REVIEW: De-Testing and De-Grading Schools, Bower and Thomas

December 13, 2013 plthomasedd 1 Comment

Reviewed by J. Spencer Clark, Utah State University, which concludes:

The purpose of this book was to offer a map of the high-stakes accountability and standardization landscape, and more importantly to provide ways to navigate this landscape in positive ways. Bower and Thomas are successful in this regard and have provided a powerful critique that equally identifies powerful alternatives to high-stakes accountability. Overall, this is a fresh look at how to meld the theories behind de-grading and de-testing schools with actual classroom practice. This book could be a useful tool for instructors of pre-service methods and assessment courses, and possibly educational foundations courses at all levels, as it provides both an analysis of key aspects of a failing system of accountability and possible alternatives to it.

Bower, J., & Thomas, P. L. (2013). De-testing and de-grading schools: Authentic alternatives to accountability and standardization. New York, NY: Peter Lang USA.

Testing

GUEST POST: Continu—what? Sara Newell

December 13, 2013 plthomasedd 3 Comments

Continu—what?

Sara Newell

How do you derive meaning from a number? Should a parent or student respond differently to a 97% than to a 99%? What about a 75%? How do you know what number to assign to a student created product you’ve never seen before? As a 5^th grade teacher at the Charles Townes Center for highly gifted students in grades 3-8, I felt these questions were a constant thorn in my side.

My students qualified for invitation to the center in Greenville, South Carolina based on scores in the top percentile on nationally normed tests. The current, numerical grading system has always presented quite a challenge to me as a public school classroom teacher—how do I push my students to strive for excellence without encouraging the crippling effects of perfectionism? In giving students and parents a true measure of learning, personal achievement, and goal-setting, the numerical grading system always seemed to me ineffective at best. Since I began teaching gifted students, I have been in a constant struggle to find a more effective way to provide accurate feedback about their current performance while motivating them to continue to give their best effort on whatever challenges are presented next.

The assessment issues faced in our school were exaggerated versions of the problems caused by the numerical grading system in schools across the country. The nature of our students simply intensifies the problem. For example, the vast majority of my students can ace a grade-level multiple-choice test before I even engage in the first lesson. Should they just receive “A’s”? Is that what they earned? And, if I – instead – increased the depth and complexity of my instruction to provide the appropriate intellectual challenge and a student then only mastered 92% of that material—is it “fair” to assign a less than stellar grade?

This issue becomes even more important as students begin to move into high-school level courses. How does a 92 affect their GPA when they are enrolled in high-school and honors courses beginning in 7^th grade? Should they be scored less than their peers who attend mainstream schools? Teachers of gifted (and all) students face these types of problems again and again as they are asked to differentiate to meet the needs of diverse learners. How does a teacher maintain some sort of equity and still challenge students appropriately? Some schools have attempted to rectify this disparity by offering higher grade points for honors or AP classes. This does not remedy the problem—it simply magnifies the spectrum of an inaccurate ruler and introduces an additional disadvantage for college applicants whose schools do not offer this option. The issue of quality feedback and appropriate challenge remains.

For a while, I thought the solution to the problem was that I needed to design better rubrics. If I could just break assignments down into more concrete sections, the students would see what they needed to do and would be able to demonstrate mastery in a way that provided equal access to all while challenging students appropriately. (And I could still put a number on it and feel good about it.) Unfortunately, there were still roadblocks.

In a subject-integrated inquiry-based classroom, how do you quantify “delightful,” “sophisticated,” “clever” and all of the other descriptors that address the work of students who clearly went above and beyond the scope of the assignment? The scale model in gingerbread of the Metropolitan Museum of Art or the original musical composition in response to a Langston Hughes poem received a 100% that was “worth” exactly the same amount as the student who ploddingly met the minimum requirement for each element. So, the rubric was a start, but it still lacked the depth I was seeking to truly communicate effectively with my students (not-to-mention their parents) about the quality of their work. Truly authentic assessment with feedback that can guide students into becoming independent learners still seemed out of reach.

Then, our principal brought back the idea of using continua from a school visit in Seattle. These reading, writing and math continua are based on the work of Bonnie Campbell Hill and provide a system to analyze student skill and progress over many years. The lists are simple and concise. They do not include every possible state standard but instead provide an overview of the crucial skills students need to be successful.

I jumped on these tools and piloted using them with my students almost immediately. My students completed self-evaluations, rating themselves at the “beginning,” “developing,” “proficient,” or “independent” levels described on the continua. I then added my own assessment of their skills. We used these in our student-led conferences, and I could see the beginnings of evidence-based discussions in their conversations. Students were using their writing portfolios and math assessments to provide concrete support for their evaluations. This represented a terrific shift in the way students and parents thought and talked about student work.

Instead of parent comments like, “What did you miss?” or “Great job!” I was hearing, “How did you decide you were proficient in reading fluency instead of independent?” One parent asked his son, “I didn’t know you should be reading different genres. What are you reading right now? Is that the kind of book you always read?” These conversations were so much richer than the previous years’ event which basically consisted of students proudly showing their work while their parents made appreciative mumbles and nodded their heads. I was excited by the beginnings of the give and take that marks a truly thoughtful discussion, but something was still missing. There was still not a way to communicate the truly exceptional or the gifted student who was playing it safe.

After musing on this initial success and talking repeatedly with a middle school colleague struggling with many of the same frustrations, we decided that we needed to create an additional continuum. The difference between the “minimum doer” and the outstanding student in our school was based not only on the ability to demonstrate skill mastery, but on the willingness to strive to apply critical and creative thinking skills. With this in mind, I pulled together a number of resources and began to hammer out a draft of a critical and creative thinking skills continuum. (I still haven’t hammered out a shorter name, though.) Dr. Richard Paul’s mini-guides on critical and creative thinking, Torrance’s work on creativity and Van Tassel-Baska’s writing on application of these skills in the classroom were all of great benefit to me as I worked. My hope was that this document would bridge the gap between the seemingly arbitrary nature of a number grade and the lightning strike of truly outstanding work. I ended up with a scale more rooted in psychology and child development than pedagogy and standards. This was initially surprising, but it became more satisfying as I realized that perhaps with this tool we might finally get to the roots of why one student was clearly outperforming another and more importantly—what to do about it.

The purpose of this creative and critical thinking skills continuum is to provide specific feedback for students and parents about the students’ current progress as well as to communicate in a straightforward way the next steps in their educational growth. Numeric grades are loaded with judgment, both objective and subjective, as well as academic stigma. Students feel that a 100% means that you are perfect while a 67% means that you are a loser. I’ve even had students tell me that even numbers are better than odd numbers (a 99% means that I am a point away from perfect—the most frustrating thing—but a 98% means that I’m solidly in the high “A” category). The focus on the number rather than what the number represents is a bizarre, yet true manifestation of the problem with attempting to quantify something as variable as knowledge and learning. Students become so focused on the number and what it “means” that they completely lose sight of the true purpose of assessment– reflection and growth. A continuum has no numbers—hence, no judgment. There is no “right” or “wrong” way to evaluate oneself with this method.

On first executing the continua in my classroom, I did not ask my students to provide evidence to support their evaluations. (That came later…) It was absolutely fascinating to see students read through and begin their self-evaluations on the critical and creative thinking continuum. I only allowed one hour of the class period for students to complete their analysis of this one-page document. However, most of my students took much more time than that. The room was silent. My students were incredibly focused on their reading and analysis. As 5^th graders are still fairly ego-centric at this concrete operational stage (thanks Piaget), they seemed to feel that an assessment all about them was well worth their time. The questions students asked about concepts like “intellectual humility” and perseverance got to the core of what I had been trying to teach for years. Why is it important to continue to try to find a solution to a difficult problem? What does it mean to demonstrate originality? How do I know if I am taking an intellectual risk? These were the questions that I wanted my students to ask—and this was finally a document that set the stage to ask them.

Another revelation occurred when I reviewed these documents individually. I began to get a much more relevant picture of how each child saw him or herself. It was striking to compare the self-assessments with the list of test-score data that my principal had just sent out. (Yes, we are still in a public school. And yes, we still have to do things like set learning goals based on the number of points students “should” improve on certain tests.) Those standardized test scores have been relatively meaningless to me in the past. However, coupled with the information from the continuum self-assessments, a fascinating phenomenon was revealed. By and large, students in the top performing test score group had consistently given themselves the lowest evaluations on the continuum while the students with the lowest (comparative) test scores had marked themselves as having mastered all or almost all of the critical and creative thinking skills. The Dunning Kruger effect in action! We had a tremendous class discussion about this effect—in which less competent people in a field tend to overestimate their abilities. We analyzed how it applied to their attitudes and approaches to learning. I began to see a shift in several students’ attitudes and performance following this one illuminating discussion.

This initial work was very inspiring. I was surprised and pleased at the effort my students put into their evaluations. The vocabulary from the continuum was popping up in our discussions again and again. Instead of “I don’t get it,” I was hearing comments like, “I need to clarify this—do you mean…?” The students were beginning to look at learning through this alternate lens. I continued to have students review the continuum and reflect on their progress as we completed units of instruction. They documented their growth and reflected on their struggles.

We also used the continuum to decide on areas of focus for the next units. I previewed with the students what I felt were the “big ideas” for learning while they made choices about skills they thought it important to develop. The quality of our communication continued to improve. Our goals were aligned—I was attempting to provide opportunities for them to improve in areas that THEY had identified as needing work. This method gave them a sense of control over their own learning.

Other teachers in my school are currently working to apply the math, reading, writing, and thinking skills continua in their classrooms. In the middle school, students are expected to provide support for their analysis as they complete their initial evaluations. In the lower grades, teachers use the continua to shift the focus from what students can’t do to what students COULD do. These continua are shared between teachers vertically to provide a long-range picture of the student’s development over time. This is something that a numeric grade based on grade-level standards fails to communicate.

At first some teachers struggled with how to make the continua relevant to their students, and all teachers recognized that the thought and effort needed to accurately utilize the continua required more time than typical “grading.” However, the value of the knowledge gained far outweighs the extra effort the analysis requires.

The next breakthrough came when I began to use the critical and creative thinking continuum in one-on-one parent conferences. For years, my conferences followed a fairly typical script. First, I would go over the previous year’s test scores. Then, I would discuss grades. The parent(s) and I would discuss any issues or “concerns,” and then I would try to end on some kind of positive note. For the parents of my highest achievers though, this was not a helpful meeting. While I’m sure they enjoyed hearing me list all of the delightful adjectives that described their child, I’m not sure that they felt that they were getting a clear picture of what their child could do to continue to grow.

The use of the continua has changed our discussions. My conferences conducted this fall focused on which elements their child was clearly demonstrating as well as areas their child could continue to develop. I was able to explain the Dunning Kruger Effect to parents who thought their child was practically perfect but who in reality was barely making an effort. I described to the parents of the perfectionists what intellectual risk-taking was and how their child could begin to do it. The conversations were so much richer than in the past, and parents did not feel that I was judging their parenting, or their children.

Instead, the focus was on attributes and evidence. Parents were surprised and fascinated when reading their child’s reflections. The conferences now were a detailed conversation about the whole child and how he or she interacted with the world. Even more importantly, parents were now able to support our classroom objectives with greater accuracy. One parent commented, “We were delighted to discuss and learn about the Creative Continuum. The Continuum is visual and the skill sets are clearly presented…Our meeting was one of the most informative conferences I have attended.”

Shifting our focus from a numerical grading system to a continuum-based evaluation has started to address many of the assessment issues I was facing. My students have stopped asking, “Is this for a grade?” as though that alone determines the value of an assignment. I continue to work to provide more opportunities for students to develop those critical and creative thinking skills. Knowing that I am going to be asking them to evaluate their growth—I am very conscious of the need to design learning experiences that require students to demonstrate those skills.

Most importantly, the students themselves feel a sense of ownership over their learning, and now they are making the effort to ask accurate, insightful questions about what they can do and what they still need to learn to do. Removing the focus from the number grade and putting it back on the evaluation of skills and attributes improves the quality of instruction, performance and communication. The end result is a focus on authentic student learning and success.

References

Davis, G.A., & Rimm, S.B. (2009). Education of the gifted and talented (6^th ed.). Boston, MA: Allyn and Bacon.

Dunning, D., Johnson, K., Ehrlinger, J., & Kruger, J. (2003). Why people fail to recognize their own incompetence (PDF). Current Directions in Psychological Science, 12(3), 83–87.

Elder, L., & Paul, R. (2005). The miniature guide to critical thinking concepts & tools. (4th ed.). Dillon Beach, CA: The Foundation for Critical Thinking.

Hill, B. C. (2008). Retrieved from http://www.bonniecampbellhill.com/support.php

Van Tassel-Baska, J., & Stambaugh, T. (2006). Comprehensive curriculum for gifted learners. (3rd ed.). New York, NY: Pearson.

For Further Reading

Rubrics

Kohn, A. (2006). The trouble with rubrics. English Journal, 95(4), 12-15.

Wilson, M. (2007). Why I won’t be using rubrics to respond to students’ writing. English Journal, 96(4), 62-66.

Wilson, M. (2006). Rethinking rubrics in writing assessment. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

Self-Assessment

Liberating Grades/Liberatory Assessment, sj Miller

Testing

What Are Tests Really Measuring?: When Achievement Isn’t Achievement

December 12, 2013 plthomasedd 6 Comments

High-stakes standardized testing must be the most resilient phenomenon ever to exist on the planet. Joining high-stakes standardized testing in that (dis)honor would be the persistent but misleading claim that test scores are primarily achievement (and a growing future candidate for this honor is the claim that test scores by students, labeled “achievement,” are also credible metrics for “teacher quality”).

Let’s start with a couple statistical breakdowns of what test scores constitute:

From Di Carlo:

But in the big picture, roughly 60 percent of achievement outcomes is explained by student and family background characteristics (most are unobserved, but likely pertain to income/poverty). Observable and unobservable schooling factors explain roughly 20 percent, most of this (10-15 percent) being teacher effects. The rest of the variation (about 20 percent) is unexplained (error). In other words, though precise estimates vary, the preponderance of evidence shows that achievement differences between students are overwhelmingly attributable to factors outside of schools and classrooms (see Hanushek et al. 1998; Rockoff 2003; Goldhaber et al. 1999; Rowan et al. 2002; Nye et al. 2004).

And now from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation:

Just 14 per cent of variation in individuals’ performance is accounted for by school quality. Most variation is explained by other factors, underlining the need to look at the range of children’s experiences, inside and outside school, when seeking to raise achievement.

Next, consider this from the UK:

Differences in children’s exam results at secondary school owe more to genetics than teachers, schools or the family environment, according to a study published yesterday.

The research drew on the exam scores of more than 11,000 16-year-olds who sat GCSEs at the end of their secondary school education. In the compulsory core subjects of English, maths and science, genetics accounted for on average 58% of the differences in scores that children achieved.

While the genetics claim is potentially dangerous, and certainly controversial, the article offers some important clarifications:

The findings do not mean that children’s performance at school is determined by their genes, or that schools and the child’s environment have no influence. The overall effect of a child’s environment – including their home and school life – accounted for 36% of the variation seen in students’ exam scores across all subjects, the study found….

Writing in the journal, the authors point out that genetics emerges as such a strong influence on exam scores because the schooling system aims to give all children the same education. The more school and other factors are made equal, the more genetic differences come to the fore in children’s performance. The same situation would happen if everyone had a healthy diet: differences in bodyweight would be more down to genetic variation, instead of being dominated by lifestyle.

Plomin said one message from the study was that differences in children’s performance were not merely down to effort. “Some children find it easier to learn than others do, and I think it’s appetite as much as aptitude,” he said. “There is a motivation, maybe because you like to do what you are good at.”

Genetics, he said, caused people to create, select and modify their environment, and so nature drives nurture, which in turn reinforces nature. A child with a gift for maths seeks friends who like maths. A child who learns to read easily might join a book club, and work through books on the shelves at home.

Additional points drawn from this research present some strong cautions about continued reliance on not only standardized tests, but also uniform national standards:

“Education is still focused on a one-size-fits-all approach and if genetics tells us anything it’s that children are different in how easily they learn and what they like to learn. Forcing them into this one academic approach is going to make some children confront failure a lot and it doesn’t seem a wise approach. It ought to be more personalised,” he said.

“These things are as heritable as anything in behaviour, and yet when you look in education or in educational textbooks for teachers there is nothing on genetics. It cannot be right that there’s this complete disconnect between what we know and what we do.”

Finally, consider this research on the disconnect between test scores and student abilities:

To evaluate school quality, states require students to take standardized tests; in many cases, passing those tests is necessary to receive a high-school diploma. These high-stakes tests have also been shown to predict students’ future educational attainment and adult employment and income.

Such tests are designed to measure the knowledge and skills that students have acquired in school — what psychologists call “crystallized intelligence.” However, schools whose students have the highest gains on test scores do not produce similar gains in “fluid intelligence” — the ability to analyze abstract problems and think logically — according to a new study from MIT neuroscientists working with education researchers at Harvard University and Brown University.

In a study of nearly 1,400 eighth-graders in the Boston public school system, the researchers found that some schools have successfully raised their students’ scores on the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS). However, those schools had almost no effect on students’ performance on tests of fluid intelligence skills, such as working memory capacity, speed of information processing, and ability to solve abstract problems….

Instead, the researchers found that educational practices designed to raise knowledge and boost test scores do not improve fluid intelligence. “It doesn’t seem like you get these skills for free in the way that you might hope, just by doing a lot of studying and being a good student,” says Gabrieli, who is also a member of MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research.

So should we be shocked when students passing high-stakes reading tests in Texas admit they cannot read?:

A female classmate of Tony’s says she can’t get through the stories she reads in school unless someone explains them to her. She’s passed all her state tests, too. How? She says she uses classroom-taught “strategies” on her English reading test and that if she underlines and highlights enough and narrows down her options, she has a better chance of guessing right by playing the odds. She failed her math state test because of the word problems, so she employed her English strategies there on the retry attempt and passed.

Or that the most recent analysis of the teaching of writing in middle and high schools has found that best practice in writing hasn’t occurred because of accountability and high-stakes testing?:

Overall, in comparison to the 1979–80 study, students in our study were writing more in all subjects, but that writing tended to be short and often did not provide students with opportunities to use composing as a way to think through the issues, to show the depth or breadth of their knowledge, or to make new connections or raise new issues…. The responses make it clear that relatively little writing was required even in English…. [W]riting on average mattered less than multiple-choice or short-answer questions in assessing performance in English…. Some teachers and administrators, in fact, were quite explicit about aligning their own testing with the high-stakes exams their students would face. (Applebee & Langer, 2013, pp. 15-17)

Our educational world has been turned over wholesale to testing, despite ample evidence that test scores are many things (markers of privilege, markers of genetic predispositions, markers of teaching-to-the-test), among the least of which are student achievement and teacher quality.

If we don’t have the political will to de-test our schools, the evidence is clear that the stakes associated with testing must be greatly lessened and that the amount of time spent teaching to the tests and administering the tests must also be reduced dramatically.

Education, education reform

CALL FOR PROPOSALS: Pedagogies of Kindness and Respect: On the Lives and Education of Children

December 12, 2013 plthomasedd 4 Comments

CALL FOR PROPOSALS

Pedagogies of Kindness and Respect: On the Lives and Education of Children

Edited by P. L. Thomas, Paul R. Carr, Julie Gorlewski, and Brad Porfilio

Peter Lang USA

Rethinking Childhood Series, Gaile Cannella, series editor

Call and Submission Requirements

Submit a proposal of about 300 words by February 28, 2014, to paul.thomas@furman.edu.

Chapter initial drafts due July 15, 2014, should be in APA citation/style format (see citation proofing guidelines below) and 5,500-6,500 words. Authors are urged to submit clean and carefully edited drafts to enhance the editing process. Please take great care with block quotes (do not set off with returns and tabs) and hanging indents in the references list (do not create hanging indents with return/tab, but use the ruler or Menu>Format>Paragraph>Special>Hanging Indent). (Please read carefully below the background underpinning informing this volume.) Also, it is important to have complete bibliographic information with up-to-date references. (See the end of this document for more information on APA).

Topics, problems, and practices addressing the following will be included:

How are “no excuses” ideologies dominant in child rearing and schooling in the U.S. and elsewhere? How are these practices harmful to children?
Why are the Commons essential to a thriving democracy, and how does a cultural attitude toward children impact that culture’s commitment to the Commons (notably public schools)?
What constitutes pedagogies of kindness and respect?
What practices in child rearing and schooling reflect pedagogies of kindness and respect?
How are attitudes and practices related to children connected to democratic values?
How are current educational structures reflecting and perpetuating stratified opportunities for children, and what education reform alternatives address those structures?
How does kindness play into the conceptualization of educational curricula, pedagogy, policy and evaluation?

Submission of Chapter Proposals

To be included in the 300 words are:

Name(s) and affiliation(s) of author(s)
Proposed title
A detailed abstract on the focus of the proposed chapter, including conceptual, theoretical and methodological frameworks as well as the central research question.
A list of 8 keywords.
Also attach the CV(s) for the proposed author(s).

Points of Emphasis

Because we are living in times of historical amnesia, the chapters themselves should be critical, illustrate multiplicity and nuance, and demonstrate an awareness of historical and critical constructions of childhood (and the past work done related to these areas). The following are examples of expectations for the work:

The fields of education, and especially early childhood education, have included some histories and perspectives that view/treat those who are younger with kindness and respect. Examples include the works of Nel Noddings (1992), The Challenge to Care in Schools, and Lisa Goldstein (1998), Teaching with Love (in Peter Lang’s Rethinking Series) as well as various scholarly and educational models practiced or put forward by multiple educators and scholars. Chapters in the work should demonstrate an informed awareness of this history and the ways that both old and new ideas can counter current conditions that are harmful to both those who are younger and older.
The chapters should avoid reconstitution of the romantic, innocent child to be saved by more advanced adults; this has been addressed by many. The issue is the context in which we are all being placed (not that we should protect the “innocent” child) that is harmful to those who are younger, as well as everyone else.
The notion of two interpretations of childhood: (a) those who are poor who are also often labeled as not knowing how to raise their children so needing help, and (b) those who are privileged and know how to raise their children, has been discussed and problematized over the past 30 years. Rather than treating this circumstance as a new revelation, the issue is “why has this circumstance continued and even worsened?” The gap between the rich and poor has certainly increased (why?); testing and standards based education has been critiqued as problematic, but the practices are more accepted than ever (why?); why has past work been ignored and what can be done to change our current circumstances?

Timeline

Call, proposals due: February 28, 2014

Accepted chapters: March 15, 2014

Chapters due: July 15, 2014

Revised/final chapters due: September 30, 2014

Manuscript delivered: October 15, 2014

Background

Eliot Rosewater in Kurt Vonnegut’s God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater implores:

“Go over to her shack, I guess. Sprinkles some water on the babies, say, ‘Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It’s round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you’ve got about a hundred years here. There’s only one rule that I know of, babies—:

“‘God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.’” (p. 129)

In Sandra Cisneros’s short story “Eleven,” Rachel sits in class on her eleventh birthday, a day in which she is confronted by her teacher about a found red sweater that the teacher is certain belongs to Rachel:

“Of course it’s yours,” Mrs. Price says. “I remember you wearing it once.” Because she’s older and the teacher, she’s right and I’m not. (Cisneros, 2004, p. 42)

While these are fictional representations, children live in a state of powerlessness, silenced by the hierarchy of authority. The sweater in Cisneros’s story is, in fact, not Rachel’s, but as the narration reveals, facts are secondary to hierarchy.

In the U.S. and throughout the world, children tend to experience not only silencing but also a level of harshness not found in other cultures.

The twenty-first century remains a harsh place for children in their lives and their schools, even in the U.S. where childhood poverty is over 20% and the new majority of public schools involve children in poverty (A new majority, 2013).

But more than the conditions of children’s lives and schools in 2013 is worth addressing. As Barbara Kingsolver (1995) details in “Somebody’s Baby”:

What I discovered in Spain was a culture that held children to be meringues and éclairs. My own culture, it seemed to me in retrospect, tended to regard children as a sort of toxic-waste product: a necessary evil, maybe, but if it’s not our own we don’t want to see it or hear it or, God help us, smell it. (p. 100)

A sort of cultural antagonism and authoritarian control of children pervades the U.S., and during the current thirty-year cycle of accountability, children tend to face this formula[i]:

Corporal punishment—persists in 19 states in the U.S.
Medication—ADHD diagnoses and medications have risen in the U.S. during the same 30-year period as the current accountability era in education.
Grade retention—one of the most popular forms of reading policy in the U.S. is retaining children in 3rd grade based on one high-stakes testing, despite 40 years of research about the overwhelming negative impact of grade retention.
Testing, more testing, and even more testing—over the past thirty years, U.S. schools have increased dramatically both the time spent testing, the time spent on test-prep, the funding spent on testing, the funding spent on test-prep materials, and the consequences of high-stakes testing.
Segregation by race and class—both public schools and charter schools can be accurately described as reflecting and perpetuating the return of segregation in the U.S.
“No excuses” schools and demands for “grit”—especially children who live in poverty are segregated in schools where their days are characterized by “no excuses” policies that include authoritarian demands on their behavior.
Children must prove they are deserving—childhood is Social Darwinism in the U.S.

If children in the U.S. can survive the gauntlet that is the national formula for children, as young adults they can look forward to crushing debt to attend college so that they can enter a nearly non-existent workforce.

But there is a caveat to this formula: The U.S. formula for children above is for “other people’s children,” that new majority in U.S. public schools and those children living in homes of the working poor, the working class, and the dwindling middle class.

Children of the privileged are exempt.

This volume will collect a wide variety of accessible chapters from scholars and practitioners to explore pedagogies of kindness, an alternative to the “no excuses” ideology now dominating how children are raised and educated in the U.S. The genesis of this volume cane be linked to two poems by P.L. Thomas: “the archeology of white people” and “the kindness school (beyond the archeology of white people, pt. 2),” the second of which reads in full:

it simply happened one day
when the teachers decided
enough was enough

all the boys with OCD
spent the day playing drums
or riding their bicycles

and the introverts sat quietly
smiling periodically in the corners
while the extroverts laughed and laughed

and soon the pleasures became many
as varied as the children themselves
until one day a child stood to proclaim

after reading Hamlet all on her own
“I say, we will have no more tests”
to which there was thunderous cheering

yes it seemed simple and obvious enough
the founding of the kindness school
with open doors and children singing

References

Cisneros, S. (2004). Vintage Cisneros. New York, NY: Vintage Books.

Kingsolver, B. (1995). High tide in Tucson: Essays from now and never. New York, NY: Perennial.

A new majority: Low income students in the South and nation. (2013, October). Atlanta, GA: Southern Education Foundation. Retrieved from http://www.southerneducation.org/getattachment/0bc70ce1-d375-4ff6-8340-f9b3452ee088/A-New-Majority-Low-Income-Students-in-the-South-an.aspx

Vonnegut, K. (1965). God bless you, Mr. Rosewater or pearls before swine. New York, NY: Delta.

Thomas: Charter schools not a smart investment for S.C. (The State, Columbia, SC)

December 12, 2013 plthomasedd 1 Comment

Charter schools not a smart investment for S.C.

See full data tables and analysis HERE.

Poverty, SAT

Our Real-World Dystopia

December 11, 2013 plthomasedd 3 Comments

As a science fiction (SF) fan, partial to dystopian SF, and writer, I would have a great novel on my hands if this weren’t simply the way things are.

How to create a real-world dystopia:

Identify “privilege” as “achievement” using a mechanism that you label “scientific” and “standard.”
Use “achievement” to create the authority class.
Repeat.

Sounds easy, but some may call this outlandish. So let me offer a visual:

And for those who enjoy the power of the word, let me offer this:

Paul Tough v. Peter Høeg – or – the Advantages and Limits of “Research” or, How Children Succeed v. Borderliners , Ira Socol

Dystopias are hard to see when you live in one—just as fish have no idea what “water” means.

Teacher Evaluation, VAM

VAM Fails Test, Again: The Bizarro World of Education Reform

December 10, 2013 plthomasedd 6 Comments

The great state of South Carolina (and for full effect, you should hear that with “great” and “state” rhyming, sort of, with “pet” because that is how the good ol’ boy patriarchy says it around here) continues down a path all too familiar across the U.S.: adopt any and all education reform policies that other states are rushing to implement, even (and maybe especially) when research fails to support the practices.

I have catalogued the inexcusable political and public support in SC for retaining third graders based on high-stakes testing scores—a policy directly linked to Read, Florida.

And despite equally ample evidence to the contrary about basing teacher evaluations on value added methods (VAM), also a corrosive policy in Florida, Charleston, SC is moving forward with BRIDGE, characterized by Peter Smyth as A BRIDGE to I Have No Clue Where.

Public policy implementing grade retention, VAM, and lingering commitments to merit pay—just to name a few—continues to thrive in SC and across the U.S., seemingly as a bold-faced snub of the idealistic (and increasingly Orwellian) call in No Child Left Behind that education policy must be “scientifically based.”

Education Reform in Bizarro World

In the DC Universe, Superman has often encountered Bizarro World, Htrae. Education reform is no less bizarre with the political and public mania for policies that have been and continue to be refuted by large bodies of research.

For example, Edward H. Haertel’s Reliability and validity of inferences about teachers based on student test scores (ETS, 2013) now offers yet another analysis that details how VAM fails, again, as a credible policy initiative—with a few caveats*.

Briefly, the analysis by Haertel offers the following:

First, Haertel addresses the popular and misguided perception that teacher quality is a primary influence on measurable student outcomes. As many researchers have detailed, teachers account for about 10% of student test scores, as shown in this graphic (see p. 5):

Next, Haertel confronts the myth of the top quintile teachers (pp. 6-7*), outlining three reasons that arguments about those so-called “top” teachers’ impact are exaggerated.
Haertel also acknowledges the inherent problems with test scores and what VAM advocates claim they measure—specifically that standardized tests create a “bias against those teachers working with the lowest- performing or the highest performing classes” (p. 8).
The next two sections detail the logic behind VAM as well as the statistical assumptions in which VAM is grounded (pp. 9-13), laying the basis for Haertel’s main assertion about using VAM in high-stakes teacher evaluations.
The main section of the report, An Interpretive argument for value-added model (VAM)
teacher effectiveness estimates (pp. 14-25), reaches a powerful conclusion that matches the current body of research on VAM:

These 5 conditions would be tough to meet, but regardless of the challenge, if teacher value-added scores cannot be shown to be valid for a given purpose, then they should not be used for that purpose.

So, in conclusion, VAMs may have a modest place in teacher evaluation systems, but only as an adjunct to other information, used in a context where teachers and principals have genuine autonomy in their decisions about using and interpreting teacher effectiveness estimates in local contexts. (p. 25)

In the last brief section, Haertel outlines a short call for teacher evaluations grounded in three evidence-based “common features”:

First, they attend to what teachers actually do — someone with training looks directly at classroom practice or at records of classroom practice such as teaching portfolios. Second, they are grounded in the substantial research literature, refined over decades of research, that specifies effective teaching practices….Third, because sound teacher evaluation systems examine what teachers actually do in the light of best practices, they provide constructive feedback to enable improvement. (p. 26)

Haertel’s concession that VAM has a “modest” place in teacher evaluation is no ringing endorsement, but it certainly refutes the primary—and expensive—role that VAM is playing in the rush to reform teacher evaluation in SC and across the U.S.

In the irony of ironies that can occur only in the Bizzaro World of education reform, each time VAM is tested, it fails, and each time it fails, more states line up to implement it.

* Haertel offers a more than generous analysis of the Chetty, Friedman, and Rockoff (2011) claim that teacher impact can be extrapolated into adult earning for students. I urge readers to examine Bruce Baker‘s and Matthew Di Carlo‘s more nuanced and cautious analyses of those claims.

Education

“He knows, or thinks he knows”: It’s Still a Man’s (Hostile) World

December 8, 2013 plthomasedd 3 Comments

During the spring of 2006 when members of the Duke lacrosse team were first accused of rape (later to be dismissed by North Carolina Attorney General Roy Cooper), I was teaching a freshman English course that focused on Kurt Vonnegut. Although my university is composed of a female majority, this class was mostly male students; since the university is a small, selective liberal arts university, the students in most ways identified with the lacrosse players.

Nonetheless, I was taken aback that the students almost unanimously (including the females) believed the lacrosse players were innocent. Class and race identification was central to these feelings, I believed, but when the case was exposed as a false accusation, I was placed in a much more complex position.

As the accusation against Florida State University quarterback Jameis Winston unfolded, then, I was once again faced with the tension that accompanies high-profile public discourse about rape and sexual abuse. Beyond the issue of innocence or guilt of Winston, however, we have been confronted with something we seem almost unwilling to acknowledge, something Emily Bazelon frames as How Did Jameis Winston Evade a Rape Charge?:

At a press conference that turned weirdly jokey—at one point, a female reporter in the room blurted “Come on” in exasperation—why did Meggs make a point of the fact that the victim “acknowledged having sex with her boyfriend”? I suppose he felt he had to say something about the presence of someone else’s DNA, in addition to Winston’s, on her clothing. But the effect was to fuel the slut shaming she’s already enduring—treatment that has led her to withdraw from her FSU classes.

Here is what’s bothering me most: I’ve been looking for a case in which a woman accuses a big-time college athlete of rape, and he is charged and then convicted.

Bazelon has found few examples, and adds:

The underlying question about Winston, his accuser, and Meggs’ decision is this: Did she lie, or did she make an accusation of rape that is credible but too difficult, in the view of this prosecutor, to prove in court? One thing is clear: It is uncommon for victims to make false accusations of sexual assault. Yes, it happens, causing terrible damage for men who are falsely accused. But the evidence suggests that the vast majority of the time, women who go to the police about rape are telling the truth.

Reading through the police narrative of this alleged victim’s account, it is hard for me to imagine that she had consensual sex with Winston and then decided to lie and say it was rape. It’s not easy to call the cops and say, as she did, after explaining she was out drinking at a bar with friends, that “next thing I know I was in the back of a taxi with a random guy that I have never met. There was another person in the taxi. We went to an apartment, I don’t know where it was. I kept telling him to stop but he took all my clothes off. He started having sex with me and then his roommate came in and told him to stop. He moved us to the bathroom ‘because the door locked’ and I’m not 100% sure how everything in there happened.” She also said, according to the warrant, that after the drinks she had at the bar, her “memory is very broken from that point forward.”

Again, beyond the specifics of the Winston case, but in the context of high-profile sexual assault accusations such as those identifying Ben Roethlisberger and Kobe Bryant (both of which were not pursued), how must all women feel when sexual assault of any kind is aired publicly with smiles, smirks, laughter, and essentially derision exhibited in the press conferences by Florida State Attorney Willie Meggs and Winston lawyer Tim Jansen?

Are we to believe that women targeting athletes, as Jansen claims, is somehow more prevalent and a greater scar on our society than women being sexually assaulted?

As Laurie Penny declares in a discussion of Miley Cyrus, the agency of women and girls remains decontextualized from their humanity: “We care about young women as symbols, not as people”:

Another week, another frenzy of concern-fapping over teenage girls. A few days ago, I was invited onto Channel 4 News to discuss a new report detailing how young people, much like not-young people, misunderstand consent and blame girls for rape. The presenter, Matt Frei, tried to orchestrate a fight between myself and the other guest, Labour MP Luciana Berger, because it’s not TV feminism unless two women shout at each other….

The tone of the reports on girls’ lack of confidence, on the persistence of myths of ignorance about rape and sexual violence, is as patronising as ever. The implication is that girls fret about their appearance, are confused about sex and consent and worried about the future because they are variously frivolous or stupid.

Penny highlights both the specific mansplaining around Cyrus and the wider mansplaining, paternalism, and objectifying that remains pervasive in public discourse of girls and women. The “slutshaming” of women—whether it be aimed at Cyrus (as simultaneous sexualizing and de-sexualizing of females) or the wink-wink-nod-nod discrediting of Winston’s accuser by Meggs and Jansen—exposes the fact that it’s still a man’s (hostile) world for women, including when women are accused of slutshaming women.

A Man’s (Hostile) World for Women

A rare safe haven for challenging paternalism and slutshaming (see Penny’s The Miley Cyrus complex – an ontology of slut-shaming) is art, where writers (mostly women) and film makers have portrayed the aftermath of sexual assault as another sexual assault.

Poet Adrienne Rich‘s “Rape” is a stark and powerful recreation of a sexually assaulted woman doubly assaulted during her police interview, beginning:

There is a cop who is both prowler and father:
he comes from your block, grew up with your brothers,
had certain ideals.

And then concluding:

You hardly know him but now he thinks he knows you:
he has taken down your worst moment
on a machine and filed it in a file.
He knows, or thinks he knows, how much you imagined;
he knows, or thinks he knows, what you secretly wanted.

He has access to machinery that could get you put away;
and if, in the sickening light of the precinct,
and if, in the sickening light of the precinct,
your details sound like a portrait of your confessor,
will you swallow, will you deny them, will you lie your way home?

With a dexterity that leaves the reader deeply uncomfortable, Margaret Atwood explores “date rape”—both as an unfolding of the reality of a woman in the context of the possibility of sexual assault by a male blind date and as a complicating of normative views of women having “Rape Fantasies.” (Atwood builds similar examinations in her The Handmaid’s Tale.)

While it raised considerable attention when released, The Accused and the real-life events it was based on, the gang rape of Cheryl Araujo, the film also anticipated discussions of slutshaming by highlighting what was then and still remains the pre-disposition to blame the victim, when the victim is a woman and when the violence is sexual.

But the attention achieved by the film and the sanctuary of poetry and fictional narrative bring us back to Penny’s charge: “We care about young women as symbols, not as people.”

For example, Lisbeth Salander is powerful and complex in the Millennium Trilogy, the fictional personification of blaming the victim:

“Our client on principle does not speak to the police or to other persons of authority, and least of all to psychiatrists. The reason is simple. From the time she was a child she tried time and again to talk to police and social workers to explain that her mother was being abused by Alexander Zalachenko. The result in every instance was that she was punished [emphasis added] because government civil servants had decided that Zalachenko was more important than she was.” (The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest, p. 733)

Salander’s entire life is the situation in Rich’s “Rape” writ large.

But we must not ignore that even in fiction—Lisbeth as symbol—the first book in the trilogy is given the English title The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (why “girl” not “woman”?), instead of the literal translation from Swedish, “men who hate women,” and as in the film The Accused, why do we appear more concerned about women being assaulted in books and films than in real life? And is it possible that at least in the U.S. film version, we appear more drawn to Salander as vigilante than morally enraged by the repeated violence and sexual assaults she endures?

•

It is without question that the human dignity of a man wrongly accused of rape is no less valuable than the human dignity of a woman raped; it is without question that I have no inside knowledge and cannot know the innocence or guilt of Winston or his accuser.

But unknowables do not excuse us from confronting the known: The smirks and grins, the innuendo and direct slutshaming aimed at Winston’s accuser were all the sort of double assault we have been warned about, the sort of double assault that affects all women, the sort of double assault that must not be tolerated:

“The victim and her family appreciate the State Attorney’s efforts in attempting to conduct a proper investigation after an inordinate delay by the Tallahassee Police Department,” Carroll [the accuser’s lawyer] said in a statement. “The victim in this case had the courage to immediately report her rape to the police and she relied upon them to seek justice. The victim has grave concerns that her experience, as it unfolded in the public eye and through social media, will discourage other victims of rape from coming forward and reporting.”

As Christine Brennan explains:

There was laughter. There were jokes. There were smiles. The news conference in which Florida state attorney Willie Meggs announced that Jameis Winston was not going to be charged with sexual battery was an extremely light-hearted affair.

Everyone seemed so incredibly happy to be talking about an alleged sexual assault.

The known has confronted us: relief that a football career and national championship would not be derailed combined with a levity not suited for public talk around the possibility of sexual violence—it’s still a man’s (hostile) world, and as Rich reminds us in “What Kind of Times Are These?”:

…this is not somewhere else but here,
our country moving closer to its own truth and dread,
its own ways of making people disappear.

Martin Luther King Jr.

MLK to Mandela: Dishonored by Passive Radical Myth

December 8, 2013 plthomasedd 7 Comments

Early in February 1990, my daughter, born March 11, 1989, spent an entire night vomiting. My wife and I were new parents, and we called our pediatrician multiple times, always urged to be patient and wait it out. By the morning, we were in the emergency room, followed by our tiny child, a month shy of a year old, being admitted to the hospital.

After a few sleepless days for my wife and me, my daughter was released from the hospital on February 11, 1990, the day she was eleven months old and the day Nelson Mandela was released from prison.

I think that I will never forget the moment that remains in my memory when I stood in the hospital room holding my frail, beautiful child, watching on the TV the news coverage of Mandela’s release. There were personal and political promises of relief and hope in that coincidence, that intersection of history and my own life that filled my heart in a way that is beyond words.

Mandela’s death now overlaps with my daughter in that she is carrying her first child and has begun to live a life that offers challenges and hope in ways than Mandela’s legacy speaks to for me, but I also must pause my hope because, as Mike Klonsky (@mikeklonsky) posted to Twitter: “They’re turning Mandela into a harmless icon.”

NBC reports, Nelson Mandela’s death: World mourns ‘hero,’ ‘icon,’ ‘father’—with a reductive paragraph near the end:

Mandela spent 27 years in prison and led his country to democracy. Though he was in power for only five years as his country’s first black president, his moral influence earned him the praise and respect of people all over the world.

And as Klonsky anticipates, an annual ritual will now follow, reducing Mandela like Martin Luther King Jr. to the passive radical myth.

Passive Radicals: The Manufactured Myth [1]

With the annual and somewhat functional recognition of certain versions of the life and work of Martin Luther King Jr. behind us in 2013, let me ask this: What do Jesus, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, and King have in common?

I admit the answers could be many: Significant historical voices and lives, shared messages of peace and harmony, tragic assassinations, and more.

And while these are all credible answers, I suggest the most important commonality among Jesus, Gandhi, and King is how their legacies have been manipulated by the privileged in order to create a mythology of the passive radical.

Consider Jose Vilson’s framing of how King serves other people’s purposes:

For some revisionists, MLK Jr. was either one of two things: a staunch conservative who lived patriotically, owned guns, and worked towards self-help, or he was a such a commercial pacifist whose message for peace followed every rule in the book and posed no real threat to the establishment. Then, there are those who, after having recognized MLK’s full history, still want to use his name for things he would never entertain, like breaking unions and limiting opportunity to a full education to only the “good” kids, whatever that means.

It is at Vilson’s second point—framing radicals as “commercial pacifist[s] whose message for peace followed every rule in the book and posed no real threat to the establishment”—I want to pause for a moment.

Passive Radicals?

My journey to critical consciousness may very well be anchored in my confrontation as a child and teen with the Hollywood portrayals of Jesus common at mid-twentieth century. I shared a revelation found in Alice Walker’s The Color Purple in a letter from Nettie, in Africa, to Celie:

All the Ethiopians in the bible were colored. It had never occurred to me, though when you read the bible it is perfectly plain if you pay attention only to the words. It is the pictures in the bible that fool you. The pictures that illustrate the words. All of the people are white and so you just think all the people from the bible were white too. But really white white people lived somewhere else during those times. That’s why the bible says that Jesus Christ had hair like lamb’s wool. Lamb’s wool is not straight, Celie. It isn’t even curly. (pp. 140-141)

Just as the church and Western culture created a mythology of Jesus as white, the Hollywood versions of my youth clearly established Jesus as passive, meek, exactly as Vilson characterizes one version of King—”no real threat to the establishment.”Many years later, I included the film Gandhi in a unit that explored Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, King (about whom all students know only “I Have a Dream”), and Malcolm X (a figure students had either never examined or had been taught he was a negative figure in history). That film portrayal of Gandhi perpetuated the passive radical myth in Gandhi through a British actor, able only to mask the whiteness but not abandon it entirely.

The life and work of activist and historian Howard Zinn has catalogued and confronted what Nettie learns in Africa: Those in power who control the images and the narrative use those images and narratives to feed their privilege.

The passive radical myth allows the privileged in the U.S. to wield the mask of praise to hide their self-interests.

Jesus, Gandhi, and King are reduced to cartoons, single-dimensioned, almost entirely upon a middle-class and white norm of “articulate.”

In school (including Sunday school in churches), children are led in close analysis of the rhetorical power of their words, keeping the gaze almost entirely on the mechanics and not the reasons why those words were needed, the consequences of what those words did and could incite.

As Nettie discovers, however, if anyone looks carefully, even at the words that the passive radical myth uses to honor rhetoric over action, the truth is right there before us.

Even in the reductive film, Gandhi challenges the term “passive resistance” and prefers “civil disobedience.” And many Jesus scholars note Jesus overturning the tax collectors’ tables may best reflect the radical Jesus.

For America, the mythology of King, the distorted mythology of King as passive radical, must be confronted and dismantled if any of the promises King envisioned can become reality. As Zinn notes,

Martin Luther King himself became more and more concerned about problems untouched by civil rights laws—problems coming out of poverty. In the spring of 1968, he began speaking out, against the advice of some Negro leaders who feared losing friends in Washington, against the war in Vietnam. He connected war and poverty….King was turning his attention to troublesome questions….And so, nonviolence, he said, “must be militant, massive nonviolence.” (pp. 205-206)

Like Nettie, we must look carefully at the words, and not be distracted by the fabricated images, the narratives creating the manufactured myth of the passive radical. King, especially in his last days, offered words that refute that myth:

These are revolutionary times; all over the globe men are revolting against old systems of exploitation and oppression….We in the West must support these revolutions. It is a sad fact that because of comfort, complacency, a morbid fear of Communism, and our proneness to adjust to injustice, the Western nations that initiated so much of the revolutionary spirit of the modern world have now become the arch-antirevolutionaries. This has driven many to feel that only Marxism has the revolutionary spirit. Therefore, Communism is a judgment against our failure to make democracy real and follow through on the revolutions that we initiated. We must move past indecision to action. We must find new ways to speak for peace in Vietnam and for justice throughout the developing world, a world that borders on our doors. If we do not act, we shall surely be dragged down the long, dark, and shameful corridors of time reserved for those who possess power without compassion, might without morality, and strength without sight. (“Conscience and the Vietnam War,” in The Trumpet of Conscience)

These words of a genuine radical ring true today, but are unlikely to be read in a classroom or quoted from a political stump, or echoed in the pulpits of any church. Nettie’s revelation about Jesus leads to her own blossoming self-awareness: “We are not white. We are not Europeans. We are black like the Africans themselves. And that we and the Africans will be working for a common goal: the uplift of black people everywhere” (p. 143).

Knowledge is the fuel of the liberatory impulse, and thus, it is in the interests of the privileged to manufacture characters and narratives of the passive radical in order to maintain the imbalance of equity that enslaves the promise of democracy in “proneness to adjust to injustice.”

King’s embracing unionization, direct eradication of poverty, minimum salaries, the eradication of permanent war, and the insidious racism maintaining the historical divisions between impoverished whites and blacks will not be allowed in that myth since the voice of a true radical is also the voice raised to lead to action.

[1] Originally posted January 22, 2013, at Daily Kos.