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A brand-new crossroads in education

March 23, 2013 by

According to Ken Kay (former president of the Partnership for 21st Century Skills) and Bob Lenz, we face a crossroads with the implementation of the Common Core. We could focus on mapping the standards to curricula, or we could use the standards to transform teaching and learning. The authors cheer for the latter.

The common core can and should serve as a unique transformational opportunity for our nation’s teaching and learning systems. Educators who leverage these standards to teach and assess such competencies as critical thinking, problem-solving, and collaboration will lead the way to postsecondary and career success for more students.

They associate the second path with the 21st century and its attendant skills. Other details are unclear–for instance, what books they think would be good to read in literature and history classes.

But vagueness may be a 21st century skill in itself, if a satirical piece by Arnold Arons tells truth:

REPORTER: Dr. Platitudeford, how do you and your colleagues characterize the salient features of the instructional methods you advocate?

DR. PLATITUDEFORD: They are innovative, individualized, inquiry-oriented, performance-based, experiental, and unstructured.

Oops–this piece, “Educational Practices–An Expert View of Human Trends,” was published in 1973. (Hat tip to Richard Hake for bringing it to my attention a few months ago.)

Maybe we’re at a crossroads, but the two roads aren’t what Kay and Lenz suppose. Who knows what they are until we’ve traveled them a bit? There’s a chance, though, that they might be the well-worn roads of clarity and obfuscation.

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Study art for art’s sake

December 5, 2012 by

Why study art? It’s not a way to boost math and reading scores, much less to prepare students for the 21st century workforce, writes Jay Greene. We’re trying to educate civilized human beings.

As he researches the effect of field trips to art museums on student learning, Greene encounters arts educators eager to climb on the economic utility bandwagon. Afraid art will be seen as a frill, they feel compelled to argue it’s a form of job training.

Most of what students learn in math and reading also has no economic utility.  Relatively few students will ever use algebra, let alone calculus, in their jobs.  Even fewer students will use literature or poetry in the workplace. When will students “use” history?  We don’t teach those subjects because they provide work-related skills. We teach algebra, calculus, literature, poetry, and history for the same reasons we should be teaching art — they help us understand ourselves, our cultural heritage, and the world we live in.  We teach them because they are beautiful and important in and of themselves.

Policymakers, pundits and others suffering from PLDD (petty little dictator disorder) use economic utility to club their critics into submission, Greene writes. Even math and reading must prove to be economically useful.

You have folks like Tony Wagner and the 21st Century Skills movement suggesting that we cut algebra because students won’t ‘need’ it.  Instead, students would be better off learning communication skills, like how to prepare an awesome Power Point (TM).  And you have Common Core cutting literature in English in favor of “informational texts.”

If the purpose of school is workforce prep, then let’s do away with it and set up apprenticeships, Greene writes.

His study asked 4,000 students to write short essays in response to Bo Bartlett’s painting, The Box.  ”It may be harder to code and analyze essays about paintings than to run another value-added regression on the math and reading scores that the centralized authorities have collected for us, but that doesn’t mean it’s any less important.”

2002-the-box-sm.jpg

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Real-world problems without much math

June 11, 2012 by

The new math skills map produced by the Partnership for 21st Century Skills (P21) does not help teachers teach Common Core State Standards (CCSS), writes Ben McCarty, a University of Memphis math professor, on the Common Core blog.  McCarty, who’s taught mathematics to first, second, and third-graders and to pre-service elementary teachers, says P21′s exercises are ill-defined, imprecise and not aligned with content.


Art from Bigstock.

The 8th grade example on page 12, for instance, engages students in a wonderful discussion about the health content of a typical fast food meal, but mathematically, students are only computing percentages and comparing them to daily values. That’s it. This activity is well below the 8th grade content standards in the CCSS.

Worse still, the 4th grade example on page 21 has students tallying the number of various types of media messages they are exposed to on a daily basis. Based on the description of the activity, no analysis is done with the data beyond basic counting–a Preschool/Kindergarten skill.

. . . Finally, the 12th grade example on page 23 has students collect and display data on developing countries, as well as build a web page to display the information.  The students don’t generate the data.  They don’t do calculations with the data.  They merely read about a poor country, and publish data on it.

“Simple arithmetic problems and routine data collection assignments” will not “prepare students for professional careers as engineers, doctors, software developers, and the like,” McCarty writes.

 

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Educational insanity

November 6, 2011 by

After 20 years of education reform focused on reading and math — and billions of dollars in spending — NAEP results show little improvement, writes Lynne Munson of Common Core. It’s educational insanity, she writes, using Einstein’s definition: “Doing the same thing over and over but expecting different results.”

We’ve tried to bring market pressures to bear through charters and choice.  We’ve attempted to set high standards and given high-stakes tests.  We’ve experimented with shrinking school and class sizes. We’ve focused on “21st century skills” and used the latest technologies. We’ve collected and analyzed data on an unprecedented scale.  We’ve experimented with a seemingly endless array of “strategies” for teaching reading and math and have tried to “differentiate” for every imaginable “type” of student. And we’ve paid dearly in tax dollars and in other ways for each of these “reforms.”

Interestingly, all of these reforms have one thing in common (aside from their failure to improve student performance except in isolated instances):  None deals directly with the content of what we teach our students.

Teaching knowledge “of things like standard algorithms, poetry, America’s past, foreign languages, great painters, chemistry, our form of government, and much more” works for all students, Munson writes, citing International Baccalaureate, Latin schools curricula and Core Knowledge. Ignoring curricular content is nuts.

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Educators can’t predict 21st-century skills

September 16, 2011 by

“Educators make bad prognosticators,”  writes Christopher L. Doyle, who teaches history and contemporary issues, in an Education Week commentary.

. . .  when school “reformers” try to reorder education based on “21st-century skills,” or what some describe as “teaching tomorrow’s skills to today’s students,” they show not only lack of prescience, but also ignorance of the past.

History suggests that public schools don’t know what skills are needed for the future, Doyle writes. A century ago, educators, business leaders, and politicians wanted to reform education.

 They stressed “efficiency” (today called “efficacy”), competition and nationalism (today “competing in a global economy”), and following directions (today “respect” and sometimes “collaboration”).

It was great preparation for World War I.

Doyle’s agenda is to teach history well to “high school students whose intellectual world is increasingly fragmented into sound bites, PowerPoint bullets, text messages, Facebook posts, and ‘tweets,’ and who appear rapidly to be losing the capacity for lengthy reading, synthesis of thought, and critical analysis.”

My agenda also encompasses linking the past to current events such as climate change, economic and debt crises, and wars on terrorism. I aspire additionally to teach empathy and ethics, qualities that I believe the discipline of history is uniquely capable of developing. And I seek to improve my students’ skill at writing while sharpening their capacity for critical thought.

It may not be “21st century,” Doyle writes, but “it appears far more realistic and hopeful to stick to my subject than to chart a suspect course toward a badly drawn image of the future.”

 

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Teaching skills without content

February 26, 2011 by

“Emma Bryant” (a pseudonym) teaches at a New Tech public high school — one of 62 in 14 states — devoted to “21st-century skills.” Knowledge? Not so much, she writes on the Common Core blog.

We practice project based learning, utilize the latest technology, and hold to a mission of helping our students acquire “21st century skills.”

Innovation, collaboration and critical thinking are stressed, leaving little time for literature, history, poetry, music or theater.  The theory is that “most content, after all, can be Googled.”

Roughly once a month we present students with a new project which must result in a “product.” According to our model the more “real world” the product, the better. Real world, meaning the product mirrors what could reasonably be demanded in a corporate setting — from a redesigned company logo and slogan to a promotional video or a press release.

Students work in small teams to complete projects, with each team member receiving the same grade at the end. After all, it’s not about what individual students learn but the final product. Students are assessed on a handful of learning outcomes — collaboration, communication, innovation, work ethic, technological literacy, information literacy and content. Content usually makes up between 15 and 30 percent of a student’s grade.

In a 21st century classroom, “content is a shopping list of rubric indicators to be applied to the product.”

For example, students might work a quote from a short story into a reworded company slogan. Or perhaps they might work with Photoshop to create a company logo depicting an event from European history. They might write a press release in the style of a founding American document or create a user’s manual for a product using a particular rhetorical device mentioned in our state’s English Language Arts standards.

Teachers don’t teach content directly. Students are supposed to learn in teams or on their own with little or no direction from the teacher.

Dialogue, questions, critical thinking, and debate surrounding content are low on the list of things you will see in a 21st century classroom. And so students end up with convoluted ideas about history, a cursory understanding of and appreciation for literature, and a shaky foundation in math and science.

Also see Critical Thinking: More Than Words? in Ed Week’s Leader Talk.

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Yoga, fireplaces, organic food — and failure

January 24, 2011 by

Courtney Sale Ross, the very wealthy widow of a Time Warner CEO, put $8 million of her own and her friends’ money into Ross Global Academy, a New York City charter school that promised “an innovative curriculum that would spiral through different historical eras, small class sizes, yoga, Mandarin lessons, an extended day and organic food prepared by a chef,” reports the New York Times. After five years, the city plans to close the K-8 school for low performance. Ross Global lost its appeal last week, though Ross pledges to fight on.

Ross had started a successful private school in East Hampton. She recruited the dean of New York University’s education school for the board of Ross Global.  But the East Village charter, which primarily enrolls black and Hispanic children, went through six principals in five years and lost more than 40 percent of teachers each year. Many parents pulled out their children, often complaining of poor discipline.

Much of the extra funding seems to have gone for decor.

Mrs. Ross and her backers spent $3 million making the school look “like an Ikea showroom, with working gas fireplaces, lounges and daybeds in the hallways,” said Mariama Sanoh, 32, who had three children at the school. But in the classrooms, there was often chaos.

“The middle school was extremely violent,” said Ms. Sanoh, who has since withdrawn her children. “There were students cursing, breaking chairs, out of control, and there was no strong disciplinary action. Children just knew they would be suspended for several days and come back.”

Charles Hosang, 35, withdrew his third-grade son after three years because of a “very bad bullying problem.”

In a 2006 interview, Ross told the New York Times about her desire to provide “a 21st century skill set, interdisciplinary, integrated thinking, and innovative leadership” to city children, educating “the whole child for the whole world.” If she’d hired a competent principal and prioritized spending, it might have worked.

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In search of education’s ‘sweet spot’

October 5, 2010 by

Are education professionals engaged in soul-searching or navel-gazing? National Journal Online’s Education Experts looks for a “sweet spot” of “common knowledge that facilitates consensus but also allows for honest differences of opinion.”

1) Washington insiders consistently underestimate current spending on K-12 education and overestimate average class size, according to a National Journal education poll conducted in association with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

2) A Fordham Institute survey found mixed responses from professors of education, with 83 percent saying it is “absolutely essential” for public school teachers to teach 21st-century skills but only 36 percent saying the same about teaching math facts.

If only 36 percent of education professors think it’s essential to teach math facts, then there’s no sweet spot, writes Bob Schaffer, a former congressman who chairs the Colorado Board of Education.

In five years, today’s 21st-century skills – whatever that really means – will already be obsolete. Math facts won’t.

Students used to be taught part of America’s greatness was its phenomenal ability to accommodate varied approaches to such fundamental and profound questions as, for example, what children should be taught. That was back in the embryonic dark ages of public education before Washington insiders knew best how to teach young citizens.

In those days, the only laboratories of democracy were referred to as “These United States.” Today, these pesky states – conceived by the 18th-century minds of men like Jefferson, Madison and Franklin – are treated as mere impediments to the kind of advanced learning necessary to sustain a great Republic.

Watch out for either/or questions, writes Steve Peha of Teaching That Makes Sense. “And” is often the right answer.

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Education profs don’t teach tradecraft

September 29, 2010 by

Education professors see themselves as “philosophers and agents of social change, not as master craftsmen sharing tradecraft,” concludes a Fordham study, Cracks in the Ivory Tower,  released today.

More than eighty percent of the nation’s education professors think it’s “absolutely essential” that teachers be lifelong learners, but far fewer believe it’s as necessary for teachers to understand how to work with state standards, tests, and accountability systems (24 percent), maintain discipline and order in the classroom (37 percent), or work in high?need schools (39 percent).

“Too many education professors still cling to outmoded, romantic views of what education is about and what teachers need,” said Fordham Institute President Chester E. Finn, Jr.

Education professors, for example, are far likelier to believe that the proper role of a teacher is to be a “facilitator of learning” (84 percent) not a “conveyor of knowledge” (11 percent). When asked to choose between two competing philosophies of teacher education, 68 percent believe they should be preparing tomorrow’s class instructors to be “change agents” versus 26 percent who believe they should prepare teachers to “work effectively within the realities of today’s public schools.” And while 83 percent of professors believe it’s “absolutely essential” to teach 21st Century skills, just 36 percent say that about teaching math facts and 44 percent about teaching phonics in the younger grades.

However, compared to the 1997 survey, professors are less likely to say struggling with questions is more important than finding the right answer. “Only 37 percent of today’s professors believe that early use of calculators will improve children’s problem?solving skills, a 20 percent drop from 1997.”

While most education professors support pay increases for teachers who work in challenging schools, they strongly reject linking teacher pay to student test scores. Professors split on measuring teacher effectiveness by analyzing students’ academic gains.

Twelve percent of professors surveyed are reformers who oppose the current teacher education system, while 13 percent are defenders of the system, the study concluded.

Teach for America and similar programs are a good idea, according to 63 percent of education professors.

Seventy?eight percent support a core curriculum with knowledge
and skill standards specified at each grade level, but only 49 percent believe state governments should adopt the “same set of standards and give the same tests in math, science, and reading nationwide.”

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3 Rs, 4 Cs and the arts

July 16, 2010 by

P21 (Partnership for 21st Century Skills) has released a skills map for the arts, which shows “how the three Rs and four Cs (critical thinking and problem solving, communication, collaboration and creativity and innovation) can be fused within arts curriculum.”

. . . at the fourth-grade level, students could be asked to perform and record the same story three times; once with words only, once with physical movement only, and once with both. They then review the different performances and reflect in group discussions and individual writing about how the presentations and story changed and whether or not one version communicated more effectively than another and why.

At the eighth-grade level, students could be asked to examine how composers, artists, choreographers, and playwrights use the arts to communicate particular ideas, themes, or concepts and to evoke particular emotions or feelings. They then would develop multimedia presentations illustrating how such communication occurs through each of the arts disciplines.

In twelfth grade, students could be asked to view and discuss single or multiple works of art created by themselves and their peers. Students would be required to use mutually agreed upon criteria (elements and principals of art and design, subject matter, technique, style, etc.) to describe, analyze, interpret, and make informed judgments about the art works.

This seems a little 22nd century to me.

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