Saturday, February 6, 2010

How to Lengthen the School Year and Save Money!

Oh, and improve student achievement and teacher retention rates, increase attendance and graduation rates, and reduce anxiety among elementary students.

It's a simple plan, and it will make TPTB nervous from the outset. But they should find comfort in the fact that it is scientifically based.

The Plan? Stop administering OAKS to students in 3rd, 4th and 5th grades. The current practice is at best wasteful, at worst (more likely, in my mind) harmful in other ways as well.

What would be the result of this Cessation of Hostilities toward the cultivation of the intellect?

We could:

1. Increase time for teaching and learning by anywhere from 3 (in really good schools that only take minimal time for the tests) to 20 (in schools that spend a month on test-prep) days with no added expense. (The longest school year in the world doesn't do any good it's not being used well.) We could add significantly to the school year without touching the calendar.

2. Make school libraries and technology labs available to students and teachers for instructional activities. (There are schools in which the entire technology inventory is tied up for months out of each year because one or another grade has to take state tests in reading, math or science.)

3. Increase the willingness of the best teachers and administrators to work in the most challenging schools. This is critical. Policy-makers bemoan the fact that great teachers don't line up to go to work in struggling schools. But the fact is that teachers who work in struggling schools are often required to employ mind-numbing, commercially-driven strategies aimed at putting band-aides on test scores. Of course great teachers don't want to teach in a place where the teaching profession has been reduced to reading scripted lessons to a room full of defeated youngsters.

4. Save significant dollars and hours that are currently wasted on teaching teachers how to interpret the results of standardized tests (This activity is often referred to as Professional Learning Communities). What if teachers were allowed (and supported) instead to use this time to learn more about the world through participation is real Professional Learning Communities?

5. Save countless dollars and hours that are spent revising the State Standards and the State Assessments for 8-to-11-year-olds. Not one of these hours or dollars adds one iota to student achievement, and yet we continue to hold bake sales for classroom books while throwing good money after bad in the quest for the well-phrased mandate articulating the need for children to know how to add and subtract using carrying and borrowing.

6. Allow children the joy of experiencing a well-rounded school day rather than punishing them with 'early intervention' when they fail to perform on a standardized test. There are students all over Oregon who are being deprived of part of the normal school experience so that they can spend 'double' time doing something at which they are judged to be deficient. I can't think of a better way to make a child hate a subject forever than to force him to spend twice as much time at it while he is missing out on something else that he finds of interest.

7. In the place of anxiety over testing, cultivate a love of learning. For children who love to learn, testing takes care of itself.

My proposal is to give these children a chance to grow up before we begin weighing and measuring the contents of their minds. This is particularly urgent in light of the fact that long-term academic achievement depends far more on the virtues of care, commitment, respect and diligence than it does on specific subject-matter prerequisites. To fail to understand this is to miss the boat so entirely as to risk an ankle sprain from the jolt of striking dry land.

To those who worry that without OAKS academic deficiencies would go undetected, I have to suggest that you go introduce yourself to a real teacher. Elementary teachers know who can and can't read. They know who can and can't do math. A teacher who doesn't know these things regarding his or her own students needs to hang it up. But to organize an entire system around the assumption of incompetence in every classroom is both unrealistic and wasteful.

For those who argue the urgency of EARLY INTERVENTION, your theoretical ice is pretty thin. Early intervention makes the adults feel good. But most children just need more time to get their feet under themselves. And the most urgent needs for early intervention have never relied on state assessments for detection.

Longer School Year? More instructional time? Savings? All doable. Abandon OAKS in the elementary grades.

Sometimes progress depends on the bold implementation of a recent stroke of genius. But there is also something to be said for the decisive abandonment of a deeply entrenched monument to mediocrity.

P.S. I am aware of the federal mandate for testing. So let's grab a test off the shelf (whichever one requires the least amount of time) administer it, and never speak of it again. The savings in instructional time, money, and quality of life would be reduced only slightly by the nuisance. But to continue the charade by which we treat the testing nuisance as a boon to education is unconscionable.

Wednesday, February 3, 2010

J. K. Rowling for State Superintendent?

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix includes a magnificent parody of the anti-intellectualism that gave rise, in this country, to No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top. In the novel, the Ministry of Magic invades Hogwarts and attempts to convert it to a test prep mill in which students prepare to pass their OWL exams and avoid unnecessary distraction such as wands and magic. This in a school for wizards!

The parallel to schools in Oregon where attention to passing the OAKS exam threatens to eliminate any possibility of classroom magic is unmistakable.

Silly? Perhaps. Fun? Undeniably. Hogwarts is a school the likes of which would never be tolerated in the pubic sphere. Classes are taught by 'unqualified' teachers who are only expert practitioners in their fields of study. Instructors raise their voices. Sarcasm is freely administered. Classroom activities sometimes end in bumps and bruised egos (which in our schools is allowable only on the football field) and there is no guarantee against the possibility of failure.

All well and good, but what of the Ministry of Magic working to reduce schooling to a series of basic competency exams? Certainly there is no parallel in our experience!

Is there really a movement so plodding, so pedantic, so life-denying in our own place and time? Obviously! It's common name is No Child Left Behind. A more recent incarnation goes by the name of the Common Core State Standards Initiative. It is the brainchild of the nation's governors and the state superintendents of schools. Forty-eight states have signed on to date. Oregon included. Who signed on Oregon's behalf? Who knows? And yet we are somehow signed up!

Common Core State Standards! What can that mean? All fourth graders the nation should know and be able to do the same things on February 19th of each year? And how is this educational chimera to be promoted if not by a single, national test? Call it an OWL, and OAK, or whatever you wish, it is a profoundly wrong-headed notion. It would be a wrong-headed notion if it could be achieved with the waving of a wand, with no investment of time or expense. But in the world of muggles, there will be no wand-waving. Instead, we will waste millions of hours and dollars on a process at the end of which we will not have achieved any significant gains and we will be looking for the next silver bullet, magic bean, or scientifically-based miracle.

Let's be clear. Common standards do not make sense for two 9-year-olds sitting in the same classroom. They make less sense to two 9-year-olds living across town from one another. And common standards for all 9-year-olds in America (among whom the oldest are 364 days older than the youngest) is absurdity the likes of which can only be achieved on a grand scale.

Rowling is smart. She tells good stories. But how does she understand so much more about education than do the high-profile policy-makers in our state and nation? What a strange turn of events when a writer of fantasy displays more educational insight in her sub-plot than the majority of educational thinkers have been able to put together with decades of conferences, summits, legislative edicts, and re-re-re-re-re-reforms?

We educators like to call what we do a profession. Yet we tend to be cowards when it comes to actually professing. We leave it to the Rowlings, the Tolkiens, the Mathesons of the world to say what really needs to be said about schools and schooling while we professionals stand guard over the safe, the stalwart, the polished forms that are too often empty of meaningful content.

We professionals need to find our voice. We need to profess. We need to demand that what we be allowed to do what we know. That what we do should be fun. We need to be a little more fanciful and a little less concerned with appearances. We need to teach more like coaches and coach more like teachers. We need to develop real, authentic relationships with our charges and bring extraordinary expertise to their intellectual lives. We need to read literature with an ambulance on the sidelines and play football with a poet's passion.

We should demand that what we do be fun. Serious fun. More fun than Bill and Ted or Ferris Bueler. More fun that Charlie Bartlett.

The obstacles are many and they are formidable. The State of Oregon. The Ministry of Magic. The U.S. Department of Education. Every professional organization that I am aware of. Public opinion, shaped by years of uniformed (to put the best face on it) reporting. But the possibility of progress is worth the effort.

It appears that Superintendent Castillo may have competition in the next election. Election? Is that really how we want to choose a state superintendent? Do we really want which ever applicant can mount the best political campaign? Perhaps we should consider an alternative. Many states appoint a superintendent. Maybe it's worth considering. And J.K. Rowling might be worth a careful look. She won't fall for claims of magic where there is none. That would be a great start.

Sunday, January 31, 2010

David and the Philistine

"An art which cannot be specified in detail cannot be transmitted by prescription, since no prescription for it exists".

"It is pathetic to watch the endless efforts--equipped with microscopy and chemistry, with mathematics and electronics--to reproduce a single violin of the kind the half-literate Stradivarius turned out as a matter of routine more than 200 years ago."

Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge, describing the limits of science in comprehending artful performance.

PBS. RTI. AVID. IDEA. RTTT. Title I. TAG. OAKS. NCLB. State Standards. National Standards. Direct Instruction. Reading First. All examples of an attempt to 'transmit by prescription' and measure the outcomes of the art of teaching.

I have written again and again, one acronym at a time, that each of these programs/approaches/concepts is deeply flawed. They are not flawed in their implementation or in their finer points. This is not a matter of nuances. They can't be fixed or adjusted or improved. They are flawed in principal. They are epistemologically malformed. They are monstrous. They have their roots in a misunderstanding of science. Everything else follows from that misunderstanding.

Each of these programs is worthy of criticism in its own right. Each is flawed in ways that are unique to its intended outcomes. Still their single common flaw dwarfs their individual maladies. But how does one flaw find its way into all of these arenas?

The proponents of these various programs begin with an inadequate understanding of the physical sciences which they then misapply to the social sciences. Next they misappropriate this ill-wrought vision of social science and deploy it as a substitute for a theory of education. They have no theory of education and yet they are certain that they have the wisdom to determine practice on a state and national scale.

There you have it. Three sentences, three critical errors. And all of those errors are subterranean. They aren't even part of the discussion in the education community. In fact each error registers as truth (through relentless repetition) in the deep background knowledge of educators everywhere. Schools of education never discuss these issues. Most have no faculty capable of leading the discussion. They indoctrinate without questioning, they believe without hesitation. Their unexamined belief? The common article of faith? That they are doing some sort of science. That the practices that they promote are 'scientifically based'. That when they add up three test scores and divide by three, they are doing the educational equivalent of physics or chemistry. The notion is, of course, absurd. But they are serious. And they are in charge.

Those within the education community (mostly teachers) who feel ill-at-ease with the ramifications of this flawed thinking generally lack the channels of communication with which to effectively voice them. And if they can articulate them, they are still under the authority of leaders who don't want to hear it (and who often as not wouldn't understand it if they did). Education 'leaders' aren't generally informed or patient with ideas. They don't know or like philosophy. Most will identify themselves as pragmatists, by which they mean that they just 'do what works'. The fact that what they do doesn't work seems never to register with them. The fact that they don't understand Pragmatism (a philosophical orientation) leaves them untouched.

There are many circumstances in which it is unimportant whether a person lacks philosophical sophistication. But educational leaders who miss the mark regarding the very nature of schooling are far from harmless. Educational leaders who want to command compliance with their malformed theories are dangerous in the extreme.

These are people who cannot tell the difference between Merlot and grape jelly, Van Gogh and paint by numbers, Giselle and DDR. They are artless. AND they misunderstand science. Twice blind, and firmly in charge.

All that is left to those of us who have glimpsed the possibility of teaching as art, as craft, requiring judgment and connoisseurship, is to shield those closest to us from the worst of the edicts of the philistines and to create what space we may for real education to take place within our spheres of influence.