"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.
Sunday, January 31, 2010
Thursday, January 28, 2010
Data Driven Decision-Making?
Current educational literature contains few ideas that are so widespread or so damaging as "Data Driven Decision Making". (This phrase has recently displaced "Rigor, Relevance and Relationships" as the shibboleth of the neo-know-nothings who both create and profit from the state and national consensus regarding educational practice).
Because most preachers know very little about their own sacred texts, it is entertaining in the extreme to occasionally ask some unsuspecting proponent of DDDM what exactly is meant by the phrase. The typical response is a moment of shocked silence (surely everybody knows that!) followed by an disturbingly similar disclaimer (delivered with almost catechism-like exactitude): "Well, when we say data, we don't mean just numbers...we mean informal data, too, like the observations that teachers make in the classroom and all sorts of ordinary things..." Wait a minute! If when 'we' say 'data' 'we' don't really mean what everyone else means by that word, then why are 'we' using it? If what 'we' really mean is 'decisions driven by the immediate experience and judgment of each classroom teacher' then why don't 'we' just use those words? Well, that's just not what 'we' mean. Quite the opposite. What 'we' more often mean is a sort of slight of hand by means of which a teacher's direct knowledge and judgment regarding her students is discarded in favor of abstract data analysis.
And what is ironically called 'Professional Development' is in reality quite the opposite: training teachers to interpret data regarding their own students as though they had never actually met, never spoken, never shared a passion for learning, a love for the world or for each other. Training teachers, in fact, to distrust their own eyes, their own judgment. Training teachers to avoid risks, to avoid controversy, to play it safe.
What can ultimately be meant by 'Datadrivendecisionmaking' except the abdication of personal responsibility? If the decision was driven by data, then no other decision was possible. Nobody else, properly trained in a the proper conduct of Professional Learning Communities could have decided otherwise. If the results are disappointing, it's not anyone's fault. Nobody is responsible. The decision was not mine, after all, but was driven by the data. The decision was the result of technique and not judgment. And when (not if, but when) the results of this sort of manipulation are disastrous, it is the technique and not the decision-maker that needs refining, resulting in a need for new workshops, new trainings, new shibboleths, new profits for prophets.
Data Driven Decision Making is finally just another delay tactic. It will buy a few more years while its proponents claim that it's too early to judge the results. About the time that the results might be accessible, the next new thing will come along to replace it. The new innovation will require several years of implementation, of course, before its effects can be judged.
Because most preachers know very little about their own sacred texts, it is entertaining in the extreme to occasionally ask some unsuspecting proponent of DDDM what exactly is meant by the phrase. The typical response is a moment of shocked silence (surely everybody knows that!) followed by an disturbingly similar disclaimer (delivered with almost catechism-like exactitude): "Well, when we say data, we don't mean just numbers...we mean informal data, too, like the observations that teachers make in the classroom and all sorts of ordinary things..." Wait a minute! If when 'we' say 'data' 'we' don't really mean what everyone else means by that word, then why are 'we' using it? If what 'we' really mean is 'decisions driven by the immediate experience and judgment of each classroom teacher' then why don't 'we' just use those words? Well, that's just not what 'we' mean. Quite the opposite. What 'we' more often mean is a sort of slight of hand by means of which a teacher's direct knowledge and judgment regarding her students is discarded in favor of abstract data analysis.
And what is ironically called 'Professional Development' is in reality quite the opposite: training teachers to interpret data regarding their own students as though they had never actually met, never spoken, never shared a passion for learning, a love for the world or for each other. Training teachers, in fact, to distrust their own eyes, their own judgment. Training teachers to avoid risks, to avoid controversy, to play it safe.
What can ultimately be meant by 'Datadrivendecisionmaking' except the abdication of personal responsibility? If the decision was driven by data, then no other decision was possible. Nobody else, properly trained in a the proper conduct of Professional Learning Communities could have decided otherwise. If the results are disappointing, it's not anyone's fault. Nobody is responsible. The decision was not mine, after all, but was driven by the data. The decision was the result of technique and not judgment. And when (not if, but when) the results of this sort of manipulation are disastrous, it is the technique and not the decision-maker that needs refining, resulting in a need for new workshops, new trainings, new shibboleths, new profits for prophets.
Data Driven Decision Making is finally just another delay tactic. It will buy a few more years while its proponents claim that it's too early to judge the results. About the time that the results might be accessible, the next new thing will come along to replace it. The new innovation will require several years of implementation, of course, before its effects can be judged.
The Banishment of Professional Judgment
Much of current programming in education only makes sense if one begins with the assumption that most (if not all) teachers are below average. Sounds silly, I know. But a quick review of common practices makes sense of this claim.
The Standards Movement, to take the broadest example, assumes that teachers are incapable of guiding or evaluating the reading progress of a 9-year-old. It not only assumes that the teacher is not expert, it assumes that the teacher is so incapacitated that only an expensive, time-consuming commercial program can provide reliable instruction and that only an expensive and time-consuming outside assessment can provide real 'data' regarding a student. It further posits that the numbers generated by the test paint a better picture of a student than the teacher is capable of producing independently.
The 'Professional Learning Communities' movement, ironically enough, teaches teachers what to say to each other when they collaborate. It trains them to systematically sift through data for the purpose of replacing each teacher's independent judgment regarding their children (which would require competence) with a common approach. Thus, if students are posting an inappropriate number on a sub-strand of the outside assessment then the teachers ought to agree to a one-size-fits-all strategy for changing that number. The marvel of this movement is that it recruits teachers to collaborate in ridiculing the notion that any of them really know what they are doing! PROFESSIONAL Learning Communities?
Positive Behavior Support is a miracle of commercial packaging. Who could possibly be opposed to Positive Behavior Support? Only those who remember B.F. Skinner and his claim that promoting pro-social behavior is just a question of conditioning people to respond in certain ways to certain stimuli. For most PBS practitioners (who one has to believe have never heard of The Skinner Box) PBS is just a harmless network of bribes for good behavior. They don't even remember that the word 'positive' in this context means the introduction of a new stimulus to the situation and that it has nothing to do with warm and fuzzy feelings. Prizes for good behavior is all they know about the program. Fine. That should be enough. To take something so essential to human community (one's conduct around others) and to reduce it to an exercise in prize-grubbing is an insult to our children as well as to our teachers. It takes the virtue out of behaving well (because now good behavior is competition for a limited number of prizes) and it strips the teacher of her traditional role of a caring adult who models and encourages virtue. PBS replaces virtue with greed. It is cynical. And within the context of this discussion, it strips the teacher of any significant role in facilitating the development of virtue through daily interaction in the flow of teaching and learning.
I don't know how many letters of recommendation I have written for students, teachers and administrators. Whatever the number, I can say with some certainty that there is one adjective that I have never used to describe a prospective candidate for admission to college, scholarships, or employment. I have never described a candidate as "proficient". Proficiency is assumed. It is a minimum standard. To lay claim to it is to lay claim to mediocrity.
Credit by Proficiency obscures differences among students. It eliminates the achievement gap by limiting advanced achievement. If proficiency is the goal, then nobody needs to worry about being more than proficient. While giving the appearance of rigor, Credit by Proficiency promotes mediocrity.
If I could waive a magic wand and make every student in Corbett proficient readers, writers and mathematicians, I would not give it a moment's thought. No, thanks. Or maybe no thanks. No thanks at all. Why? Because proficiency is not a worthy goal for our kids (and not just because they are ours). Proficiency that is not won in the context of meaningful, life-impacting relationships with teachers (whether a favorite or a least favorite is beside the point)is largely useless. Most of the value of high school (where the credit by proficiency movement is growing) consists in the interactions between students and teachers and among students. To leave our high school with only proficiency in math and without the benefit of hours of time with our math teacher is to miss the whole point. Writing proficiency? Absent the encouragement and demands and expert guidance of our English teachers, the achievement of proficiency (measured, no doubt, by some standardized test) is hollow.
Education consists in relationships. Proficiencies, academic standards, social skills, all of these are only significant in the context of long months and years of mentoring. Mentoring requires skill. It hinges on judgment. Eliminate the professional judgment of those whom we have tasked with mentoring the next generation and there is nothing of value going on at school.
Standards, PLC's, PBS, RTI...if these reflect our beliefs and our aspirations regarding children, then it would be much more efficient to leave them at home with a computer and an online account. Data could be collected moment by moment, prescribed correctives could be delivered immediately, disruptive behavior would no longer disrupt (we could take lessons from game designers on how to reinforce desirable responses) and certificates of proficiency could be downloaded and printed off at the completion of each unit. Diplomas could be printed at birth and password protected pending the accumulation of the prescribed proficiencies. Letters of recommendation could be customized to each young graduate.
If we believe in the virtue and the efficacy of meeting together, of sharing more of ourselves than our proficiencies, of putting children in contact with magnificent adults, then why would we simultaneously employ practices that reflect a very different (and thoroughly cynical) view of the world? One explanation is that too many schools and school districts don't trust that they have gathered magnificent adults to mentor their children. So they compensate by preventing the adults from making important decisions, from exercising judgment, from evaluating their own work.
I am occasionally called 'cynical' for the swiftness and harshness with which I dismiss so many of the educational fads of the day. Quite the opposite in the case. Cynicism is the core value of these various fads, and my response is an emphatic rejection of cynicism. Every program cited here demonstrates a profound distrust of teachers. All offer a meager vision for our educational future. They betray a lack hope for our children. To reject them is not cynical. I am an unrepentant optimist. Were I not, I would be more polite to those in power whose cheerful cynicism causes immeasurable, ongoing harm to children and to the efforts of every good teacher within their spheres of influence.
If we can't find ways to let our great teachers be great, and if we instead impose on them those strictures that are designed to restrain the incompetent, then I fear that a self-fulfilling prophecy may result when great teachers refuse in ever greater numbers to participate in this folly.
We need to reassert the necessity and support the development of professional judgment in the work of teachers. We need to strip away every tendency to devalue or limit its exercise. That, or we will achieve standardization...and the standard will be mediocrity or worse.
The Standards Movement, to take the broadest example, assumes that teachers are incapable of guiding or evaluating the reading progress of a 9-year-old. It not only assumes that the teacher is not expert, it assumes that the teacher is so incapacitated that only an expensive, time-consuming commercial program can provide reliable instruction and that only an expensive and time-consuming outside assessment can provide real 'data' regarding a student. It further posits that the numbers generated by the test paint a better picture of a student than the teacher is capable of producing independently.
The 'Professional Learning Communities' movement, ironically enough, teaches teachers what to say to each other when they collaborate. It trains them to systematically sift through data for the purpose of replacing each teacher's independent judgment regarding their children (which would require competence) with a common approach. Thus, if students are posting an inappropriate number on a sub-strand of the outside assessment then the teachers ought to agree to a one-size-fits-all strategy for changing that number. The marvel of this movement is that it recruits teachers to collaborate in ridiculing the notion that any of them really know what they are doing! PROFESSIONAL Learning Communities?
Positive Behavior Support is a miracle of commercial packaging. Who could possibly be opposed to Positive Behavior Support? Only those who remember B.F. Skinner and his claim that promoting pro-social behavior is just a question of conditioning people to respond in certain ways to certain stimuli. For most PBS practitioners (who one has to believe have never heard of The Skinner Box) PBS is just a harmless network of bribes for good behavior. They don't even remember that the word 'positive' in this context means the introduction of a new stimulus to the situation and that it has nothing to do with warm and fuzzy feelings. Prizes for good behavior is all they know about the program. Fine. That should be enough. To take something so essential to human community (one's conduct around others) and to reduce it to an exercise in prize-grubbing is an insult to our children as well as to our teachers. It takes the virtue out of behaving well (because now good behavior is competition for a limited number of prizes) and it strips the teacher of her traditional role of a caring adult who models and encourages virtue. PBS replaces virtue with greed. It is cynical. And within the context of this discussion, it strips the teacher of any significant role in facilitating the development of virtue through daily interaction in the flow of teaching and learning.
I don't know how many letters of recommendation I have written for students, teachers and administrators. Whatever the number, I can say with some certainty that there is one adjective that I have never used to describe a prospective candidate for admission to college, scholarships, or employment. I have never described a candidate as "proficient". Proficiency is assumed. It is a minimum standard. To lay claim to it is to lay claim to mediocrity.
Credit by Proficiency obscures differences among students. It eliminates the achievement gap by limiting advanced achievement. If proficiency is the goal, then nobody needs to worry about being more than proficient. While giving the appearance of rigor, Credit by Proficiency promotes mediocrity.
If I could waive a magic wand and make every student in Corbett proficient readers, writers and mathematicians, I would not give it a moment's thought. No, thanks. Or maybe no thanks. No thanks at all. Why? Because proficiency is not a worthy goal for our kids (and not just because they are ours). Proficiency that is not won in the context of meaningful, life-impacting relationships with teachers (whether a favorite or a least favorite is beside the point)is largely useless. Most of the value of high school (where the credit by proficiency movement is growing) consists in the interactions between students and teachers and among students. To leave our high school with only proficiency in math and without the benefit of hours of time with our math teacher is to miss the whole point. Writing proficiency? Absent the encouragement and demands and expert guidance of our English teachers, the achievement of proficiency (measured, no doubt, by some standardized test) is hollow.
Education consists in relationships. Proficiencies, academic standards, social skills, all of these are only significant in the context of long months and years of mentoring. Mentoring requires skill. It hinges on judgment. Eliminate the professional judgment of those whom we have tasked with mentoring the next generation and there is nothing of value going on at school.
Standards, PLC's, PBS, RTI...if these reflect our beliefs and our aspirations regarding children, then it would be much more efficient to leave them at home with a computer and an online account. Data could be collected moment by moment, prescribed correctives could be delivered immediately, disruptive behavior would no longer disrupt (we could take lessons from game designers on how to reinforce desirable responses) and certificates of proficiency could be downloaded and printed off at the completion of each unit. Diplomas could be printed at birth and password protected pending the accumulation of the prescribed proficiencies. Letters of recommendation could be customized to each young graduate.
If we believe in the virtue and the efficacy of meeting together, of sharing more of ourselves than our proficiencies, of putting children in contact with magnificent adults, then why would we simultaneously employ practices that reflect a very different (and thoroughly cynical) view of the world? One explanation is that too many schools and school districts don't trust that they have gathered magnificent adults to mentor their children. So they compensate by preventing the adults from making important decisions, from exercising judgment, from evaluating their own work.
I am occasionally called 'cynical' for the swiftness and harshness with which I dismiss so many of the educational fads of the day. Quite the opposite in the case. Cynicism is the core value of these various fads, and my response is an emphatic rejection of cynicism. Every program cited here demonstrates a profound distrust of teachers. All offer a meager vision for our educational future. They betray a lack hope for our children. To reject them is not cynical. I am an unrepentant optimist. Were I not, I would be more polite to those in power whose cheerful cynicism causes immeasurable, ongoing harm to children and to the efforts of every good teacher within their spheres of influence.
If we can't find ways to let our great teachers be great, and if we instead impose on them those strictures that are designed to restrain the incompetent, then I fear that a self-fulfilling prophecy may result when great teachers refuse in ever greater numbers to participate in this folly.
We need to reassert the necessity and support the development of professional judgment in the work of teachers. We need to strip away every tendency to devalue or limit its exercise. That, or we will achieve standardization...and the standard will be mediocrity or worse.
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?
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?
Saturday, January 9, 2010
Oregon's High School Ratings and RTTT
I love Oregon. Oregon is in my bones. I was born in Oregon City and have lived in three corners of the state. Every attempt to leave Oregon (even for years at a time) has somehow become a round-trip. But some things about Oregon make me crazy.
Oregon's approach to education is frequently annoying. Particularly in the last decade, we have seen a state with a long tradition of local control become (due largely to its dependence on federal grant dollars) focused on state-wide compliance to the exclusion of nearly every other consideration. And it's not just a matter of material compliance. The education community in Oregon seems to feel the need to adopt and BELIEVE the rhetoric of its federal sponsors. (It would be fun to do research on the coming and going of certain federal 'stock phrases' in Oregon publications...RTI, PBS, PLC's, Data-Driven-Decision-Making. My favorite has to be the rapidly evolving 'scientific'-'scientifically based'-'research based'-'evidence-based", all casting about for some magical guidance that will replace the judgments of practitioners with something more mechanically sound. The fact that the phrase has evolved so rapidly and so thoroughly should be a hint that there is something about the notion that doesn't hold up to scrutiny.)
One of the federal fashions that Oregon has adopted without reservation is high school bashing. I don't know that they mean to (as I observed, the Oregon institutions seem to need to believe the federal rhetoric, making much of their practice unreflective), but that's the habit.
Oregon's blind spot regarding high schools played out in an interesting way with its Race to the Top (RTTT!) application. The authors claim that Oregon has no Districts that are performing poorly, only individual schools. Nobody who is familiar with the results of state assessments and report cards will be surprised to know that the vast majority of 'failing' schools are high schools. But here is the blind spot: if a high school performs abysmally, is it reasonable to assume the every elementary and middle school feeding into it is somehow healthy? Is it likely that the high school is taking incoming freshmen who are fully prepared for the rigors of 9th grade and crushing them into failure in the 15 short months between entering high school and the administration the 10th grade assessments? Are those 15 months (three of which are vacation time) really undoing 9 years of successful schooling?
This is an unsustainable proposition. And yet ODE's official position seems to be that a district that has not one successful high school is somehow not a failing district. Is it really feasible that a high school is failing while all of its feeder schools are successful? My experience is other than that. 10th graders who fail to meet state benchmarks nearly always entered high school at a significant deficit. Adept 9th graders become, with rare exceptions, adept 10th graders and competent graduates. Exceptions are rare and typically have to do with personal trauma or other significant life events. To claim otherwise can only indicate a lack of experience with high school students.
Oregon's dilemma? The cold hard truth about schools is politically undesirable and won't win any competitive grant money from the feds.
The naked truth is that doing is good job at schooling is a difficult and tenuous undertaking. It is fraught with political temptations and pitfalls. There are no guarantees. And every attempt to make the enterprise more predictable, more efficient, more uniform, has failed. Utterly. And yet those who control the purse-strings feel the need to create the illusion of predictability, uniformity, standardization, and simple cause-effect relationships in order to justify even a bare subsistence level of funding.
So what do we do? Do we lie? Never! Unthinkable! What we tend to do instead is to adjust our beliefs in order to survive. We begin to BELIEVE those stock phrases and unexamined assumptions that will align our rhetoric to the language of the funding agencies. Does the use of technology in the classroom improve student achievement? Yes, Sir! Is PBS effective? You bet! Can RTI change the world? Give us 10 minutes! (and a grant!)
Here's another cold, hard truth. Every effort at school reform, teacher reform, principal reform, every implementation of new math, new science, computerized English, curriculum mapping, improved textbooks...every educational cure deployed over the past 50 years, has gotten us to where we are today. And today, according to the establishment, we are in crisis.
And if we are in trouble today, what could be less rational than to turn to the same people who have, for 50 years now, promised that the next reform, the next innovation is the real, real, real, real cure? And yet, what are we doing?
And what are the alternatives? Are there any? And if there are, is there any way to access them from inside the current system? The system? The System? Someone at ODE used be fond of saying that we don't want a K-12 school system, we want a system of K-12 schools. What they meant, I think, was that local communities should still get to decide on the decor in the staff room.
Oregon desperately needs more schools that are outside the System. There are a few, including some very good public schools in Eastern Oregon where teachers and students produce wonderful results and take solace in the fact that Salem is further away than is Boise! And for children whose parents have the means, the connections and the drive to access them, there are private schools. Some of these are quite good, others are decidedly not, but they do have the virtue of greater independence from a centralized (and largely paralyzed) bureaucracy. And there are charter schools. Again, some quite good, some not, but all operating with some insulation from the Powers That Be and therefor capable of course correction and innovation.
The Oregon system largely hates charters. Charters are unruly. They are non-standardized. Some are extremely successful (which is in violation of Oregon's egalitarian mandate). And while no charter school can ever remotely be said to cause a financial hardship for a district, the accusations of 'stealing', 'pirating', 'cannibalizing', and 'union busting' ring through the halls (including union halls) of power at the mention of Charters. In fact, all of the pretend-conflicts within the current near-monopoly give way to rousing choruses of 'We Shall Overcome' at the very mention of Charter Schools. Why is that? Change is scary. Charters are scary. Charters can fail. (When other public schools fail, we just continue propping them up across the decades, so that doesn't really count as failing in the minds of TPTB). Worse yet, Charter Schools might succeed? And what if a school succeeded where others had failed? Would that make it (gulp!) better? Unthinkable! And what if it succeeded without conforming to the guidance of this week's hot education guru? That would be a double indictment of the education industry.
There are many reasons to fear-hate charters. Money is not among them. I believe that money is a smokescreen for those much deeper fears that will never be named in a public meeting.
Oregon's schools have room to improve. Dramatically. And Oregon's High Schools can improve, but there are limits to what they can get done until the rest of the K-8 experience is much more fruitful. So long as Oregon continues passing out lollipops to elementary feeder schools while kicking the high schools for dropping the ball, not much is going to change except the name of the vendor who will profit from the next wave of reform.
I support the goal of holding high schools accountable. But high schools cannot be held fully accountable until K-8 education provides the conditions that make high school success thinkable. High Schools would never ask for a free pass or special favors, but a level playing field would be nice. And while Oregon's K-12 system is mired in old habits and clinging to old wine-skins, Charter Schools in the K-8 range are probably the best hope for Oregon's struggling high schools.
Wonk bonus: in a fit of uncontrollable inconsistency, Oregon has declared its intention to name a proportionate number of elementary, middle and high schools to be on the turnaround list. This is because they recognize that if they stick to the Oregon rating system, the vast majority of schools that would qualify would be high schools and virtually all elementary schools would be excluded! So some elementary schools will be targeted for extra support in spite of having higher ratings than some high schools that will, consequently, receive nothing! It's impossible to know (although I suppose it's researchable) whether this has the end result of steering more of the grant money to certain districts at the expense of others.
Oregon's approach to education is frequently annoying. Particularly in the last decade, we have seen a state with a long tradition of local control become (due largely to its dependence on federal grant dollars) focused on state-wide compliance to the exclusion of nearly every other consideration. And it's not just a matter of material compliance. The education community in Oregon seems to feel the need to adopt and BELIEVE the rhetoric of its federal sponsors. (It would be fun to do research on the coming and going of certain federal 'stock phrases' in Oregon publications...RTI, PBS, PLC's, Data-Driven-Decision-Making. My favorite has to be the rapidly evolving 'scientific'-'scientifically based'-'research based'-'evidence-based", all casting about for some magical guidance that will replace the judgments of practitioners with something more mechanically sound. The fact that the phrase has evolved so rapidly and so thoroughly should be a hint that there is something about the notion that doesn't hold up to scrutiny.)
One of the federal fashions that Oregon has adopted without reservation is high school bashing. I don't know that they mean to (as I observed, the Oregon institutions seem to need to believe the federal rhetoric, making much of their practice unreflective), but that's the habit.
Oregon's blind spot regarding high schools played out in an interesting way with its Race to the Top (RTTT!) application. The authors claim that Oregon has no Districts that are performing poorly, only individual schools. Nobody who is familiar with the results of state assessments and report cards will be surprised to know that the vast majority of 'failing' schools are high schools. But here is the blind spot: if a high school performs abysmally, is it reasonable to assume the every elementary and middle school feeding into it is somehow healthy? Is it likely that the high school is taking incoming freshmen who are fully prepared for the rigors of 9th grade and crushing them into failure in the 15 short months between entering high school and the administration the 10th grade assessments? Are those 15 months (three of which are vacation time) really undoing 9 years of successful schooling?
This is an unsustainable proposition. And yet ODE's official position seems to be that a district that has not one successful high school is somehow not a failing district. Is it really feasible that a high school is failing while all of its feeder schools are successful? My experience is other than that. 10th graders who fail to meet state benchmarks nearly always entered high school at a significant deficit. Adept 9th graders become, with rare exceptions, adept 10th graders and competent graduates. Exceptions are rare and typically have to do with personal trauma or other significant life events. To claim otherwise can only indicate a lack of experience with high school students.
Oregon's dilemma? The cold hard truth about schools is politically undesirable and won't win any competitive grant money from the feds.
The naked truth is that doing is good job at schooling is a difficult and tenuous undertaking. It is fraught with political temptations and pitfalls. There are no guarantees. And every attempt to make the enterprise more predictable, more efficient, more uniform, has failed. Utterly. And yet those who control the purse-strings feel the need to create the illusion of predictability, uniformity, standardization, and simple cause-effect relationships in order to justify even a bare subsistence level of funding.
So what do we do? Do we lie? Never! Unthinkable! What we tend to do instead is to adjust our beliefs in order to survive. We begin to BELIEVE those stock phrases and unexamined assumptions that will align our rhetoric to the language of the funding agencies. Does the use of technology in the classroom improve student achievement? Yes, Sir! Is PBS effective? You bet! Can RTI change the world? Give us 10 minutes! (and a grant!)
Here's another cold, hard truth. Every effort at school reform, teacher reform, principal reform, every implementation of new math, new science, computerized English, curriculum mapping, improved textbooks...every educational cure deployed over the past 50 years, has gotten us to where we are today. And today, according to the establishment, we are in crisis.
And if we are in trouble today, what could be less rational than to turn to the same people who have, for 50 years now, promised that the next reform, the next innovation is the real, real, real, real cure? And yet, what are we doing?
And what are the alternatives? Are there any? And if there are, is there any way to access them from inside the current system? The system? The System? Someone at ODE used be fond of saying that we don't want a K-12 school system, we want a system of K-12 schools. What they meant, I think, was that local communities should still get to decide on the decor in the staff room.
Oregon desperately needs more schools that are outside the System. There are a few, including some very good public schools in Eastern Oregon where teachers and students produce wonderful results and take solace in the fact that Salem is further away than is Boise! And for children whose parents have the means, the connections and the drive to access them, there are private schools. Some of these are quite good, others are decidedly not, but they do have the virtue of greater independence from a centralized (and largely paralyzed) bureaucracy. And there are charter schools. Again, some quite good, some not, but all operating with some insulation from the Powers That Be and therefor capable of course correction and innovation.
The Oregon system largely hates charters. Charters are unruly. They are non-standardized. Some are extremely successful (which is in violation of Oregon's egalitarian mandate). And while no charter school can ever remotely be said to cause a financial hardship for a district, the accusations of 'stealing', 'pirating', 'cannibalizing', and 'union busting' ring through the halls (including union halls) of power at the mention of Charters. In fact, all of the pretend-conflicts within the current near-monopoly give way to rousing choruses of 'We Shall Overcome' at the very mention of Charter Schools. Why is that? Change is scary. Charters are scary. Charters can fail. (When other public schools fail, we just continue propping them up across the decades, so that doesn't really count as failing in the minds of TPTB). Worse yet, Charter Schools might succeed? And what if a school succeeded where others had failed? Would that make it (gulp!) better? Unthinkable! And what if it succeeded without conforming to the guidance of this week's hot education guru? That would be a double indictment of the education industry.
There are many reasons to fear-hate charters. Money is not among them. I believe that money is a smokescreen for those much deeper fears that will never be named in a public meeting.
Oregon's schools have room to improve. Dramatically. And Oregon's High Schools can improve, but there are limits to what they can get done until the rest of the K-8 experience is much more fruitful. So long as Oregon continues passing out lollipops to elementary feeder schools while kicking the high schools for dropping the ball, not much is going to change except the name of the vendor who will profit from the next wave of reform.
I support the goal of holding high schools accountable. But high schools cannot be held fully accountable until K-8 education provides the conditions that make high school success thinkable. High Schools would never ask for a free pass or special favors, but a level playing field would be nice. And while Oregon's K-12 system is mired in old habits and clinging to old wine-skins, Charter Schools in the K-8 range are probably the best hope for Oregon's struggling high schools.
Wonk bonus: in a fit of uncontrollable inconsistency, Oregon has declared its intention to name a proportionate number of elementary, middle and high schools to be on the turnaround list. This is because they recognize that if they stick to the Oregon rating system, the vast majority of schools that would qualify would be high schools and virtually all elementary schools would be excluded! So some elementary schools will be targeted for extra support in spite of having higher ratings than some high schools that will, consequently, receive nothing! It's impossible to know (although I suppose it's researchable) whether this has the end result of steering more of the grant money to certain districts at the expense of others.
Thursday, January 7, 2010
Darning (socks, of course) with Faint Praise
The Superintendent's Pipeline, which is issued by ODE over the state superintendent's byline, very nearly mentioned Corbett Schools in a positive light today. That is, it very nearly mentioned Corbett, but swerved at the last minute to avoid a collision with it's dominant policy.
The Pipeline, dated today, congratulates Oregon's 2009 Advanced Placement State Scholars, which is appreciated. Oregon should recognize excellence at every opportunity. The announcement loses some of its power when it misstates the criteria for the award, but points for effort.
The article continues with a brief advertisement for the AP program (which we adamantly support) and mentions Oregon's 50% growth over the past five years in Advanced Placement participation. Oregon is right to highlight this growth. Corbett's growth during that same period was about 4800%. (No, I didn't fall asleep with my finger on the zero key!) In fact Corbett, which educates about one-tenth of one percent of Oregon's students, made up 14% of the State's growth over that five year period.
So naturally the article went on to spotlight Reynolds High School in celebration of its new AP Program. I applaud Reynolds' efforts and they will reap tremendous benefits for their children and the families involved. We are encouraged by the good work of the staff and students there.
But it is a mystery to me (or I wish it was mysterious) how an article from the State that celebrates AP State Scholars (one of whom graduated from Corbett High School) and highlights the growth of the AP program statewide (Corbett's growth is unparalleled in the State and it's rate of participation has led the state for the past three years) manages to avoid the word C-O-R-B-E-T-T. Somewhere there is an envious contortionist who can only marvel and despair.
So yes, the title of this post was misleading. There was no faint praise. There was no mention whatsoever.
At least Lara will get a kick out of having gone from being a Corbett grad to being "Lara Dunton of Troutdale"...
The Pipeline, dated today, congratulates Oregon's 2009 Advanced Placement State Scholars, which is appreciated. Oregon should recognize excellence at every opportunity. The announcement loses some of its power when it misstates the criteria for the award, but points for effort.
The article continues with a brief advertisement for the AP program (which we adamantly support) and mentions Oregon's 50% growth over the past five years in Advanced Placement participation. Oregon is right to highlight this growth. Corbett's growth during that same period was about 4800%. (No, I didn't fall asleep with my finger on the zero key!) In fact Corbett, which educates about one-tenth of one percent of Oregon's students, made up 14% of the State's growth over that five year period.
So naturally the article went on to spotlight Reynolds High School in celebration of its new AP Program. I applaud Reynolds' efforts and they will reap tremendous benefits for their children and the families involved. We are encouraged by the good work of the staff and students there.
But it is a mystery to me (or I wish it was mysterious) how an article from the State that celebrates AP State Scholars (one of whom graduated from Corbett High School) and highlights the growth of the AP program statewide (Corbett's growth is unparalleled in the State and it's rate of participation has led the state for the past three years) manages to avoid the word C-O-R-B-E-T-T. Somewhere there is an envious contortionist who can only marvel and despair.
So yes, the title of this post was misleading. There was no faint praise. There was no mention whatsoever.
At least Lara will get a kick out of having gone from being a Corbett grad to being "Lara Dunton of Troutdale"...
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