Monthly Archives: January 2014

race

Richard Sherman’s GPA and “Thug” Label: The Codes that Blind

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Three aspects of the public and media focus on Richard Sherman after the NFC championship game on January 19, 2014, are notable.

First, the images of Sherman tend to be like this one.

Next, after his much replayed and discussed post-game interview with Erin Andrews, Sherman was labeled a “thug,” as well as directly slurred with overt racist labels throughout social media such as Twitter.

And then, most of the mainstream efforts to explain the so-called real Sherman include his GPA, such as this caption in a photograph:

A student at Dominguez High, where Richard Sherman compiled a 4.2 grade-point average and played football and ran track. 

Or this from Getting to Know Richard Sherman:

Classroom Superstar

In 2005, Sherman’s excellence in the classroom was the centerpiece of a profile by Eric Sondheimer of the Los Angeles Times. Compton gained a national reputation as the epicenter of Los Angeles’ gang and crime problems in the 1980s and 1990s, and the state ran the failing school district from 1993 to 2001. Sherman, though, knew he had the ability to excel in the classroom—and that his teammates did too.

“I’m trying my best to get them where I’m going, to the college level,” Sherman told Sondheimer. “I’m helping them study for the SAT. A lot of people come in blind in what they need to know, not knowing one day they could be a top college prospect.”

Sherman talked the talk and walked the walk, telling his teammates to “quit making excuses” for poor academic performance while posting a 4.1 GPA—more than good enough to be accepted into Stanford, the first Dominguez player in over 20 years to be good enough athletically and academically to earn an invite there.

While media hype certainly plays a role in the lingering focus on Sherman after the on-field interview, the responses offer important moments to consider.

There is some comfort, I think, in a growing recognition that responses to Sherman have been at least fueled by racism—including the coincidence of Justin Bieber’s arrest and the resulting confrontation of how Sherman has been labeled a “thug” while Bieber’s wealth and white/male status shield him from a number of verbal and legal consequences that African American males experience daily.

And beginning a dialogue on the use of “thug” as code for racial slurs and racism also adds to a social effort to reach race and class equity in the U.S.

But I haven’t seen yet any consideration of using GPA to justify Sherman; his GPA has become a reflexive association, especially among mainstream, white, middle-class media.

Sherman did well in high school. (And he grew up in Compton.)

Sherman went to Stanford. (And he grew up in Compton.)

Sherman had a high GPA in high school and Stanford. (And he grew up in Compton.)

And while I haven’t heard or read it, I imagine Sherman has been discussed with the standard, “He speaks so well. (And he grew up in Compton.)”

Each time these justifications are used, I recognize a level of racism and condescension not unlike the use of “thug”—not toward Sherman, but toward a hushed suggestion of those real thugs (he grew up in Compton) with whom Sherman is being unfairly confused. You know, those others who do poorly in school. His GPA becomes a tool in wink-wink-nod-nod public discourse that is just as poisonous as the use of “thug.”

For me, Sherman is a highly skilled athlete in a sport filled with other highly skilled athletes—many of whom happen to be African American.

Setting aside the slurs aimed at him, Sherman is also triggering a social taboo (grounded in racialized norms) against a certain type of bravado. Sherman isn’t Muhammad Ali, but it seems fair to note how white mainstream America responded to Ali—not for the substance of his vision, not for the power of his athleticism, not for his eloquence and showmanship, but for his bravado.

Having been born and raised in the South, I am old enough to recognize the warnings in negative responses to bravado by African American men—a warning about being uppity, a nastiness of lingering racism.

So when many rush to justify Sherman by his GPAs, I see the same white faces explaining how Barry Sanders and Jim Brown did it the right way, meaning they displayed an understated character on the field. No spiking the ball after a touchdown, no thumbs to the name on the back of the jersey, no chest thumping.

And it all sounds to me like praising the other for knowing his place, a place decided for him.

Let’s not allow the conversation about “thug” being code for a racial slur disappear behind the next wave of media hype, but let’s also unmask the many other codes being used to justify Sherman—such as branding him with the confirmation of GPA and attending the right university.

Richard Sherman is a highly skilled athlete, competing in a sport made up of highly skilled athletes.

That isn’t simple, or even meant to be simplistic, but there are credible ways to praise Richard Sherman for the content of his character without taking veiled swipes at those people we continue to marginalize as Others.

Yes, there are codes behind words, but there are codes behind numbers as well. GPA (and SAT scores) may be waved to justify an athlete unfairly slurred, but those numbers are also masking how GPA and SAT serve to perpetuate privilege and gate-keep—a mask of objectivity that hides racial, class, and gender biases in those numbers.

No one should be justified by a number, in fact. Thus numbers must not continue to carry the weight of such justifications, the false veneer that they are objective or fair.

We have much left to do, including uncovering the codes that blind, both the words and the numbers.

Testing

If Fewer or No Tests, Then What?

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When I responded to Students Should Be Tested More, Not Less by Jessica Lahey and the related study by Henry L. Roediger III and Jeffrey D. Karpicke in the blog post Students Should Be Tested Less, Then Not at All, resulting comments and Tweets suggest that the topic of moving toward fewer and even no tests needs further discussion and clarification.

One aspect of debating the role of tests in education revolves around the term “test.” For the general public, Lahey’s headline, I am certain, triggers a relatively basic view of tests—students answering questions created by a teacher or a standardized testing company. For the general public, distinguishing between teacher-made tests and high-stakes standardized tests or between summative and formative assessments will likely not change that basic perception.

And thus, Lahey’s headline is certain to cause more problems than good in the public debate about accountability, education reform, teacher effectiveness, and student achievement.

Many have noted the headline problem, but quickly argue that Lahey’s article, and Roediger and Karpicke’s research make a valuable case for formative assessment, adding that the study also raises concerns about high-stakes standardized testing and seeks to encourage more in-class formative assessments.

As I noted in my initial post, however, Roediger and Karpicke’s study is flawed—in their narrow defining of learning as retention and recall as well as their idealizing of testing (they raise concerns, but argue the positives outweigh those negatives).

Here, then, I want to clarify that calling for fewer and then no tests is not hyperbole on my part and not some idealized goal unfit for the real world of public school. As a co-editor with Joe Bower and building off the work of Alfie Kohn, I have detailed how to de-grade and de-test the writing classroom—practices I began as a public high school English teacher for 18 years and then expanded as a writing teacher in first-year seminars.

In terms of magnitude, yes, high-stakes standardized tests are by far the most corrosive types of tests impacting negatively teaching and learning. Standardized tests remain significantly biased by race, class, and gender, and their high-stakes status encourages the worst characterizations of schools, teachers, and students while also draining valuable resources and time from teaching and learning.

Despite the tradition of using standardized tests, U.S. education should end all high-stakes standardized testing—with a reasonable compromise being the use of randomized samplings of NAEP periodically to monitor large trends in measurable student outcomes (recognizing the limitations of measurable outcomes).

While ending standardized testing, or even lessening its frequency and impact, would be a huge move forward, continuing in-class testing would remain a misguided practice. Let me offer a few reasons and then an alternative.

Even the best in-class and teacher-made tests are reductive and only partial representations of learning because testing by its nature is artificial.

For example, consider testing any courses or student activities outside the so-called core curriculum, such as visual art, music, or athletics.

A course in painting that seeks students who can create their own original paintings does not begin with paint-by-numbers, and art teachers would never rely on traditional in-class tests of any kind to represent a student’s ability as a visual artist.

High school football teams, as well, line up each Friday night and the high school players actually play football; they don’t sit in desks and take tests to decide the best team (see Childress for an elaboration on this idea).

In other words, education has conceded the least accurate process, testing, to the core courses that we deem essential, while allowing in the so-called non-essential courses and activities the most authentic demonstrations of learning and teaching practices.

If tests are inadequate for determining a student’s ability in chorus, art, or soccer (where we allow and require students and players to perform the real task), I suggest that they are also inadequate for English, math, science, and social studies.

Now, before offering a brief consideration of what should replace testing, let me also explain that testing fails because it occupies time better spent doing real activities and receiving authentic feedback from teachers. This is the same issue with isolated grammar instruction as it fails the teaching of writing.

Isolated grammar instruction does not transfer to student writing and the time spent on that futile grammar instruction would have been better spent asking students to write. Such is the case with testing—as it wastes time better spent doing whole and authentic activities.

A transition to whole and authentic activities by students in class must begin by reconsidering the place of content acquisition and retention. Most commitments to testing see content as fixed and assume that memorization of that content must come before application, evaluation, or synthesis.

This is the distorted traditional view of Bloom’s taxonomy applied both to instruction and assessment in U.S. education—a view that reduces Bloom’s work on assessment to a linear and sequential model of teaching and learning.

To embrace students engaging in whole and authentic activities instead of tests, the acquisition of knowledge must be re-imagined as the result of that engagement, not a prerequisite to that engagement.

We own and know facts, knowledge, and details because and once we have used those facts in whole and authentic ways. Again, consider how we have learned to paint a work of art, play an instrument, or participate in an athletic event. All of these require some basics, some practice, some artificial preparation, but the real learning comes from the doing, the feedback while performing as a novice, and then the re-doing, and re-doing.

About 60 years ago, Lou LaBrant (1953) lamented:

It ought to be unnecessary to say that writing is learned by writing; unfortunately there is need. Again and again teachers or schools are accused of failing to teach students to write decent English, and again and again investigations show that students have been taught about punctuation, the function of a paragraph, parts of speech, selection of “vivid” words, spelling – that students have done everything but the writing of many complete papers. Again and again college freshmen report that never in either high school or grammar school have they been asked to select a topic for writing, and write their own ideas about that subject. Some have been given topics for writing; others have been asked to summarize what someone else has said; numbers have been given work on revising sentences, filling in blanks, punctuating sentences, and analyzing what others have written….Knowing facts about language does not necessarily result in ability to use it. (p. 417)

And this is essentially my argument about testing.

If we want students to be better at taking tests, then more testing will certainly accomplish that goal (again, that is basically what Roediger and Karpicke show).

But if we redefine learning and frame our teaching goals toward whole and authentic behaviors by students, we must recognize that students learn by doing those whole and authentic things.

Instead of tests, then, and grades, students need extended blocks of time in school to perform in whole and authentic ways (ways that occur in the real world outside of school; ways that occur in art class, chorus, and band, and on athletic fields and courts) along with having teachers observing and offering rich and detailed feedback that contributes to those students trying those performances again and again.

Not tests, whether we call them formative or summative, of the artificial kind, but whole and authentic performances and rich feedback leading to more and more performances.

Again, if you seek examples of what should replace the inordinate amount of time spent testing in schools, visit an art class, chorus, an athletic event—or consider that a central aspect of science courses are labs.

Commitments to testing are commitments to the static classroom where teachers are active, students are passive, and content is central. These commitments are asking very little of students.

I am calling for de-testing and de-grading the classroom in order to increase student activity, engagement, and thus learning in ways that are whole and authentic.

As Childress concludes in his argument that football is better than high school:

What I am saying is that we have a model for learning difficult skills — a model that appears in sports, in theater, in student clubs, in music, in hobbies — and it’s a model that works, that transmits both skills and joy from adult to teenager and from one teenager to another.

For Further Reading

More on Failing Writing, and Students

Education Done To, For, or With Students?

Teacher Quality, Wiggins and Hattie: More Doing the Wrong Things the Right Ways

CCSS, Education, education reform, Ravitch

On Public Schools and Common Core: Graff’s Critique of Ravitch

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Are U.S. public schools failing, and if so, will implementing Common Core and next-generation tests as part of school accountability correct those failures?

At Valerie Strauss’s The Answer Sheet, Gerald Graff, an English professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, has challenged Diane Ravitch’s stance on the both public schools and Common Core, which he characterizes as follows:

“Public education is not broken,” says Diane Ravitch in her new book, “Reign of Error: The Hoax of the Privatization Movement and the Danger to America’s Public Schools.”  The “diagnosis” of the corporate reformers “is wrong,” Ravitch writes, and their solutions are also wrong.  “Our urban schools are in trouble because of concentrated poverty and racial segregation.  But public education as such is not ‘broken,’” and “the solutions proposed by the self-proclaimed reformers have not worked as promised.”

Ravitch’s argument — that the real problem is not public education but its would-be reformers — has become a familiar one for opponents of current attempts to reform the American educational system.  Like most such opponents, Ravitch concedes that the system is far from perfect, but she argues that the causes lie in social conditions outside education, in “concentrated poverty and racial segregation,” as she puts it, and in the false story of a broken system that reformers disseminate in order to justify privatizing education and enriching themselves.  So goes this argument.

Graff concludes: “I don’t buy it.”

While he concedes that Ravitch is correct about the negative impact of poverty and inequity on schools as well as the failure of many aspects of the reform movement (“more charters, more standardized tests and fetishized test data, all of it used punitively, more privatization”), Graff argues that, based on his experiences as a professor, public schools are failing and poverty cannot be the sole cause: “Few of the college students I teach are poor and many are white, middle class, and relatively privileged, yet their command of basic skills of reading, writing, and critical thinking falls far short of their potential.”

And thus, Graff aligns himself with the promise of Common Core standards, “which focus on precisely these ‘college readiness’ skills that my students not only struggle with but don’t seem to have been told are important” (See Mercedes Schneider’s response to Graff’s endorsing Common Core).

First, Graff’s characterization of Ravitch, I think, distorts how public school effectiveness should be described (and likely Ravitch’s position).

Public education is not failing the ways that reformers claim, typically based on raw test score comparisons (year-to-year in the U.S., international, state-to-state) and sweeping charges about “bad” teachers, public school monopolies (and lack of choices), and the negative influences of the status quo (often code for “unions”).

However, public schools are failing as they are overburdened by out-of-school influences (as long as we focus on standardized test scores, that influence remains the dominate problem facing education reform) and in the ways in which they perpetuate those social inequities (for example, tracking, inequitable discipline practices such as zero tolerance policies, rising segregation in public and charter schools, and inequitable teacher assignment including commitments to Teach for America for high-poverty minority students).

But the larger public school failure (the one I believe at the root of Ravitch’s “Public education is not broken”), however, is not that public education is failing the U.S., but that so far, we have failed public education. In other words, Ravitch’s argument is a call to reconsider our commitment to public education as part of the essential Commons and the need to reject market-based critiques and reform for that institution.

Here, Graff ignores that much of Ravitch’s Reign is, in fact, a call for reforms—which would be an odd thing to do if she in fact held as Graff claims that public schools are fine as they are.

Next, Graff’s reasons for endorsing the Common Core are ironically the reasons Common Core standards will never address the failures of public schools.

Since Graff and Ravitch highlight that public education struggles under the weight of poverty and inequity, we must acknowledge that there is nothing about Common Core (or any aspect of the accountability movement based on standards and testing) that addresses those inequities; in fact, a great deal of evidence suggests that high-stakes accountability simply labels inequity and often increases inequity—along with failing to achieve the goals often associated with accountability-based reform.

For example, there is nothing in Common Core that will change African American males being disproportionally suspended and expelled, nothing that will change African American and impoverished students attending majority-minority schools that are underfunded and staffed by inexperienced and un-/under-certified teachers, nothing that will insure that minority and high-poverty students will have access to high-quality courses (such as Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate), and nothing that will end the disproportionate retention of minority and male students (in fact, a growing trend of the accountability movement is retaining third grade students based on high-stakes test scores).

Finally, and directly drawn from Graff’s concerns about college students not burdened by poverty, is the claim that those students are not well prepared by public education.

Setting aside that every generation has bemoaned the failure of the children coming after them (including Aristotle), we must ask why those students appear not prepared for the demands of college work.

The answer, for example, lies in Graff’s experience with students analyzing text and writing original essays.

Applebee and Langer have explored what students are asked to do as student writers in middle and high schools. Their research reveals a powerful, but damning dynamic: English teachers of middle and high school know more than ever about best practices in the teaching of writing, but students do little extended writing and much of that best practice is never implemented in U.S. classrooms.

Applebee and Langer’s research appears to expose why Graff finds his students ill prepared for college demands related to text analysis and writing, but the most important pattern found by Applebee and Langer is the reasons students are not be challenged are the inordinate high-stakes demands of the standards and testing era under which U.S. public schools function.

College-bound students, currently and over the past thirty years, have disproportionately spent their time in English classes learning to write to prompts for AP exams, high-stakes state tests, and, since 2005, the one-draft, 25-minute essay on the SAT.

As a writing teacher of freshman at a selective liberal arts university, I can attest that Graff’s characterization of students’ ability to write autonomously and with authority is lacking, but unlike Graff, I recognize that the problem is grounded in high-stakes accountability.

I also recognize that the historical record of standards and testing reveal that Common Core and next-generation tests will not change the entrenched failures of the accountability era, and Common Core has no mechanism to shift traditional failures of public schools (the inequities I have identified above).

In the end, Common Core is continuing to dig even after we have found ourselves in a pointless hole.

As Deborah Meier explains, even if Common Core standards do align better with college readiness (and that claim falls short), we are still asking too little of students with that goals.

And that is the problem, ultimately, with standards-based education and education reform.

If schools are failing to meet the needs of children living in a free society—and they are—that failure can be traced to the narrowing of teacher and student expectations—the one guaranteed consequence of standards-based education about which we have ample evidence.

In ten years, political leaders and the public will be decrying the failures of public education, professors such as Graff will still bemoan the inadequacies of their students, and we will again hear demands for yet another round of new standards and new tests—standards and tests that must be world-class and address college readiness. And Common Core will be placed on the shelf with all the other disappointing trophies to how we continue to fail universal public education.