Saturday, January 23, 2010

Follow the Bouncing Blog!

Blogging about education from inside the system carries certain career risks. The fact is that education is political. There is therefore nothing to be said, among those things that might be worth saying, that lacks the potential to offend someone. And there are those who hold that the very prospect of anyone being offended (a friend calls it "Portland Nice", by which I take him to mean the local belief that it is better to let your neighbor's dog tinkle on your shoe than to point out that the mangy beast has the manners of a feral pig and the intelligence of a filbert) is a threat to the very fabric of life. So the blog has moved. Again. It is no longer linked to the website that shall not be named, nor are the opinions, aspirations or even the facts of the matter on these posts in any way a reflection of the attitudes, beliefs, or reality of the sponsors of the aforementioned site. Nobody here but us chickens. Really. Just me pecking at the alphabet with an occasional point for punctuation.

Monday, January 18, 2010

Frankenstein's Monster at the Ballet

Oregon's Race to the Top application made the Oregonian again today. The article implied (and the subtitle mistakenly claimed) that teacher evaluations would be tied to student test results. Sounds reasonable. Merit pay. Pay for performance. Empty cliches. Attempts to frame an issue so that the outcome desired by certain parties will be the inevitable result of the application of 'common sense'.

One can only marvel at the claim any educators were involved in the development of the Race to the Top application. (And by educators I mean people who have spent significant time teaching. During the last 10 years.) The list of celebrity authors and endorsers in the Oregonian seemed mostly to be a roster of former Oregon Department of Education staffers who now work as administrators in Oregon districts, community activists, and business people. Oh, and an OEA representative, which sure gives weight to the revolutionary potential of the plan.

There is no doubt that these folks are good and virtuous public servants. Reading the Race to the Top application leaves little doubt of their dearth of experience on the teaching end of their bizarrely formulaic approach to education.

The number of ways in which they demonstrate a complete misunderstanding of how schools work is too much to cover in one post, so I'll stick to just a couple.

First is the idea that teachers can improve their teaching by studying data regarding their own classrooms. This is just nonsense. Teachers who are in the room with their students all day should not need to collect outside assessment data in order to know who is where, what's working and what's not. To suggest that their practice can be improved by use of better data is akin to saying that their knowledge of their students' names can be improved through the weekly publication of a new class list. If there are teachers whose practice can be improved through frequent outside assessments, those teachers will never be remotely effective.

Second is the notion that the Oregon assessments are an adequate basis for measuring progress. The usefulness of these assessments is an article of faith for the ODE types, but it is a false religion. The tests aren't that good. The results lack any real diagnostic value. And whatever else is the case, they are not necessary to school improvement. Why do I think so? Because the Oregon State assessments have never played a role in a single decision that Corbett has made in the last decade, and we have improved. Not only have the test data not informed instruction, but we hold it to be a matter of some urgency that the pursuit of higher passing rates in the lower grades not be allowed to interfere with the long-term success of our students. This is one reason that Corbett's 10th grade passing rates are often higher than the passing rates in the lower grades. We believe that stopping to maximize 3rd grade passing rates has a dampening effect on future achievement. (Evidence of this is the statewide trend that 10th grade passing rates are about 25% lower than 3rd grade rates. Corbett understanding of the assessments makes sense of this cold, hard fact. ODE's claims regarding the assessments fail to account for the pervasiveness of this pattern). We do take time to orient our 3rd graders to the test environment in order to reduce the stress on 8-and-9-year-olds, but we have never made a single adjustment to our teaching based on the results.

In most cases, it doesn't matter that the State of Oregon gets these things wrong. Always. But as the legislature is continually mislead into translating this impoverished educational theorizing into classroom mandates, the state has the potential to do real harm. Let's hope that they are never that effective.

Frankenstein's monster? Who's to say that his interpretation of Swan Lake, though it might lack a certain (optional) aesthetic quality, isn't a miracle of modern pedagogy? He can certainly approximate the movements (or at least the location) of a dancer, and if only we can quantify his progress in the various dance-strands and link his success to his teacher's salary, he'll doubtless be soaring in no time. And had we started 20 years ago, there is a very real chance that his improvement would have kept pace with Oregon's progress on the 10th grade math assessment.

Is it time for a new approach? Or will the next profoundly unsound federal incentive produce the same profoundly unsound response from Oregon. How long can we afford to insist that the monster can dance?