, or selecting material? Can’t it also take the form of learning what’s given to you, turning it this way and that in your mind, and coming up with observations and questions? Given the point scale system, it appears likely that fine teachers with dedicated students will receive point deductions because there’s no evidence that the students are taking charge. A shame.