Childhood, education

A Child’s Story: “Because she’s older and the teacher, she’s right and I’m not”

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A child’s birthday should be a ritual of joy, a celebration of living as well as of being a child.

Rachel sits in class on her eleventh birthday in Sandra Cisneros‘s “Eleven,” however, feeling many things except joy:

Only today I wish I didn’t have only eleven years rattling inside me like pennies in a tin Band-Aid box. Today I wish I was one hundred and two instead of eleven because if I was one hundred and two I’d have known what to say when Mrs. Price put the red sweater on my desk. I would’ve known how to tell her it wasn’t min instead of just sitting there with that look on my face and nothing coming out of my mouth. (p. 7)

Even before her day turns against her, Rachel has offered a glimpse of her world, the life she brings with her each day to school:

And maybe one day when you’re all grown up maybe you will need to cry like if you’re three, and that’s okay. That’s what I tell Mama when she’s sad and needs to cry. Maybe she’s feeling three. (p. 6)

On this day of her turning eleven, Mrs. Price, her math teacher, discovers a red sweater, and when the teacher asks for its owner, Sylvia Saldivar says the sweater is Rachel’s. The teacher adds she has seen it on Rachel so she “takes the sweater and puts it right on [Rachel’s] desk” (p. 7).

In a voice that almost isn’t a voice, Rachel tries to explain that the sweater isn’t hers, but to no avail “[b]ecause she’s older and the teacher, she’s right and I’m not,” Rachel recognizes (p. 7).

Rachel struggles with her rising powerlessness and anger, crying and prompting the teacher to reprimand her:

“Now, Rachel, that’s enough,” because she sees I’ve shoved the red sweater to the tippy-tip corner of my desk and it’s hanging all over the edge like a waterfall, but I don’t’ care.

“Rachel,” Mrs. Price says. She says it like she’s getting mad. “You put that sweater on right now and no more nonsense.”

“But it’s not—”

“Now!” Mrs. Price says. (p. 8)

The sweater stinks. It itches. Rachel soon crumbles for everyone to see, a nightmare in the world of childhood:

That’s when everything I’ve been holding in since this morning, since when Mrs. Price put the sweater on my desk, finally lets go, and all of a sudden I’m crying in front of everybody. I wish I was invisible but I’m not. I’m eleven and it’s my birthday today and I’m crying like I’m three in front of everybody. I put my head down on the desk and bury my face in my stupid clown-sweater arms. My face all hot and spit coming out of my mouth because I can’t stop the little animal noises from coming out of me, until there aren’t any more tears left in my eyes, and it’s just my body shaking like when you have the hiccups, and my whole head hurts like when you drink milk too fast. (p. 9)

And then, Phyllis Lopez claims the sweater—adding insult to Rachel’s embarrassment. But “Mrs. Price pretends like everything’s okay” even though, for Rachel, “it’s too late,” her birthday has been ruined (p. 9).

While it may be compelling to read “Eleven” as a powerful narrative of a child’s ruined birthday, it is important not to ignore how Cisneros offers us all important messages about how schools and teachers impact the children they are intended to serve, how teachers often become calloused and hurtful especially as they fail to recognize the frailty and humanity of each child.

Here, then, are some lessons from the story:

  • Children do not and cannot leave their lives behind when they walk through the doors of a school or a classroom. To pretend that they can is dehumanizing and hurtful.
  • How a child feels about the world and her/himself is at least as important if not more important than what a child thinks about the world. Emotions should not be ignored or marginalized as “childish.” A child’s affective and cognitive selves are dialogic and inseparable.
  • The authoritarian teacher is the failed teacher.
  • “We know of course there’s really no such thing as the ‘voiceless’. There are only the deliberately silenced, or the preferably unheard,” cautions Arundhati Roy in her 2004 Sydney Peace Prize lecture.
  • All education should begin with the child, and then always hold the dignity of each child sacred.

Rachel knows a certain sadness in her home, and on her eleventh birthday, her teacher, her peers, and her school make her want to disappear, force her deny herself and her childhood:

I’m eleven today. I’m eleven, ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, and one, but I wish I was one hundred and two. I wish I was anything but eleven, because I want today to be far away already, far away like a runaway balloon, like a tiny o in the sky, so tiny-tiny you have to close your eyes to see it. (p. 9)

Every child that we teach needs our relentless love and patience because childhood is a frail becoming that leads to this thing we call adulthood, which we fail each time we allow ourselves to be callous to the laughter or tears of a child—especially when we do so in the name of education.

A Nation at Risk, education, George Orwell

SOTU 2014: Orwellian Educational Change under Obama Continues

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Orwellian Educational Change under Obama: Crisis Discourse, Utopian Expectations, and Accountability Failures

Paul L. Thomas

Furman University

“It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. . . .[T]he slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts,” Orwell (1946) warns in “Politics and the English Language.” Few examples are better for proving Orwell right than political language addressing the education of children in the U.S. But, as Orwell adds, “If one gets rid of these habits one can think more clearly, and to think clearly is a necessary first step towards political regeneration.”

Barack Obama personifies the power of personality in politics and the value of articulating a compelling vision that resonates with many voters in the US and other global citizens. For Obama’s presidential campaign, the refrain that worked was driven by two words and concepts, “hope” and “change.” From healthcare, to war, to education reform, however, the Obama administration is proving that political discourse is more likely to mask intent—just as Orwell warned through his essays and most influential novel 1984, the source of the term “doublespeak” that characterizes well Obama’s and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan’s public comments on education reform. They mask the programs promoted and implemented by the Department of Education.

Beginning with the Reagan administration and perpetuated by Obama’s presidency are patterns of public speeches—crisis discourse and Utopian expectations—and educational policy that began with 1983’s “A Nation at Risk,” accelerated through Goals 2000, and codified without much critical concern as No Child Left Behind (NCLB) under George W. Bush and Secretary of Education Paige (Schmidt & Thomas, 2009).

Here, I will explore the neoliberal assumptions driving the language and policies related to education that came from the Obama administration and guided by Duncan. The examination will unpack Duncan’s speeches and the realities of the ideologies the administration supports through policy and public messages. The dynamic established through crisis discourse about the public education system, combined with Utopian expectations for those schools, helps mask the neoliberal assumptions embedded in what Freire (1998) calls “the bureaucratizing of the mind”: “The freedom that moves us, that makes us take risks, is being subjugated to a process of standardization of formulas, models against which we are evaluated” (p. 111).

PLEASE CONTINUE READING HERE

See also (which is being re-issued as an updated edition soon):

PhenomenonObama2011

Thomas, P.L. (2011). The educational hope ignored under Obama: The persistent failure of crisis discourse and utopian expectations. In P. R. Carr & B. J. Porfilio (Eds.), The phenomenon of Obama and the agenda for education: Can hope audaciously trump neoliberalism? (pp. 49-72). Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing.

Thomas, P.L. (2011). Orwellian educational change under Obama: Crisis discourse, Utopian expectations, and accountability failures. Journal of Inquiry & Action in Education, 4(1), 68-92. http://digitalcommons.buffalostate.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1034&context=jiae

CCSS

What We Know (and Ignore) about Standards, Achievement, and Equity

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Calling for, establishing, and implementing high (or higher) standards has been a part of U.S. public education at least since the 1890s when the Committee of Ten called for higher standards for high schools to prepare students for college.

The more recent accountability era built on standards (and multiple versions of revised standards) and high-stakes tests (and multiple versions of those tests) began in the 1980s.

Common Core as a reform initiative is a federalization, then, of that state-based accountability paradigm; there is noting in the Common Core initiative that distinguishes it from the state-based approach except for unsubstantiated and untested claims that the standards and tests are superior to the state versions.

Since we have had a standards-based accountability system for three decades, we have ample evidence of the relationship between the presence and quality of standards and their impact on achievement and equity.

In Research-based options for education policymaking, Mathis (2012) highlights what we know about standards, achievement, and equity.

First, Mathis notes the larger context of Common Core and their potential for reform:

The actual effect of the CCSS, however, will depend much less on the standards themselves than on how they are used. Two factors are particularly crucial. The first is whether states invest in the necessary curricular and instructional resources and supports, and the second concerns the nature and use of CCSS assessments developed by the two national testing consortia. (1 of 5)

Key here are several important points: (1) Common Core standards are not and cannot be separated from implementation or the related high-stakes tests, and (2) nothing in the Common Core initiate guarantees that implementation and testing will be any different than what has occurred over the previous thirty years of state-based accountability.

Currently, we already know some things about implementation and testing related to Common Core:

  • Every state adopting Common Core is also using high-stakes tests, committing to either of two companies charged with creating those tests. There is no mechanism in the Common Core initiative to insure that the standards will not become “what is tested is what is taught”—which is exactly what did happen to all standards at the state levels, which is what must happen when any set of standards are linked to high-stakes tests and punitive consequences for that data.
  • Despite calls for a need to have a common set of standards for the entire nation (a call that has never been verified by evidence), the Common Core is being implemented in a wide variety of ways across the states. If “common” is really our goal (and I suspect it isn’t a worthy goal), it is not happening—even with the tests since they come from two different companies.
  • Common Core implementation is costing states millions and even billions of dollars—with no evidence of their quality, no vetting by educators, no guarantee that this version of standards and tests will be any less a failure than the ones that have come before.

So what do we know about standards and achievement?:

There is, for example, no evidence that states within the U.S. score higher or lower on the NAEP based on the rigor of their state standards. [4] Similarly, international test data show no pronounced tests core advantage on the basis of the presence or absence of national standards. [5] Further, the wave of high-stakes testing associated with No Child Left Behind (NCLB) has resulted in the “dumbing down” and narrowing of the curriculum. [6]

It bears emphasizing that there is no correlation between the presence or quality of standards and student achievement, and that high-stakes testing has created a dynamic in which we ask less of students not more.

At the very least, Common Core implementation should not move forward until clear mechanisms are in place to insure that this round of standards and testing does not replicate the history of standards and testing so far.

As of now, no such guarantees exist. None.

So what do we know about standards and equity?:

As the absence or presence of rigorous or national standards says nothing about equity, educational quality, or the provision of adequate educational services, there is no reason to expect CCSS or any other standards initiative to be an effective educational reform by itself. [13]

As I have noted above about no safeguards that Common Core and the related tests will impact achievement any differently than all the other standards and tests before, there is absolutely nothing in the Common Core initiative that addresses equity—which remains the greatest problem facing education, school, and teacher impact on student achievement.

With Common Core, African American, Latino/a, and impoverished students will continue to be disproportionately funneled into test-prep courses with high student-teacher ratios and inexperienced as well as un-/under-certified teachers

With Common Core, African American and Latino boys will continue to be disproportionately suspended and expelled.

With Common Core, African American, Latino/a, and impoverished students will continue to be disproportionately blocked from advanced courses.

Standards-based reform has never and will never address equity. Common Core is no different.

Since Common Core as a reform initiative in no way offers solutions to identifiable problems with student achievement and equity, we must stop that train, get off, and try something new.

Some are calling for a pause button. I urge delete.

—

Notes (retaining original report numbering)

[4] Whitehurst, G, (2009, October 14). Don’t forget curriculum. Brown Center Letters on Education, #3, 6. Washington, DC: Brown Center on Education Policy, Brookings Institution. Retrieved February 11, 2010, from http://www.brookings.edu/papers/2009/1014_curriculum_whitehurst.aspx/

Bandeira de Mello, V. D., Blankenship, C., & McLaughlin D. (2009, October). Mapping state proficiencies onto NAEP scales: 2005-2007. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics. Retrieved March 20, 2010, from http://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/pubs/studies/2010456.asp/

[5] Kohn, A. (2010, January 14). Debunking the case for national standards: one size fits all mandates and their dangers. Retrieved January 13, 2010, from http://www.alfiekohn.org/teaching/edweek/national.htm/

McCluskey, N. (2010, February 17). Behind the curtain: Assessing the case for national curriculum standards, Policy analysis 66. Washington: CATO Institute. Retrieved February 18, 2010, from http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=11217/

[6] Robelen, E. (December 8, 2011) Most teachers see the curriculum narrowing, survey finds (blog post). EdWeekOnline. Retrieved October 2, 2012, from http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/curriculum/2011/12/most_teachers_see_the_curricul.html/

Wisconsin Center for Educational Research. (1999, Fall). Are state-level standards and assessments aligned? WCER Highlights, 1–3. Madison, WI: Author.

Amrein, A. & Berliner, D. (2002). High-stakes testing, uncertainty, and student learning. Education Policy Analysis Archives, 10(18). Retrieved October 4, 2012, from http://epaa.asu.edu/epaa/v10n18

Shepard, L. (2000). The role of assessment in a learning culture. Educational Researcher, 29(7), 4–14.

Phillip Harris, Bruce M. Smith,B. M. & Harris, J. (2011) The Myths of Standardized Tests: Why They Don’t Tell You What You Think They Do. Rowman and Littlefield, 100-109.

[13] Whitehurst, 2009 (see note 4); McCluskey, 2010 (see note 5);

Mathis, W. J. (July, 2010). The “Common Core” Standards Initiative: An Effective Reform tool? Retrieved October 2, 2012, from nepc.colorado.edu/files/PB-NatStans-Mathis.pdf

race

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

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

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

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

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

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

Or this from Getting to Know Richard Sherman:

Classroom Superstar

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Testing

If Fewer or No Tests, Then What?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And this is essentially my argument about testing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

For Further Reading

More on Failing Writing, and Students

Education Done To, For, or With Students?

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

educator, public scholar, poet&writer – academic freedom isn't free