Archive for February, 2010

Let’s Banish Critical Thinking, Part 2: Learn

February 15th, 2010

Kyle examined his bookmarks. If he’d printed out all the information he’d found the paper would pile up to well over an inch high. Even though he’d been discerning in the references he noted, the information available was overwhelming and defeating, an obstacle that prevented Kyle from moving past the data collecting stage of his project. Whether he chose the traditional approach and wrote a paper or the technological option of a multimedia presentation, Kyle couldn’t communicate ideas he didn’t yet “own” himself, and the list of bookmarks represented more than he could ever apprehend.

His teacher expected evidence of his learning, but Kyle lacked the know-how that could enable his success. Kyle was a successful student in traditional classrooms, but he did not know how to learn, especially when he was responsible for the process.

As teachers we tend to focus on our teaching and assume students know how to learn. It’s a natural perspective—we teach, students learn. Focusing on learning can seem misdirected because what we’re going to do in the classroom demands our immediate concern—it’s what we describe in the required lesson plans. However, failing to focus on student learning capacity produces the predicament Kyle faced: expectation without enablement.

I suggested in the previous post that we examine thinking as a target. “Memorize” formed the target’s outermost ring.

Learning represents a movement toward the target’s center and beyond mere recall. In fact, we’re moving from a relatively straightforward process (rehearse→remember→recall) to more complicated combinations of processes.

Learning often involves four core processes, or four “states” of thinking. (Thinking is more fluid than the term states suggests, but this simplification can help us understand its flow.) Through experience, the brain gains raw sensory data. During comprehension, the brain sorts, labels, and organizes the raw sensory data. Through elaboration, the brain examines the organized data for patterns, recalls relevant prior experiences, and blends the new data with your experiences to construct understanding. During application the brain practices using or expressing the new understanding. There’s much more that could be said just about these core processes (an entire chapter of The Architecture of Learning explores these in depth), but allow me to move on and introduce a related idea.

The influential book 21st Century Skills: Learning for Life in Our Times argues for a greater emphasis on “Learning and Innovation Skills.” Such skills, explain authors Trilling and Fadel, “are the keys to unlocking a lifetime of learning and creative work.”1 We should increase instruction in the skills of learning, not just guide student learning of core subject matter. In other words, we need to place more value and emphasis on teaching students how to self-teach (or self-learn). We need to teach them how to engage learning’s core processes; we need to teach them the thinking skills that enable self-directed learning.

As we explore learning’s core processes in detail, a myriad of related skills emerge. Here’s a partial chart I’ve compiled. All these skills either contribute to a core process or engage a combination of learning’s core processes.

Going deeper, learning to learn becomes even more interesting (or complex, depending on your perspective), but what we can actually teach comes into focus.

For example, a group of educators in Philadelphia took part of the very first skill (identifying, clarifying, and phrasing questions) and discussed, “What is the range of this skill? What do its initial steps of development look like? What would its fullest expression look like?” After we grappled with these concepts, we considered when instruction for each step might begin and where it might mature to mastery. Here’s what evolved:

As we saw this potential scope emerge, the group became excited. For the first time, many of them felt they knew what to teach to equip students to think critically. (I know, I used the term I’m advocating we banish!) My response, and what I still believe, is that we identified, at least in part, the skills we could teach that would equip students to learn independently. Learning is not separate from thinking but dependent on it:

What we know results from what and how we think. Researcher and critical thinking expert Diane F. Halpern explains:

Knowledge is not something static that gets transferred from one person to another like pouring water from one glass to another. It is dynamic. Information becomes knowledge when we make our own meaning out of it…[We] create knowledge every time we learn a new concept.

Educator Laura Erlauer agrees, explaining that thinking processes “allow the brain to thoroughly understand the new concepts and internalize them into meaningful memories.” Learning is a product of thinking.2

Where does that leave us? Here are a few possible conclusions:

  • Learning is more than memorizing. It engages cognitive processes (comprehension, elaboration, application) that extend beyond rehearsal and recall. Learning is powered by thinking, and learning provides new material for thinking. (As one commenter on the last post put it, you have to have something to think about.)
  • Teaching students how to become learners requires helping them develop these cognitive processes and their associated skills/sub-skills.
  • The associated skills possess “steps” of development that provide more specific direction for what we can emphasize in the classroom.
  • Teaching these skills should be our priority. Everything else, such as the specific topics we teach, should be the material students learn through practice in using these skills. In other words, these skills should “drive” the curriculum. That does not mean we do not teach the traditional disciplines, but that the traditional disciplines are a means to the desired end of equipping self-directed learners.

I realize this leaves plenty of unanswered questions, such as:

  • What are the developmental steps for all the other skills?
  • What about problem solving? creativity? reasoning?
  • How can we “cover” the mandated curriculum while teaching students the skills to become self-directed learners?
  • How does teaching students to become self-directed learners aid achievement as measured on standardized testing?
  • Are there approaches we can use that would engage students in utilizing these skills while becoming knowledgeable of new subject matter?

I’ll address some of these in future posts, but honestly, I don’t have answers to all of them. It seems current educational mandates and structures hinder good answers to some of these critical questions (and produce the very problems Kyle faced). Changing direction likely requires a rethinking of current emphases and structures.

But then you probably already knew that.

References

  1. Trilling, B. & Fadel, C., 21st Century Skills: Learning for Life in Our Times (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2009), 49.
  2. Washburn, K.D., The Architecture of Learning: Designing Instruction for the Learning Brain (Pelham, AL: Clerestory Press, 2010), 186).

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Posted in 21st century skills, architecture of learning, Authentic learning, Cognition, comprehension, critical thinking, Education, elaboration, k-12 education, thinking

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Bilingual Education in Policy and Practice: Teaching Under Proposition 227

February 12th, 2010
In 1996, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) presented to world conference a Universal Declaration on Linguistic Rights asserting as “inalienable personal rights” the “right to be recognized as a member of a language community; the right to the use of one’s own language both in private and in public” and “the right for [one’s] own language and culture to be taught” (UNESCO, 1996). At the time that this declaration was published, California would seem to be a model state. After the landmark Lau v. Nichols case of 1974 in which the Supreme Court found that “there is no equality of treatment merely by providing students with the same facilities, textbooks, teachers, and curriculum; for students who do not understand English are effectively foreclosed from any meaningful education”, California would set the bar on bilingual education. In 1976, the California State Assembly would pass AB 1329, the Chacón-Moscone Bilingual-Bicultural Education Act, which “established the legal framework for a mandatory bilingual education program. In 1980, the bill would be revamped and expanded and although the bill was allowed to “sunset” in 1987, “the California Department of Education has nevertheless continued to uphold the bill’s principles” (Lemberger, 1997). And yet, in 1998, through a controversial ballot measure, California voters passed Proposition 227 which amended their constitution to ban instruction in any language other than English.
In the case of bilingual education in California it would seem as though politics had trumped pedagogy, as Californians “revealed that language learning is as much a political issue as an educational program or a field for linguistic research” (Mitchell, D., et al., 1999). Indeed, an analysis of news items on Proposition 227 in the months leading up to the vote found “he-said, she-said reporting dominated” with “little or no discussion of actual bilingual programs” (Aryal, 1998). A debate that should have focused upon linguistic theory, cultural identity and a technical decision regarding the balancing of “language and academic learning outcomes” (Mitchell, D., et al., 1999) was reduced to monolingual versus multilingual cultural warfare with little discussion of the impact on students.
In essence, Californians set a policy on bilingual education which “places language learning ahead of academic attainment” (Mitchell, D., et al., 1999), as the statewide curriculum for instructing English Language Learners was established in blanket mandate. Proposition 227 states that without parental waiver, students learning to speak English will be given a single year of sheltered English language immersion. This despite the fact that well vetted research on the subject found that “even in schools that are considered successful in teaching English to EL students, oral proficiency can take 3 to 5 years to develop, and academic English proficiency can take 4 to 7 years” (Biegel, p. 507, 2009).

Legal Aspects of Bilingual Education
U.S. law has had very little to say on the topic of bilingual education and can be reduced to a single Supreme Court Case, Lau v. Nichols, a single act of Congress, the Equal Educational Opportunity Act (EEOA), and the Fifth Circuit Court’s application of Lau. An application of the Fourteenth Amendment, Lau found that “where inability to speak and understand the English language excludes national origin – minority group children from effective participation in the educational program offered by a school district, the district must take affirmative steps to … open its instructional program to these students.” As a result of the Lau decision, the San Francisco Unified School District would enter into a consent decree, to ensure the implementation of a bilingual program to serve all students. Ironically, this consent decree would allow San Francisco to continue to provide bilingual education to its students after it was banned by Proposition 227.
Following the decision, congress incorporated the key points of Lau into the EEOA. The EEOA stated that:

No State shall deny equal educational opportunity to an individual on account of his or her race, color, sex, or national origin, by … (f) the failure by an educational agency to take appropriate action to overcome language barriers that impede equal participation by its students in the instructional programs.

As Wiley has pointed out however, the EEOA may not have explicitly provided for bilingual education. The EEOA does establish the right to “equal participation”, what Wiley calls “the right to access an education that allows for social, economic, and political participation” (2002, p. 39). What is not explicitly established is “the right to an education mediated in one’s mother tongue(s)” (Wiley, 2002, p. 39). This would be made clear by Judge Legge in the majority decision to uphold Proposition 227, “Since there is no requirement in the federal constitution for bilingual education, the voters of California were free to reject bilingual education” (Valeria v. Davis, 2003)
The key to understanding what is required of an educational agency is the phrase “appropriate action”. This appropriate action was not made explicit by Lau or by the EEOA. This would not be made explicit until the 1981 Fifth Circuit Court heard the Castaneda v. Pickard case. Castaneda established a three-fold framework for what constitutes “appropriate action”:
  1. The school system is purs[uing] a program informed by an educational theory recognized as sound by some experts in the field, or at least, deemed a legitimate experimental strategy.
  2. The programs and practices actually used by a school system [must be] reasonably calculated to implement effectively the educational theory adopted by the school.
  3. Even if theory is sound and resources are adequate, the program must be borne out by practical results.
In Valeria, Legge states “The Castaneda court … requires educational agencies to take ‘appropriate action,’ it does not require a program of bilingual education.” An unexplored option under Castaneda is whether or not single year immersion mandated by Proposition 227 meets the third criteria and has been “borne out by practical results”.
Marshall, et al. have established a framework on the “assumptive worlds of the policy maker”. What is interesting about Proposition 227 is that education policy was not made by district officials or state or federal legislators, but by the voters of California through ballot initiative. We might look at this legislation through the lens of the first domain of the “assumptive worlds”, “Who has the right and responsibility to initiate policy?” (Marshall, et al., 1985, p. 95). Do the voters have the right or the responsibility to initiate legislation on the linguistic rights of a minority group? Aryal’s meta-analysis on the media portrayal of this issue found that it was “not treat[ed] as an education story” and that popular discourse “seem[ed] to have forgotten that this issue will affect the lives of hundred of thousands of children for years to come” (1998). In his dissent to the Valeria decision, Judge Pregerson raised concerns along these lines:

Proposition 227 generates the type of restructuring of the political process that runs afoul of the equal protection guarantees of the Fourteenth Amendment. Proposition 227 siphons power away from those minorities who are directly affected by bilingual education policy and transfers the power to influence that area of educational policy to the general electorate. While public school students and parents could influence policy at the local level before the passage of Proposition 227, they must now launch a successful statewide ballot initiative to bring about any meaningful change. (Valeria v. Davis, 2003)

Education Policy Aspects of Bilingual Education
The years following the passage of Proposition 227 were marked by turmoil in California schools. In an action research study on bilingual teacher candidates, Rubio and Attinasi (2000) identified six dominant themes in reaction to the mandated changes. Faced with the difficult (and expensive) task of rebuilding entire programs, some districts opted to make minimal changes to classroom instruction. For others, the changes caused uncertainty and awkwardness as they struggled to interpret the pedagogical implications of the policy. Many teachers reported duress at the changes, most often at being “kept in the dark” as to what the changes would mean. Other districts opted for rigid directives, sometimes including the directive that “no waivers will be given”. Some districts took the opposite tack and actively sought parental waivers that would allow them to continue to operate their bilingual programs. Some districts pursued alternative programs such as dual immersion programs or as in the case of San Francisco Unified, continued bilingual education under its court ordered consent decree.

Next Steps
Several years into the program mandated by Proposition 227, California’s English Language Learners (ELL) find themselves in a difficult position. In 1998, just after the passage of Proposition 227, a review of data on students who had transition from bilingual education programs showed that “Third-graders who had graduated from bilingual classrooms in San Francisco, for example, scored 40 percentage points higher in math than their native English-speaking counterparts. On the language portion, bilingual fourth-graders scored 25 points higher than the natives. And in reading, eight-grade bilingual grads outscored the natives by nine points – although their reading scores slipped behind in later grades” (Asimov, 1998). Today, “linguistic minority children, particularly those who are not yet proficient in English, lag far behind children from English only backgrounds” (Biegel, 2009, p. 532). Furthermore, Rumberger and Gándara have identified seven inequitable conditions that effect ELL students’ opportunities: (1) inequitable access to appropriately trained teachers, (2) inadequate professional development opportunities to help teachers address their instructional needs, (3) inequitable access to appropriate assessment to measure their achievement, gauge their learning needs, and hold the system accountable for their progress, (4) inadequate instructional time to accomplish learning goals, (5) inequitable access to instructional materials and curriculum, (6) inequitable access to adequate facilities and (7) intense segregation into schools and classrooms that place them at particularly high risk for educational failure (Biegel, 2009, pp. 533-534).
As research has conclusively demonstrated that a single year of English language immersion is not a practical approach to the instruction of English language and academic content for ELLs, Education policy makers must seek new ways to develop strong programs for ELLs. While California may not be allowed to provide bilingual instruction, “the conditions that had been put into place before”, specifically its programs for the “training for bilingual teachers” (Varghese & Stritikus, 2005) provides an excellent resource for the reconstruction of strong programs. Varghese and Stritikus (2005) call for the creation of explicit “spaces” in teacher education programs where “teachers’ beliefs, their local settings, and research-based content” are discussed alongside “language policy” to make these discussions explicit for young teachers.
Varghese and Stritikus (2005) found that a teacher’s “sense of professional identity, … personal history and their entry into the profession” had as much impact in how teachers responded to language policy as did the school district’s official policy. Rubio and Attinasi (2000) take the discussion a step further by offering two concrete solutions via teacher education to California’s dilemma. First, new teachers must be thoroughly prepared by their programs. Having identified a list of seven needs of a strong BCLAD teacher certification program, it becomes as simple as filling these needs: (1) methods for primary language support (legal under 227 as “support”), (2) English Language Development (ELD) instructional strategies, (3) Specifically Designed Academic Instruction in English (SDAIE) strategies, (4) support in lesson planning (as in the Sheltered Instruction Observation Protocol (SIOP)), (5) support in classroom management, (6) homework strategies with parents and (7) access to ELD/SDAIE resources and materials. Finally, Rubio and Attinasi (2000) provide a set of enduring understandings that graduates of Bilingual Credential programs must possess: (a) how language policies affect the larger societies, (b) a focus on short range compliance with Proposition 227 and (c) the ideal education for societal bilingualism through dual language immersion. In this way, teacher education programs may provide the best and brightest hope to ameliorating the Achievement Gap for English language learners.
References
Aryal, M. (1998). “He says, she says: How California’s major papers have covered prop. 227”. Media File, Volume 17 #3.
Asimov, N. (1998). Bilingual surprise in state testing. San Francisco Chronicle. July 16, 1998, A1-A10.
Biegel, S. (2009). Education and the Law. St. Paul, MN: West.
Lau v. Nichols (1974), 414 U.S. 563, 94 S.Ct. 786
Lemberger, N. (1997). Bilingual Education (p. 171). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Marshall, C., Mitchell, D. & Wirt, F. (1985). Assumptive words of education policy makers. Peabody Journal of Education, Vol. 62, No. 4, pp. 90 – 115.
Mitchell, D., Destino, T., Karam, R. & Colón-Muñiz, A. (1999). The politics of bilingual education. Educational Policy, 13 (p. 86).
Rubio, O. & Attinasi, J. (2000). Teachers in post-Proposition-227 southern California: implications for teacher education. Journal of Instructional Psychology, 27 no. 4
United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), (1996). Universal declaration on linguistic rights. World Conference on Linguistic Rights, Barcelona, Spain.
Valeria v. Davis (2003), 320 F.3d 1014, 1018-20 (9th Cir.).
Varghese, M. M. & Stritikus, T. (2005). “Nadie me dijó [nobody told me]”: Language policy negotiation and implications for teacher education. Journal of Teacher Education, 56 (pp. 73 – 87)
Wiley, T. G. (2002). Accessing language rights in education: A brief history in the U.S. context. In J.W. Tollefson (Ed.), Language policies in education: Critical issues (pp. 39-64). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

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School discipline for off-campus conduct?

February 12th, 2010

Recently, the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit (which covers Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware and the U.S. Virgin Islands) decided two cases in which public school districts disciplined students for creating fake MySpace profiles of their principals.  For reasons that I do not understand, Pennsylvania is a leading state in this area of the law.  Those of us who track these issues nationally look to the Keystone State as a leading indicator.

The decisions were decided by co-equal panels of different judges in the same court.  On the surface, they are dramatically different.  In one case, it was acceptable for the school district to impose discipline.  In the other case, under nearly identical facts, disciplining the student ran afoul of the First Amendment.

For a detailed, two-part analysis of how the court reached different results in each of these cases – and why the decisions are important – please go to http://bit.ly/9cdVnx for part one and http://bit.ly/bhZKcW for part two.  I hope you will take advantage of this blog to discuss these evolving issues.

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Education Design Thinking- The Balance of Exploitation and Exploration

February 12th, 2010

Should schools get better at what they do or find better ways of doing what they do?

Professor Emeritus at Stanford University, James March believes that organizations may engage primarily in two types of activities, exploration, the search for new knowledge, or exploitation, the maximization of payoff from existing knowledge.

In public education terms, schools can look for new strategies, methods, and models for delivering education, or they can refine, hone, manage, and systematize the delivery of their current models of education.

In his new book The Design of Business: Why Design Thinking Is The Next Competitive Advantage, Roger Martin explains that while both are valuable and both are critical, it is hard to do. “…they are hard to engage in simultaneously; most often, organizations choose to focus on one activity, either exploration or exploitation, to the exclusion of the other and to their own detriment.”

In other words, education focuses on either the exploration of new models and methods, or focuses mainly on managing and administering their current model and methods.

Roger explains that there dangers of an organization that focuses only on exploration.
“An organization exclusively dedicated to exploration will expire relatively short order. Typically, exploration alone will not generate the returns needed to fund further exploration.”

If education is always looking for the next best thing, the next model, method, or strategy, they will fail to produce the student achievement results demanded of them. They will not capitalize or leverage the good models, methods, strategies, and ideas that have been developed.

But there are dangers too for the organization that focuses solely on exploitation.

“ On the other hand, many organizations flip quickly from an early exploration phase—the generation of the founding idea behind the business—to the steady exploitation of that idea, never returning to exploration. These organizations, solely dedicated to exploitation, might last somewhat longer than exploration-only businesses, but the business that creates value only through exploitation will exhaust itself in due course. It can’t keep exploiting the same piece of knowledge forever. If it tries to do so, the cost of the business can be devastating.”

If education is never looking for new models, methods,strategies, or ideas for delivering education to it’s students, it is inevitable that the model they exploit will eventually cease to produce the results desired of it.

Roger provides the following table for reference. I have added the education references.

Exploration
 Exploitation
Organizational Focus
 The invention of teaching and learning
 The administration of teaching and learning
Overriding Goal
 Dynamically moving from the current knowledge stage to the next
 Systematically honing and refining within the current knowledge stage
Driving Forces
 Intuition, feeling, hypotheses about the future, originality
 Analysis, reasoning, data from the past, mastery
Future Orientation
 Long-term
 Short-term
Progress
 Uneven, scattered, characterized by false starts and significant leaps forward
 Accomplished by measured, careful incremental steps
Risk and Reward
 High risk, uncertain but potentially high reward
 Minimal risk, predictable but smaller rewards
Challenge
 Failure to consolidate and exploit returns
 Exhaustion and obsolescence

Roger Martin argues that what is needed is balance between exploration and exploitation found in Design Thinking. “The design thinker therefore, enables the organization to balance exploration and exploitation, invention of business and administration of business, and originality and mastery.”

The education design thinker enable a school to balance finding new and better ways increasing student achievement and delivering effective instruction, while mastering, embedding, and refining the effective methods that are in use. Schools that get better at what they do while finding better ways to do it. That is educational design thinking.

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Students Should Graduate with a Résumé, Not a Transcript

February 6th, 2010

Consider that title for a moment, at least one moment.

The words are from Arnold Packer, principal author of what is know as the SCANS report, (SCANS = Secretary’s Commission on Achieving Necessary Skills, and the Secretary was of the Dept. of Labor). I encountered that phrase in a recent piece by Grant Wiggins, writing for The Association of Supervision and Curriculum Development’s new EDge professional social network project in piece titled Abolish the Diploma.

There is an important message, contrary to most of our discussions about educational policy. What if we totally abandoned the idea of a high school diploma meeting certain common standards, what might that mean for education, for the money we spend on standardized tests? Can we consider the implications, at least for a moment? If you are interested in the idea, please keep reading.

Wiggins is one of the great advocates of Authentic Learning and Authentic Education (you can read about his ideas here, with an undergraduate degree from St. John’s Annapolis and an Ed. D. from Harvard. But he is not afraid of challenging conventional thinking about education. Consider how his blog post starts:

Imagine the following HS requirements being recommend to the School Board:
• 3 years of economics and business
• 2 courses in philosophy – one in logic, the other in ethics
• 2 years of psychology, with special emphasis on child development and family relations
• 2 years of mathematics, focusing on probability and statistics
• 4 years of Language Arts, but with a major focus on semiotics and oral proficiency
• US and World history, taught as Current Events – backwards from the present
• 1 Year of Graphics Design, Desktop Publishing, and Multimedia presentation

Outrageous? Hardly – if we do an analysis of what most graduates actually need and will use in professional, civic, and personal life. How odd it is that we do not require oral proficiency when every graduate will need the ability. How absurd it is in this day and age that students aren’t required to understand the capitalist system. How sad it is that physics is viewed as more important than psychology, as parents struggle to raise children wisely and families work hard to understand one another. Requirements based on pre-modern academic priorities and schooling predicated on the old view that few people would graduate and fewer still would go on to college make no sense. Ask any adult: how much algebra did you use this past week?

Keep in mind these phrases pre-modern academic priorities and few people would graduate and fewer still would go on to college because I will revisit them.

Or consider another paragraph:

We are once again confusing standards with standardization in education. Our misguided quest for a set of one-size-fits-all requirements shows that we do not yet know how to make education modern – i.e. client-centered; adapted to an era where the future, not the past, properly determines curricula; and where the future is re-invented regularly, and far more personalizable than our forebears dreamed possible.

Let me offer a few shorter quotes from the piece before I begin to offer some thoughts of my own:

We badly need a Hippocratic Oath for schooling: Above All Else, Do No Harm.

It is absurd to mandate standardized prescriptions in a pluralistic democracy. Enforced uniformity, whether required in school or a country, has no place in a modern world.

About the last of these, I am immediately reminded of two lines from magnificent opinion, the famous Pledge of Allegiance case, where in opposing mandatory participation in the Pledge Ceremony he writes

Those who begin coercive elimination of dissent soon find themselves exterminating dissenters. Compulsory unification of opinion achieves only the unanimity of the graveyard.

For me, a compulsory and uniform approach to education is parallel to the coercive elimination of dissent to which Jackson objected. It denies our students their individuality, their right to explore their own gifts, subordinating them to different priorities – the presumed economic needs of large corporations or national policy, for example. And I think it ultimately robs us of the riches our students could produce if allowed greater freedom to explore more broadly. Increasingly we are locking them into ever more rigid academic programs. In the process, we produce high school graduates who are not used to taking intellectual risks, who have not learned that one can try and fail and perhaps learn even greater lessons than those who never encounter any academic difficulty, who stay on the approved paths to academic “success.” We have forgotten about play, although I assure you that given a chance many of our students can quickly rediscover it.

Let me return to Wiggins. One size fits all – standardized assessment driving standardized instruction to the detriment of real learning. Allow me to point at another recent offering, by UVa Psychology Professor Daniel Willingham, in a Boston Globe op ed, Turning schools into Registry of Motor Vehicles. Consider this, written in opposition to evaluating teachers by the test scores of their students:

We do not have good tools to measure teachers, and when you hold people accountable with poor measures, things don’t just fail to improve. They get worse.

The reason is simple: Accountability changes workers’ focus from “do a good job” to “do a job that looks good according to the measure.”

There is much more in Willingham’s piece, and he is not opposed to accountability per se. As he concludes:

Advocates of teacher accountability often acknowledge these problems, yet insist it’s better than nothing. Not true. A poor system could make teaching worse and a failed attempt will allow opponents to dismiss accountability as a failed policy. Accountability is a good idea, but we have to get the measures right.

What Willingham writes about accountability for teachers connects with my concerns about what we are doing to our students in our approach to education, and I would argue is essential to the points Wiggins is making. We set a standard for high school graduation, we tie everything to that, we are in theory gearing that towards having all student ready for college upon high school graduation even though many will never attend, still more will not attend immediately, and in the process we are pushing kids out of school because they cannot fit into that narrow model. Are our schools serving those kids? If not, is not our entire approach to schooling flawed?

Wiggins puts it bluntly, that we are confusing standards with standardization in education. I do not oppose the idea of having some criteria in various domains that students should strive to meet. But in the process of attempting to agree to common standards we seem to fall into one or several traps. Either in our attempt to agree we create standards that are very narrow, that is, they only concern a few of the many domains of learning. And/or to get concurrence we begin to throw in so many criteria to be met that the standards become little more than check lists. We have seen both occur in the various iterations of standards movement, including the current effort to define common corp standards among the states in English Language Arts and Math, an effort that has largely excluded the voices of classroom educators, the professional organizations of educators in English and Mathematics, or even the voices of relatively recent graduates of our high schools who might be able to offer some meaningful insight as to what was effective and what was not in their own experience. Instead we have people from think tanks, testing companies, and the like. And in the entire process we begin to find ourselves standardizing for its own sake rather than really understanding what it is our students really need to know AND WHY, because we do not step back and ask a basic question – how does this serve the real interests of our students? Why is it that we presume that a common high school diploma necessarily serves to prepare our students for life, or even for college? Is not that the challenge with which Wiggins presents us? And if we are bothered by that challenge, do we not step back and reexamine our entire approach to education, rather than doing we we now see happening:

… the Common Core Standards

… the insistence on ever increasing “rigor” as if “raising the bar” will somehow magically lead to better performance

… shaping educational policy on the failed framework of NCLB, even as we may drop the idiotic demand that all students be “proficient” in 2014 ( which no one ever really thought was achievable, which is why ever increasing numbers of schools fail to make AYP)

… assuming the best way to serve our children is to make states compete, when our obligation should be to serve ALL our children, not just those whose states are willing to conform to ever narrow visions of education such as those required by the criteria of Race to the Top

We ignore the advice of real experts. W. James Popham is a retired professor from UCLA and a past president of the American Educational Research Association, and his area of expertise is testing and assessment. Like Willingham, he is opposed to tying teacher compensation to test scores. In Test scores and teacher competency, which appeared on Thursday, he warns

many of the items on state accountability tests end up being linked to students’ inherited academic aptitudes, such as a child’s innate quantitative potential, or to the socioeconomic status of a student’s family. Because inherited aptitudes and family status are nicely distributed variables, test items influenced by these factors tend to create the needed spread in students’ test scores. Yet, inherited academic aptitudes and family status reflect what students bring to school, not what they are taught once they get there. Many of today’s accountability tests are laden with items tending to make them instructionally insensitive.

It is not that Popham is opposed to testing, any more than Willingham is opposed to evaluating teachers. Both raise real issues about how our current methods of assessment are flawed, and how conceivable using the results on student tests will definitely drive the instructional process. Some might argue that is a good thing. I think given the current tests – and standards – driving our educational process, both of these gentlemen would object.

Wiggins certainly would object. Because he would argue that the issue is far greater than the sensitivity of the test and their ability to control for non instructional factors such as family wealth and education, or the tendency of many in any domain – not just teaching – to distort what they do to achieve better performance on measures that affect their income and position. Consider that if police are given awards on how many tickets they issue or arrests they make, our courts will be clogged with cases that may not lead to convictions. If instead you give awards on the percentage of cases that lead to convictions, then police may be inclined only to arrest those whose cases appear to be slam dunks for conviction. In either case what should be the real goal – of ensuring public safety – takes a back seat to meeting the standard of measurement, and yet again demonstrates the wisdom of Donald Campbell’s famous law, The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decisionmaking, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor.

All of this is important to understand, but mainly so that it enables us to break free of our conventional patterns of thinking about education and step back.

And when we step back, perhaps we need to ask questions that should be more basic, such as why do we have schools, what is the purpose of an education, what does it mean to be educated, why do we think students need to learn certain things, what do we really need to know about students, how can we best fulfill the various and sometimes conflicting goals we have . . .

Should not one goal be that we can know what a student can do, what passions s/he has, what turns that young mind on? Can we really judge that by a transcript that indicates how many credits, at what level of class (basic, honors, AP/IB), even when accompanied by various test scores, sometimes with reports of performance on subdomains? Is everything important quantifiable, or is it that we focus on those things we think we can quantify because we are lazy, because we want to resort to a single number?

When I was growing up, one quarterback with a very high completion rate was Milt Plum of the Cleveland Browns. He had few interceptions. He also often hung on to the ball too long getting sacked, or took a safe pass for a completion that did not keep a drive alive. He was not that effective a quarterback, although if we only examined his completion percentage he was at or near the top. Does a transcript necessarily tell us all we really want to know about a student? Might not a narrative, with products (eg, a portfolio) that demonstrates in real world situations what a student has done not give us better, more meaningful information? Yes, we can find correlations between SATs and first year college performance, or between the “rigor” of the high school transcript in terms of challenging courses undertaken and so-called college readiness. Yet I teach AP. And the requirements of preparing students for the AP test restricts my ability even as a skilled teacher to fully give my students the opportunity to explore topics in depth, to follow their passions, because there is so much material that I must “cover.” I would think if you ask my students why they take my AP government class, for some it is for the weighted GPA, for others it is for the hope of college credit, but for many it is the chance to experience a teacher who will challenge them, who will provoke them, who wants them to challenge him, to develop their own ideas. I care more about their developing as caring persons who use their intellect positively than how well they do in my class or on the AP exam, and perhaps it is that care that is part of the reason so many do so well, because they begin to understand that learning is more than the score on a test or the grade on a transcript.

I used Wiggins as a starting point. I used his quote from Packer. Let me repeat that quote: students should graduate with a résumé, not a transcript If, like me, you thing that has some relevance. . . if, like Wiggins, you then raise real questions about the increasing standardization of our schooling . . . then why are you not letting your policy makers know of your concern?

I began with computers in the Marines, in the mid-1960s. I spent 20+ years of my life working in that field, but I keep clearly in my mind what was regularly printed on the punch cards that were the primary means of transmitting data when I began: “Do not fold, spindle, or mutilate.” Should not how we do our education at least treat our students with the same respect with demanded for punch cards? Are not we, in our insistence on standardization, folding, spindling, and mutilating the dreams and personas of our young people?

students should graduate with a résumé, not a transcript or at least, not JUST a transcript.

Thoughts from a certifiable teacher on a snowy day in Northern Virginia.

Peace.

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Options, Opportunities, and CTE

February 5th, 2010
The Labor Market Information Division (LMI) of the Virginia Employment Commission (VEC) is a robust resource for state workforce data and labor market analysis. One of LMI’s publications, Community Profiles, features a wealth of locality-specific information including demographic, economic and educational data.
From the perspective of Career and Technical (Vocational) Education, I find the projections of occupation decline and growth particularly interesting. The data in Albemarle County’s Community Profile (updated 1/29/10) paint an intriguing picture.
A quick analysis:
First, the declining occupations are skill-specific and the functions highly routine. Most are vanishing for one of two primary reasons: 1) they are being replaced by technology, or 2) someone overseas can do it more cheaply.
In the 2007 report by the New Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce, Tough Choices or Tough Times, researchers note:
If someone can figure out the algorithm for a routine job, chances are that it is economic to automate it. Many good well-paying, middle-class jobs involve routine work of this kind and are rapidly being automated…. A swiftly rising number of American workers at every skill level are in direct competition with workers in every corner of the globe.
Occupations replaced by technology are not limited to manufacturing automation. Routine service-sector positions are also vulnerable to cheaper, faster software solutions or free online services.  We can see this phenomenon illustrated in the chart below, which depicts the projected nature of work in the prototypical U.S. workplace.

In Albemarle’s case, one could assume occupations (in addition to those clearly identifiable as routine) like photographic machine operators are giving way to online distribution channels like Flickr or upload and print services like Shutterfly. How many of us call a local travel agent before visiting Travelocity or KAYAK? And, typically, the Google search bar is our travel guide. Traditionally high-wage occupations aren’t immune either, as software or online programs can replicate routine legal or financial services.
Secondly, most of the declining occupations listed—even if they aren’t susceptible to outsourcing or algorithms—do not offer a real opportunity for upward career or lateral academic mobility. This is problematic, as it leaves workers in a state of “square one” in the event of job loss or occupational obsolescence.
Next, let’s look at the occupations projected to continually grow:

In a direct contrast to those in decline, nearly all of these occupations offer academic and professional mobility. And, interestingly, several rungs on the respective career ladders are also projected to be high growth. For instance, one could theoretically have the following career progressions:

Veterinary Assistant –> Veterinary Technologist –> Veterinarian

Social and Human Services Assistant –> Social Worker /Mental Health Counselor –> Psychiatrist

The same mobility can be applied to the fields of healthcare, business, construction, and information technology–which are also represented at some level in Albemarle’s projected growth occupations.

The critical ingredient, though, is the option for lateral academic entry through community colleges and universities at each phase of a career progression.

What’s the likelihood of a “vocational student” progressing from veterinary assistant to veterinarian, carpenter to architect, or office assistant to executive? It doesn’t matter.

Educators cannot predict the future aspirations of current students, nor should we try. All we can do is ensure that secondary CTE programming makes future options and opportunities available. To knowingly do otherwise is not only irresponsible; it’s malpractice.

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Here’s a Thought: Let’s Banish Critical Thinking

February 4th, 2010

I’ve been thinking about thinking lately, and I’ve had it with critical thinking. Note the italics. I’ve had it with the term critical thinking, not the actual practice. From a recent immersion in thinking-related research, I’ve concluded that critical thinking is like the weather: everybody talks about it but few do anything about it.

No arena bandies the term about as widely as education. Few conferences fail to include at least one session devoted to the topic, and book vendors at these events hawk the latest tomes dedicated to it. Educators seem to agree on the need for students to learn to think critically, but that seems to be the end of their consensus. Ask three different educators for their definition of critical thinking and you’re likely to get at least four different ideas, and at least half of them will include a nod to Bloom’s Taxonomy. Somewhere in our history, many of us were convinced that if our questioning climbed a ladder and we called on students whose names we wrote on popsicle sticks and pulled randomly from a styrofoam cup, we were teaching students critical thinking.

Because of the confusion all these preconceived notions create, I propose that we stop talking about critical thinking and instead just think about thinking. To that end, I’ve started referencing a different model. Imagine thinking as a target. As any marksman knows, the center of the target is where you aim if you want the best result. However, though the center of this target represents the ultimate goal, the outer circles are not without value. Let’s examine the first of these outer circles: memorize.

Wait, don’t stop reading! I know memorizing lacks the flash and appeal of the target’s other circles, but our brains do indeed memorize information, sometimes without our consent. For example, I know every lyric to the 70’s classic but somewhat mind-numbing “Funkytown.” I never intentionally sat down and used flash cards to learn the lyrics. They just got stuck in my head, which is one way to define memorizing. We memorize when things get stuck in our heads, on purpose or otherwise.

When educators talk about memorizing, it’s usually with a scowl on their faces and the taste of battery acid on their tongues. Memorizing is so beneath us. We don’t have students memorize anything. Everything we teach is meaningful. It’s all the others—teachers who teach other disciplines—who make students memorize unnecessary information. We’re above such an approach. We climb questioning ladders and pull popsicle sticks, for pete’s sake!

But let’s be honest. Despite the fact that most everything factual can now be found quickly via technology, some information still possesses its greatest value when it’s memorized. At its best, memorizing enables efficiency in thinking and acting. For example, knowing how to spell the words critical and thinking saved me plenty of time in developing this post. If I didn’t know instantly how to spell most of the words I use in writing, I’d probably have far less to say. (I know what you’re thinking: that’d be a bad thing?) Can you imagine trying to compose any significant passage of writing if you had to stop and check your wireless device for the correct spelling of every word?

I once had an experience that provides a picture of what this might be like. My wife and I love going to the theater for live performances. One time, just before the curtain was raised on a new drama, the announcer spoke via the public address system: “Today the role of Countess Calista will be played by Jane Smith, script in hand.” Apparently the lead actress and her understudy were unavailable. Sure enough, Ms. Smith waltzed onto stage with “script in hand,” and read her lines throughout the performance. It was disjointed and distracting. So much so that I can’t even remember the name of play, let alone what it was about. Memorizing has its place, even when technology that can provide the next line or correct spelling exists.

However, at its worse, memorization becomes merely testable material that lacks any use beyond the end of an instructional unit. With such material, its measurability is often its sole benefit, and it’s a benefit for the teacher not the student. Unfortunately it seems that many schools would rather aim for this outermost circle, decreasing the likelihood of hitting any part of the thinking target. But if we aim for and even hit this outermost circle, we have problems. Memorizing, while valuable when engaged selectively, has its limits.

First, students who only memorize remain subject to dogma’s sway. Parroting is evidence of memorizing, and a student who has highly developed memorizing capacity without equally developed processing abilities will tend to repeat the ideas of others, often without understanding.

Second and relatedly, students only equipped to memorize tend to accept without question. Such individuals tend to take the words that fall from the mouths of people they like and repeat them whether they are true or not. Since they lack the ability to process the ideas the words represent, accepting and repeating those words become the individual’s way of “thinking.”

Third, individuals who rely solely on memorizing as thinking cannot entertain or even understand conflicting ideas. That which they’ve memorized becomes their sole reference, so anything new must conform with the previously memorized information.

In short, merely memorizing severely limits an individual. So, while hitting the outermost circle represents one element of mental activity, always aiming there produces individuals I don’t think most schools and teachers would claim as their intended outcome. We need to consider the inner circles (and we will in future posts) and actually teach students the cognitive skills associated with them. Popsicle sticks and questioning variety alone won’t get us there.

Let’s think about thinking—teaching it, increasing it, developing students who actually can do it—but let’s leave our confusing dance with critical thinking behind.

Top Image: ‘la linea della vita, nichilismo’ http://www.flickr.com/photos/32347849@N08/3269623518

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Posted in Bloom's Taxonomy, critical thinking, Education, evaluate, learn, learning, memorize, reason, target, technology

Peyton Manning Can Call Audibles, Can You?

February 1st, 2010

By Jason Flom, Ecology of Education


I’m not afraid to admit it. Standardization — it scares me.

It’s the monster under the bed, lurking in the closet, rumbling around in the attic of my mind. Its the haunting moans in the walls of the profession, a harbinger of doom. In fact at times, in states of sleep deprived overly-dramatic hyperbolization, it is the end of days. At least in my head.

Its not common concepts, core values, or normalized skill sets that go bump in my night. No, the zombie lurking in my room is mandated standardized teaching, the cranking out of factory built sameness. The terror is this: If educators are bitten by standardization will they cease to think for themselves? If they must all teach “X” during the __th week and then assess that content on Friday, will they churn out little stardardized zombie students?

Ultimately, my fear is the dichotomous relationship between what we want (teachers as professionals) and what we may be moving toward (teachers as laborers).

(Warning, Mixed Metaphors Ahead!)

The teacher as professional is still a long way off. That’s not to say there are not a number of very professional teachers in the field. There are. However, there is a difference between “teachers who are professionals” and “teachers as professionals”. In the former, some teachers act as polished experts, while in the latter, the field of teaching is respected for its (eek, eek) standard of excellence.

In many ways, teachers are quarterbacks in the football game of schooling. They try to move the ball of learning and knowledge down the field despite the numerous linebackers that attempt to halt forward progress. The talented quarterback, much like judo experts, use the oncoming obstacles as opportunities. (Technology is a good example of this. Teachers who embrace students’ immersion in it can move their team closer to touchdowns than those who try to keep it off the line of scrimmage.)

Teachers able (meaning possessing both the ability and autonomy) to “read the field” and make adjustments fair better than those who cannot (either do to ineptitude or restriction).

I’m not suggesting that teachers go on the field without a game plan or without consulting regularly with their coach (administrator, team, mentor, or planbook). Professionals work in collaboration on a number of fronts and approach each task with established goals and objectives. Teachers are no different. The well prepared teacher can manage a wider assortment of obstacles than can an unprepared one.

The great topography of the US, both in terms of geography and demography, is a boon to our future possibilities. Myriad communities, resources, and experiences present schools with a rich diversity of ideas, cultures, and personalities. The adaptable and engaging teacher culls from this a unique blend of opportunities, tailored specifically to the students under his/her leadership. Innovation is born of imagination, discovery, research, knowledge, and exploration. Creativity and flexibility are necessary components of growth and development, and schools can be allies in this far beyond the 3 r’s.

Because of the dynamic nature of classrooms, teachers able to tailor curriculum to the reality on the ground — essentially to adapt to the configuration of the defense — can “score more touchdowns” and provide students with more skill depth than teachers who stick to the texts.

The ability to take advantage of learning opportunities depends on three interrelated components:

  1. Teachers trained to “read the field” and adapt or construct curriculum to meet the reality of the field. Colleges of ed need to prepare teachers who know how to learn. For working with interns in my classroom, I use this sheet. We can’t simply give teachers autonomy. It must be worked into the system, to capitalize on diverse ideas, talents, and visions. Students thrive under inspired teachers.
  2. Administrators who have (and can use) more effective methods for providing teachers with feedback and support. (I’m a big fan of this rubric.)
  3. The support and respect of the policy making establishment and, by proxy, the public. (A pay grade that attracts top flight candidates might help.)

I wonder, can we standardize creativity, individualism, differentiation, learning opportunities, innovation, and a sense of community in our learning environments? I think we can, but it’ll take a different effort than “simply” standardizing for scoring high on standardized tests. We need to standardize teachers’ ability (skill as well as autonomy) to follow the lead of the students, and fully capitalize on the gifts students bring with them.

Teachers need to be able to call audibles without fear of reprimand. Its not going to happen over night (nor should it), but with concerted effort, it can happen. And the team — the kids –will only benefit, if we do it right.

Zombie Image: Wiki Commons
Peyton Image: UPI.com

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Posted in Education Reform, Peyton Manning, Service Learning, Teacher Efficacy, teaching

Education Hell: Rhetoric vs. Reality

February 1st, 2010

When teachers are forced, against their better judgment, to focus on teaching test content to the exclusion of almost everything else, I can only conclude that the high-stakes testing movement nourishes totalitarian regimes.

If the title did not grab you, I suspect that if you really care about what is happening to American public schools, that quote should get your attention. It is from the introduction to the final book by the late Gerald W. Bracey, taken from us too soon this past October.

This is a book that will give you all the ammunition you need to oppose the so-called reformers who, despite their professed best intentions, are destroying American public education.

The book has an additional subtitle, Transforming the Fire Consuming America’s Schools, which makes clear Bracey’s opposition to much of what has been happening in the past decade or more. I invite to you come with me on a further exploration of the book, and of Bracey.

This will not be a conventional review. Susan Ohanian has penned a superb review for Education Reviews, which you can read here. Rather, this will be an appreciation by me of Bracey as embodied in this final work.

Jerry was brilliant and acerbic. Let’s start with the brilliance. He was first in his class at William & Mary. And you can get a sense of how much of a force of nature he was in this Washington Post obituary by Jay Mathews, for whom Bracey was an ongoing critic, regularly firing off criticisms and corrections of things Jay had published.

I first got to know Jerry online before I decided to become a teacher, when I encountered some of his writing in Phi Delta Kappan, a professional educational journal for whom he wrote a research column for years. One of the highlights would be his annual report on the state of education, which came to be known for its Golden (good) and Rotten (bad) Apple awards in education. Unfortunately, the editors decided the Rotten Apples caused them too much grief, so Jerry had to publish them separately.

He also ran a list serv known as EDDRA, for the Education Disinformation Detection and Reporting Agency, through which Bracey and his followers would take apart sloppy education research and reporting. I can guarantee that Jay Mathews was not the only education reporter on the receiving end of a burning email from Jerry pointing out any errors or misinterpretations. Those of us who participated learned that despite what we had in common with Jerry we could also be on the receiving end of his acidic observations should we misinterpret or misrepresent something.

I never met Gerald Bracey face to face. We talked on the phone several times, but although until recently we only lived about 10 miles apart somehow we never found the time to get together. Besides EDDRA, my electronic communications with him were fairly extensive, as he sometimes pointed me at things I needed to learn and understand.

I received Education Hell as soon as it was in print, devoured it, and was so impressed called the publisher to buy several copies to give to members of the House Committee on Education and Labor that I know. Several have told me how impressed they were with what they read, one recently telling me he had found it invaluable.

Somehow as much as I appreciated the book, which was one of the most important things on education I had read in recent years, the press of school and other activities meant that I never got around to properly reviewing it before Jerry passed, and since October I have been regretting that I could not email him to discuss further some of the things in the book.

It is important to know that Bracey directed educational testing efforts at various times in his career, for the Commonwealth of Virginia, and for the Cherry Creek CO school district. He had worked for Educational Testing Service as well. His doctorate was in Developmental Psychology from Stanford, but his interests were extensive, including food and wine – as Mathews notes, Jerry had served as a restaurant reviewer along side his work in education.

It was from Bracey that I learned about Simpson’s paradox, a basic problem in statistics, which shows up as we increase the percentage of groups who score lower into test pools. Each sub group can increase its scores, but the overall average drops because more of the testees are from lower scoring groups. He would constantly criticize writers who would lament things like drops in SAT scores caused by the changing makeup of the universe being tested.

I came to Education Hell predisposed to like it, because of my great respect for Jerry. I was blown away. As I look at my copy, there are so many stickies to indicate passages I have marked that it looks like a hedgehog, or an armadillo whose plates have suddenly pivoted at 90 degrees from the skin. His knowledge of the data and the relevant research is mindboggling. And his ability to cut to the heart of the issue is critical. Consider how often we hear lamentations about how our students are not proficient enough in reading. After quoting Bill Clinton’s former Chief of Staff and head of the Center for American Progress (CAP) John Podesta lamenting the proficiency of our 4th and 8th graders, Bracey responds like this on pp. 64-65:

While Podesta was finding this situation unconscionable, Richard Rothstein and his colleagues at Columbia Unibversity were releasing a study showing that there is no country in the world that has a majority of its students proficient in reading(Rothstein,Jacbosen & Wilder, 2006). And at the American Institutes for research, former acting commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, Gary Phillips, was releasing a more extensive tusyd finding that only 5 nations have a majority proficient in math (Singapore, 75%; Korea, 65%; Hong Kong, 64%, Japan, 61%; and Taiwan, 61%). In reading, no country comes close to having a majority proficient. Sweden is tops with 33% (U. S> about 31%; Finland did not take part in this particular study). A mere two nations had a majority of their students proficient in science (Taiwan, 51%; Singapore, 51%) (Phillipa, 2007).

As for proficiency on our own National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP), Bracey was long critical of how artificial the levels were. After noting that it is NAEP proficiencies to which Americans most often refer when using the term, Bracey is characteristically blunt:

But the NAEP achievement levles, as we shall see in chapter 3, are essentially meaningless and set a totally unrealistic level. They were Designed by Chester Finn, at the time president of the National Assessment Governing Board, to sustain the sense of crisis established first by Sputnik and more recently by ANAR

(in case you do not recognize ANAR, that is Bracey’s abbreviation for A Nation At Risk, the incredibly flawed “report” released early in the Reagan administration alarming American that our economy would crumple before certain Asian nations because our -economy- educational system was so bad. If you think you hear echoes of that kind of rhetoric in much of the current bloviation about our schools, Bracey would rightly be satisfied to remind you that he had criticized the reasoning in the 80s and continued to criticize it to the end of his life.

The book is divided into two sections, with a total of 11 chapters. Part I has four chapters:

1. Pre-Sputnik: No-Test-Based Criticism of Schools

2. Post-Sputnik: Criticisms and the Descent Into Test Mania

3. Tests: Descriptions and Trends – How Do We Measure Up?

4. NO Child Left Behind: “The Beatings Will Continue Until Morale Improves”

Part II has the remaining 7 chapters:

5. Science, Engineering, and Economic Competitiveness

6. The Real Meaning of Competition

7. “Poverty is Poison”

8. A Few Words About Learning – Eureka!

9. The Goals of Public Education

10. The Lost Lessons of the Eight-Year Study

11. Democracy and Education

The final chapter features selections by Richard Gibboney, who served at one point as Vermont’s Commissioner of Education; Nel Noddings, now retired from Stanford and whose ethic of caring was the theoretical framework of my now abandoned dissertation; and MacArthur genius winner Deborah Meier.

For those who do not know about it, the Eight Year Study, which ended in 1942, was an effort by the Progressive Education Association, which got 30 schools and systems and several hundred colleges to allow the high schools to certify their students’ readiness without requiring them to take admissions examinations. sometimes while having them follow a very non-traditional course of studies. The students were tracked through their collegiate careers, and they did no worse, and usually better, than their collegiate peers who came from more conventional education settings. You can get a sense of the project here

Bracey’s presentation of the study, and of the lessons learned, is accessible, and his book earns its value just in this chapter. I have read all 5 volumes of the study, and Bracey’s summary and presentation are more than fair. Allow me to offer just a few snips to illustrate some of what can be learned.

Ralph Tyler headed the evaluation staff for the study.

Tyler insisted that teachers be intimately involved in all aspects of developing assessment instruments . . . He called his approach to evaluation “comprehensive appraisal” where instruments were designed to ascertain student development and merely to determine the acquisition of knowledge and factual learning. For him, evaluation should being with teachers discussing “what kinds of changes in its pupils the new educational program was expected to facilitate” (Kridel & Bullough, 2007).

Tyler also did not believe it appropriate to use one instrument to measure all thirty participating schools.

As a classroom teacher, and a strong critic of our current approach to assessment, I feel the material above presents a strong counterweight to the absurdity of our current test-manic approach.

One lesson from the study was that students needed to take some responsibility for what they learn. Consider

The idea that schools should be democratic communities meant that students would need to end their usual roles as passive recipients of instruction. This shift in which students would plan some of their course of study and develop curriculum stunned them.

As it would stun most of our students today! And yet, if our intent is to help them develop the ability to learn independently, why are we not involving them with designing the course of instruction to which we submit them?

Let me offer one more sentence from this chapter that struck me:

Here;s why education can never be a science: education deals with sentient beings and each is different.

Any teacher who is being honest recognizes the wisdom of that sentence, and yet we find ourselves increasingly forced to ignore those differences in the mad rush to cram more and more information (not even knowledge, which would imply some comprehension and ability to apply it in new and previously unknown situations) in order to demonstrate the “rigor” of our course of studies, such rigor being measured by tests that too rarely require higher level thinking.

Bracey is quite willing to give credit to other thinkers. I have already noted that his final chapter, with its focus on Democracy in education, relies on the work of Gibboney, Noddings and Meier. Chapter 9, The Goals of Public Education, introduces to readers to the work of John Goodlad, with the 12 goals he declaimed in his great book, What Schools Re for. Bracey goes through the 12 goals, and offers commentary on each, sometimes with pointed criticism, even as overall he approves of Goodlad’s efforts. Let me list the 12 goals (with some ongoing comments by me) and then offer Bracey’s brief final commentary at the end of the chapter.

1. Mastery of Basic Skills or Fundamental Processes

2. Career Education-Vocational Education (which I note is disappearing in our mad insistence that every child be prepared for college upon graduation from high school)

3. Intellectual Development

4. Enculturation – Bracey notes that this could be considered simple-minded, except that it becomes broadened in the next goal

5. Interpersonal Relations – yet, in schools with high poverty, such as that written about by Linda Perlstein, students arriving lacking basic skills in this area, and are given no time to work on them because raising test scores – always difficult for poor kids – takes over everything else

6. Autonomy – on this Bracey considers our insisting that all students take Algebra in 8th grade serves either to dumb down algebra, increase the dropout rate, or both. It does little to develop a positive attitude towards learning, which should be an essential building block of developing autonomy

7. Citizenship – here I note, as a teacher of Government to 10th graders, that students now arrive in high school with ever decreasing background in history and related subjects, because they are not tested for Adequate Yearly Progress under NCLB. Goodlad already saw the problem developing in 1979.

8. Creativity and Aesthetic Appreciation

9. Self-Concept

10. Emotional and Physical Well-Being

11. Moral and Ethical Character Bracey is critical of the list of items Goodlad offers under this goal, because he does not see the word Democracy.

Let me offer the complete list of bullet points in the final goal
12. Self-Realization
- Develop an appreciation of the idea that there are many ways to be a good human being
- develop a better self
- Contribute to the development of a better society

And Bracey’s final commentary:

Again, this is a list that, while missing some key constructs, stands in stark contrast to the debased “conversation” about the nature of public schooling today.

I hope by now you have a sense of the book, of Bracey’s thinking.

Let me end by returning to the beginning, to the introduction. Bracey refers to Fareed Zakharia, who asked the Singapore Minister of Education why the test aces in that small nation faded as they moved into real life while the Americans who trailed them badly outperformed them in almost all aspects of life.

The Singapore Minister of Education responded that there are some parts of the intellect that you cannot test very well. This is where America excels, said the minister. Most of all, he said, American students are willing to challenge the conventional wisdom, even if it means challenging authority. . .

Bracey goes on to quote psychologist and psychometrician Robert Sternberg as noting how our wide-spread use of standardized test

is one of the most effective, if unintentional vehicles this country has created for suppressing creativity

As Bracey points out,

We measure what we can and come to value what is measured over what is not. In doing so we throw away most of education.

He then offers a list of things – “hardly exhaustive” – of personal qualities that we either don’t use test to measure or that, for the most part, we can’t use tests to measure” and it is with that list I wish to end, hoping that I have convinced you that this final book by Gerald Bracey is more than worthy of your attention, of the money and time to obtain and devour – not just read – it.

Peace

Creativity

Critical thinking

Resilience

Motivation

Persistence

Curiosity

Inquisitiveness

Endurance

Reliability

Enthusiasm

Civic-mindedness

Self-Awareness

Self-discipline

Leadership

Compassion

Empathy

Courage

Imagination

Sense of Humor

Resourcefulness

Humility

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