Category Archives: education

Charter schools, education, education reform, race, racism

The Tone-Deaf Politics of Denying Racism, Excusing Segregation

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Let’s connect the dots, which is challenging because, if those with power had their way, it would be white dots on a field of white.

Rick Hess, whose tagline is “Education policy maven Rick Hess of the American Enterprise Institute [AEI] think tank offers straight talk on matters of policy, politics, research, and reform,” blogging at Education Week makes this claim:

Some deem this a healthy and long-overdue development, believing that social justice demands that education be understood through the prism of race and inequality. They believe that tackling deep racial inequities is the measure of one’s commitment to educational improvement, and view measures like the DREAM Act and affirmative action as inseparable from elements of that work. Thus, they tend to see an inevitable overlap between school reform and the pursuit of progressive policies regarding housing, immigration, policing, health care, and much more.

Others of us think that viewing education primarily through the lens of race is unhealthy and divisive, fueling a destructive hypersensitivity and race-based grievance. We’re concerned that it undermines the unifying possibilities of democratic schooling, especially when foundational virtues like personal responsibility and patriotism get dismissed as culturally oppressive remnants from yesteryear. We fear that it turns schooling, potentially one of our great common endeavors, into something very different, political, and partisan.

Keep in mind the dichotomy of “some” and “we.”

Next, a review of an AEI report on charter schools reveals:

The reviewers find that the report presents charter school de facto segregation as a benign byproduct of parental choice. In fact, the review finds that the original report actually acknowledged that this type of stratification was part and partial of a “properly” functioning charter sector – one in which parents get to choose the type of school their children attend.

“Some” who “[believe] that social justice demands that education be understood through the prism of race and inequality” are being, according to Hess, “political” and “partisan.”

And AEI finds segregation “benign” because it is just what parents choose.

With those dots detected and connected, consider this Tweet from Charles Blow:

What is at play here, and linked by AEI, includes an ends-justify-the-means ideology paired with Social Darwinism (masked as “parental choice”)—all of which is bereft of any sort of ethical grounding, any acknowledgement that “some” (the ellipsis of race, and thus, people of color) are making pleas for being heard to create a more just and equitable education system and country.

The ends justify the means for the winners because they have no personal experience with the devastating impact of the means—think the pyramids of Egypt to the economy of the South and the entire nation during U.S. slavery.

The Masters must keep pointing at the outcomes and must find ways to silence the enslaved, the oppressed.

The Masters must control what is normal, objective, and non-partisan/non-political (their way) while casting everyone else as the “other”—biased, partisan, political, radical.

Hess and AEI are peddling the inexcusable in a time now dominated by the deplorables.

None the less, these are calloused claims, and nothing can justify denying racism or embracing segregation.

Charleston Post and Courier, Charter schools, education, education reform, Educational Research, Teach for America, Teacher Evaluation, Teaching, Testing, VAM

Don’t Buy Bluster from Teacher Quality VAM-pires

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The responses are predictable online and through social media any time I address teacher quality and policy focusing on teacher evaluation such as my recent commentary on Charleston adopting value-added methods (VAM).

How dare I, some respond, suggest that teacher quality does not matter!

The pattern is exhausting because most responding in indignation first misrepresent what I have claimed and then make the most extreme arguments themselves in order to derail the conversation along their own agenda, usually linked to the charter school movement grounded in teacher bashing and making unobtainable promises.

So let me state here that the central elements of what we know about teacher quality and efforts such as VAM-based teacher evaluation is that teacher quality is not an independent variable (any teacher may be effective for one student and ineffective for another, for example) and, since student high-stakes testing is not designed to measure teacher quality and is more strongly linked to out-of-school factors, VAM is both a horrible technique for identifying teacher quality and, ironically, a guaranteed process for devaluing the importance of teachers.

Teacher quality is unparalleled in importance in terms of student learning, but it is also nearly impossible to measure, quantify—especially through student scores on high-stakes standardized tests.

Teacher quality VAM-pires, then, often have agendas [1] that are masked by their bluster about teacher quality.

Trying to measure and quantify teacher quality is a mistake; linking any evaluation of teacher quality to student test scores lacks validity and reliability—and VAM discourages teachers from teaching the most challenging populations of students (high-poverty, special needs, English language learners).

Focusing on simplistic and inappropriate measures reduces teacher impact to 10-15% of what high-stakes standardized testing measures; in other words, VAM itself devalues teacher quality.

My informed argument, based on 18 years as a public school classroom teacher and 15 years as a teacher educator and scholar, then, is that we must recognize teacher quality is impacted by teacher preparation, teaching/learning conditions, student characteristics, and dozens of other factors inside and outside of schools—many of which are beyond the control of teachers or students.

As well, we must address the teacher quality issues that political and administrative leaders can control: class size, school funding, and most important of all, teacher assignment.

Just as decades of research have revealed that teacher quality accounts for no more than 10-15% of student test scores, decades of research show that affluent and white students are assigned the most experienced and certified teachers while poor and black/brown students are assigned new/inexperienced and un-/under-certified teachers.

The charter school crowd’s bluster about teacher quality is pure hokum because charter schools increase that inequity of teacher assignment by depending on new and uncertified teachers such as candidates from Teach For America.

No one is saying teacher quality does not matter—I clearly am not saying that—but dishonesty about teacher quality does lay at the feet of the edu-reformers and the VAM-pires who wave their collective arms any time we call them on their failed policies and their political agendas.

[1] See the evangelical urge of Broad-trained acolytes, the resume building and cut-and-run patterns of edu-reformers, and the post-truth practices of turn-around and charter advocacy.

Charleston Post and Courier, education, education reform, Teacher Evaluation

Post and Courier (Charleston, SC): CCSD plan for teachers won’t work

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Post and Courier (Charleston, SC): CCSD plan for teachers won’t work

[see full submission with hyperlinks below]

Charleston School District Arriving Late to a Very Bad Party

P.L. Thomas, Professor, Furman University

The most telling aspect of Charleston County School District’s announcement about holding teachers accountable for student test scores may be in the second paragraph of Paul Bowers’s coverage: “District leaders say they don’t want to fire anyone — particularly not in the midst of a statewide teacher shortage that’s only getting worse.”

While it appears some are aware of the unintended consequences of new education policy, we must be concerned that such awareness has not helped better inform this recent decision to move forward with using value-added methods (VAM) in teacher evaluations.

Early research warned and current studies confirm that VAM fails to fulfill political promises, but also feeds existing problems. This pattern has been seen with school choice increasing segregation, exit exams causing higher drop-out rates, and high-stakes tests driving teaching to the test, asking far less of students.

First, we should acknowledge the flawed logic driving the use of VAM to increase teacher accountability. The recent concern about teacher quality is grounded in several false assumptions.

One is the “bad” teacher myth strongly associated with the stereotypical unionized teacher as portrayed in Waiting for Superman.

However, across the U.S. teachers in unionized states produce students with higher test scores that teachers in non-union (called right-to-work) states such as South Carolina. The problem with associating teacher quality and low student outcomes with union protection is that student test scores are more powerfully associated with poverty than any other factor.

This leads to the other false assumption that teacher quality is the most or one of the most important causes of student learning. In fact, teacher quality accounts for only about 10-15% of standardized test scores, the basis of VAM, while out-of-school factors remain the greatest influence, at 60%.

A final assumption is that using test data to evaluate teachers is objective and valid, and thus fair. Yet, many teachers are in content areas without standardized tests, and then, ironically, making any set of data high-stakes causes that data to be less credible (see Campbell’s Law).

Student test scores are poor evidence about teacher quality, and making those scores central to evaluating teachers is guaranteed to further erode that evidence’s usefulness and the process.

Matthew Di Carlo, blogging for the Albert Shanker Institute, details the unintended consequences of VAM as implemented in Houston.

While assessing the Houston teacher evaluation system, Julie Berry Cullen, Cory Koedel, and Eric Parsons discovered that teachers identified as weaker by their student test scores were already leaving at high rates before the new system was implemented in order to identify weak teachers.

In other words, Houston adopted a policy without investigating whether or not teacher quality was the key problem, without acknowledging that with high teacher attrition among so-called weaker teachers, schools were not achieving in ways they envisioned.

Here is one powerful lesson of education reform: Do not adopt a policy until you gather evidence of the problems; and assumptions about those problems are not enough.

After Houston adopted VAM-based evaluation of teacher, as Di Carlo explains, teachers identified by test scores as weak were even more likely to leave, but:

On the other hand, all exits increased under the new evaluations — including among teachers who were rated as average and high performers. The extent to which this spike is attributable to the new evaluation system per se is unclear, but it served to “dilute” the impact on student achievement of the increase in exits among low performers. There is also some indication that higher-rated teachers were more likely to switch out of schools with low-performing students after ETI (versus before the policy), which would also attenuate the impact of the policy.

Historically and currently, Charleston has a teacher problem, yet Houston is a powerful example of how VAM is not the solution to those problems.

The remaining challenge is recruiting and maintaining experienced and certified teachers in the schools that serve the most vulnerable students from high-poverty homes and communities.

The new policy linking teacher evaluations with student test scores will not address those challenges, and we can expect it will actually increase challenges to recruit new teachers and stem teacher attrition.

By adopting VAM and investing in critically discredited system, EVAAS, Charleston County School District is late to a very bad party. The students and community would be better served by making sure we know what the teacher quality problems are and then seeking ways to address those instead of choosing political expediency and wasting tax dollars on policies and programs already shown to fail.

education, James Baldwin, Segregation

6 April 2017 Reader: Segregation and James Baldwin

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But it’s also a country where if you’re running and you’re black there is a high chance you’ll be shot in the back. Then there will be a brief and cinematic fuss but no justice. Baldwin’s beautiful and screaming incomprehension sixty years ago at such atrocities still makes too much sense [emphasis added].

Please take the rope from my throat so that I may sing, Talia Marshall

Segregation

Within integrated schools, de facto segregation persists, Erica L. Green

Howard County is the most integrated school district in the region, according to the Maryland Equity Project of the University of Maryland. Children of different races — especially those who are black and white — are more likely to sit next to each other in Howard than almost anywhere else in the state.

But within that diversity, school leaders have uncovered a de facto system of segregation.

Enrollment data obtained by The Baltimore Sun through a public records request shows that the district’s advanced classes — honors, gifted and talented, and AP — are disproportionately white, while the regular and remedial classes are disproportionately black.

How School Choice Is Increasing Racial Segregation in Public Education

Erika Frankenberg, an associate professor of education and an associate of the Population Research Institute at Penn State, was the lead author of the study. She notes that “Black and Latino students tended to move into charter schools that were more racially isolated than the public schools they left.” This is a cause for concern, according to the authors. Dr. Frankenberg states that “minority students in more diverse school settings have higher short-term and long-term academic outcomes than those who attend racially isolated minority schools.

White students in Philadelphia area schools tended to go to charter schools that had a greater percentage of White students than the public school they had attended. But in the rest of the state, White students tended to opt for charter schools that were more diverse than the public schools.

James Baldwin

How James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time still lights the way towards equality, Steven W Thrasher

His 1962 classic The Fire Next Time was originally a letter, written by Baldwin to his nephew on the 100th anniversary of the so-called emancipation of black America. In the letter’s penultimate paragraph, Baldwin writes: “This is your home, my friend, do not be driven from it; great men have done great things here, and will again, and we can make America what America must become.” It is rhythmically similar to Trump’s red-hatted mantra – but there’s a big difference between trying to make America “great again” and focusing on what it once was, rather than what it “must become”.

More than 50 years on, The Fire Next Time has been reprinted by Taschen in a beautiful new edition that pairs his text with images by the civil rights-era photographer Steve Schapiro. Baldwin was “the scribe of the movement, our illustrious griot, who knew our struggle because he lived it”, as congressman John Lewis writes in the foreword. But before mobile phone videos and Twitter allowed black Americans to directly telegraph their plight to the world, it was up to photojournalism to visualise the message, as Schapiro’s images did in Life magazine.

James Baldwin. The Fire Next Time. Photographs by Steve Schapiro

Against Literary Nationalism, Jan Clausen

In the twenty years since [Adrienne] Rich spoke out, the injustices she pointed to have intensified. Indeed, anyone who thinks that “cynical policies” disappeared under Obama should review his remarks to the nation’s top financial executives in March 2009, when the purveyor of “hope and change” tried to reassure the fat cats: “My administration is the only thing between you and the pitchforks. . . . I’m going to shield you from congressional and public anger.”

Those who value “justice for all” cannot look at the actually existing United States — the barbarous inequalities it fosters at home, the imperial violence it passes off as foreign policy — without concluding that “the American proposition” is bunk. This is not, of course, to give up on fighting for justice; it is merely to eschew the veneration of a history of abuses.

So why don’t today’s writers take a stand like Rich? What happened to the radical dissent embodied in figures like James Baldwin, Grace Paley, and June Jordan — or the United Kingdom’s Harold Pinter, who devoted part of his 2005 Nobel Prize acceptance speech to delivering a scathing rebuke of America’s imperial crimes?

Under the Spell of James Baldwin, Darryl Pinckney

Baldwin said that Martin Luther King Jr., symbol of nonviolence, had done what no black leader had before him, which was “to carry the battle into the individual heart.” But he refused to condemn Malcolm X, King’s supposed violent alternative, because, he said, his bitterness articulated the sufferings of black people. These things could also describe Baldwin himself in his essays on race and US society. He may not have dealt with “this sociology and economics jazz,” as Harold Cruse complained of him in The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual (1967), but the reconstruction of America was for him, even in his bleakest essays, firstly a moral question, a matter of conscience. And at his best he simply didn’t need the backup of statistics and dates. When it came to The Fire Next Time (1963), the evidence of his experience, the truth of American history, he could take perfect flight on his own.

Battling to Save James Baldwin’s Home in the South of France, Rachel Donadio

Baldwin, who had lived in Paris earlier in his life, first came to Saint-Paul-de-Vence in 1970, at the age of 46, after a breakdown. He had been excoriated by fellow members of the civil rights movement — some called the author, who was gay, Martin Luther Queen — and believed he was under surveillance by the United States government. In France, he found the tranquillity and distance to write.

At the time of his death from cancer, he had been buying the house in installments from his landlady, Jeanne Faure, who grew up in Algeria under French colonial rule. Despite her right-wing politics, she and Baldwin had become the best of friends. (When President François Mitterrand of France made Baldwin a commander of the Legion of Honor in 1986, one of the country’s highest honors, the author brought Ms. Faure to the ceremony.)

Please take the rope from my throat so that I may sing, Talia Marshall

I read Baldwin’s gay novel Giovanni’s Room at the same time, but Another Country is my favourite because it had these women in it: white, privileged Cass with her WASP, horse-riding New England girlhood, and Black, imperious and beautiful Ida who was aloof and suspicious of her dead brother’s white friends. Cass and Ida were proof Baldwin paid some attention to the inner world of women even if he imprisoned them in their sex as equally as men.

All his writing toils with the fact and cage of the body. The black body and the white fear of its darkness, and the cultural incomprehension at the heart of American life. His paradoxical and gospel-fed vision was that the only way to solve the ‘negro problem’ was to set white people free from their prejudice, given the subjugating nature of power even for the powerful.

James Baldwin was the double negative: Black and gay, and blessed with a frog-like lovely/unlovely face and boy-preacher airs; the greedy reader who devoured every single book in the Harlem library as a child; the ear for mixing the street talk of Harlem and Brooklyn, and the Beat chatter of the Village with the heady modernism of James and Joyce. Baldwin is often accused by critics of having superfluous amounts of empathy, and at times this compassion for the human condition slips into purple, gushing sentimentality. Like Disney for the bohemian set, Baldwin’s writing can be the literary equivalent of a relentless zoom lens shot of people’s faces and all their wretched, spilling emotions.

education, Teacher Evaluation, VAM

VAM, Teacher Bashing, and Unintended Outcomes: “[A]ll [teacher] exits increased under the new evaluations”

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Research analysis at Shanker Blog is among the very best available online, notably the work of Matthew Di Carlo.

The posts there are predictably nuanced and careful, dispassionate—to a fault. As a critical educator, I am on edge when I read these careful explications of educational research because they tend to stand so far back from drawing critical conclusions that they leave a great deal of room for forgiving awful and baseless policy.

Teacher Evaluations And Turnover In Houston is an extremely important post as it unpacks new research on the current era of teacher evaluations spawned during the Obama years, notably the increased use of value-added methods (VAM) that link teacher quality to student test scores.

I highly recommend reading the post in full, but here I want to add a few annotations to address both my concerns the analysis tip-toes when it should stomp and to emphasize a few key takeaways well addressed by Di Carlo.

Let me share a few passages, and I will boldface what I want to address; first, the opening:

We are now entering a time period in which we might start to see a lot of studies released about the impact of new teacher evaluations. This incredibly rapid policy shift, perhaps the centerpiece of the Obama Administration’s education efforts, was sold based on illustrations of the importance of teacher quality.

The basic argument was that teacher effectiveness is perhaps the most important factor under schools’ control, and the best way to improve that effectiveness was to identify and remove ineffective teachers via new teacher evaluations. Without question, there was a logic to this approach, but dismissing or compelling the exits of low performing teachers does not occur in a vacuum. Even if a given policy causes more low performers to exit, the effects of this shift can be attenuated by turnover among higher performers, not to mention other important factors, such as the quality of applicants (Adnot et al. 2016).

To address incredibly flawed educational policy, I believe we must be much more careful about distinguishing between political/public claims and then how the research community poses the same issues.

As Adam Bessie has outlined, the “bad” teacher myth was never “sold” in the ways Di Carlo notes above. The film Waiting for Superman is a powerful example of how political and public discourse about “bad” teachers was primarily an argument that teacher quality was the singular or most important factor in student learning, period; politicians and the public almost never added the caveat “most important in-school factor.”

And we must acknowledge that the “bad” teacher movement driving new teacher evaluations including VAM was significantly grounded in anti-union sentiment and union-busting objectives—not about teacher quality or student learning.

The nuanced argument about teacher quality, in fact, was most often expressed among some researchers, while mostly absent from the media or political discourse, such as Di Carlo (from 2010):

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

Next, further into the recent post:

Prior to ETI, there was a negative relationship between teacher effectiveness and exits – i.e., less effective teachers were more likely to exit than their more effective colleagues, with effectiveness here defined in terms of validated measures of teachers’ ability to raise students’ test scores (in part because the original value-added scores, unlike the other components of the system, are available both before and after the new evaluations were implemented).

A strong footnote for this important point—so-called weaker teachers were already leaving—is that the real teacher quality problems facing schools, notably high-poverty schools serving vulnerable populations of students, are a lack of equity in terms of teacher assignment (poor students, black/brown students, ELL students, and special needs students disproportionately are assigned year after year to new or inexperienced and un-/under-certified teachers; white and affluent students are gifted the most experienced and certified teachers) and the debilitating grind of high teacher attrition, turnover, in high-poverty and majority-minority schools.

Just as school choices increases educational problems such as segregation, VAM-based teacher evaluation does not address the real problems—equitable access to experienced and qualified teacher, and teacher turnover in high-poverty schools—while also increasing those problems.

And finally:

The big finding of Cullen et al. is that the relationship was stronger after the onset of the new evaluation system, with the estimated effects concentrated among low-performing teachers in schools serving low-performing students, who were more likely to exit the district than they were before ETI.

On the one hand, this suggests that the new evaluations worked as intended. Under a system in which principals were armed with better information about their teachers’ performance (full evaluation results instead of single year value-added scores), teachers who were less effective in raising test scores were more likely to exit the district (or be dismissed) post-ETI than they were prior to ETI, particularly in schools serving lower performing students. On the other hand, all exits increased under the new evaluations — including among teachers who were rated as average and high performers. The extent to which this spike is attributable to the new evaluation system per se is unclear, but it served to “dilute” the impact on student achievement of the increase in exits among low performers. There is also some indication that higher-rated teachers were more likely to switch out of schools with low-performing students after ETI (versus before the policy), which would also attenuate the impact of the policy.

The Big Caveat, of course, is that this evaluation process and concurrent analysis remain trapped in the efficient (read: lazy) use of test scores by students to determine teacher quality and effectiveness. That said, this study seems to show that VAM-type evaluations may actually push out so-called weak teachers—while also pushing out so-called effective and experienced teachers.

This preliminary evidence supports what many of us have been warning about during the Obama era of education reform: The “bad” teacher approach to education reform causes more harm than good because it misrepresents teacher quality and further de-professionalizes teaching, such as eroding the current teacher work force and discouraging the so-called “best and brightest” from choosing education as their career.

Di Carlo continues to offer incredibly important education research analysis, and I highly recommend anyone interested in education reform to return to this blog regularly. There you will find careful and crisp analysis—although I will continue to hope for the sort of analysis that will critically confront what lies beneath the political and public discourse about schools, education, teachers, and students.

The story inside the story of the research analyzed above is that beneath the “bad” teacher approach to education reform is a great deal of bad politics and bad media; and we must stop tip-toeing around those facts.

education

“So We must meet apart”: #NationalPoetryMonth 2017 and My Journey with Emily Dickinson

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So We must meet apart –
You there – I – here –
With just the Door ajar
That Oceans are – and Prayer –
And that White Sustenance –
Despair –

“[I cannot live with You (640)],” Emily Dickinson

I stumbled into college a hyper-student, with greater parts ignorant arrogance than knowledge or awareness.

By traditional schooling metrics, I was a very smart redneck.

Formal education had convinced me I was a math and science person; therefore, I often stated in my first two years attending a local junior college that I intended to major in physics—that wonderful nexus of math and science.

But then college intervened. During my first survey literature course, my professor, Dean Carter, asked me to tutor for all his classes. I was stunned and initially balked at the idea.

Dean Carter was effusive in his praise of my work in the course, and I gave in, mostly, I think, because tutoring was a paying position. This moment, however, is the foundation of my becoming both a teacher and a writer, I believe.

During my first year of college because of a speech class where I discovered e.e. cummings, I also started writing poetry. Yet, making the transition from math/science guy to English guy was still slow in coming.

My junior college experience, as you may be able to tell already, was extremely important in steering me toward who I am as a person and professionally. Those years, though, were not without bumps.

There, I found myself in Mr. Pruitt’s class for the second time, the first being a positive experience in which we covered some standard American literature I had enjoyed in high school—Thoreau and Emerson standing out in my memory.

This second class began by covering what felt like at the time every single poem by Emily Dickinson, who I genuinely did not enjoy.

Mr. Pruitt had a condition causing him to shake, his head always in motion, and he, like my French professor, was a chain smoker. (This was the late 1970s, early 1980s when smoking was common in every situation casual or formal.)

And Mr. Pruitt loved Emily Dickinson.

These were the days of ditto machines, a copying process that involved typing onto paper with a purple ink sheet behind it in order to create a master to run through the ditto machine; the product was a slightly damp stack of papers reeking of chemicals.

Mr. Pruitt’s Dickinson test was on 8.5 x 14 paper with prompts and questions squeezed into every inch of white space, even sideways along the left and right margins as well as crammed against the top and bottom edges.

Let me return for a second here to the hyper-student claim in the opening: throughout high school, I was capable of making As and Bs without much effort, very little studying.

Before Mr. Pruitt’s Dickinson test, I likely spent more time recreational beer drinking than studying or even reading the poems by Dickinson assigned.

I made a 62.

At that point of college, I was already more of an A student than the A/B student of high school so that 62 soured my attitude about Mr. Pruitt and English, but it completely poisoned my view of Dickinson.

After junior college, I declared a secondary education major when I transferred to a local hyphenated campus of the state university, focusing on English certification. I also dedicated myself to taking as many upper-level courses as the so-called “straight” English majors did.

I graduated college very dedicated to a career as a teacher and extremely aware that I was a writer, specifically a poet. For about a decade or more, I must confess, I carried my disdain for Dickinson into my high school English classes.

And then, from 1995 until 1998, I continued to teach high school full time, adjuncting as well at local colleges, and enrolled in my doctoral program, where I wrote a biography of English educator Lou LaBrant for my dissertation.

My doctoral work included my own commitment to read as many biographies of women as possible along with my scholarly examination of feminist theory on biography, education biography, and the history of education in the U.S.

Toward the end of my program, I discovered The Passion of Emily Dickinson by Judith Farr, a literary biography that carefully confronted Dickinson’s life in a way I had never experienced before. Farr anchored her biographical considerations in Dickinson’s poetry and letters, emphasizing poems often not a part of the traditional canon of what we teach, which tells students Dickinson is obsessed with death, and once wrote about a snake [1].

Of course, despite my being a poet and an avid reader/writer, I had simply failed to see Emily Dickinson reflected in the grandeur of her work, her words. And that was traceable back to how she had been taught, misrepresented, in formal English classrooms, including the singular daguerreotype:

Yale University Manuscripts & Archives Digital Images Database

Several things changed for me then.

I pledged to be more intentional about what I taught my students in terms of author biography, and I began to work even more carefully about honoring the sanctity of what I taught over other less important objectives: echoing Dewey [2] from my doctoral work, I began to ask what did it avail me or my students to badger them with canonical poetry and scansion if that experience made them not want to read poetry.

Just as men “edited” Dickinson’s found treasure of poetry to make it publishable, Dickinson has been reduced to a caricature, and the canon of her poems further misrepresents her, glossing over her full humanity, her womanhood, and her richness as an artist/poet.

My journey with Dickinson also included Adrienne Rich’s brilliant and revolutionary examination, “Vesuvius at Home.” My classes already included joyful lessons on Rich, Sylvia Plath, and Anne Sexton, all of whom had been taught wonderfully to me by Dr, Nancy Moore over my junior and senior years of college.

After my conversion, then, I began to include “Wild Nights—Wild Nights! (249)”—yes, Dickinson was sexual, even erotic, and she played with gender expectations of her poem’s personas—and “This World is not Conclusion (373),” my favorite Dickinson because the first line includes a period, creating tension with “not Conclusion” and student expectations of Dickinson’s use of punctuation.

“I cannot live with You – ,” Dickinson’s speaker begins, adding later: “I could not die – with You –.” And then the tension that in many ways defines her life and her poetry:

They’d judge Us – How –
For You – served Heaven – You know,
Or sought to –
I could not –

“So We must meet apart – ,” the speaker concludes, Dickinson ending the poem with the single “Despair – .”

And there we are confronted with poetry—the human compulsion to capture our experience through words, as expression and investigation.

Notes

[1] The traditional canon and formalized ways of teaching women writers often, I think, is at least shaded by the misogynistic “hysterical” marginalizing of women. Male writers return again and again to universal themes or are hard drinkers and womanizers, but women writers are “obsessed” or disproportionately reduced to suicidal and/or psychotic.

[2] John Dewey:

What avail is it to win prescribed amounts of information about geography and history, to win ability to read and write, if in the process the individual loses his own soul: loses his appreciation of things worth while, of the values to which these things are relative; if he loses desire to apply what he has learned and, above all, loses the ability to extract meaning from his future experiences as they occur? (Experience and Education, p. 49)

education, privilege, race, racism

Understanding Racism as Systemic and about Power

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You are an hourly worker in a non-union (euphemistically called “right-work-work”) state. Your immediate boss is abusive and unfair often, but in ways that are nearly impossible to prove.

This is your first real job, and you develop a deep resentment for that boss—eventually coming to despise all bosses and people in authority.

That manager uses tactics that workers believe are abusive and unfair because the manager has decided all workers are lazy and unwilling to work without threats and constant authoritarian oversight.

The worker attitude about bosses and the boss attitude about workers are, however, not the same because of the imbalance of power.

In the beginning, I mention “non-union” because unionization grew out of a recognition that an imbalance of power (owners/bosses/managers versus individual workers) was often conducive to abusive working conditions (think Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle).

Now let’s transfer this workplace dynamic to how people (usually white people) misread racism.

Too often individuals with race or class privilege respond to charges of racism at the individual level: “What about black people who hate white people?” or “What about this white cop shot by a black man? Nobody’s making a fuss about this incident!” or “I am not a racist!”

Decades after his death—and much like the warped legacy of Martin Luther King Jr.—Malcolm X lingers in the white psyche as proof of black racism toward whites because of his “white devil” refrain.

And just as my hypothetical workplace scenario above shows, there exists, in fact, whites who reject all blacks simply for being black and blacks who reject whites for being white.

But, as with bosses and workers, several aspects of these facts expose how they are not the same.

The worker above develops antagonism for all bosses based on actually being mistreated by a boss; now this is possibly an unfair overgeneralization, but it is grounded in real evidence.

Black distrust, black anger—these are expressed in the context of real historical and current inequities that give whites privilege and negatively impact the lives of most if not all blacks.

Both white privilege (advantages not earned) and white animosity to all blacks simply for being black (what most people view as “racism”) are primarily grounded in inequitable systems and stereotypes (not credible evidence).

To make understanding racism even harder, we must try to untangle the recognition that race is not a biological fact (and thus, racial tags cannot be used as valid claims that whites are smarter or blacks are faster, etc.), but a social construct.

And here is where, despite that complexity, racism can be better understood.

Racism cannot be proven or disproven by an individual example. One white person refusing to hire one black person does not prove racism (even when it is clearly a racist act); one black man shooting a white police officer does not prove “reverse racism” or disprove racism.

This individual-gaze has made examining racism and admitting racism a persistent social problem in the U.S. Barack Obama being elected president was never proof of a post-racial society because one event cannot prove (or disprove) a systemic reality.

We are left then with some important elements to understanding—and thus, for many whites, resisting and denying—racism.

Racism is systemic, and while race is not a biological fact, it is a social construction that can be relatively easily managed (we can usually see race, or most people believe they can).

That “believe” is important because racism remains a reality because it, like privilege, works mostly in invisible ways.

Yes, some people remain overt in their oafish racism—the KKK, etc.—but most racism occurs along with privilege without people making conscious decisions to be racist (since virtually everyone is aware that “racism” is a negative behavior) or consciously benefitting from their privilege (a person inherits money or parents secure him a nice profession, after which that person genuinely works hard and is very successful; for that person, the initial privilege is invisible).

So let’s think of another parallel: While men certainly can be raped and physically abused just as women can, virtually all women walk around with a pervasive sense of threat to them physically and sexually because men tend to be physically bigger and stronger but also disproportionately have more power and wealth—while men rarely consider the threats of rape or violent attack.

And this is where understanding racism raises the central element of power.

Systemic racism in the U.S. is exclusively white power over black and brown people—just as sexism is exclusively men’s power over women. When black or brown people hate or demonize whites, this is racial, but not racism because black and brown people lack the systemic power to create the large scale consequences that whites can and do for black and brown people.

Despite being well educated, black women in the U.S. on average earn less than white males because of systemic and inequitable forces, racism and sexism.

Just as we can prove and should be able to see sexism in domestic violence data, rape culture, and inequitable workplace pay and promotion, we can prove and should be able to see racism in access to all sorts of opportunities in the U.S. (education, work), inequitable incarceration rates for blacks and shootings by police, and disproportionate underrepresentation in positions of authority.

Denying racism—as with proving racism—cannot be accomplished at the individual level and and cannot be treated as if race is the singular element in racism.

Racism is systemic and about imbalanced power dynamics that can be correlated with socially constructed racial categories.

Privilege and power are inequitably pooled among white straight men, and thus, a key to eradicating all types of inequity—racism, sexism, homophobia, etc.—is for anyone with privilege to resist denying inequity, especially by focusing on individual examples and by ignoring the central role of power in all types of inequity such as racism.

When confronted with claims of racism, then, “I am not a racist” fails, turning all of the gaze onto the self and thus failing to see—leaving racism both invisible and corrosive.

education, education reform, race, racism

How to Expose Racists: Simply Mention Racism

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I was pleasantly surprised when Education Week published Why Are We Criminalizing Black Students? by Tyrone C. Howard.

Regretfully, this blog is gorged with posts about EdWeek routinely failing the education discussion, but Howard’s commentary confronts well a hard topic in education.

And then came the comments—tone deaf at best, defensive and racist themselves as worst (first three opening rebuttals):

mcruiz

I’m amazed. I truly didn’t know we teachers had that much power, and the propensity to use it for evil deeds. Wow! Imagine that, we have the power to criminalize Black students. Wow, again!

LynnG

This is a ridiculous article and the author’s bias is so heavy handed that he’s made his argument a joke. Talk about confirmation bias.

Paul D. White

One more racist rant from a Black college professor who doesn’t have the courage to tell the truth, and one more worthless posting by Ed Week for what? A desire to show how “tolerant” they are to biased, ignorant positions regarding race and performance in the schools?

The great failure of the U.S. which has brought us to Trumplandia is, as I have pointed out often, James Baldwin’s “this rigid refusal to look at ourselves” that must be aimed with laser focus on white America.

In schools, black and brown children are disproportionately targeted and punished for the same behaviors as white children, and then in society, black and brown people suffer more inequitable treatment by police and the judicial system.

As Thomas Rudd explains about school discipline:

Contrary to the prevailing assumption that African American boys are just getting “what they deserve” when they are disciplined, research shows that these boys do not “act out” in the classroom any more than their White peers.

For example, in a study conducted by the Indiana Education Policy Center, researchers conclude that:

“Although discriminant analysis suggests that disproportionate rates of office referral and suspension for boys are due to increased rates of misbehavior, no support was found for the hypothesis that African American students act out more than other students. Rather, African American students appear to be referred to the office for less serious and more subjective reasons. Coupled with extensive and highly consistent prior data, these results argue that disproportionate representation of African Americans in office referrals, suspension and expulsion is evidence of a pervasive and systematic bias that may well be inherent in the use of exclusionary discipline (Skiba, 2000).”

And the ACLU reports: “Staggering Racial Bias: Marijuana use is roughly equal among Blacks and whites, yet Blacks are 3.73 times as likely to be arrested for marijuana possession.”

Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow details that policing and the judicial system routinely practices inequitable targeting, convicting, and sentencing along racial lines for the same behaviors—blacks disproportionately suffering for acts no different than whites.

This begins in our schools because the white power structure cannot or will not see the bias in order to eradicate it.

The seeds of the wider post-truth U.S. have been sown by the white “rigid refusal” to admit and then confront the racism that continues to fester in the country.

This is old fake news, but as the posts on the EdWeek commentary reveal, racists respond to facts about racism by calling the messenger a racist. That’s the nastiest fake news there is, especially when it is coming in a publication about the education of our children—the first victims of racism, the most powerless victims of racism.

See Also

Racial Disproportionality in School Discipline: Implicit Bias is Heavily Implicated, Thomas Rudd

The War on Marijuana in Black and White (ACLU, 2013)

Education Reform in the New Jim Crow Era

education, Educational Research, reading, Writing

“We Teach English” Revisited

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At times quaint and oddly misguided but unflinchingly confrontational and assertive—the signature tone of her work—Lou LaBrant’s We Teach English (1951) was a rare book-length text over her 65 years as an educator.

While this text for teachers of ELA/English never garnered the status of Louise Rosenblatt’s Literature as Exploration (LaBrant and Rosenblatt were colleagues at NYU), both works represent a long history of trying to coral the field of ELA/English teaching.

A recent conversation and debate on NCTE’s Connected Community about teaching whole-class, assigned novels has reminded me of the enduring tensions of what it means to teach ELA/English—tensions that span K-12 grade levels as well as being grounded in responsibilities to student needs and interests, the field or discipline of English, and literacy broadly.

Historically and then magnified during the past thirty years of high-stakes accountability, ELA/English has shared with math demands and expectations that are not as pronounced in other disciplines; despite the limitations and problems with the terms, I characterize those demands as addressing disciplinary knowledge (or content) and literacy skills.

Our disciplinary knowledge obligations rest with the compulsion to cover established content, such as identifying the parts of speech, analyzing the main characters in The Scarlet Letter, or explaining the key ideas expressed by Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau as American Transcendentalism.

Literacy skills comprise reading, writing, speaking, and listening—how we as humans navigate the world through literacy. Some see these skills as a different way to think about content, skills such as comprehension, predicting, narration, and persuasion.

At best, these obligations can and possibly should work in tandem. When we teach a poem, Langston Hughes’s “Harlem,” for example, we are introducing students to key content about American literature and the Harlem Renaissance while also teaching them about the elements poetry, reading skills (such as analysis), and reading like a writer so they can transfer those rhetorical and literary strategies into their own writing.

Let me pause here to stress that at all levels from K-12, this is a damn high bar for any teacher. It takes a great deal of time and expertise to learn to manage all that effectively.

At worst, these obligations become professional and disciplinary battles—ones waged among practitioners often at the expense of students we should be serving.

We must teach phonics, but what about the children acquiring the desire and ability to read?

We must teach grammar, but what about the children acquiring the desire and ability to write?

Everyone must read The Great Gatsby, but what if that requirement creates nonreaders?

When we form ideological camps about disciplinary knowledge or literacy, we often fail both our field of ELA/English and students.

We teach English means something extremely complex and difficult, something that in fact may be too much to expect of any teacher.

But this is what we do, this is who we are.

If we return to the debate and discussion about teaching whole-class novels, we are revisiting an enduring debate that captures exactly what teaching English means.

To resolve that debate, I believe, we must remain focused on our students, and not on whether or not we address either area of demands in our field.

It is not a simple way to resolve the questions, but it is rather simple: When we attend to either disciplinary knowledge (and we should) or literacy skills (and we must), what are the consequences of those lessons in the evidence of learning by our students?

If we require our students to read Charles Dickens, and many do not read because they dislike the work, and many begin or continue the journey to being a nonreader, then we have failed dramatically any obligations as teachers of ELA/English.

If a whole-class unit on Lord of the Flies or The Hunger Games becomes a vibrant adventure in the novel and literacy, and most if not all read the novel, if several become hooked on literature, then we have accomplished everything that can be expected of teaching ELA/English.

In terms of both student reading and writing, there are decades of evidence that show how student choice in what they read and write is most effective in both fostering disciplinary knowledge (because they actually read and write) and literacy skills as well as literacy engagement (because they become eager to read and write).

But we as teachers of ELA/English are confronted with the essential problem beneath the call for student choice: students must have acquired some disciplinary and skills knowledge and proficiencies in order to make those choices.

If we can keep a critical eye on the outcomes of the instructional decisions we make—if we can resist dogged commitments to ideologies—then we can make informed choices about what best serves our students in terms of both what disciplinary knowledge they acquire and whether or not they develop as proficient and eager readers and writers.

Staying big picture is important—always asking what we are trying to accomplish with students and then paying close attention to what our students show us we are teaching.

In 2004, Donald Graves looked over his career seeking ways to teach students writing; he offered some enduring ideas about “what remains the same”:

The following fundamentals have remained unchanged in the teaching of writing:

  1. Children need to choose most of their own topics. But we need to show them all the places writing comes from, that it is often triggered by simple everyday events.
  1. Children need regular response to their writing from both the teacher and other readers.
  1. Children need to write a minimum of three days out of five. Four or five days are ideal.
  1. Children need to publish, whether by sharing, collecting, or posting their work.
  1. Children need to hear their teacher talk through what she is doing as she writes on the overhead or the chalkboard. In this way, the children witness their teacher’s thinking
  2. Children need to maintain collections of their work to establish a writing history. Collections show that history when they are used as a medium for evaluation. (Language Arts, Vol. 82 No. 2, November 2004)

In the same way as the debate over whole-class novel instruction, if we view Graves’s fundamentals as strict rules and teach to these rules—instead of to how we are fostering students as writers—we become lost, and we likely fail.

So, yes, students choosing what they read, especially something as daunting as a novel, is a fundamental, but that doesn’t necessarily discredit the possibility of whole-class novels.

To answer any instructional questions, then, as a teacher of ELA/English is in our students, not our obligations to disciplinary knowledge or literacy skills—and especially not in covering the mandated standards or preparing students for high-stakes tests.

The questions are worthy of discussion and debate among teachers of ELA/English, but ultimately we must each answer them with each unique group of students we teach.

When faced with the debates and questions about teaching ELA/English, LaBrant could be harsh and demanding—often seeming to teeter on the edge of, if not crossing over into, prescription. However, what LaBrant was demanding about in terms of “we teach English” is not that we follow her rules, or any rules, but that we remain committed to our students and their journeys in both literature and literacy.

During war, in 1942, LaBrant became frustrated with national concerns about literacy:

The induction of American youth into the armed forces, and the attendant examinations and classifications have called attention to a matter long of concern to those who teach reading or who are devoted to the cause of democracy: the fact that in a land which purports to offer universal education we have a considerable number of youth who cannot read intelligently. We are disturbed now because we want these men to be able to read military directions, and they cannot. A greater tragedy is that they are and have been unable to read with sufficient understanding to be constructive peace-time citizens.

As is to be expected, immediate explanations have been forthcoming, and immediate pointing-of-fingers has begun. Most of the explanations and pointing have come from those who have had least to do with teaching reading, and who are least conversant with the real problem.

Sound familiar?

LaBrant argued against what became a recurring political and public hand wringing about a reading crisis:

An easy way to evade the question of improved living and better schools for our underprivileged is to say the whole trouble is lack of drill. Lack of drill! Leťs be honest. Lack of good food; lack of well-lighted homes with books and papers; lack of attractive, well equipped schools, where reading is interesting and meaningful; lack of economic security permitting the use of free schools—lack of a good chance, the kind of chance these unlettered boys are now fighting to give to others. Surround children with books, give them healthful surroundings and an opportunity to read freely. They will be able to read military directions—and much more.

Here and for over six decades, LaBrant was a champion of the we who teach English but in the name of those students we teach, especially the most vulnerable students.

To that end, when we teach English, we teach students.

And there is where our commitments must lie.

education, Writing

Rethinking Grading as Instruction: Rejecting the Error Hunt and Deficit Practices

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As a first-year English teacher, I joined the department of the high school where I had graduated only five years earlier, becoming a colleague with teachers who had taught me. That introduction to the field allowed me behind the curtain, and one of those secrets was being handed a sheet that detailed every grammar and mechanics error students were likely to make in their writing and the amount of points to be deducted from their grade (writing was assigned the traditional content/grammar grade then).

One fragment, by the way, was an immediate deduction that resulted in an F in grammar.

This was department policy, and my efforts to navigate that system were akin to Sisyphus, his rock, and that damned mountain.

Since then, well over thirty years ago, I have become a non-grader, but I also have investigated and adopted concepts about grading (since we all at some point must grade) that I believe are incredibly important in the context of seeing grading (and feedback) as a part of instruction—and not something we do to students and their work after we teach.

A  teacher recently asked on NCTE’s Connected Community about subtracting points for grammar in student writing, and this is an ideal entry point to rethink how grading (especially of writing) sends instructional messages to our students.

My first caution is about a serious flaw with traditional grading that is grounded in viewing assessment situations in a deficit model whereby we have students start with an unearned 100 points from which we subtract credit by identifying errors. This fosters an atmosphere of risk aversion—which is not a healthy environment for developing literacy.

Specifically when teaching writing, we must abandon the “error hunt” (see Weaver, et al., and Lois Matz Rosen).

Therefore, we can send a much healthier message about student performances of learning if we acknowledge that students begin all assessment situations with zero and then give them credit for what they accomplish, what the artifact of learning demonstrates—and not where they fail.

I learned this concept of grading through my Advanced Placement training that encourages viewing writing holistically and then reading for what students do, not conducting the “error hunt.”

Conceptually, then, we must change our language and then couch our grading in a drafting process that gives students the space to take risks while receiving ample feedback as they revise and edit their writing.

Our language about writing must stop referring to “mistakes” and “errors,” while also not asking students to “correct” their work.

Instead, we should delay addressing if our students are being conventional (grammar, mechanics, and usage) until late in the drafting process when we can agree a piece of writing is worth editing (see LaBrant). The question is not if and how much to deduct for surface features not being conventional, but when to consider those issues relevant to the drafting of the piece of writing.

Our feedback during the drafting process is our instruction, and then, most of us at some point must abandon each assignment, requiring that we assign a grade, an act that also is teaching students lessons—ones that should match our philosophy of teaching/learning as well as what we want them to embrace about writing and literacy.

Here, I recommend that we take a holistic approach (I love the upper-half, lower-half concepts of the AP 9-point scale rubric*), but I also believe we should help students learn that all aspects of writing contribute to that holistic response.

The two categories we should be using to grade writing, I think, are revision (if and how students demonstrate content, organization, diction, style) and editing (grammar, mechanics, and usage). When I have graded, I weighted those categories to reflect my main lessons about what makes writing effective by using a 20-point scale articulated as 10 points for content and organization, 5 points for diction and style, and 5 points for grammar, mechanics, and usage.

In all assessment, we should be seeking ways in which grading is both philosophically matched with our instruction and a seamless aspect of our instruction.

If you are teaching students writing quality is holistic and that surface features are less significant to meaning than content, organization, and diction/style, then calculating a grade based on deducting points for errors contradicts (and probably supersedes) your lessons.

Therefore, reducing the grading of writing by students to a set of points to be deducted fails as assessment and instruction.

While most teachers have no real option to de-grade the classroom, we can step back from deficit views of student work and grading in order to embrace grading and instructional practices that create positive learning environments (where risk is encouraged) and celebrate what our students accomplish in their journey as readers, writers, and thinkers.

* The process for scoring a written response to an AP Literature prompt includes thinking in terms of a range of scores 9-8, 7-6, 5, 4-3, 2-1. Above 5 is upper half, and below, lower half. As you read, you are constantly monitoring holistically if you believe the essay is upper or lower by focusing on in what ways the student is fulfilling the expectations of the prompt and remaining accurate in the analysis of the literature being discussed. Typically, that process allows the reader to return to the rubric to refine the grade after completing the essay. If you know the response is upper half but only marginally so, then returning to the 7 and 6 rubric descriptors help refine the final score.