Monthly Archives: February 2015

Education, education reform, Educational Research, reading, word gap

The “Word Gap”: A Reader [Updated]

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[Header Photo by Leonhard Niederwimmer on Unsplash}

The AMC series, based on the iconic graphic series The Walking Dead, has finally included Rick admitting, “We are the walking dead” (Season 5, Episode 10).

Viewers witness the inevitable lethargy of living always under the threat of zombies, a reduced existence in which even stabbing a zombie in the brain is executed with a resignation that borders on macabre camp:

Maggie is confronted with death—and the walking dead—throughout the episode. We open to her weeping, as a walker shambles up behind her. She casually stands, and knifes the zombie in the skull. Later she finds a walker tied up and gagged in the trunk of a car. She must have been tied that way when she was alive, and starved to death before turning. It’s a horrible thought. Glenn kills that one for her. At the barn, she finds a third walker, this one apparently camped out there before she died.

I have explored the power of zombie narratives to examine the weight of living in poverty and the paralysis of anxiety, but here I want to add that one study and the term “word gap” are also yet more proof of the zombie apocalypse.

The “Word Gap” That Will Not Die

Like Maggie, I am nearly numb, having spent over thirty years in education mostly having to refute constantly misguided policy and misinformed media.

The most resilient and disturbing among those experiences is the term “word gap” and the single study that will not die—this time from Elizabeth Gilbert:

The term “word gap” was first coined in the 1995 Hart/Risley study that found low-income children are exposed to 30 million fewer words than their higher-income peers before age 3. This study and others have linked poor early literacy skills to lifelong academic, social and income disparities. Word gap initiatives primarily target low-income parents to help them understand the effect they have on their children’s cognitive development. Unfortunately, this misses another important part of the problem.

The deficit view perpetuated by Hart and Risley (not the credibility of the study or its claims) is as contagious as the zombie virus infecting everyone in The Walking Dead universe.

And while it would be easier just to lie down, give in, I remain steadfast against the “word gap” throng; thus, please take the time to consider the following reader:

In this article, we argue that strong claims about language deficiencies in poor children and their families based on the Hart and Risley study are unwarranted. Further, we argue that the uncritical acceptance of Hart and Risley’s findings is emblematic of a trend among some educators, educational policy makers, and educational researchers to readily embrace a deficit stance that pathologizes the language and culture of poor students and their families (Dudley-Marling, 2007; Foley, 1997). We hope that this critique will help teachers resist “research-based” policies that aim to fi x the language and culture of poor and minority students with whom they work.

  • Dyson, A. H. (2015). Research and Policy: The Search for Inclusion: Deficit Discourse and the Erasure of Childhoods. Language Arts, 92(3), 199-207. http://www.jstor.org/stable/24575568

Hart and Risley, Meaningful Differences in the Everyday Experience of Young American Children—Google it and in .15 seconds you get over 100,000 hits. Hart and Risley’s book Meaningful Differences (1995) is the most-cited piece of academic work that attempts to explain what goes wrong with poor kids, with grand extrapolations and claims (which you’ll see that I argue are totally unsubstantiated) about how poor children will fare in school and later life—based on their early home experiences with language. The book purports to demonstrate (with what I will call pseudo-scientific elegance) that poor children (in their study six families, all black, all on welfare) are doomed before they enter school because 1) their parents don’t talk to them as much as upper middle class parents (13 upper SES, “professional” families—where the parents were predominantly professors, all white except one); and 2) poor children don’t experience as many “quality” features in the talk with their parents.

Because of the severe methodological flaws in the study, these conclusions are unwarranted. To truly investigate the relationship between quantity of interaction and vocabulary growth, we need at least two completely independent measures — (1) a measure of quantity of interaction such as that used by Hart and Risley, and (2) a measure of vocabulary size such as a vocabulary size test.

The differences are striking….

Neither the approach of concerted cultivation or the accomplishment of natural growth is without flaws. Both have strengths and weaknesses [emphasis added]. Middle-class children, for example, are often exhausted, have vicious fights with siblings, and do not have as much contact with their extended families as working-class and poor children. But when children enter institutions such as schools and health care settings, the strategy of middle-class child rearing of concerted cultivation is far more in compliance with the current standards of professionals than is the approach of the accomplishment of natural growth. There are signs that middle-class children gain advantages, including potentially in the world of work, from the experience of concerted cultivation. Working-class and poor children do not gain this benefit.

Update

Unlike fatalism in The Walking Dead, World War Z is a zombie narrative offered after the apocalypse, a tale told with a dark optimism since humans have survived the rise of the living dead.

There are lessons in this version as well, particularly about the possibility of an antidote—about choosing to see the world differently in order to make a different world.

Let us put the term “word gap” to rest, permanently, along with the nearly compulsive urge to cite Hart and Risley.

Related and Recommended

Why we need to smash up the concept of the achievement gap in tiny little pieces, Andre Perry

A Nation at Risk, Education, education reform, Educational Research, grade retention, reading

What Are Evidence-Based Practices and Policies in Education?

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The best laid schemes o’ Mice an’ Men
Gang aft agley,
An’ lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain,
For promis’d joy!

“To a Mouse,” Robert Burns

If John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men offers a fictional dramatization of Scottish poet Robert Burn’s dire warning in poetry, above, then the mangled federal education policy popularly known as No Child Left Behind (NCLB) may be a top candidate for real-world proof of Burns continuing to be right 230 years later.

Heralded as bi-partisan and bold, NCLB has been unable to manage its central directive: scientifically based policy and practice in education.

The wider accountability paradigm of education reform driven by standards and high-stakes tests and NCLB have proven to be failures, but with the reauthorization of ESEA (NCLB) now on the table, those failures provide ample evidence for how to move forward with education reform and policy.

A policy memo from NEPC now stresses the importance of making evidence-based decisions during reauthorization:

Kevin Welner and William Mathis discuss the broad research consensus that standardized tests are ineffective and even counterproductive when used to drive educational reform. Yet the debates in Washington over the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act largely ignore the harm and misdirection of these test-focused reforms. As a result, the proposals now on the table simply gild a demonstrably ineffective strategy, while crowding out policies with proven effectiveness. Deep-rooted trends of ever-increasing social and educational needs, as well as fewer or stagnant resources, will inevitably lead to larger opportunity gaps and achievement gaps. Testing will document this, but it will do nothing to change it. Instead, the gaps will only close with sustained investment and improvement based on proven strategies that directly increase children’s opportunities to learn.

First, to heal the damage done, we must admit those clear failures. Next, we must change course away from accountability, standards, and high-stakes tests. Finally, we must clearly identify the reasons for educational struggles and failures in order to embrace the best policies and practices to prompt genuine and effective reform.

That reauthorization process, the new reform agenda, and then the daily practice of running schools and teaching students must re-embrace evidence-based policies and practices, but not without clarifying exactly what that means.

Two powerful lessons about creating evidence-based policy and practice can be drawn from the NCLB era: (1) simply codifying and mandating policy and practice must be evidence-based do not make that occur, and (2) the National Reading Panel’s procedures and outcomes highlight that “evidenced-based” when politicized is just as subject to human whims and corruption as anything else.

The inevitable train wreck of the Common Core (doing the same thing over and over while expecting different results) can be avoided now if we learn from NCLB; otherwise, we continue a long history identified by Lou LaBrant, former president of NCTE, in 1947: “A brief consideration will indicate reasons for the considerable gap between the research currently available and the utilization of that research in school programs and methods.”

What Are Evidence-Based Practices and Policies in Education?

What counts as evidence has been the basis of stringent debate within the disciplines throughout the history of organized disciplines. In fact, that tension is how disciplines continue to seek knowledge, define themselves, and thus crawl closer and closer to the ultimate goal of Truth.

The two lessons noted above, however, show that once partisan politics are the process for mandating what counts as evidence, the credibility of that evidence is essentially destroyed.

Along with the National Reading Panel (NRP), A Nation at Risk demonstrated as a process how partisan political goals corrupt evidenced-based conclusions. The panel creating A Nation at Risk and the NRP had conclusions dictated first and then selected the evidence to reach those conclusions. Codifying what counts as evidence through a political process corrupts knowledge (and thus policy and practice) while forcing disciplinary debate about what counts as evidence to remain on the sidelines (and thus ineffective).

Briefly (and at the risk of oversimplification), the debates within fields over what counts as evidence tend to be between those embracing quantification and generalizability and those who who embrace qualitative data in order to raise and pursue essential questions.

In most disciplines, experimental and quasi-experimental (and thus quantitative) research has historically (and still currently) dominated those debates. The rise of qualitative research, however, has both expanded the disciplines and forced quantitative analysis of the world to address that reducing phenomena to numbers is both limited and limiting.

So the first problem with codifying what counts as evidence through the political process is that mandates (through legislation and funding) narrow and render static a process that must remain vibrant and organic in order to be effective.

For education as a discipline, then, the added political layer (again, think A Nation at Risk, NRP, or the USDOE) is the problem that mutes the already existing and rich professional organizations that have the needed knowledge base and guidelines for both how to teach students the disciplines and what to teach students within the disciplines.

Since it is difficult to clearly separate policy and practice in education, let me end with some concrete examples in order to give the bones of the question what counts as evidence flesh: corporal punishment, grade retention, and teaching reading.

Corporal punishment remains relatively common in parenting in the U.S., but it also lingers in schools in about a third of states. The American Psychological Association (APA), however, has a clear stand against corporal punishment based on over 60 years of evidence.

This represents one level of the needed relationship between government mandates and the disciplines as that informs education: When a professional field has a clear understanding of an issue, policy should reflect that stance. In other words, corporal punishment should be banned in public schools—not because some partisan political committee has studied the issue, but because the APA has done so and over a long period of time, while taking into consideration a wide and varied body of evidence.

A second level of the needed relationship between government mandates and the disciplines as that informs education is grade retention. Like corporal punishment research, grade retention research is robust and suggests that grade retention is mostly harmful. But at this second level, how the political process fails is strongly highlighted. Currently, states are mandating the opposite of what the research reveals (embracing high-stakes testing as a trigger for grade retention).

At this second level, based on the disciplinary evidence over a long period of time and built on a wide and varied body of evidence, grade retention must not be mandated, but not banned either. In cases such as grade retention, policy should caution against the practice, but allow that, as the research shows, some children may benefit from the practice, but professionals closest to those case are best for making that decision.

A third level involves daily classroom teaching of the disciplines; I’ll focus here on reading by highlighting whole language and balanced literacy.

Reading policy and practice are possibly the most debated areas of partisan political agendas. Everyone believes children need to learn to read—and almost everyone thinks s/he knows how that should happen.

Whole language has been codified (see California) and banned (see NRP), and balanced literacy has also been codified (see New York).

Complicating this third level is that politicians, the media, parents and the public, and even practitioners often misunderstand practices such as whole language and balanced literacy. In the cases of California and New York, whole language and balanced literacy did not fail; the political and implementation processes failed them.

Whole language commercialized (textbooks, programs), tested in high-stakes contexts, and prescribed (standards, curriculum and pacing guides) ultimately is not whole language (or best practice).

The lesson at this third level is that political policy always corrupts classroom practice because classroom practice is never as simplistic as policy. Even the gold standard of experimental research fails the teacher in her day-to-day work because her classroom is not a random sampling of students, because her work is mostly with outliers.

At this third level, the political mandate must address only that teachers are provided the opportunity to decide for each student and during each teaching moment what counts as evidence. And in the teaching moment, what counts as evidence becomes that teacher’s experience couched in that teacher’s content and teaching knowledge as all of that happens against the on-going evidence of the act of teaching—which is exactly what balanced literacy is:

Spiegel 3

The third level, then, is the arena of professionalism. A reading teacher must come to class equipped with the knowledge of her field of literacy (one powerfully informed by whole language and balanced literacy, for example, but also a field in constant tension due to the debates about what literacy is and how to teach it), and then, capable of providing different students different approaches in order to provide the learning needed in the pursuit of each child’s literacy.

The evidenced-based real world of teaching reading is messy, chaotic, and cumulative over a period of time that cannot be predicted for any individual child.

Simply put, no politician or political committee in DC or any state house has any business or ability to mandate the daily teaching of children. The political job is to ensure professionals have the opportunity to be professionals—and to create a process of transparency so that tax payers know that professionals are provided for children and doing their work as experts in the disciplines.

Federal and state policies are misguided when they are prescriptions that supersede the complex and on-going knowledge of the disciplines.

As the NEPC memo above notes, what counts as evidence now in education reform is the political disaster that is NCLB. The grand lesson of that evidence is that political mandates in education—detailed in three levels above—are creating problems, not solving them—and at tremendous expense.

In education reform, we need political humility and a new era of recognizing both the existing power of the disciplines and the the professional possibilities of teaching.

We do not need a commission of a wide range of stakeholders to fumble badly again what, for example, the field of literacy has been carefully examining for decades, what the field of literacy could easily and quickly provide every teacher in the U.S.—the wide range of strategies for ensuring each child becomes an eager and empowered reader.

If our goal is truly evidence-based practices and policies in education, the evidence suggests we must first have partisan politics step aside.

race

Is Kanye West the Music Industry’s Marshawn Lynch?

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After the 2015 Grammy Awards show following closely the 2015 Super Bowl, I am pressed to ask, Is Kanye West the music industry’s Marshawn Lynch?

Let’s start with the short answer: Yes, because although Kayne is accused of talking too much and Lynch, too little, they both are powerful voices against the racism most people in the U.S. refuse to acknowledge.

Just as I have examined about how the media and public have responded differently to Lynch’s and Rob Gronkowski’s behaviors, Kanye’s challenge to Beck’s Grammy and Beyonce not receiving the award presents yet another uncomfortable black and white picture.

Although many want to frame the Kanye/Beck controversy as an either/or debate, several seemingly contradictory truths exist:

  • Beck is a deserving artist, and his recent album warrants recognition for its high-level of artistic quality. [Note: I am a huge Beck fan.]
  • Beyonce is a deserving artist, and absent institutional and societal racism and sexism, determining between Beck and Beyonce as more deserving may be possible.
  • The Grammy Awards, like the Oscars, and like the NFL, remain as likely to be corrupted by racism and sexism as most mainstream institutions in the U.S.
  • Beck’s Grammy may reflect institutional racism as much as it does his deserving artistry.
  • Beyonce not winning may show that institutional racism remains more powerful than recognition of artistic merit.

Ultimately, Kanye and Lynch prompt similar reactions because, although their methods differ, they are perceived as powerful black men who don’t know their proper place—tinged with public finger wagging for their biting the hand that feeds them.

Lynch must speak when the NFL demands; Kayne must remain silent when the music industry demands.

Both situations are reverberations of the coded and back-handed ways in which people praise (high GPA) and slur (“thug”) Richard Sherman.

Again, as the public and media wink-wink-nudge-nudge relationship with Gronkowski (whose public behavior rarely rises above that of a 12-year-old, albeit a 12-year-old who happens to be old enough to drink) demonstrates, Kanye, Lynch, and Sherman are mostly guilty of being black.

Many, then, wish to keep the public and accusatory gaze on Kanye’s and Lynch’s behavior so that no one has to address directly their inherent and credible message about the weight of race, gender, and class—even among racial minorities with tremendous financial and professional success.

Preferring Beck over Beyonce or Beyonce over Beck is not an act of racism necessarily, but marginalizing Kanye or misrepresenting his protest as an attack of Beck is certainly making a case that despite what you think of Kanye, he sees something others wish he didn’t, and he is willing to speak up when others wish he wouldn’t.

See Also

America’s “Prince” problem: How Black people — and art — became “devalued,” Brittney Cooper

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar: The Exploitation of Beyonce for Political Agendas

Kanye West vs. white mediocrity: The real story behind Beck, Beyonce and “SNL” 40, Arthur Chu

Education, education reform, Education Week, NCTQ, NEPC, Teach for America, Teacher Evaluation, Teaching

Leaning Think Tanks or (More) Flawed Education Journalism?

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In the spirit of good journalism, let me start with full disclosure.

I am on the Editorial Board of NEPC (you’ll see why this matters in a few paragraphs), and that means I occasionally provide blind peer review of research reviews conducted by scholars for NEPC. That entails my receiving a couple very small stipends, but I have never been directly or indirectly asked to hold any position except to base my reviews on the weight of the available evidence.

Further, since this appears important, I am not now and have never been a member of any teacher or professor union. Recently, I spoke to a local union-based conference, but charged no fee (my travel from SC to TN was covered).

Finally, I have been confronting the repeatedly poor journalism covering education and education reform for several years, notably see my recent piece, Education Journalism Deserves an F: A Reader.

My key points about the failures of journalism covering education include (i) journalists assuming objective poses, that are in fact biased, (ii) the lack of expertise among journalists about the history and research base in education, and (iii) the larger tradition in journalism to dispassionately (again a pose, but not real) present “both sides” of every issue regardless of the credibility of those sides or regardless of whether or not the issue is really binary (let’s highlight also that virtually no issue is binary).

So I remain deeply disappointed when major outlets, here Education Week, and experienced journalists, specifically Stephen Sawchuk, contribute to the worst of education reform by remaining trapped in the worst aspects of covering education.

Sawchuk’s U.S. Teacher-Prep Rules Face Heavy Criticism in Public Comments includes a common framing of “both sides” in order to address the USDOE’s new proposal to reform teacher education.

That framing pits NEPC against the Thomas B. Fordham Institute—although a number of others with stakes in the debate are listed. What is notable here is how Sawchuk chooses to characterize each; for example:

Still other commenters drew on a brief prepared by the National Education Policy Center, a left-leaning think tank at the University of Colorado at Boulder that is partly funded by teachers’ unions and generally opposes market-based education policies….

Thomas B. Fordham Institute, which generally backs stronger accountability mechanisms in education….

Only a handful of commenters were outright supportive of the rules. At press time, a coalition of groups were preparing to submit a comment backing the proposal. The coalition’s members included: Democrats for Education Reform, a political action committee; Teach Plus, a nonprofit organization that supports teacher-leadership efforts; the National Council on Teacher Quality, an advocacy group; and the alternative-certification programs Teach For America and TNTP, formerly known as The New Teacher Project.

In the U.S., labeling NEPC “left-leaning” and highlighting union affiliation is just as coded as calling Richard Sherman a thug. We all know that wink-wink-nudge-nudge is dismissive, prompting Audrey Amrein-Beardsley to ask, “Why such (biased) reporting, Sawchuk?”

Yet, Fordham supports “stronger accountability” and not a single group in the third listing has a “nudge” despite, for example, NCTQ entirely lacking credibility.

Also, NEPC has a hyperlink, but none of the others? And where is the link to the actual report from NEPC, and is there any credible evidence the report on the USDOE’s proposal is biased or flawed?

Since traditional faux-fair-and-balanced journalism continues to mislead, since we are unlikely to see a critical free press any time soon, let me, a mere blogger with 31 years of teaching experience (18 in a rural public SC high school, and the remainder in teacher education) and about twenty years of educational scholarship offer some critical clarifications.

First, here is the abstract for Kevin K. Kumashiro‘s review of Proposed 2015 Federal Teacher Preparation Regulations by the USDOE:

On December 3, 2014, the U.S. Department of Education released a draft of proposed new Teacher Preparation Regulations under Title II of the Higher Education Act with a call for public comments within 60 days. The proposal enumerates federally mandated but state-enforced regulations of all teacher preparation programs. Specifically, it requires states to assess and rate every teacher preparation program every year with four Performance Assessment Levels (exceptional, effective, at-risk, and low-performing), and states must provide technical assistance to “low-performing” programs. “Low-performing” institutions and programs that do not show improvement may lose state approval, state funding, and federal student financial aid. This review considers the evidentiary support for the proposed regulations and identifies seven concerns: (1) an underestimation of what could be a quite high and unnecessary cost and burden; (2) an unfounded attribution of educational inequities to individual teachers rather than to root systemic causes; (3) an improperly narrow definition of teacher classroom readiness; (4) a reliance on scientifically discredited processes of test-based accountability and value-added measures for data analysis; (5) inaccurate causal explanations that will put into place a disincentive for teachers to work in high-needs schools; (6) a restriction on the accessibility of federal student financial aid and thus a limiting of pathways into the teaching profession; and (7) an unwarranted, narrow, and harmful view of the very purposes of education.

If there is anything “left-leaning” or any evidence that union money has skewed this review, I strongly urge Sawchuk or anyone else to provide such evidence—instead of innuendo masked as balanced journalism.

And let’s unpack “left-leaning” by looking at NEPC’s mission:

The mission of the National Education Policy Center is to produce and disseminate high-quality, peer-reviewed research to inform education policy discussions. We are guided by the belief that the democratic governance of public education is strengthened when policies are based on sound evidence.

A revision appears in order so I can help there also:

Still other commenters drew on a brief prepared by the National Education Policy Center, a left-leaning think tank committed to democratic and evidence-based policy at the University of Colorado at Boulder that is partly funded by teachers’ unions and generally opposes market-based education policies not supported by the current research base….

Since NEPC is balanced against Fordham, it seems important to note that NEPC has three times awarded Fordham its Bunkum Award (2010, 2008, 2006) for shoddy and biased reports; thus, another revision:

Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a free-market think tank which generally backs stronger accountability mechanisms in education regardless of evidence to the contrary.

I added the hyperlink to the Fordham mission statement, which uses code also (“options for families,” “efficient,” “innovation,” “entrepreneurship”) to mask their unwavering support not for “stronger” accountability but for market-based policy.

What does all this teach us, then?

All people and organizations—including Education Week, NEPC, and Fordham—are biased. To pretend some are and some aren’t is naive at best and dishonest at worst.

NEPC, I believe, freely admits there is a bias to what reports are selected for review (just as EdWeek chooses what issues to cover and where to place and how to emphasize those pieces), but the reviews implement the most widely accepted practices for transparency and accuracy, blind peer-review. Further, the reviews are freely available online for anyone to examine carefully and critically.

The real story that mainstream media are refusing to cover is that the USDOE (and the so-called reformers such as TFA, NCTQ, DFER, TNTP, etc.) lacks the experience and expertise to form education policy, but the actual researchers and practitioners of the field of education remain marginalized.

Yes, the real story is that those rejecting the USDOE’s proposed teacher education regulations are credible and that the proposal itself (as Kumashiro details) lacks credibility (notably in its use of value-added methods, which has been rejected for use in high-stakes ways by researchers left-leaning, right-leaning, and moderate; see HERE, HERE, HERE, HERE, and HERE).

The greatest failure among the mainstream media is the inability of journalists to recognize and then address that their narrative about “reformers v. anti-reformers” is a straw man argument and that the real battle is between those seeking reform built on the research base (researchers and educators consistently marginalized and demonized) and the rich and powerful without credibility committed to accountability, standards, and high-stakes testing as a mask for market ideologies—despite three decades of research showing that has not worked.

And since I opened with transparency, let me end with a solid clarification that I am on record as a teacher educator that teacher education desperately needs reforming, as does public education broadly, professional education organizations, and teacher unions. And thus, I recommend the following:

Open Letter to Teachers Unions, Professional Organizations, and Teacher Education

Are We (Finally) Ready to Face Teacher Education’s Race Problem?

What’s Wrong with Teacher Education?

Conditions v. Outcomes: More on What’s Wrong with Teacher Education (and Accountability)? pt. 2

Education, education reform

The Fatal Flaw of Teacher Education: “We have met the enemy and he is us.”

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Since the fall of 1984, I have been a teacher—the first 18 years as a high school English teacher in a rural public school in South Carolina, and then as a teacher educator at a private liberal arts university only about an hour’s drive from that high school and my hometown.

SC adds important layers to viewing the professions of K-12 teacher and college professor because SC is a so-called “right-to-work” state (non-union) and the South clings to a tradition of respecting authority (notably as a mask for lingering sexism, racism, and harsh attitudes about children).

Throughout my three-plus decades as an educator, I have worked within and against the accountability movement that has now reached a fever pitch, aiming the political, media, and public accusatory fingers at both teachers and teacher educators. I believe my public record as a strong public education, student, and teacher advocate is solid so it is incredibly difficult to turn my accusatory finger toward those colleagues I genuinely admire, have sought to defend against the misguided and dishonest attacks from the eduction reform movement.

As I have detailed repeatedly, claims that education is itself a powerful mechanism for social change and individual success and that teachers are the most important aspect of that formula are factually untrue.

Historically and currently, educators at all levels have little influence over or voice in public policy, and the norms of teaching have always dictated that teachers and professors remain objective, and thus not political, in the classroom.

All of these factors have combined for the perfect storm, specifically in the South but nationally as well, for further de-professionalizing teaching as federal and state policy continues to increase accountability based on prescriptive standards and high-stakes testing despite the growing evidence that those policies do not work.

Teacher education stands at the intersection of that disturbing trend.

“We have met the enemy and he is us.”

While I continue to seek ways to support K-12 teachers in raising and asserting their professional voices, I am deeply aware that public school teachers (especially in non-union states) must consider the job insecurity related to any political efforts.

Yes, I want K-12 public school teachers to embrace their empowerment, but I appreciate that call from a tenured university professor rings hollow.

That is not the case, however, among my university-based teacher educators, many of whom are themselves tenured and all of whom are directly culpable for the policies being imposed on both public education and teacher education.

Yet, in the same tradition of public school teachers, teacher educators remain mostly inert, passive, and compliant. In fact, as I have noted, many in teacher education rush to out-do the exact reformers poised to destroy public education and teacher education.

Education reform at all levels and in all contexts is designed so that everyone is constantly starting over, never able to finish because the bureaucracy needs that paralysis of infinite compliance:

testing 2

Having now been in higher education for well over a decade, I have watched how other departments and disciplines function. Most disciplines are not only self-determining, but also self-policing.

Biologists are not scrambling to comply with political demands, and they certainly are not abdicating their field to political, media, or public expectations. Consider that biology remains firm on evolutionary biology and climate change despite the tremendous political, media, and public misunderstanding and misinformation about as well as resistant to significant bodies of research and credible evidence.

Teacher education, on the other hand, simultaneously notes that value-added methods (VAM) for evaluating teachers and teacher education are not supported by the research base while also rushing to implement policies that require VAM in teacher evaluation as well as certification and accreditation.

Such professional schizophrenia for K-12 teachers is unhealthy and dehumanizing, but often understandable in the larger context of job security.

In higher education, that professional schizophrenia is inexcusable.

To my fellow teacher educators, then, I must stress that we are the possible line in the sand about failed accountability, about the complete failure to implement evidence-based policy and practice.

When we lament the lack of respect for education by the other disciplines, when we lament that teaching is not a prestigious profession in the U.S., when we read yet another media trashing of teachers and teacher certification and degrees, when we listen to politicians and self-proclaimed reformers with no background in education make repeated claims that are untrue, how do we simply complain and then turn right around and comply?

Or possibly more important: Why do we simply complain and then turn right around and comply?

As long as we continue such schizophrenia, we are contributing to education as the punch line in a not-so-funny cartoon:

Pogo_-_Earth_Day_1971_poster

For Further Reading

Maxine Greene and the “Frozen Sea Inside of Us”

Lessons from the Zombie Apocalypse

“A generalized crisis in relation to all the environments of enclosure”: Deleuze

Re-framing teacher evaluation discourse in the media: an analysis and narrative-based proposal, Jasmine B. Ulmer

Education, race

NFL’s Shielded Barbarism Exposes Racism in U.S.

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A few days after the 2015 Super Bowl XLIX, during the ESPN Radio Mike & Mike sports talk show, Mike Greenberg returned to the debate over Seattle Seahawks running back Marshawn Lynch, while also mentioning New England Patriots Rob Gronkowski‘s appearance on ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel Live.

Lynch has received considerable criticism for his behavior during required media sessions as well as crotch-grabbing after scoring touch downs.

Greenberg has more or less argued that much of that criticism (except for the crotch grabbing) is misguided, including calling for everyone to leave Lynch alone. Since Arizona Cardinals linebacker Larry Foote (and others) has recently claimed Lynch is a dangerous role model, especially for inner-city youth, Greenberg pointed to Gronkowski’s comments to Kimmel, offered jokingly:

“I got pushed or something, and it was the last game of the year, and I was like, ‘Screw it, I’m throwing some haymakers,'” Gronkowski said Monday night.

Further, Greenberg highlighted that Gronkowski had also said the last book he read was in ninth grade, To Kill a Mockingbird, pointing out that Gronkowski had attended the University of Arizona.

The intersection of judgmental reactions to Lynch with, as Greenberg emphasized, most people viewing Gronkowski (playfully referred to as “Gronk”) as a lovable goof who likes to have a good time, partying and dancing (even after post-season loses), prompted Greenberg to wonder why Lynch and Gronkowski receive such different public responses.

Two important messages are presented in that intersection and Greenberg’s inability to understand it.

First, the closing seconds of Super Bowl XLIX included a “scrum that marred the end” of the game, ESPN reported, noting Gronkowski was not ejected. While viewing the fight with Kimmel, Gronkowski laughed about the incident:

“I don’t think I did. Roger, no, I did not,” the tight end said with a smile when asked by Kimmel whether he threw punches, referring to commissioner Roger Goodell.

Gronkowski said he did not want the league to fine him, jokingly saying he needed money for an upgraded party bus.

“Roger, that wasn’t me,” Gronkowski said as video replay of the fight was aired during the interview.

In a season highlighted by the NFL receiving several black eyes and bloody noses for players involved in off-the-field violence and the league appearing to fumble how to handle those public failures, and against the on-going pressure and fines bombarding Lynch mainly for not talking to the media, both the fight and Gronkowski’s role in and attitude about it expose the cavalier and hypocritical barbarism of the NFL itself.

Every play in the NFL depends on violence—but only the sort of violence endorsed by the shield. Fights after a violent play are forbidden (apparently because the sport has some sort of ethical code?). And violence off the field is now also forbidden since those incidences have been made public.

Especially New England fans, but virtually everyone who weighed in on the fight, directly and indirectly drifted into why Lynch receives more criticism and hatred than Gronkowski—those Seahawks revealed who they really are (hint: thugs).

Setting aside that moralizing by Patriots or Patriots fans may be one of the most hypocritical events in all of sports, how the media and public responded leads to an explanation for Greenberg’s question.

The NFL maintains a tight grip on its shield, hoping to hide behind it, but the inherent hypocrisy of the sport and business is gradually being exposed. As well, the NFL provides ample evidence of the power of racism remaining in the U.S.

The media and public cry, Why doesn’t Lynch know his place?

And then the media and public guffaw with Gronkowski: “The people of Boston could not love him more.”

Those different responses are literally black and white.

Of the two, the far worse role model is Gronkowski—whose nudge-nudge-wink-wink to “Roger” was clearly disrespecting authority (but remains safely in the Joe-Namath playboy template of good ol’ U.S.A. middle-class hypocrisy), whose response to the fight never rose above what we should expect from a nine-year-old, and whose reading comment may be the most troubling of all.

Of the two, Lynch deserves a much different response—as Jay Smooth explains far more eloquently than I could.

Delusion is a powerful thing, and in the U.S., our entertainment is certainly some of the ugliest examples of our delusions.

Those delusions of entertainment, however, reveal some hard truths.

The selective barbarism of the NFL is our barbarism.

But the most barbaric reality about the NFL is the racism shielded as moralizing condemning Lynch but exempt for Gronkowski.

Education, education reform

Consuming Education and Unintended (Ignored) Consequences

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As I have noted often, the roots of the accountability era—President Reagan’s directive for the Nation at Risk report—are clearly connected to commitments to free market forces as central to education reform.

Over the past thirty years or so, parental choice has been promoted through a variety of market formats (vouchers, tuition tax credits, charter schools), and then accountability driven by standards and high-stakes tests have increasingly been morphed from academic incentives to financial incentives—starting with school report cards and exit exams for students before expanding to linking teacher retention and pay to student test scores and even now calling for adding teacher education to the value-added mania.

Many have begun to confront the negative impact of focusing high-stakes accountability on test scores, but those concerns tend to be about narrowing the curriculum and expectations by teaching to the test or about the lack of credible research supporting value-added methods of evaluating teachers or teacher education programs.

While those concerns are powerful and accurate, something more insidious is rarely examined: the unintended and ignored consequences of creating in education a culture of competitiveness among teachers about student test scores.

Whether value-added methods are used to determine teacher retention or merit pay, those policies are creating a system of labeling and ranking teachers, and thus, pitting teachers against each other for a finite number of jobs or pool of compensation.

The result of those policies is that each teacher must now not only prioritize her/his students’ test scores, but also seek ways in which her/his students can score higher than students in other teachers’ classes.

If Teacher A, then, finds ways in which to raise her/his students’ scores, she/he is incentivized to implement those practices while not sharing them with the wider community of teachers.

Yes, value-added methods (VAM) further reduce education to teaching to the test, but even more troubling is that VAM codifies a culture of competition that consumes the very community needed so that all students and all teachers excel.

Competition is often barbaric—as we witnessed at the end of the 2015 Superbowl when the Seahawks and Patriots were reduced in the closing seconds to the sort of fighting not accepted in the sport of football.

Schools, teaching, and learning are increasingly like those closing seconds—the circumstances are reduced, the stakes are high, and everyone becomes desperate to grab “his/hers,” without regard to others.

In education, then, the market forces us into the barbarism that formal education has been trying to overcome for decades.