Category Archives: CCSS

CCSS, Education, education reform, Educational Research

CAUTION: Technology!

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In the myriad debates surrounding implementation of Common Core and the concurrent tests, the sheer costs of this process tends to be ignored. Another issue related to both CC and the related costs is yet another series of commitments to technology as a part of the perpetual education reform process. Here is a reposting of a presentation [see Note below] I gave offering a stern caution about our repeated rush to embrace technology:

Author Kurt Vonnegut quipped, “Novels that leave out technology misrepresent life as badly as Victorians misrepresented life by leaving out sex.” As with novels, so with schools, I believe, but we must take one step beyond “whether schools should address technology” to “how.”

In Walden, Henry David Thoreau offered two warnings that should guide how we approach technology: “We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate,” and, “We do not ride on the railroad; it rides upon us.”

It’s a Book, Lane Smith [VIDEO]

Shifting from seeking technology for technology’s sake to critical technological awareness

  • Caution: Inflated costs (market forces) in state-of-the-art technology
  • Caution: Pursuing state-of-the-art technology is self-defeating since “state-of-the-art” is a moving target; teaching students to use state-of-the-art technology fails to recognize that it will be “old” technology once students leave school. Also, state-of-the-art technology has a high risk/reward factor since many “new” gadgets fail and many “new” upgrades fizzle. Consider the storage facilities at schools filled with cables, software, out-dated hardware, and the LaserDisk players that never caught on.
  • Caution: New technology has inflated costs AND embedded costs related to repair and upgrades.
  • Caution: Adding new technology or upgrading existing technology requires added time spent for teachers (in-service) and students to learn the technology itself, draining time better served on teaching and learning themselves.
  • Caution: Research base, although sparse, does not support a positive role for technology in improving teaching/learning, and evidence we have shows teachers rarely use technology provided (EdWeek synthesis of research on technology):

That study found that most of the schools that have integrated laptops and other digital tools into learning are not maximizing the use of those devices in ways that best make use of their potential.

From “Who really benefits from putting high-tech gadgets in classrooms?” (Los Angeles Times, February 4, 2012):

Almost every generation has been subjected in its formative years to some “groundbreaking” pedagogical technology. In the ’60s and ’70s, “instructional TV was going to revolutionize everything,” recalls Thomas C. Reeves, an instructional technology expert at the University of Georgia. “But the notion that a good teacher would be just as effective on videotape is not the case.”

Many would-be educational innovators treat technology as an end-all and be-all, making no effort to figure out how to integrate it into the classroom. “Computers, in and of themselves, do very little to aid learning,” Gavriel Salomon of the University of Haifa and David Perkins of Harvard observed in 1996. Placing them in the classroom “does not automatically inspire teachers to rethink their teaching or students to adopt new modes of learning.”

…In 2009, the Education Department released a study of whether math and reading software helped student achievement in first, fourth, and sixth grades, based on testing in hundreds of classrooms. The study found that the difference in test scores between the software-using classes and the control group was “not statistically different from zero.“In sixth-grade math, students who used software got lower test scores — and the effect got significantly worse in the second year of use.

  • Caution: Seeking to close GAPS (equity, achievement, technology) found in the lives of children (children in poverty, disadvantaged; children in affluence, privileged) through education presents a paradox: As Walt Gardner has succinctly explained: “Don’t forget that advantaged children are not standing still in the interim. They continue to benefit from travel and other enriching learning experiences. As a result, the gap will persist.”
  • Caution: Begin with educational (teaching/learning) NEEDS, not the allure of new technology.

References

Thomas, P. L. (2012, January 3). A misguided use of money. Room for Debate. The New York Times.

—–. (2011, December 2). No. At Issue in CQ Researcher, p. 1017.

http://library.cqpress.com/cqresearcher/ and http://wrestlingwithwriting.blogspot.com/2011/12/cq-researcher-online.html

NOTE: This originally was a presentation, as below:

CEFPI/SC Annual Conference

March 8-9, 2012

9:30-10:15

CAUTION!: Technology

P. L. Thomas, EdD

Associate Professor of Education

Furman University

UPDATE:

Larry Cuban, Answering the Big Question on New Technology in Schools: Does It Work? (Part 1) 

See related: Technology In Education: An Answer In Search Of A Problem?

CCSS, Education, education reform, Standards

Are Common Core and Testing Debates “Two Different Matters”?

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A comment posted on my blog about union support for Common Core (CC)—which parallels my blog post about Secretary Duncan and the Obama administration’s support for CC—represents a typical response coming from standards advocates in the CC debate: “You can’t combine the issue of high stakes testing with the common core [sic] they are two different matters.”

Alfie Kohn in January 2010 argued against national standards in Education Week; I then offered a direct rejection of CC in the same publication in August of 2010. A few others took early stances against CC, such as Susan Ohanian (whose work is impressive and certainly well before most people raised any concerns) and Stephen Krashen.

Diane Ravitch and Carol Burris have taken stances opposing CC more recently, and they represent thoughtful and patient considerations of the exact issue raised by the comment quoted above. At first, Ravitch and Burris appeared willing to consider that CC could prove to be an effective reform mechanism. But both of their explanations for deciding to oppose CC are windows into my initial and continuing stance against the expensive and unnecessary venture into what for most states will be the third or fourth set of standards and high-stakes tests in about thirty years.

I have been a teacher for those thirty years, in fact—the first 18 years spent as a public school teacher in the rural South and the last 13 years as a teacher educator in the same region.

My work as a classroom teacher in the 1980s and 1990s was characterized by quarterly multiple-choice benchmark tests of reading and quarterly writing samples from my students that asked them to write one of four types of writing: description, narration, persuasion, or exposition (types that do not exist as stand-alone forms in the real world, by the way, but exist only in a world where standards and testing rule).

During those years also, state standards changed three times, and concurrent with those changes, we adopted new textbooks and sat through hours and hours of in-service, handed over more and more class time to test-prep, and implemented SAT courses during the school day (ones for which students received credit toward graduation) that required huge investments in hardware and software, which mostly never worked (my home state of SC has a history of so-called low SAT scores so our 1990s approach to addressing that was to encourage more students to take the SAT).

Eventually, the entire state of SC became invested in MAP testing while students at the high school where I taught were assigned two ELA and two math courses as sophomores if they had 8th-grade test data suggesting they would struggle with the state high-stakes tests. Our administration assigned as many as half our sophomores in double ELA and math courses, in fact.

One legacy of this test-mania was that many sophomores in our school wrote only 3-5-3 essays (3-sentence introduction, 5-sentence body paragraph, 3-sentence conclusion) because that was how they were trained to answer on the state writing test—a strategy that did increase how many passed but also ignored good writing pedagogy and mis-educated those students severely.

In the 1980s and 1990s, my high school became a master of doing the wrong thing the right way as we were regularly the top-scoring school in the state on the state’s high-stakes tests.

Once at higher education, I watched my teacher candidates and teachers in the surrounding public schools suffer under yet more revisions to the standards and two different versions of high-stakes tests (since the mid-1980s, SC has implemented BSAP and then PACT and then PASS); now the entire state is implementing CC and poised for the CC-based and once again new set of high-stakes test.

All of this is to say: If you have ever taught in public schools during the past three decades you know that the comment quoted at the beginning is patently false. In fact, if you have taught in public schools during the past three decades you know that CC cannot be separated from highs-stakes testing.

In 2013, with almost all states in the U.S. committed to CC, with the U.S. Department of Education supporting CC, with teachers’ unions supporting CC, with textbook and testing companies supporting CC, and with professional teacher organizations supporting CC, there is a deafening silence about a few facts that must be confronted if anyone or any organization wishes to make this claim: “You can’t combine the issue of high stakes testing with the common core [sic] they are two different matters”:

  • Name a state in the U.S. that implemented state standards since 1980 without also implementing high-stakes tests.
  • Name a state in the U.S. that has adopted CC and has not adopted some form of high-stakes testing related to CC.
  • Name a state that does not have high-stakes accountability mechanisms in place—as a legacy of state legislation and/or as a result of complying with federal mandates within policy such as Race to the Top or opting out of NCLB.
  • Name a school (especially a high-poverty school) where “what is tested is what is taught” does not drive most of what occurs in that school.
  • Name a state that is not spending tax payer money (totaling in the 10s if not 100s of millions of dollars nationally) on CC resources and technology, CC-aligned text books, CC testing, and CC teacher in-service.
  • Name a strong CC advocate who isn’t making money and/or gaining political advantage by endorsing CC.

My doctorate is in curriculum and instruction. A foundational part of my doctoral study and dissertation research, then, explored the century-old debate about what content matters, what should be taught in public schools. Any standards movement is a direct descendent of the larger curriculum debate.

While John Dewey and even Joseph Schwab provide engaging and powerful places upon which Eliot Eisner and others have the luxury of thinking deeply about esoteric things (issues that I too find fascinating), in the real world of day-to-day K-12 teaching, it is pure delusion and myopic idealism to make claims that CC and high-stakes testing debates are “two different matters.”

Around 2000 when my daughter was 11 and attending a public middle school, she came out to the car one day leaning against the weight of her giant backpack, slid into my car, and then said: “All they care about is the PACT test [SC’s high-stakes test at the time]; they don’t care if we learn anything.” [1] She never once as a student mentioned the standards. And in many ways as a child of the accountability era, I think she learned to hate school. She loved her friends and loved many of her teachers, but she hated what school had become throughout the 1990s—which pales to what school has become in the twenty-first century.

Thus, address the bullet points above if you don’t believe me, or better yet, ask a classroom teacher—not a union leader, not a politician, not a representative of Pearson, not a consultant.

[1] See “Standards, Standards Everywhere, and Not a Spot to Think,” English Journal (2001, September).

CCSS, Charter schools, Education, education reform, grade retention, No Excuses Reform, Poverty, Segregation, Testing

The U.S. Formula for Children and the Choices We Refuse to Make

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The formula for children in the U.S. can be summed up in one word, I think: “harsh.” And the response we should have to this formula is “inexcusable.”

Let’s consider the U.S. formula for children:

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.

And what are the choices we refuse to make?

The Joseph Rowntree Foundation (UK) has released “Does money affect children’s outcomes?”—based in part on “many studies…from the US.” The key points include:

  • This review identified 34 studies with strong evidence about whether money affects children’s outcomes. Children in lower-income families have worse cognitive, social-behavioural and health outcomes in part because they are poorer, not just because low income is correlated with other household and parental characteristics.
  • The evidence was strongest for cognitive development and school achievement, followed by social-behavioural development. Income also affects outcomes indirectly impacting on children, including maternal mental health, parenting and home environment.
  • The impact of increases in income on cognitive development appears roughly comparable with that of spending similar amounts on school or early education programmes. Increasing household income could substantially reduce differences in schooling outcomes, while also improving wider aspects of children’s well-being.
  • A given sum of money makes significantly more difference to children in low-income than better-off households (but still helps better-off children).
  • Money in early childhood makes most difference to cognitive outcomes, while in later childhood and adolescence it makes more difference to social and behavioural outcomes.
  • Longer-term poverty affects children’s outcomes more severely than short-term poverty. Although many studies were from the US, the mechanisms through which money appears to affect children’s outcomes, including parental stress, anxiety and material deprivation, are equally relevant in the UK.

The third bullet point should not be ignored: The key to eradicating poverty and the negative consequences of poverty for children is to address poverty directly in the lives of children—money—and to address inequity directly in the education of children.

There is no either/or, then, in the education reform debate. It is imperative that we do both.

Ultimately, the U.S. formula for children is based on flawed assumptions. Before we can change that formula, we must change our views of poverty as well as people and children trapped in poverty.

Scarcity and abundance are powerful forces; in the U.S., both are allowed to exist as an ugly game of chance.

The choice of abundance for all is there to be embraced, however, if compassion and community are genuinely a part of the American character.

CCSS, Testing

Beyond Doing the Wrong Thing the Right Way

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My nephew is in elementary school, and my parents drive him to school each morning and arrive at his school an hour or two before school lets out each afternoon. This is a rural community in the South where many family members do the same—surrounding the school well before dismissal and often socializing.

Recently, my mother told me about parents of a child at that school who are refusing to allow their son to be placed in a test-prep class (and removed from his normal class) because of his low score on a MAP test. The parents are adamant that his test grades in class are high 90s, and they see no reason for his being out of that class to prepare for a test. [1]

Over the past year, I have also been a part of or observed two situations with education policy: one involving a compromise about reading legislation linked to retaining 3rd graders and another about language in the state’s science standards.

In both cases, good pedagogy and foundational aspects of the fields have been sacrificed for political expediency.

The situation at my nephew’s school and both of these education policy developments represent for me the central problem with the Common Core and high-stakes testing arguments: We are content to find the right ways to do the wrong things.

For example, a new report Data-Driven Improvement and Accountability by Andy Hargreaves, Henry Braun, and Kathleen Gebhardt for NEPC is excellent work that confronts how accountability has failed as well as how data should be used more effectively.

However, despite the high quality of this report, it doesn’t allow us to move a few steps further back and consider not using the accountability paradigm at all.

While there are certainly some outrageous claims made against the Common Core (the Tea Party railings against Obama and big government that often play loose with facts) and some passionate arguments against CC that are credible but tarnished by that passion (concerns about Gates money and its influence as well as the role of David Coleman), the dominant narratives about CC and the high-stakes testing connected with the new standards are about how critics are focusing on bad implementation, and not flaws in the standards or the tests. From that, the arguments are how to implement CC and the tests right.

And here is where we are failing.

Setting aside the impassioned arguments against CC and more high-stakes testing, a good deal of evidence shows that most of our educational problems have nothing to do with either the presence or quality of standards or tests (see Mathis, 2012, for example).

As well, we have considerable reason to be concerned about accountability based on high-stakes tests—Campbell’s Law and Gerald Bracey’s caution about what is tested is what is taught.

Simply put, there is no right way to implement standards and high-stakes tests in an accountability framework because neither the goals/purposes nor problems of U.S. public education call for that paradigm; schools are not failing due to a lack or poor quality of accountability.

And that leads to the next typical response: All critics do is criticize. Where is your alternative?

Let’s consider that, then.

Is there any value in a cohesive body of knowledge associated with the major disciplines (what we typically call standards)? Yes.

So what is wrong with Common Core? CC is a bureaucratic, top-down mandate. In all fields, there exists a cohesive body of agreed upon knowledge, a set of contemporary debates, and a set of enduring debates. Public school standards fail because they are primarily bureaucratic and essentially partisan political documents.

Building on that essential problem, then, a cohesive body of knowledge identified for a field of study that is a resource for an autonomous teacher—this should be the starting point of education reform.

However, even if we address re-tooling how we view standards, even if we drop high-stakes testing (and we should), and even if we afford teachers the professional autonomy they deserve, schools will still ultimately fail unless we address equity and opportunity both in the lives and in the education of all children.

We now face a tremendous wake-up call since—despite the increasingly influential and pervasive accountability movement in our schools—the majority of students in U.S. public schools in the South and urban schools live in poverty.

That fact itself calls into question our social policy and the likelihood that schools alone can overcome social dynamics.

There are no right ways to do the wrong things. CC, new high-stakes testing, and more accountability are simply the wrong things.

[1] Evidence from the SAT seems to support these parents’ wishes since GPA remains a better predictor of college success than SAT scores. Despite claims to the contrary, teachers’ subjective grading is quite powerful, and more powerful than a so-called objective measure.

CCSS

Common Core in the Real World: Destroying Literacy through Standardization (Again)

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I have a brief comedy routine I use with my students, typically early in each course I teach—in part to introduce them to me, and in part to make a point about literacy.* The joke goes like this:

“When I graduated high school,” I say, ” I had 7,000 comic books,” slight pause, “and no girl friend.”

The students typically laugh, and then I deadpan, “That’s not funny. That’s sad.”

When they suddenly stop laughing, I smile widely, and we all laugh together.**

I began collecting comic books—primarily to draw from them—in the summer before my ninth grade, the summer I learned I had scoliosis and would have to wear a huge back brace throughout my high school years (23 hours a day at first and throughout school hours into my junior year of high school). That situation provided me with yet another joke for my students; when I tell that part of my life story, I say that I called my back brace “the chick magnet.” More laughter.

By my sophomore year of high school, I was collecting, drawing from, and reading dozens of comics each month. I also had begun reading science fiction (SF) voraciously. I can still recall Lucifer’s Hammer, Rendezvous with Rama and Childhood’s End vividly—not the contents of the books so much as the reading was hard and that I felt accomplished by making my way through each one.

Lynn Harrill was my driver’s education teacher the summer before my tenth grade, and then my English teacher in both my sophomore and junior years. Lynn would prove to be the most important man and mentor in my life after my father, but during tenth grade, he told me that I needed to stop reading SF and start reading “real literature.”

And I did (well, I starting reading real literature, but didn’t stop reading SF). In the next several years, I had read everything by D.H. Lawrence (to whom Lynn introduced me), F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Thomas Wolfe, and many other literary authors.

I owe a great deal to Lynn, despite his being wrong about his proclamation marginalizing SF (and indirectly my comics) and honoring literary fiction. But another moment in my sophomore year of English deserves mentioning.

A required book in my tenth grade was A Tale of Two Cities. The summative assessment on the novel was a multiple-choice test—on which I scored a 96, the highest grade in the class. Most of the students in the class—which was the highest track—made much lower, and they all were mad at me from ruining any chance at the grades being curved.

But that isn’t the important aspect of this story—what is?

I never read the novel.

I scored a 96 by reading the Cliff’s Notes and taking careful notes in class.

Common Core in the Real World: Destroying Literacy through Standardization (Again)

An essay in the Educational Research Bulletin addressing reading requirements in high school opens with the following:

Within the last few years heated discussion has centered around the question of free reading for high-school students in English classes. Critics have insisted that interest as a basis for book selection merely tends to establish poor taste; they have stressed the importance of organization in reading as in any program; they have assumed that free reading, with its emphasis upon pupil-direction, lacks content. Indeed, the arguments in slightly more abstract form are those frequently advanced against any program in whose construction pupils participate, and have been offered as criticism of the whole progressive-school movement. (p. 29)

While this could easily be a description of the debates surrounding Common Core, this is by Lou LaBrant, written in 1937.

LaBrant presents a careful study of the positive consequences of free reading in the context of the traditional view that students must be assigned reading and that students must also read primarily (if not only) from the Great Books. She concludes from the study:

The theory that in a free or extensive reading program designed to utilize interest and to serve individual needs there will be fruitless reading of light fiction gains no evidence from this study. The report does, however, point to the possibility that the adolescent has much greater power to read and to think intelligently about reading than the results of our conventional program have led us to believe. (p. 34)

In the seventy-plus years since LaBrant’s piece, as literacy scholars such as Stephen Krashen have argued and detailed in their research, student literacy has been shown to spring from choice reading and access to books (in the home and libraries)—not from prescribed reading lists, not from revised standards, and certainly not from testing reading.

Advocates for Common Core insist that CC is not prescriptive and that CC is not the tests to come from these new standards.

Those advocates are simply ignoring the real world and the history of standards-bases education in the U.S.; they are, in fact, confusing the use of “to be” verbs with “should.” It may very well be that CC should not be prescriptive and should not be reduced to the tests. But should does not dictate what most surely is and will be.

Last week, for example, a former student of mine who is now a high school English teacher texted me distraught. Her English department is aggressively pursuing a new policy to end the use of young adult (YA) literature in the high school courses at her school. Why?

The department leaders have argued that CC requires literature that is “rigorous.”

Despite having abundant evidence on her side (including research and that students do read voraciously YA literature), she has been told to stop her resistance.

Another former student of mine who teachers high school English also faced harsh evaluations during her first year of teaching because she designed and implemented a wonderful unit around The Hunger Games. Despite the huge popularity of the unit among her students (and among student not in her class who were drawn into the books because of word of mouth), the leaders of her department also reprimanded her for depending on lesser literature—arguing that her students needed higher quality reading (required Great Books, again).

In the real world, CC and the tests that are to follow have and will once again reinforce the exact practices that have harmed literacy among students for a century; teachers will be emboldened to assign Great Books (and marginalize further everything else) and teachers will be compelled to teach to the test.

In the real world, as Gerald Bracey has explained, what is tested is what is taught—especially when standards and testing are part of high-stakes accountability. CC may in fact raise (eventually) some reading test scores, but I guarantee it will only harm the teaching of literacy and the literacy of students.

I have slipped past the age of 50. I have read thousands of books and written several myself.

My greatest literacy joys remain authors I was never assigned, but discovered for myself—Milan Kundera, Kurt Vonnegut, Margaret Atwood, Haruki Murakami, Neil Gaiman.

My literary life can be traced back to my mother and the wealth of children’s books that populated my childhood home and then my deeply self-conscious nerd self as a teen sitting in my comic book room surrounded by comic books and stacks of Arthur C. Clarke novels.

I graduated high school with mostly As in math and science, intending to be physics major, because school had profoundly misled me about the joy and wonder of words.

In college, on my own, I learned otherwise.

There is no justification for CC and the tests that have and will follow if we genuinely seek to offer children the rich and valuable literacy that every child deserves. Denying students choice is ignoring what we know about literacy development as well as the essence of basic human agency.

Common Core in the real world is once again destroying literacy through standardization.

* This blog was inspired by Christopher Lehman @iChrisLehman.

** My newer joke springs from The Big Bang Theory; at some point I tell students I watch and enjoy the show, and then pause before saying quite seriously I don’t understand, however, why people think it’s funny. Then I smile widely.

CCSS, Charter schools, Education, education reform, Educational Research, Incentives, KIPP, Media, Merit Pay, miracle schools, NCTQ, Poverty, SAT, School choice, Segregation, Standards, Statistics, Teach for America, Teacher Evaluation, Testing, VAM

What We Know Now (and How It Doesn’t Matter)

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Randy Olson’s Flock of Dodos (2006) explores the evolution and Intelligent Design (ID) debate that represents the newest attack on teaching evolution in U.S. public schools. The documentary is engaging, enlightening, and nearly too fair considering Olson admits upfront that he stands with scientists who support evolution as credible science and reject ID as something outside the realm of science.

Olson’s film, however, offers a powerful message that rises above the evolution debate. Particularly in the scenes depicting scientists discussing (during a poker game) why evolution remains a target of political and public interests, the documentary shows that evidence-based expertise often fails against clear and compelling messages (such as “teach the controversy”)—even when those clear and compelling messages are inaccurate.

In other words, ID advocacy has often won in the courts of political and public opinion despite having no credibility within the discipline it claims to inform—evolutionary biology.

With that sobering reality in mind, please identify what XYZ represents in the following statement about “What We Know Now”:

Is there a bottom line to all of this? If there is one, it would appear to be this: Despite media coverage, which has been exceedingly selective and misrepresentative, and despite the anecdotal meanderings of politicians, community members, educators, board members, parents, and students, XYZ have not been effective in achieving the outcomes they were assumed to aid….

This analysis is addressing school uniform policies, conducted by sociologist David L. Brunsma who examined evidence on school uniform effectiveness (did school uniform policies achieve stated goals of those policies) “from a variety of data gathered during eight years of rigorous research into this issue.”

This comprehensive analysis of research from Brunsma replicates the message in Flock of Dodos—political, public, and media messaging continues to trump evidence in the education reform debate. Making that reality more troubling is that a central element of No Child Left Behind was a call to usher in an era of scientifically based education research. As Sasha Zucker notes in a 2004 policy report for Pearson, “A significant aspect of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB) is the use of the phrase ‘scientifically based research’ well over 100 times throughout the text of the law.”

Brunsma’s conclusion about school uniform policies, I regret to note, is not an outlier in education reform but a typical representation of education reform policy. Let’s consider what we know now about the major education reform agendas currently impacting out schools:

Well into the second decade of the twenty-first century, then, education reform continues a failed tradition of honoring messaging over evidence. Neither the claims made about educational failures, nor the solutions for education reform policy today are supported by large bodies of compelling research.

As the fate of NCLB continues to be debated, the evidence shows not only that NCLB has failed its stated goals, but also that politicians, the media, and the public have failed to embrace the one element of the legislation that held the most promise—scientifically based research—suggesting that dodos may in fact not be extinct.

* Santelices, M. V., & Wilson, M. (2010, Spring). Unfair treatment? The case of Freedle, the SAT, and the standardization approach to differential item functioning. Harvard Educational Review, 80(1), 106-133.; Spelke, E. S. (2005, December). Sex differences in intrinsic aptitude for mathematics and science? American Psychologist, 60(9), 950-958; See page 4 for 2012 SAT data: http://media.collegeboard.com/digitalServices/pdf/research/TotalGroup-2012.pdf

CCSS

Clarifying Common Core Compromise (part 2)

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My initial Common Core compromise was intentionally brief—in part to make it accessible and, ultimately, as a concession that it details elements unlikely to be embraced by the political and corporate leaders driving CC-mania.

While I remain north of skeptical, able to see clearly cynicism, about the possibility that my compromise will be embraced, I did receive enough response—and many important concerns—to justify a follow up, clarifying a few key concepts behind my compromise.

First, the foundational motivation for the compromise is to highlight that both CC (and the entire accountability movement) and the USDOE are, as currently functioning, deeply flawed structures, each working to ruin universal public education. The flaws at the root of CC and the USDOE are related to bureaucracy, political/partisan corruption (a redundancy, I realize), and predatory corporations (the private feeding on public funds).

Next, the elements in my compromise are designed to re-imagine CC as a genuine mechanism of change—to end the current accountability era and spur a new era of authentic commitments to social and educational equity and opportunity and to end the USDOE as a political/partisan bureaucratic nightmare and re-invision the USDOE as a centralized and professional ministry of education that serves the public good and the people.

So here are a few clarifications directed at the concerns raised so far:

  • Ending high-stakes testing accomplishes a few key reforms: (a) ending the disaster capitalism of Pearson and other corporations that benefit from crisis discourse about schooling, feeding on precious public funds, (b) ending a historically bankrupt tradition of linking test scores to individual students, teachers, and schools (using NAEP, random sampling, and broad data sets), and thus, addressing privacy concerns (NAEP data not linked to individual students but creating longitudinal data bases by states), ending high-stakes accountability, and stemming the tide of value-added methods designed to de-professionalize teachers.
  • Transforming the USDOE to a centralized, professional, and responsive ministry of education does not mean I am calling for standardization or “government control of schools.” In fact, I am calling for the exact opposite of those concerns. Centralized does not mean standardized. Currently, the US has a public workforce composed of public school teachers and publicly funded university professors that includes all the expertise and knowledge needed to create the resources every public school in the US needs. As I detailed, the USDOE centralizes all materials, resources, and assessments (NAEP), but  centralized must not mandate for any schools. Instead, each school will base needs on the populations of students being served, and then the USDOE becomes a centralized (thus creating an equity of opportunity) resource to serve the needs expressed by each school. Education must begin with each student and work outward.
  • Although I didn’t directly note this before, I also envision once we end high-stakes testing and move to NAEP-like data sets (similar to what Finland does), we must then expand dramatically the evidence used to monitor and reform further our schools.

Is it possible for educators, scholars, researchers, and community members who believe in public education and the essential nature of the Commons for a free people to take the tool of oppression (Common Core) and turn it against the very people who created it?

I wonder, yes, I wonder.

And when I wonder, I think about—despite all its flaws—the film Gandhi, and the spirit found in key scenes of a people coming to embrace their own freedom:

Brigadier: You don’t think we’re just going to walk out of India!

Gandhi: Yes. In the end, you will walk out. Because 100,000 Englishmen simply cannot control 350 million Indians, if those Indians refuse to cooperate.

Can a spirit of non-cooperation grow from a solidarity around CC as a true mechanism of reform?

Nehru: Bapuji, the whole country is moving.

Gandhi: Yes. but in what direction?

CCSS

My Common Core Compromise

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While nearly all states in the US implement Common Core standards as well as brace for the so-called “next generation” high-stakes tests guaranteed in their wake, the debate around CC has increased. Most people fall into one of three camps—CC advocates, Tea Party/libertarian CC detractors who see the standards as liberal “big” government intrusion, and educators, academics, and researchers who reject CC as more of the same failed accountability paradigm.

Early and often, I have stood firmly in the third camp, entirely rejecting CC. I remain troubled by the number of educators who say they support CC, but reject the high-stakes testing and accountability linked to the new standards. I also remain troubled that the tremendous investment of public funds and time benefitting directly private corporations feeding off new standards and tests appears to concern few people.

However, I am now prepared to compromise and support CC implementation under the following conditions:

  • Adopting CC in all states is part of a complete repealing of No Child Left Behind.
  • New federal education legislation fully funds CC implementation and bans any public funds being spent on private corporation materials or tests.
  • All CC materials and resources will be produced, distributed, and monitored by the USDOE, and funded by federal and state resources allocated for education.
  • The USDOE will create a centralized web-based clearing house for educators to upload lesson plans and other resources for all teachers to implement CC.
  • States accepting federal funds and implementing CC must end immediately all high-stakes testing and linking teacher evaluations and pay to test scores.
  • NAEP assessments will be aligned with CC and then administered in 3rd, 8th, and 11th grades to random samples of students in all 50 states to create a data base for examining the effectiveness of CC.

Under these conditions, adopting CC would represent real reform and would be a needed mechanism for ending the worst aspects of the accountability era over the past 30 years.

As long as CC remains central to maintaining the status quo—notably as a cash cow for private corporations to feed off public funds—I cannot support them in any way.

CCSS, Education, Teaching

Education Done To, For, or With Students?

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Teachers caution student writers to avoid cliches like the plague, but many cliches harbor enduring truths.

Rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic is an apt characterization of the rush to adopt and implement Common Core and next-generation assessments—particularly if we ignore the conditions of teaching and learning.

What happens in the classroom and which populations of students have rich learning opportunities are essential factors contributing to student academic growth, regardless of the prescribed standards (new or not) and regardless of which generation spawns the tests.

One way to consider the conditions of teaching and learning in the classroom is to examine the prepositions of teaching: (1) Education done to students, (2) education done for students, and (3) education done with students.

Education done to students. Traditional approaches to teaching and learning as well as the more recent “no excuses” model for schooling are driven by essentially paternalistic assumptions: Learning is reduced to a discrete body of knowledge to be imparted by the teacher and deposited in the student (Freire labeled this the “banking” concept). School becomes a place, then, where teaching is done to students.

Traditionally, education done to students has been common for the youngest students, couched inside an assumption that new learning is acquired best analytically (it isn’t because about 80% of people are global, not analytical thinkers) and in linear/sequential instruction. Direct and isolated grammar and phonics instruction, for example, represent well education done to students in traditional practices. More recently, during the rise of “no excuses” ideology, younger students and students confronting new learning continue to receive an education done to them, but high-poverty and minority students have also joined their ranks as “no excuses” schools tend to serve these populations by reducing schooling to highly structures test-preparation: work sheets, programmatic textbooks, computer-based diagnostic testing, benchmark testing.

As well, increasingly, standards- and test-based accountability has driven education toward static and reduced curriculum, teachers as mere agents of dispensing that fixed curriculum, and students as passive recipients of what is tested is what is taught. In short, education done to students fails everyone.

Education done for students. The progressive yin to the traditional yang* is education done for students. While the practices that characterize education done for students may be rooted in a kind of maternalism, those practices remain distorted by similar goals found in teaching done to students. A key example of the rise of teaching done for students is the work of Wiggins and McTighe, marketed as understanding by design. Central to this concept are some compelling ideas such as teachers being transparent with students about what learning outcomes are expected, lending credibility to the rubric as a mechanism for guiding student work and promoting the appearance of greater validity and reliability to assigning grades to a wide range of assessments (particularly created responses, performances, and products).

With the end chosen by the teacher in mind (the assessment), lesson planning remains focused on what the students must acquire in order to perform. Rubric-driven instruction and assessment do avoid the “gotcha” problem inherent in traditional teaching, but the rubric fails authentic learning because it, again, reduces learning to compliance.

Within a culture of teaching done for students, teachers are encouraged to take great care, for example, in designing writing prompts, with the argument that a well crafted prompt and carefully constructed rubric insure students will write the essays teachers seek. In that context, however, student agency is ignored and student voice is reduced to an observable and identified (for the student) set of criteria on the scoring rubric.

While teaching done for students again disproportionately impacts negatively young and new learners, impoverished students, English language learners, and minority students (in other words, those students most often marginalized by society and schools), a stark example of the failure of teaching done for students lies with the so-called top students, identified as the good-student trap by Scheele:

We come to college with the unspoken anticipation of all that will be done for us. We expect to be made acceptable, valuable, knowledgeable, and finally professional and employable. By graduation, we presume everything will be dazzlingly clear: We will find our calling, brilliantly catapulting us to a guaranteed successful career. This wish, seldom even conscious, lies deep in our hearts. Yet we believe it will happen….

Most of us learned as early as junior high that we would pass, even excel if we did the work assigned to us by our teachers. We learned to ask whether the test covered all of chapter five or only a part of it, whether the assigned paper should be ten pages long or thirty, whether “extra credit” was two book reports on two books by the same author or two books written in the same period. Remember?

We were learning the Formula.

• Find out what’s expected.
• Do it.
• Wait for a response.

And it worked. We always made the grade. Here’s what that process means: You took tests and wrote papers, got passing grades, and then were automatically promoted from one year to the next. That is not only in elementary, junior, and senior high school, but even in undergraduate and graduate school. You never had to compete for promotions, write résumés, or rehearse yourself or even know anyone for this promotion. It happened automatically. And we got used to it….

So what’s the problem? The problem is the danger. The danger lies in thinking about life as a test that we’ll pass or fail, one or the other, tested and branded by an Authority. So, we slide into feeling afraid we’ll fail even before we do-if we do. Mostly we don’t even fail; we’re just mortally afraid that we’re going to. We get used to labeling ourselves failures even when we’re not failing. If we don’t do as well as we wish, we don’t get a second chance to improve ourselves, or raise our grades. If we do perform well, we think that we got away with something this time. But wait until next time, we think; then they’ll find out what frauds we are. We let this fear ruin our lives. And it does. When we’re afraid, we lose our curiosity and originality, our spirit and our talent-our life.

In the end, education done to students and education done for students fail those students since they both ignore the agency of the learner (and the teacher) and allow outcomes that are arbitrary and symbolic to replace authentic demonstrations of understanding grounded in the wants and needs of the learner.

Education done with students. Historically and currently what remains rare is education done with students, a teaching and learning environment for the teacher-student to guide and support the student-teacher (as Freire argues). Education done with students is couched within democratic and liberatory goals, but also is well supported by decades of educational research.

Education done with students shifts the teaching and learning focus away from outcomes (tests), standards, content, and the teacher by honoring each learner as the primary source for teaching and learning.

Briefly, the diverse and student-based research base on best practice shows that education done with students proves to be effective, but incredibly complex, resisting pre-packaged programs and highly efficient testing formats. In fact, stating that best practice, broadly, means that teachers must be expert at adapting instruction to the demonstrated needs of each student sounds simple, if not simplistic.

A clear example of the power of teaching done with students as well as the essentially complex nature of best practice is to examine the charts provided by Zemelman, Daniels, and Hyde at the end of each content-based chapter. Significantly, best practice tends not to discount entirely or solely endorse any practice (the charts contain two columns, headed “increase” and “decrease”); instead, best practice is a collaboration between teacher and student in which the teacher seeks those strategies that the student has demonstrated a need to acquire.

Another powerful aspect of best practice that highlights the need for teaching done with students is the gradual release of responsibility, as Zemelman, Daniels, and Hyde explain: “The idea of gradual release is quite simple: in the most effective lessons, there is a stepwise transfer of responsibility from the teacher to the student” (p. 39). In other words, there is nothing whimsical (letting students do whatever they want, whenever) or haphazard about teaching done with students. In fact, it is quite purposeful, simple in its essence, and incredibly complex, messy, and unpredictable in its application (thus, it remains rare in the classroom).

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, just as the current accountability era consumed public education, education done with students gained momentum through the rise of the National Writing Project and workshop-based writing instruction, made popular by Nancie Atwell and others. Atwell’s workshop approach was controversial then, and remains rare in classrooms today. But the essence of the workshop (which Atwell attributed to Giacobbe)—time, ownership, and response—redefined the roles and agency of the teacher and the students, the nature of the curriculum (student choice within teacher guidance), and what assessments were honored (increased focus on authentic projects, such as original essays by students).

For all its promise, however, much of those initial right steps have been co-opted and consumed by traditional (teaching done to students) and progressive (teaching done for students) practices as education remains entirely focused on raising test scores based on standards.

The rush to adopt new standards and the hyperbole about next generation assessments are, then, rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.

Once again, our gaze is poised on the wrong things, a myopic and trivial concern for moving around the same old furniture without regard to the people involved or the iceberg (poverty and social inequity) right there before us certain to prompt yet more cries of crisis.

* Yin and yang are complimentary, not opposites; thus, I use this comparison to support my argument that traditional and progressive approaches to education are essentially the same flawed ideology because they remain trapped inside a single mechanistic paradigm; progressive education appears a bit more child-centered, a bit more kind-hearted, but it isn’t.

CCSS, education reform

“There wasn’t a lot of choice, but there was some”

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In the June 2013 newsletter for the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education (AACTE), Board of Directors Chair Fayneese Miller makes this case about Common Core States Standards (CCSS):

What should be our message? What do we stand for?

For starters, we need to stand resolved in supporting the implementation of the Common Core and its concomitant assessments. Unless we can demonstrate that what is about to occur in most states by 2014 will harm students, we need to stand back from criticizing and look for ways to show that we can be a real partner in improving student learning and outcomes….

We can be a powerful voice on education if we align our messages and speak with one voice. The time to do this is not tomorrow, but now.

This message of “speak[ing] with one voice” in support of CCSS comes on the heels of Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, calling for a moratorium on high-stakes testing of CCSS while the new standards are implemented.

Learning First Alliance has also added their endorsement of the testing moratorium proposal.

However, Alice Johnson Cain, vice president for policy at Teach Plus, has rejected the moratorium, endorsing both CCSS and high-stakes testing through a commentary at Education Week:

But a moratorium would be a mistake.

The common core is not just another reform; it is truly a revolutionary development. But it is also a package deal in which next-generation assessments will inform and improve instruction in ways that make far more sense to teachers than the current “bubble tests” that are often disconnected from what they teach and what their students need.

What these arguments all have in common is that CCSS are now inevitable; that we debate only how to implement CCSS, how and when to test CCSS, and to what degree CCSS are “revolutionary” all seal the fate of educators and students. As Miller seems to be suggesting, challenging implementation of CCSS is now off the table.

“There wasn’t a lot of choice, but there was some”

For over a decade of my nearly two decades as a public high school English teacher in the rural and deeply conservative South, one of the most powerful and enduring units in my Advanced Placement Literature and Composition course centered around Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale.

The discussion surrounding Chapter 16, when the main character Offred (June) contemplates The Ceremony, proved each year to be one of the best days for me as a teacher and my students. In the dystopian future imagined by Atwood, the U.S. stands fractured and the Caucasian race finds itself disappearing.

The Republic of Gilead, basing its structure and laws on the Christian bible, seeks to repopulate the white race by identifying potentially fertile young women, Handmaids, and assigning them to Commanders, who have wives but also carry out the duty of impregnating Handmaids, a process labeled The Ceremony. In Chapter 16, Offred (June) describes the act by exploring what term best captures her circumstance:

I do not say making love, because this is not what he’s doing. Copulating too would be inaccurate, because it would imply two people and only one is involved. Nor does rape cover it: nothing is going on here that I haven’t signed up for. There wasn’t a lot of choice but there was some, and this is what I chose. (p. 94)

A central motif running through Atwood’s speculative narrative is the existence and consequences of reduced circumstances. The Handmaids are but one example of many throughout the novel representing the stratification of women as a mechanism for controlling women. Just as the history of slavery in the U.S. revealed how slave owners pitted slave against slave—those allowed in the “house” and those relegated to the “field”—the reduced circumstances of women in the novel exposes the use of carefully managed choices to maintain control, to maintain the status quo of hierarchies of power.

Just as Offred (June) has had her circumstances reduced to the point that she relinquishes her humanity to “some” choice, educators now find ourselves in a state of perpetual reform under the weight of crisis:

The administrations in charge never cease announcing supposedly necessary reforms: to reform schools, to reform industries, hospitals, the armed forces, prisons….In the disciplinary societies one was always starting again (from school to the barracks, from the barracks to the factory), while in the societies of control one is never finished with anything—the corporation, the educational system, the armed services being metastable states coexisting in one and the same modulation, like a universal system of deformation. (Deleuze, 1992)

The message is clear for teachers: Be quiet and just reform. And that message endures within both the moratorium stance and “next-generation assessments” advocacy.

The reduced circumstances of teaching and learning are currently imprisoned in a state of fatalism—CCSS are inevitable so everyone must shut up, lie back, and make the best of it. As Freire warns:

There is a lot of fatalism around us. An immobilizing ideology of fatalism, with its flighty postmodern pragmatism, which insists that we can do nothing to change the march of socio-historical and culture reality because that is how the world is anyway. The most dominant contemporary version of such fatalism is neoliberalism. With it, we are led to believe that mass unemployment on a global scale is an end-of-the-century inevitability. From the standpoint of such an ideology, only one road is open as far as educative practice is concerned: adapt the student to what is inevitable, to what cannot be changed. In this view, what is essential is technical training, so that the student can adapt and, therefore, survive. (pp. 26-27)

The fatalism of reform in the guise of CCSS and “next-generation assessments” creates silent compliance, and ultimately the sort of guilt by association captured in World War Z:

Brilliance….Conventional executions might have reinforced discipline, might have restored order from the top down, but by making us all accomplices, they held us together not just by fear, but by guilt as well. We could have said no, could have refused and been shot ourselves, but we didn’t. We went right along with it….We relinquished our freedom that day, and we were more than happy to see it go. From that moment on we lived in true freedom, the freedom to point to someone else and say “They told me to do it! It’s their fault, not mine.” The freedom, God help us, to say “I was only following orders.” (p. 81-83)

“Only one road is open” in the fatalism of advocacy for CCSS, whether there is a moratorium on testing or not, but that road is yet more dystopian fiction, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.

It is, then, necessary for educators to build and then follow another road, one that confronts a fact of recent accountability history: what is tested is what is taught. The promises of CCSS and “next-generation assessments” ignore that inevitability.

The new road includes a message that we do not need “new” standards, we do not need “new” tests, but we do need to end the high-stakes accountability culture/paradigm.