Educating the educators

In today's reading from the collected works of St. Obvious of Duh, we have: a study out of the University of Vermont showing that students get substandard science education if their teachers are not trained in science.

This apparently is some kind of revelation.  What they did was to look at the use of inquiry-based instruction in eighth-grade science classes, and they found that the use of inquiry methods varied directly with the teacher's level of formal education in science.  Hearteningly, they found that teachers with little science background can eventually catch up with their better-educated peers -- if they are mentored by teachers who themselves have a solid foundation of understanding how science works.

Lest you think I'm overstating my case, here's what the authors -- Tammy Kolbe and Simon Jorgenson -- write:

For two decades, science teachers have been encouraged to orient their instruction around the practices of scientific inquiry; however, it is unclear whether teachers have the knowledge and skills to do so.  In this study, we draw upon data from the 2011 National Assessment of Educational Progress to examine the extent to which eighth-grade science teachers’ educational backgrounds are related to using inquiry-oriented instruction.  We focus on aspects of teachers’ educational backgrounds that are most frequently used by teacher education programs and state licensing agencies as proxies for teachers’ content knowledge and professional preparation to teach science.  We find that teachers’ educational backgrounds, especially in science and engineering disciplines and science education, are associated with differences in the extent to which teachers engage in inquiry-oriented instruction, regardless of teaching experience.  Findings suggest that teachers’ educational backgrounds are relevant considerations as standards-based efforts to reform science instruction in middle-level classrooms move forward.

What baffles me is that anyone is surprised by this.  It's not like you would be shocked to find out that a person's level of expertise in architecture and engineering predicted how likely it was that the house (s)he designed would fall down.  Why did they even need a study to show this?

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Gulliver Schools, Gulliver academy, CC BY 2.5]

The sad fact is that we're facing a shortage of well-trained science teachers.  This itself is not to be wondered at.  In the last ten years, we've heard teachers and teachers' unions demonized by politicians and talking heads whose last stay in a public school classroom was when they were in twelfth grade.  Teachers are derided as lazy slackers who only became teachers because they couldn't hack it in a "real" profession.  Unions get clobbered for protecting lousy teachers from getting fired -- tenure as immunity from the consequences of incompetence.

It's appalling how inaccurate this all is.  Even though the market for competent science teachers is getting woefully thin, the majority of us are doing whatever we're able to.  The fact is, I've taught in high schools for the last 31 years, and the truly bad teachers stand out in my memory primarily because they're so uncommon.  Most teachers work their asses off to provide their students with the best education they can.  They are committed professionals, who put in so much more time than the eight-to-three class schedule that it's a wonder any of us have a private life.

But honestly, I don't blame college graduates for choosing a career path other than teaching.  If I was a 2018 graduate, no way in hell would I become a teacher, and that's speaking as a veteran who (honestly) has had an overall awesome experience.  Why would you join a profession where you are working like crazy, while constantly facing salary, staffing, and budget cuts (to the extent that I purchase about a quarter of the lab supplies we use out of my own pocket), and still are portrayed negatively in the media?

So the University of Vermont study is correct, but is looking only at the surface of the problem.  The better question is: why are any students in eighth-grade science classes being taught by teachers with no background in science?  We wouldn't accept this in any other profession; why do we accept it here?

It's not an easy question to answer.  Here in New York, a lot of it has to do with the arcane funding formula, which bases part of school funding from state aid and the rest from local property taxes.  Since districts vary tremendously in the tax base, this creates huge inequities in funding -- it's unsurprising that rich districts in Westchester County have well-fitted-out, state-of-the-art science classrooms, and here in upstate New York I've more than once had to run to the store in the middle of the day to restock some lab supply we've run out of.  Even worse, school districts are forced by the funding formula into the solution of cutting the biggest-ticket item they have control over -- staffing.  Cutting staff (usually on a last-in, first-out basis) bumps up class sizes, another factor that affects how successful teaching is -- it is, quite simply, impossible to do deep, far-reaching, inquiry-based teaching in a class of 35 kids.  (No exaggeration; my first class ever in my career was 35 seventh-graders, in a classroom with 32 desks.  I had kids sitting on the lab tables.)

The result is a terrible synergy -- overcrowded classrooms, overworked teachers, poor working conditions, denigration in the press, budget cuts, and a thinning population of qualified applicants.  Why should we be surprised at poor outcomes for students?

The worst part is that this problem is a snake swallowing its own tail.  A generation of poorly-educated science students leads to a generation of poorly-educated science teachers, and on and on it goes.  However, until quality education starts being the first priority of voters -- and therefore, the first priority of politicians -- nothing's going to change.

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The Skeptophilia book-of-the-week for this week is Brian Greene's The Fabric of the Cosmos.  If you've always wondered about such abstruse topics as quantum mechanics and Schrödinger's Cat and the General Theory of Relativity, but have been put off by the difficulty of the topic, this book is for you.  Greene has written an eloquent, lucid, mind-blowing description of some of the most counterintuitive discoveries of modern physics -- and all at a level the average layperson can comprehend.  It's a wild ride -- and a fun read.

The end of the experiment

Have you heard about House Bill 610?

Introduced by Representative Steve King (R-IA), H.R. 610 is called the "Choices in Education Act of 2017."  Here's the short description:

The bill establishes an education voucher program, through which each state shall distribute block grant funds among local educational agencies (LEAs) based on the number of eligible children within each LEA's geographical area. From these amounts, each LEA shall: (1) distribute a portion of funds to parents who elect to enroll their child in a private school or to home-school their child, and (2) do so in a manner that ensures that such payments will be used for appropriate educational expenses. 

To be eligible to receive a block grant, a state must: (1) comply with education voucher program requirements, and (2) make it lawful for parents of an eligible child to elect to enroll their child in any public or private elementary or secondary school in the state or to home-school their child.

Already there should be some alarm bells ringing, and I haven't gotten to the really bad part yet.  This voucher system allows tax money to be funneled to private institutions (including religious schools), and yet establishes no standards that those institutions need to meet in order to receive these "block grants."  So that's right: your tax dollars might go to support a school where children are taught in science class that the Earth is 6,000 years old and dinosaurs went for a ride on Noah's Ark.  In North Carolina, a voucher program even funds schools that have explicit conditions for religious adherence for a student to be considered for admission.

Further, the bill sets no guidelines for money being provided for homeschooling.  Note that I am not against homeschooling per se: I know several homeschooling families who have made that choice for excellent reasons, and whose children turned out well educated (better educated, in fact, than the average public school student).  However, I've also known families in which kids were kept home out of suspicion or paranoia, and in one case resulted in an eleventh grader finally re-entering public school -- with a fourth-grade reading level.  So simply giving money to homeschoolers for "appropriate educational expenses" without specifying what is meant by "appropriate" is seriously thin ice.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Not only that, the idea of replacing current public school programs with a voucher system has a proven track record of abject failure.  A study in 2016 of voucher-funded private schools in the Milwaukee area found that 41% of those schools failed.  "I do not mean failed as in they did not deliver academically, I mean failed as in they no longer exist," said Michael Ford of the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh, who was lead author of the study. "These 102 schools either closed after having their voucher revenue cut off by the Department of Public Instruction, or simply shut their doors.  The failure rate for entrepreneurial start-up schools is even worse: 67.8 percent."

These results are mirrored in other states -- Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania have all seen significant problems with voucher programs, including loss of funding to public schools and dubious results in terms of student success, retention, and college acceptance after graduation.

But as I said, I haven't even told you about the worst part yet.  The Choices in Education Act of 2017 explicitly repeals two bills -- the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 and the No Hungry Kids Act of 2013.

Let's start with the first one.  The ESEA is a wide-reaching piece of legislation that focuses on equal access to education regardless of disability or socioeconomic status, and mandates school accountability, professional development, and support of educational programs.  Provisions include providing financial support to schools serving students from low-income families, assisting schools with the purchase of textbooks and library materials, funding bilingual education and English as a Second Language curricula, and creating or maintaining enrichment programs such as classes for gifted and talented students, Advanced Placement programs, and education in the arts and music.

The No Hungry Kids Act should be self-explanatory, but let me use the description from the bill designed to repeal it:  The NHKA establishes "certain nutrition standards for the national school lunch and breakfast programs. (In general, the rule requires schools to increase the availability of fruits, vegetables, whole grains, and low-fat or fat free milk in school meals; reduce the levels of sodium, saturated fat, and trans fat in school meals; and meet children's nutritional needs within their caloric requirements.)"

Yes, you understand all this correctly: the Choices in Education Act of 2017, if passed (and it seems to have widespread support), will trash both of these laws entirely.

One of my education professors in my long-ago teacher training program at the University of Washington called the last 120 years of American public schools "an experiment to test the radical hypothesis that all children can, and deserve to, be given equal access to education."  Through much of our history, this hasn't been the case.  If you were wealthy, your kids got to go to school; if you were not, they didn't.  The result was that poverty was effectively hereditary, and so was all that goes with it; poor access to health care, shortened life span, exploitation in the form of child labor, low-paying jobs with awful working conditions waiting for kids when they become adults because they've been trained for no better.  This bill, should it become law, will tear down an edifice that (while certainly far from ideal) has come closer than humanity ever has to giving all children, regardless of gender, origin, race, religion, or socioeconomic status, a chance to break the fetters of institutionalized class stratification.

This bill is still in the early stages, and it's not too late to fight it.  Call your representatives.  Let them know that should the Choices in Education Act of 2017 become law, it will result in irrevocable damage to our education system.  Tell them that the proposed changes aren't supported by the empirical data, and will accomplish little but program cuts in already-cash-strapped public schools, and further weakening of the wall between church and state through diverting public tax money to religious institutions.

Let them know that the public school system could use reform, but destroying it entirely will have repercussions that will take generations to undo.  Our educational system isn't perfect, but it's an experiment in social equity that can't be allowed to fail.

A call to civil disobedience

This time of year is always a difficult one in public schools -- and it has little to do with it being March, a month with no three-day weekends.

It's budget time.  State and federal funding levels have been set, local school boards are deciding on this year's tax levy -- and that means the announcement will soon come that identifies whose head is on the chopping block.  This is the season when younger teachers and teachers in the "non-core" disciplines such as art, music, and technology begin to polish up their resumés.  This, despite the fact that the number of years a teacher has taught has little correlation with his or her skill.  This, despite the fact that the areas dismissively referred to as "non-core" subjects are ones that expand the mind, foster creativity, push students to draw connections between disparate fields, and are downright enjoyable.

People -- teachers, students, and community members -- give lip service to how unfair it all is.  Every damn year.  "We should be committed to keeping excellence in our schools."  "We need to support public education."  "Build more schools, or build more jails."  And yet, each year at this time, we fight the same battles, having to cross swords with school boards who are strapped for money, arguing that our programs shouldn't be cut.  Inevitably we teachers end up in the uncomfortable position of trying to protect our own asses.  I give an impassioned plea to the board to save my job -- all the while knowing that if my position isn't cut, that of the teacher in the next classroom may well be.  At the same time, the state and federal government lays on more unfunded mandates, more high-stakes testing, as if you can legislate inspiring teaching, as if you can quantify the ability to foster creative connections with children.

Most teachers are team players.  Most of us went into the field because it seemed a good fit -- meaning we respect order and authority, believe that employees should do as told, think that whoever is in front of the room must know what (s)he is talking about.  So we grumble about all of the new laws -- laws that, in my state, will give teachers a numerical grade at the end of each year, based in part on how students perform on high-stakes end-of-the-year tests.  We complain about every year doing more with less.  We mourn for talented teachers who have been laid off, curricular areas that are simply not going to be taught any more because the school district couldn't afford to teach art, or choral music, or foreign language, or AP classes, or computer-aided design.

But we do little more than talk.  A big news story in New York state came just this week from the town of New Paltz, where the school board voted unanimously to protest on the state and federal level the increased reliance on high-stakes standardized testing, and the unfunded mandates, and the skewed and statistically absurd teacher rating system ("APPR"), and the destructive funding formula that has every year in the past five years caused significant reductions in staff.  (Read the whole resolution here.)  Although a step in the right direction, this amounts to nothing more than a symbolic gesture; Governor Cuomo and the state and federal Departments of Education have no particular motive for listening.  It still, honestly, is little more than talk, albeit on a different level than the demoralized complaining I hear on a daily basis.

Maybe it's time for something bigger.

Maybe it's time that schools band together and rebel.  No teacher, staff member, or school administrator I've ever talked to thinks that the way things are currently being managed is beneficial to the people who count the most in this endeavor -- the students.  All of us seem to feel that our hands are tied, because the state and federal governments oversee funding -- and if we don't follow the mandates, which (I must add) are almost all generated, crafted, and passed by individuals who have never taught a day in their lives, the purse strings get cut.  Both "No Child Left Behind" and "Race To The Top" carry significant financial penalties for districts who fail to meet the standards.  Because that makes sense, right?  Take districts that are failing, and withdraw more funds from them.  That'll help.

But maybe the time has come for some civil disobedience.  Maybe it'll take a group of school districts who have school boards with some backbone, to take what the New Paltz School Board did, and go a step further.  Say "no" to high stakes testing.  Send back the standardized tests that are now used to evaluate students, staff, administrators, and entire districts, and which have been shown time after time to be an unreliable measure either of student performance or of teacher performance.  Include a note saying, "Sorry, we're choosing not to participate."  Issue an ultimatum to the agencies that hold the power of the purse; revise funding formulas, so that schools can continue to provide quality education to our children -- or we will simply close and lock the doors.

It might be time to play a game of "Who blinks first?" with education, because at the moment, all of the power rests with a group of people who I am becoming increasingly convinced haven't the vaguest notion of what they are doing.  State and federal departments of education are revealing themselves to be a costly failed experiment.  It's time that committed individuals on the local level flex their muscles, and take some risks, to save public education.