Category Archives: Teaching

Education, education reform, literacy, reading, Teaching, Testing, Writing

Formal Schooling and the Death of Literacy

12 Comments

My privilege is easily identified in my being white and male, but it is the story of my life that better reveals my enormous privilege established by my mother when I was a child.

I entered formal schooling with such a relatively high level of literacy and numeracy that from those first days I was labeled “smart”—a misnomer for that privilege.

From Green Eggs and Ham to Hop on Pop, from canasta to spades, from Chinese checkers to Scrabble—games with my mother and often my father were my schooling until I entered first grade. And none of that ever seemed to be a chore, and none of that involved worksheets, reading levels, or tests.

Formal schooling was always easy for me because of those roots, but formal schooling was also often tedious and so much that had to be tolerated to do the things I truly enjoyed—such as collecting, reading, and drawing from thousands of comic books throughout my middle and late teens. I was also voraciously reading science fiction and never once highlighting the literary techniques or identifying the themes or tone.

During my spring semester, I spend a great deal of time observing pre-service English/ELA teachers, and recently I had an exchange on Twitter about the dangers of grade retention, notably connected to third-grade high-stakes testing.

And from those, I have been musing more than usual about how formal school—how English/ELA teachers specifically—destroy literacy, even when we have the best of intentions.

From the first years of K-3 until the last years of high school, students have their experiences of literacy murdered by a blind faith in and complete abdication to labeling text by grade levels and narrow approaches to literary analysis grounded in New Criticism and what I call the “literary technique hunt.”

Misreading the Importance of Third-Grade Reading

As I have addressed often, reading legislation across the U.S. is trapped in a simplistic crisis mode connected to research identifying the strong correlation between so-called third-grade reading proficiency and later academic success.

Let’s unpack that by addressing the embedded claims that rarely see the light of day.

The first claim is that labeling a text as a grade level is as valid as assigning a number appears. While it is quite easy to identify a text by grade level (most simply calculate measurables such as syllables per word and words per sentence), those calculations entirely gloss over the relationship between counting word/ sentence elements and how a human draws meaning from text—key issues such as prior knowledge and literal versus figurative language.

A key question, then, is asking in whose interest is this cult of measuring reading levels—and the answer is definitely not the student.

This technocratic approach to literacy can facilitate a certain level of efficiency and veneer of objectivity for the work of a teacher; it is certainly less messy.

But the real reason the cult of measuring reading levels exists is the needs of textbook companies who both create and perpetuate the need for measuring students’ reading levels and matching that to the products they sell.

Reading levels are a market metric that are harmful to both students and teaching/learning. And they aren’t even very good metrics in terms of how well the levels match any semblance of reading or learning to read.

The fact is that all humans are at some level of literacy and can benefit from structured purposeful instruction to develop that level of literacy. In that respect, everyone is remedial and no one is proficient.

Those facts, however, do not match well the teaching and learning industry that is the textbook scam that drains our formal schools of funding better used elsewhere—almost anywhere else.

Remaining shackled to measuring and labeling text and students murders literacy among our students; it is inexcusable, and is a root cause of the punitive reading policies grounded in high-stakes testing and grade retention.

The Literary Technique Hunt

By middle and high school—although we continue to focus on whether or not students are reading at grade level—we gradually shift our approach to text away from labeling students/ texts and toward training students in the subtle allure of literary analysis: mining text for technique.

Like reading levels, New Criticism’s focus on text in isolation and authoritative meaning culled from calculating how techniques produce a fixed meaning benefits from the veneer of objectivity, lending itself to selected-response testing.

And thus, the great technique hunt, again, benefits not students, but teachers and the inseparable textbook and testing industries.

The literary technique hunt, however, slices the throat of everything that matters about text—best represented by Flannery O’Connor:

I prefer to talk about the meaning in a story rather than the theme of a story. People talk about the theme of a story as if the theme were like the string that a sack of chicken feed is tied with. They think that if you can pick out the theme, the way you pick the right thread in the chicken-feed sack, you can rip the story open and feed the chickens. But this is not the way meaning works in fiction.

When you can state the theme of a story, when you can separate it from the story itself, then you can be sure the story is not a very good one. The meaning of a story has to be embodied in it, has to be made concrete in it. A story is a way to say something that can’t be said any other way, and it takes every word in the story to say what the meaning is. You tell a story because a statement would be inadequate. When anybody asks what a story is about, the only proper thing is to tell him to read the story. The meaning of fiction is not abstract meaning but experienced meaning, and the purpose of making statements about the meaning of a story is only to help you experience that meaning more fully.

In other words, “A poem should not mean/But be,” as Archibald MacLeish explains.

Texts of all genres and forms are about human expression, about the aesthetic possibilities of creativity.

No writer, like no visual artist, writes in order to have the words or artwork replaced by the reductive act of a technocratic calculating of meaning through the algebra of New Criticism.

To continue the hokum that is “reading level” and to continue mining text for techniques—these are murderous practices that leave literacy moribund and students uninspired and verbally bankrupt.

The very best and most effective literacy instruction requires no textbooks, no programs, and no punitive reading policies.

Literacy is an ever-evolving human facility; it grows from reading, being read to, and writing—all by choice, with passion, and in the presence of others more dexterous than you are.

Access to authentic text, a community or readers and writers, and a literacy mentor—these are where our time and funds should be spent instead of the cult of efficiency being sold by textbook and testing companies.

Education, Teaching, Writing

John Warner Swears Off Essays, and Students? (Yes, And So Should Everyone)

5 Comments

John Warner, writer and visiting instructor of first-year writing, posted yesterday the provocatively titled I’m Never Assigning an Essay Again [1]. And kept the ball rolling this morning on Twitter:

That’s right, it appears Warner is swearing off essays and students in his role as a writing instructor for first-year college students.

I immediately pounced on Warner’s post and Tweets by sharing a key article I come back to often—especially in my work at a selective liberal arts university: The Good Student Trap by Adele Scheele.

“The odd thing about life is that we’ve been taught so many life-less lessons,” Scheele laments, and then hits the key point about how school creates the “good student trap”:

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.

Until the formula doesn’t work, of course. “All that changes once you find that studying history or art or anthropology can be so much more than just jumping through hoops,” Scheele explains. “Your academic pursuits can lead to new experiences, contacts, and jobs. But so much disappointment has resulted from misusing college, treating it as school instead of life [emphasis added].”

And here is where my work as an educator significantly overlaps with Warner’s two assertions: (1) the need to end the template-approach to essays that exists almost exclusively in formal classroom settings, and (2) the inherent failure of training young people in student behaviors, which are like the canned essay, unlike human behaviors in the real world.

So in most of my classes, we start by having frank discussions about behaviors of students and how they appear if we step back from them. For incoming first-year students, I typically start with the need to use the restroom during class.

K-12 formal schooling has equated normal human urinary and bowel needs with something just short of a high crime. In K-12 schooling, your restroom needs must be conditioned to the school’s schedule, and when that fails, you must raise your hand and ask permission.

In college, however, you simply get up and go to the restroom.

This transition away from the K-12 dehumanizing of students to normal adult behavior helps my students begin to investigate how we (professor/students) behave in class settings, how they should view their roles in learning (doing assignments instead of “homework,” and completing the learning experiences for themselves and not the professor), and what scholarship means instead of “being a student.”

I have linked the end of the school essay and the call for my students to drop student behaviors as essential for the sort of education I believe all young people deserve, a liberatory one.

These goals merge in my writing-intensive courses in which I ask students to stop behaving as students and to begin to behave as writers (and what that entails is a long process we explore throughout the semester)—so that we can learn to write together in ways that serve their personal, academic, and career wants and needs.

I hope more educators follow Warner’s lead—although these sorts of transitions I ask of my students are painful—and that we can all soon come together by swearing off essays and students.

—

[1] See his post from the next day also: Kill the 5-Paragraph Essay

Education, race, racism, Teach for America, Teacher Evaluation, teacher preparation, Teaching, zero tolerance

The Ugly “Good Teacher” Discussion Few Are Confronting

8 Comments

“The King will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.'”

Matthew 25:40

The gold standard, I think, for thinking about education reform and more narrow concerns such as teacher quality is the complex and confrontational approach of Lisa Delpit, who anchors her perspective with how we teach and treat “other people’s children”—black and brown children, impoverished children.

And from that perspective we have the ugly “good teacher” discussion few are willing to confront: Vulnerable populations of children and their families are where and how we experiment with education, where and how we adopt policies and practices no affluent and white families would tolerate for their children: Teach For America, “no excuses,” zero tolerance.

High-poverty and majority-minority schools are burdened not just with social inequity hurdles but also with systemic and often unspoken practices that include having incredibly high teacher turn over because these “problem” schools are entry points for teachers to find “better” jobs (see Teachers at Low-Income Schools Deserve Respect).

Just as insidious is the systemic and often unspoken practice in all schools that “low-level” classes of students are assigned new teachers, who must endure those populations of students until they can have the “good” classes within that school.

These ugly practices grounded in racism and classism are at the root of why advocates for education reform who focus on race and class remain mostly dissatisfied with both sides of the mainstream education reform debate.

The edu-reformers are all-in on race and class tone-deaf practices—TFA, “no excuses,” zero tolerance—but the advocates for public education and progressive reform have failed to admit how the traditional public school system has historically failed “other people’s children” through the wink-wink-nod-nod approach to assigning teachers.

Too often, teachers are complicit in and fail to confront the system that marginalizes vulnerable populations of students as collateral damage of teacher advancement.

During my 18 years of public school teaching, even among teachers, the common sense attitude was that “good” teachers were assigned Advanced Placement, and teaching “low-level” classes was a negative commentary on the teacher’s ability. As department chair, I worked to assign each teacher a couple classes she/he requested, and then tried to balance every teacher’s load with a range of class levels and types.

While I was working on my dissertation, writing a biography of educator Lou LaBrant, I was profoundly struck by a point of irritation she expressed in her memoir. LaBrant noted that she had her best teachers in her doctoral program, at the end of her formal education, but that progression, she believed, is backward in that children need their best teachers in the beginning of formal education, not the end.

Our vulnerable populations of students must be served first in our public school system: assigned experienced and qualified teachers, placed in classes with low teacher/student ratios, guaranteed access to the most challenging courses and curriculums, and promised safe, diverse schools with equitable, supportive disciplinary practices.

Everything else is a distraction from what truly matters.

Education, education reform, Teaching

Confronting “Bad Journalism” in an Era of “Bad Teachers”

11 Comments

A couple of weeks ago, I posted Addressing Teacher Quality Post-NCLB in order to examine the impact of ESSA on the growing “bad teachers” narrative found in political and media commentary on the state of education in the U.S.

My speculations have now been given credence, notably Stephen Sawchuk’s 50 Years of Research Show Good Teaching Matters. Now What? at his Teacher’s Beat blog for Education Week.

Sawchuk’s post confirmed for me that the “bad teachers” drumbeat will continue so I posted a comment, one that expressed my frustration and linked to my post above:

Please let’s stop the bad journalism on teacher quality.

https://radicalscholarship.wordpress.com/2016/01/21/addressing-teacher-quality-post-nclb/

Please let’s stop treating Education Next as a credible publication.

First, we must note that the impact of teacher quality is dwarfed by out-of-school factors (http://www.shankerinstitute.org/blog/teachers-matter-so-do-words):

“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).”

However, that assessment is relative conservative when compared to Experiences of poverty and educational disadvantage by Donald Hirsch (JRF, 2007) (https://www.jrf.org.uk/sites/default/files/jrf/migrated/files/2123.pdf):

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

Sawchuk himself replied:

This is the kind of comment that makes me crazy. I very explicitly wrote that of the IN-SCHOOL FACTORS affecting achievement, teacher quality seems to matter most. Both Coleman in his study, and Goldhaber in other publications (and me in my own reporting elsewhere) have noted that out-of-school factors account for more of the overall variance in scores. You prepare teachers, Paul — so it seems really strange to argue that we shouldn’t care about what our teachers can and do do to affect learning.

And this prompted two more comments from me:

You are aware of the horribly skewed public and political view of teacher quality, and the brief nod to “in-school” does not identify how small teacher quality is related to measurable student outcomes (less than unexplained/error).

But please identify where I have in my post or any of my work ever taken this position: “so it seems really strange to argue that we shouldn’t care about what our teachers can and do do to affect learning.”

Erodes your credibility further, after treating Education Next as credible, to discredit me with a false characterization of my position.

And (which directly quotes from my own blog calling for addressing teacher quality with vulnerable students):

From my blog post linked (to refute your mischaracterization):

So the caveat for focusing on teacher quality must include that as long as we use measurable data for determining student achievement and teacher quality, failing to address out-of-school factors likely guarantees we’ll see little change in measures such as test scores.

Nonetheless, we must address teacher experience and qualifications/expertise at high-poverty, majority-minority schools; however, without social reform that alleviates the burdens of poverty on the lives of students and their families, we are unlikely to see the sorts of changes in data that would justify any in-school only reforms.

Also, the teacher quality debate often fails to make clear at the outset just how we are designating “good” or “bad” teachers (as well as “good” and “bad” schools). We must make sure that we are not using labels of quality as markers for those out-of-school factors. In other words, we tend to say schools and teachers are “good” when the student population is affluent, and both are “bad” when the student population is high poverty.

All of which resulted in Sawchuk adding:

And moreover, I encourage you try to engage constructively on the blog, rather than beginning with personal attacks.

Here, although Sawchuk has posted again, addressing how to couch teacher impact as an in-school factor, I want to highlight what I think is a very important distinction, one at the root of bad education journalism.

First, I believe Sawchuk is in fact a very good education journalist, and although I do not know him personally, I am confident he is also a good person with good intentions.

I also want to note that I have been confronting for some time now “bad journalism,” but I have never once accused anyone of being a “bad journalist”—attacking the person.

Yet, one of the most prominent aspects of “bad journalism” has in fact been a relentless and often careless narrative about “bad teachers” (the people, the professionals) and not “bad teaching.”

So, as I have argued before, the problem at the core of bad education journalism is ironically that many journalists covering education are good journalists—taking the “objective” pose and refusing to evaluate the credibility of the “both sides” approach to journalism.

For me to confront “bad journalism” (the act and not the people) for demonizing people and a profession, “bad teachers,” is my own effort not to make the same mistake I am challenging.

Sawchuk’s recent blog post, then, I am certain feeds into the “bad teacher” narrative; I also cannot believe he doesn’t realize that.

I think as well it is telling that he had my blog post link, but chose to make a fairly nasty and provably inaccurate swipe at my intentions—to discredit me and not address my argument (thus, personal); and then when was given ample evidence, chose again not to address his actions, but instead accused me , a second time, of something I did not do.

My blog and most of my public work is searchable online. I have been confronting “bad journalism,” but I have not attacked “bad journalists.”

Virtually every mainstream journalist, however, has run with the “bad teacher” narrative.

I am struck by that important distinction, and regret that journalists covering education believe that they have the right to criticize teachers (often without any background in teaching), but are offended when their own journalism is exposed for failing to provide credible investigations of much needed reforms in pubic education as well as our broader society.

Nonetheless, I am sorry Sawchuk read my post as a personal attack, and I regret that his option to respond to that misinterpretation has been to misrepresent my own intentions and public positions on the complicated ways we must address teacher quality.

See Also

In Schools, Teacher Quality Matters Most, Audrey Amrein-Beardsley

My Open Letter to Journalists: A Critical Free Press, pt. 2

On Professionalism and Good Intentions: More on Education and Journalism

Coda

Last night, I watched a segment on the CBS Evening News covering the Zika outbreak in Florida.

What struck me about the coverage is that the report included Dr. Walter Tabachnick, an expert on infectious diseases, and in a follow up story, the reporter is a doctor, Dr. Jon LaPook. That second story also uses a doctor and researcher, experts on transfusions, as the primary sources.

I must emphasize that no business leader or CEO, no think tank leader, and no members of Doctors for America were included in the coverage.

Education, Teacher Evaluation, Teaching

How to Become a “Good Teacher”

7 Comments

Being me, it will not be white.
But it will be
a part of you, instructor.
You are white—
yet a part of me, as I am a part of you.

“Theme for English B,” Langston Hughes

For a very long time in the U.S., the conventional wisdom has been that good schools were the key to just about everything—each child’s future, the nation’s economic survival, you name it.

More recently, that fantasy has narrowed to good teachers as the the “most important thing [fill in the blank].” And as I have examined, moving legislatively from NCLB to ESSA is unlikely to change that mantra, as delusional as it is.

So, if you began reading this in hopes of my analyzing why or why not to use VAM or any other myriad of teacher evaluation instruments, I must gently recommend your time may be better spent reading a volume of Harry Potter or Lord of the Rings fantasies, or take a stab an Ursula K. Le Guin.

Instead, this is a story, a true story about yesterday morning, a true story about yesterday morning and every year leading up to that during my 30-plus-years teaching career.

There is a powerful symbiotic relationship between being a teacher and a writer. Having just blogged about turning 55—using Sandra Cisneros’s “Eleven” to help me wrestle with aging—my mind was primed for attending the 2016 South Carolina Council of Teachers of English annual conference with three of my four students currently certifying to teach high school English.

This was the first professional conference and presentation for the three candidates, and it was a bit of a homecoming for me since I have been a career-long educator in SC, but haven’t attended this conference—packed with friends, colleagues, and former students—in several years.

I have always enjoyed students, my students, and I have always rejected the “don’t be friends with your students” mandate as shallow and dehumanizing. (What the hell is there about friendship that is a negative characteristic? I have to ask, musing as well that people who make such bold claims must have really lousy friendships.)

If any student of mine offers friendship, I am always deeply honored by the gesture. It ranks equal to their respect for me as a person and appreciation of my credibility as a teacher.

So the conference was also a wonderful few days for the four of us to weave together informal teacher talk with just being four English nerds, and people. They also gave me opportunities to confront the tension all students and young people feel around teachers and adults: Whether or not they can be their authentic selves without risking judgment.

Don’t worry; I am vividly aware of how fortunate I am that this is my profession.

When Saturday morning rolled around and the presentation loomed at 10:45 AM, my students and I had ample time because of the structure of the day to set up our technology and for them to practice and prepare for an hour before the presentation.

They were each excited and nervous in their own ways (for one practice run, I was asked to leave the room). When game time rolled around, we had a solid crowd drift in—many friendly faces of my career included.

I offered a brief framing of the presentations—designed around the problem that being an English major does not necessarily prepare someone to teach writing—and then each of my three pre-service teachers shared her 10-minute talk, supported by a PowerPoint that I scrolled through in support.

And then it happened.

I felt the urge to cry well up in me, my chest, my eyes. I had already been overwhelmed by recognizing that in the room were four former students of mine as well as my three current students presenting.

But it hadn’t quite risen to my consciousness until that moment—a moment in which these three students of mine were stunning, smarter and more professional that I could have ever mustered when I was their ages or even 10 years older, and my former students in the audience were eagerly engaged, contributing wonderfully in the discussion at the end.

It was then I had my closing comments, anchored by a simple realization: “If you want to be seen as a good teacher,” I said to the audience, “then just have good students,” as I motioned to the three presenters and the the four former students in the audience.

If you think this is cheesy or self-deprecating, I don’t want to be rude, but you probably haven’t taught—or if you have taught, maybe you shouldn’t.

After the presentation, a former student who is now a teacher educator herself lingered talking to my current students, praising them and the work I do (she is vividly aware of the challenges of both being a K-12 teacher—since she was an outstanding ELA teacher herself—and being a teacher educator).

And as I listened, I knew even more clearly than I have always felt that I am not just every year of teaching I have ever taught, but I am every student I have ever taught.

I am left with a paradox—one that powerfully refutes the simplistic calls for “good teachers” and the relentless pursuit of quantifying “good teachers”: If you want to know if I am a good teacher, spend some time with my students, but then don’t be eager to give me too much credit for how wonderful they are.

We did all this wonderful together.

[Reposted at The Answer Sheet]

 

Education, Teacher Evaluation, teacher preparation, Teaching

Addressing Teacher Quality Post-NCLB

Leave a comment

While the transition from NCLB (the federalization of accountability-based education reform) to ESSA (returning accountability-based education reform mostly to the states) is a microscopic change at best, it appears that teacher quality will remain a key mantra of those seeking reform—even though the use of value-added methods for evaluating teachers appear to have lost some steam.

My home state of South Carolina has been an early and dedicated home for education reform based on standards and high-stakes tests. SC is also a very high poverty state—ranking 5th in highest childhood poverty in the U.S. These pockets of poverty have been well documented by Corridor of Shame and years of court battles over equitable education funding across the state.

SC also shares with the entire U.S. a pattern of resegregation in public and charter schools as well as the historical and current reality that impoverished students, black and brown students, English language learners, and special needs students disproportionately are assigned to new and early-career teachers, and un-/under-certified teachers (notably in math). Compounding those inequities, these vulnerable populations of students also sit in high student/teacher ratio classes and are less likely to have access to challenging curriculum (such as Advanced Placement, International Baccalaureate, and gifted and talented programs), courses often taught by experienced and highly qualified teachers.

Recently, Associate Editor Cindi Ross Scoppe (The State) has argued: Key to improving poor schools: a good teacher in every classroom.

This call for a post-NCLB focus on teacher quality, I must note, does admit that teacher quality is a key part of in-school only influences on student achievement; however, we must begin to frame concerns for teacher quality in ways political leaders, the media, and the public fail to do.

First, we must note that the impact of teacher quality is dwarfed by out-of-school factors:

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).

However, that assessment is relative conservative when compared to Experiences of poverty and educational disadvantage by Donald Hirsch (JRF, 2007):

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

So the caveat for focusing on teacher quality must include that as long as we use measurable data for determining student achievement and teacher quality, failing to address out-of-school factors likely guarantees we’ll see little change in measures such as test scores.

Nonetheless, we must address teacher experience and qualifications/expertise at high-poverty, majority-minority schools; however, without social reform that alleviates the burdens of poverty on the lives of students and their families, we are unlikely to see the sorts of changes in data that would justify any in-school only reforms.

Also, the teacher quality debate often fails to make clear at the outset just how we are designating “good” or “bad” teachers (as well as “good” and “bad” schools). We must make sure that we are not using labels of quality as markers for those out-of-school factors. In other words, we tend to say schools and teachers are “good” when the student population is affluent, and both are “bad” when the student population is high poverty.

We are also apt to overreact to outliers (when so-called “bad”—high poverty—schools or teachers of poor students have higher than typical test scores) as if those outliers prove some possible standard for all teachers and schools. However, outliers are just that, outliers. And research shows that high-flying schools simply are extremely rare, and often not as high-flying as originally claimed.

Also the teacher quality discussion suffers from the false belief that “teacher quality” is a distinct and permanent quality. In fact, teacher quality is dependent on many factors and contexts. I often am a great teacher and an ineffective teacher for two different students in the same class.

Teacher quality is hard to identify and often relative to dozens of factors, including changing student populations and content being taught.

As a result, so-called low teacher quality in high-poverty schools in SC is likely a mislabel in some ways for the state being the fifth worst child poverty state in the country. But teacher quality is also a marker for our failure to address teacher experience, teacher certification, and funding at high-poverty schools.

So, yes, SC does need to insure high teacher quality for all students, addressing directly the historical and current failures associated with the most vulnerable students in the state’s high-poverty schools.

Jobs programs, comprehensive healthcare reform, food stability legislation, proving books in the homes of all children, and addressing directly the teaching and learning conditions of all schools—these reforms are likely to show greater positive outcomes than traditional approaches to the teacher quality problem.

Therefore, without addressing poverty broadly or how we determine quality teachers and schools—including moving past test-based rankings doing both—we are likely to be again disappointed with any teacher quality reforms we attempt.

See Also

Teachers at Low-Income Schools Deserve Respect, Bruce Hansen

Education, Standards, Statistics, Teaching, Testing

More Thoughts on Feedback, Grades, and Late Work

8 Comments

My good friend and stellar colleague, Ken Lindblom, posted Should Students’ Grades Be Lowered for Lateness?, spurring a series of Tweets about grading late work.

Ken’s thoughtful post focuses on these foundational ideas:

As an educator, I try to base my decisions on a principle of authenticity. In other words, I try to make my decisions more on real-world norms than traditional school norms. I try to ensure that I am preparing students for the world beyond school, not for school. As a result, I try to make sure that the ways in which I assess students’ work is similar to the ways in which they would be assessed in a professional situation.

There are times when a professional can absolutely not be late: grant applications, proposals for conferences/speaking, . . . I’m not sure I can come up with a third example to make a series.

But adults can be late with almost anything else: publication deadlines, job evaluations, doctor’s appointments, taxes–even most bills have a grace period.

Here I want to tease out a few ideas related to feedback on student work (artifacts of learning), grades, and late work.

Like Ken’s concern for authenticity, I tend to work from a personal and professional aversion to hypocrisy based on 18 years teaching English in a rural South Carolina public high school and then 14-plus years in a selective liberal arts university, also in SC.

I have been practicing and refining de-grading and de-testing practices for over thirty years. Let me emphasize, since I have been challenged before, I have implemented—and thus currently advocate for—de-grading and de-testing in many school contexts, including public schools (not just at the university level).

So my path to rejecting grades and tests has many stages and elements. First, I had to confront that calculating grades bound only to averages often distorts grades unfairly for students. Mean, median, and mode are all credible ways to analyze data, and among them, in formal schooling, the mean (average) is both the norm and often the weakest.

I show students this simple example; a series of grades: 10, 10, 85, 85, 85, 85, 85, 85, 100, 100 = 730.

The average is 73, which most teachers would assign, but the mode is 85, and if we note these grades are sequential and cumulative (10 as the first grade in terms of time, and 100 the last grade), a legitimate grade assignment would be the 100.

In other words, using the same data, a teacher could assign 73, 85, or 100 to this student, and all can be justified statistically.

My conclusion has been this greatly challenges the value of assigning grades because those who control the rules, control reality.

Thus, I do not assign grades to any student artifacts of learning (and I do not give traditional tests). Instead I offer feedback that supports students as they revise and resubmit those artifacts.

However, I cannot refuse to assign students grades for courses. Therefore, another distinction I have come to appreciate is the difference between grading an assignment and determining a grade for a grading period or course.

Therein lies my approach to late work, but first, let’s consider adult hypocrisy.

In my 30-plus years as an educator at nearly every level possible, I witness daily teachers and professors who fail to meet deadlines (regularly); talk, do other things (grade papers), stare at their computers/smart phones, etc., during meetings; and behave in a number of ways that they do not tolerate by students in their classes, behaviors that negatively impact students grades.

I also drive daily with adult motorists who exceed the speed limit without any punishment—as most of us have come to realize a grace zone of staying less than ten mph over that limit. In other words, the real world of rules is much fuzzier than the rules of formal schooling.

These are the behaviors I see when I am confronted with student late work.

About late work, then, I have some clear policies. First, I would never change a grade assigned to an artifact of learning that distorts the actual quality of that artifact. A “B” essay is a “B” essay regardless of when it is submitted.

As an educator, my primary concern is student learning, and I suffer no delusions that when that happens is more important than if it happens. I also ascribed to Rick Wormeli’s dictum that fair isn’t always equal; thus, I do not allow very narrow expectations that I treat all students exactly the same override that I am there to serve each student as well as all students.

Next, I always record “lateness” and then consider that when I assign a grade for a grading period or course. If a student has one or two assignments late (clearly an outlier), I may ignore that when determining the grading period/course grade, but if there is a pattern of lateness, then the grading period/course grade must reflect this.

In other words, I believe we must separate artifact quality (the basis of grading period or course grades) from grading period/course grades.

Feedback and grades on artifacts of learning send students clear messages about what they produce (their learning), and then grading period/course grades send a message about the totality of their accomplishments as students.

So if we return to Ken’s context, we can imagine a manager telling a habitually late worker: “Your work here is excellent, but if you aren’t here on time, we will have to let you go.”

Especially in the recent thirty-plus years of standards, educators have fallen prey to standardization, and as a result, we have too often abdicated our professional autonomy and allowed technical norms to supplant our much more important goals and obligations, the human dignity and learning of each child assigned to our care.

And because most people have greater regard for medical doctors than teachers (sigh), I’ll end with an example my major professor offered in my doctoral program.

A patient is admitted to the hospital running a dangerously high temperature. After several days, during all of which the nurses record that patient’s temperature hourly, the doctor comes in, adds those temperatures, calculates the average, and refuses to release the patient, although the current temperature is 98.6.

Right, no medical doctor would allow the norm of averages to override her/his medical authority. And neither should educators.

See Also

Missing Assignments–and the Real World, Nancy Flanagan

The Perils of Late Work and How to Make It Count, Starr Stackstein

It’s Time to Ditch Our Deadlines, Ellen Boucher

Update

The claim about real-life norms is also dubious. There are times when deadlines must be strictly enforced, but for the most part, employers are typically forgiving of extensions and late work, recognizing that “assigned deadlines can be stressfully tight, compromising output quality,” according to a 2022 study, which also found that 53 percent of workplace deadlines were flexible. In fact, “deadline estimates are often overly optimistic,” and adhering to them too stringently can dramatically increase burnout.

Why the 100-Point Grading Scale Is a Stacked Deck
canon, CCSS, comic books, Democracy, Education, education reform, George Carlin, literacy, privilege, science fiction, Standards, Teaching

Students, Not Standards: Calling for Solidarity in 2016

11 Comments

Many years ago, I was sitting in the last class session of the capstone secondary ELA methods course as part of my M.Ed. The guest speaker that day was my high school English teacher, the man responsible for my primary career path, Lynn Harrill.

Lynn was friends with the professor, who was then working at the state department of education, I believe.

Toward the end of the class, the professor asked what we wanted our students to know when they left our classes. That question was followed by lingering silence.

Ever the eager student, I said, “I want them to know themselves,” and I caught a glimpse of Lynn smiling widely.

Of course, that is what Lynn had taught me, although most people probably assumed it was reading and writing Lynn had so expertly given his students (which, by the way, was also true).

This moment—one of a very idealistic and naive young teacher, me—comes back to me often, and despite my many failures as a teacher, that grounding goal has always guided me. Not to be simplistic, but I teach students—that’s why I teach.

While reading Four Stories That Homework Tells Children About School, Learning, & Life, I was struck by “STORY #3: School Is More Important Than Other Pursuits/Interests/Activities.”

And now I have to investigate that memory again.

Yes, Lynn Harrill changed my life by being my sophomore and junior English teacher in high school. He was gracious, kind, and encouraging to a deeply insecure and anxious teen (me) who had decided he was a math and science person—because that is what school had told me.

Junior high English classes had been mostly draconian English teachers, grammar book exercises, and diagramming sentences. The “English” content of those classes was easy (I made As), but I loathed it all, even the texts we were assigned to read (much of which we did not read).

Now, before I launch into whining, let me be clear that my story is about how school failed me—but that because of my tremendous privilege (white, male and—according to traditional schooling and standardized tests—high verbal and mathematical intelligence), the consequences of those failures were miniscule. I attended college and continued to make As (easily), leading to an MEd and EdD.

I share this, then, not to bemoan poor pitiful me (or to brag), but to highlight that schools often fail students in ways we do not acknowledge and that the consequences for those students who need schooling most are monumental.

While I was begrudgingly playing school and succeeding, at home I was engaged in a rich array of hobbies and interests that school not only ignored, but also indirectly refuted (even Lynn told me as a 10th grader I needed to stop reading science fiction [SF] and start reading real literature such as Fitzgerald).

I was collecting, reading, and drawing from thousands of Marvel comic books. I was voraciously listening to popular music and studying the lyrics. And I was doing the same with comedy albums, mostly George Carlin and Richard Pryor.

My reading life, as I noted above, was Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, Arthur C. Clarke, and whatever works were prompted by my mother’s SF film fascination. I fell in love with The Andromeda Strain because of the film, and much of my formative life was driven by the five Planet of the Apes films and TV’s Star Trek.

My response to the real literature endorsed by Lynn was tepid (but always the mama’s boy, I did as teachers told me to do), but my life was irrevocably changed when he also recommended writers I would never be assigned in the rural South of the 1970s—notably D.H. Lawrence.

Well, damn, I thought. This is literature?

My journey from student to teacher began in my sophomore year of high school as I began to untangle the false narratives school had taught me and came to embrace the authentic narratives of my real life, my real Self, outside of school.

More than a decade into my teaching career (in the position Lynn left at my high school) and in the same doctoral program Lynn had completed, I finally discovered critical pedagogy as the complete vision of student-centered teaching and learning I had been haphazardly practicing.

Regretfully, my entire career as an educator (18 years as a high school ELA teacher and then 14 more years, and counting, as an English educator and first-year writing professor) has occurred under the antithesis of student-centered critical education—the high-stakes accountability movement.

All of which, ironically, I have been prepared for by the very reading material school marginalized, science fiction and dystopian fiction.

Standards, high-stakes tests, and accountability fail students, fail teachers. They conspire to do exactly what homework accomplishes in story #3 above.

I cannot step away form this: I must teach those students placed in my care, and that duty requires me to find out who they are, what they know, and what they want so that we can work together so that they find who they are and who they want to be.

So, I wonder with the new year, and the allure of resolutions—who is with me in 2016? Can we make this about students and not standards, not tests?

—

See Also

Doubling Down (Again) by Reverting, Not Changing: The Exponential Failures of Education Legislation

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

More on Evidence-Based Practice: The Tyranny of Technocrats

Beware the Technocrats: More on the Reading Wars

I Don’t Need Standards To Teach, I Need Students

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

Lou LaBrant, reading, teacher preparation, Teaching

Lou LaBrant and Teacher Education’s Enduring Legacy

2 Comments

A colleague of Louise Rosenblatt at New York University, Lou LaBrant faced mandatory retirement when she turned 65 in 1953. Reflecting on her work at NYU as a teacher educator from 1942-1953, LaBrant wrote in 1988 “Public School 65, Down on the Lower East Side” as she turned 100.

LaBrant noted “that [New York City] requirements seemed to me inadequate for those who already spoke the language clearly but needed a richer background” (p. 6). Candidates for teaching English, LaBrant argued, needed greater linguistic understanding and experiences grounded in the complex Germanic and Latinate roots of English.

But other regulations also impeding LaBrant’s goals, including restrictions on the number of student teachers placed in each school. Circumventing that restriction, however, LaBrant placed 6 teacher candidates at “P.S. 65, a junior high school on the Lower East Side, known as one of the worst slum areas in the city” (p. 7). LaBrant then explained her choice (p. 7):

two years below

Next, LaBrant built her program and the experience for the student teachers on the characteristics of the students being taught—a progressive and student-centered approach to scientific education. The students at P.S. 65, they found, had very limited experiences with the wider city, lived in cramped and poorly lit housing, had no books or reading materials in the home, had life experience unlike the national research on student reading interests, and attended a school in which “[t]eachers did not welcome an assignment to the area and within ten minutes after the final gong were on their way to the subway to avoid the five o’clock rush” (p. 8).

In that context, LaBrant’s program included taking students on bus trips to explore the city, having librarians provide students time and opportunities to examine and choose books that matched their interests, committing to not requiring book reports, and creating an overarching goal that “[s]chool was to become a pleasant place” for students and their teachers.

Key, as well, was LaBrant’s rejecting deficit views of race, literacy, and poverty that pervaded popular practices: “This simple program did not depend on the theories about word count, word recognition, left-handedness, or any of the educational fads then popular” (p. 9). This “simple” approach to teaching reading was a hallmark of LaBrant’s work, including her rejecting reading programs as “costume parties” (LaBrant, 1949).

And while LaBrant admitted she did not know the long-term results of her work, she did note that this year, this “simple” experiment with teaching a vulnerable population of students (impoverished, racial minorities and English language learners) resulted in reading levels that “[rose] from two years below to two years above” in the city testing.

Today, we can see LaBrant’s legacy endures: public education policy that impedes teacher education, reading programs and “fads” that overcomplicate and distort literacy education, and the lingering challenge of teaching vulnerable populations of students who have strengths and unique needs that cannot be addressed through deficit ideologies or “silver bullet” approaches to schooling.

In 1940, LaBrant implored: “Language is a most important factor in general education because it is a vital, intimate way of behaving. It is not a textbook, a set of rules, or a list of books” (p. 364).

Again, teacher education and teaching children to read are, in fact, “simple”—if we allow them to be.

References

LaBrant, L. (1988). Public School 65, down on the lower east side. Teaching Education, 2(1), 6-9.

LaBrant, L. (1949). A genetic approach to language. Unpublished manuscript, Institute of General Semantics, Lakeville, CT.

LaBrant, L. (1940, May). The place of English in general education. The English Journal, 29(5), 356-365.

Anxiety, Education, Teaching

The Moment: More Anxiety Chronicles

4 Comments

The worst thing about anxiety is that everything about being anxious is the worst thing.

#

At the first faculty meeting preceding the new academic year this fall, our university president, Elizabeth Davis, about to start her second year, spoke in part about focusing on the Furman experience instead of always reducing one year of college or college entirely to what comes next. As I listened I thought about talking with my students about the Furman Moment.

This call for appreciating the moment resonates with me because I have no capacity for it. As someone who has always struggled under the weight of intense anxiety, I am forever plagued by what comes next, and I am captive to an overactive brain that not only perpetually cycles through what comes next, but also manufactures always the worst case scenarios for what comes next.

For those of us who wrestle with this irrational anxiety, worrying, and senseless anticipation of doom, we develop outward appearances of stoicism to mask our frantic brains and simultaneously tightening and exploding chests (one of several bodily torture spots where anxiety nests—including shoulders, necks, hips, and hands).

We also are prone to self-medicate, seeking ways to dial us back toward normal. For the anxious, relaxation, even briefly, even if a delusion, is a cherished holiday, a relief. Let us step just for a moment off the merry-go-round, feet firmly on the ground, and we are forever grateful.

And for me, along with the rare oasis of pausing the relentlessness of anxiety and the incessant internal monologue of my Self talking to my Self, the Holy Grail is to be with another person (usually only one for those of us who are also introverts) who has some either shared understanding or graceful empathy for this anxiousness that is irrational and ultimately embarrassing.

Yes, the worst thing about anxiety is that everything about being anxious is the worst thing, but the very worst thing about anxiety is explaining it every time you have to confess to it because you cannot view the world as most others do, because what is pleasure for many people is torture for you.

We learn to confess because naming a demon helps slay a demon, or at least hold that demon at bay.

But we anxious have a language that others do not understand, cannot understand.

And so we are often drawn to the wordless (a tragic paradox for the anxious who are writers)—a hand taken without comment, a hug or cuddling just to, these simple intimacies between two people who know each other, who know that sometimes everything is just beyond words. No expectations, no caveats, but the moment.

The great irony here, of course, is we anxious may dread physical contact or even being close to people virtually 99% of the time—the stress of casual proximity; the torture of ritualistic touching—handshakes, hugs—close talking, and crowds at social events. Let’s not even trudge into formal gatherings.

Anxiety, you see, is being overfull as a human too aware of everything. I mean Every Thing.

So full of recognition and sensation that we are spontaneous criers—more embarrassment—so we clench our entire bodies to try to hold everything in that is near to bursting through our eyes.

It is exhausting.

So as a late teen and young adult, I was immediately drawn to existentialism’s claim that our passions are our suffering, to the yin-yang concept of the impossibility of separating the light from the dark.

This was well before I recognized the anxiety, but I was quite aware that caring deeply was inseparable from feeling deeply anxious.

Relationships—marriage, a child—intensified these responses to the world exponentially, and then as I was more and more unable to manage all that overload of feeling this world, another response was to detach.

The hardest was my daughter’s teen and then young adult years when I had to set aside the urge to carry her around in my arms 24 hours a day. This is a universal issue for parenting, but for the anxious, it is the iceberg that sank the Titanic—others witness only the tip.

So now I am just a little over a year into being reminded of those wonderful and teeth-clenching years of parenting my daughter because she has gifted me a granddaughter.

A granddaughter just beginning her second year is a mostly wordless wonderment who when I am holding her in my arms while she naps is the most precious gift of relaxation an anxious human can enjoy.

A toddler, you see, often shuffles up next to you, a glorious proximity of closeness, raising her arms, longing to be picked up and held. These wonderful and precious years before she will quite literally beg to be left alone.

In the moment, she is wordless and affectionate with all the possibilities a child embodies.

There is more than a little guilt because of my need from this tiny child, to sit there and not worry in the moment because it is easy to believe everything is all right when a child is sleeping on your chest—a chest that is most of the day an artificial shield between the world and all the anxieties expanding there below the breastbone.

For me, my granddaughter sleeping on my chest is the moment I can live in, the evidence that for my students I must make the plea that they work on the very human skill of enjoying the moment instead of being always captive to the past or the unknowable future.

What I owe this granddaughter, what I owe my students—these are the things that make me whole because holding her and that wonderful time teaching, each is the moment that gives me pause and rebalances all the world.

#

The worst part of anxiety is believing that you are not good enough, believing that you are a fraud and that at any moment other people will discover your secret, at any moment you will be unmasked and all that you care about will be taken away—because that is the dirty little secret about anxiety that is the everything about anxiety that is the worst thing.