Standardized failure

Over the last few days in my Critical Thinking class we've been critiquing the educational system.  After all, who better to ask than a class full of people who've been immersed in it, been the beneficiaries of the successes and the victims of the failures, for ten or more years?  I find that most of them are reasonable and fair about the assessment -- neither lashing out without justification nor telling me what I think they want to hear.  Their criticisms are reasoned, well supported, and usually spot-on.

But nothing riled them up more than the documentary I showed them on the school systems in Finland.  (The link is to part 1, but you can access it all from there -- the entire thing is an hour long but is well worth the time.)  The documentary was the brainchild of Dr. Tony Wagner of Harvard University, who went to Finland to see if he could find out why Finnish schools routinely rank at the top of any measure you want to apply to them -- whether it's test scores, rigor, success of students in college or career after graduation, innovation, breadth, or depth -- and why we, in a word, don't.

Finnish students at an outdoor celebration in Helsinki [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Wagner interviewed teachers, principals, education professors, students, and parents, and came up with the following rather surprising characteristics of Finnish schools:

• little to no homework
• few tests; the only major exam is the exit exam administered before graduation, which is highly rigorous
• long class periods, and fewer classes per day than typical American schools
• work centering on projects, application, and synthesis rather than memorization of facts
• a lot of projects that require meaningful collaboration (not just the much-hated "group projects" often found in American schools, where typically one or two members of the group do all the work)
• small class size
• informality (teachers are called by their first names)
• an intense and rigorous vocational track that students can enter in tenth grade
• flexibility of choice; students in the vocational track can take classes in the academic track, and vice versa -- and high school can take either three or four years depending on student choice
• a huge amount of trust.  Administrators trust teachers to do their jobs, and rarely do formal evaluations; teachers trust students to do their work, whether supervised or not

Of course, I immediately noticed the stark contrast between the Finnish schools and my own.  And I must emphasize that I am lucky to work in the school I do -- we have great students, few problems, and (I believe) a pretty good success rate (again, however you want to measure it).  But of the characteristics I listed above, virtually every one is the opposite of how we approach things here in the United States.

Which makes me wonder if the success we do have is mostly due to the resilience of the students, the dedication of the teachers to rise above adverse circumstances, and a heaping measure of dumb luck.

The one that struck me the most was trust.  Dr. Wagner was talking to one of the teachers over lunch, and walked back with him to his class -- and was astonished to find out that the teacher was twenty minutes late to his own class.  The teacher, for his part, was a little surprised at Wagner's reaction.  "They know what they have to do," the teacher said.  "I don't have to stand over them and force them."

And sure enough, he walked back into the room -- and everyone was busily working.

In American schools, one of the first things that will jump out at you is the lack of trust.  Rules and regulations abound for what you can and can't do, every minute of the day.  Teachers are of the opinion that as soon as they turn their backs, students will stop working.  Administrators feel like they have to micromanage the teachers to make sure they're doing their job.  The state education departments increasingly add evaluations and observations and "quantitative measures" of principals and teachers, so that everything they do is turned into numbers and used as a tool for reward or censure.  The implication is that no one can be trusted, and the more you watch, the more you control, the better the results will be.

It's been long established, of course, that no one works well while being micromanaged -- not children, not adults.  Dan Pink and others who analyze the corporate world have found incontrovertible evidence that when our every move is scrutinized, when it is evident that there is no trust, our productivity decreases -- as does our job satisfaction.

Why, then, do we think that children would thrive in such an environment?

The Finnish administrators whom Wagner interviewed were adamant that the most important piece in their success was trust -- but that it wasn't easy to achieve, because it meant letting go of the fear that when you stop watching, people will stop working.  But if you couple that letting go with making sure that what you are expecting students to do is meaningful, engaging, and interesting, the results are nothing short of spectacular.

The students in my Critical Thinking classes spoke with one voice after watching this documentary: Why on earth do we not try this here?  I didn't have a good answer for that except that we've all become so suspicious of each other -- teachers of students, principals of teachers, state and federal oversight administration of everyone -- that we've become locked into the system even though it demonstrably doesn't work.  Instead of decreasing testing, we've increased it -- and not in any kind of meaningful way.  Just last week poet Sara Holbrook found out that some of her poems were used on the Texas Assessment of Academic Readiness, and when she read the questions, she couldn't answer them.

You read that right.  The students were being presented with questions about her poems and expected to select one right answer when the poet herself had no idea how to determine what the right answer was.  We have become so stuck on a linear, one-right-answer mode that we now do everything that way -- even though it clearly kills creativity, destroys enthusiasm, and (as Holbrook's example shows) isn't reflective of anything meaningful or even real.

It's easy to come up with excuses.  "Finland is wealthier than we are."  "Finns are a more homogeneous society than we are."  The documentary dismisses those out of hand -- actually, we spend more per capita on students than Finland does, and 16% of Finnish students learn Finnish as a second language.

But even if those were true -- even if the hurdles we face are higher than the Finns faced in reconstructing their schools back in the 1970s -- so what?  What, exactly, do we have  to lose?  What we have now is only marginally successful, and in many inner cities is a demonstrable failure.  Our dropout rates are on the rise, and our increasing reliance on trivia-dense "quantitative assessments" do nothing but alienate students and further convince them that school is boring, pointless, and has no connection to real life.

It's time to try something different.

And, after all, the Finns have demonstrated that what they do is successful.  Why not try their model?  Okay, maybe it won't work exactly as it's done in Finland, maybe it'll need some fine tuning and adjustment to meet the different needs of students in our country.  But why not try -- and why wait?  As the adage goes, "If you always do what you've always done, you'll always get what you've always got."

Score card

It's the last week of June, and I just wrapped up another school year.  My 29th overall, which still seems kind of impossible to me until I realize that a child of a former student graduated from high school this year.  Then it seems pretty real, along with a realization of "Good lord, I'm getting old."

So I've been at this for a long time, and with, I think, some measure of success.  Which is why I read my letter from the school district awarding me my numerical grade for the school year with a mixture of amusement and irritation.

I won't leave you hanging; I got an 81.  I got an 84 last year and a 91 the year before that, so according to the state rating scale, I'm becoming incrementally less competent.  It can't, of course, be because the metric is flawed, that the three grades are comparing different assessments of different students put together in different ways.  No, in the minds of the geniuses at NYSED, this number means something fundamental about my effectiveness as a teacher.

In fact, that's what an 81 gets you; a designation of "Effective."  You have to have a 92 to be "Highly Effective."  If you're below 75, you're "Developing."  I'm glad I didn't land in that category.  If after 29 years at this game, I'm not "Developed," I don't hold out much hope.

What amused me most about all of this nonsense was the paragraph that said, and I quote:

Please remember that your scores are confidential and should not be shared in any way.  In accordance with state regulations, the parent of a child in your class may request your composite score and rating as well as that of the principal.  For your own protection, teachers are strongly discouraged from sharing their own scores outside of the district process.

Which is a recommendation I'm happy to toss to the wind (along with the aforementioned letter).  If we keep our scores and the way they were generated under wraps, it allows the statistics gurus at the State Education Department to keep everyone under the impression that they actually know what they're doing.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Let me get specific, here.  My 91 two years ago was based upon the scores of my Critical Thinking classes and my AP Biology class.  Critical Thinking is an elective, and while the day-to-day work is difficult (requiring a lot of thinking, surprisingly) the material that is suitable for an exam at the end of the year is actually quite easy.  So my students performed brilliantly, as I would expect.  Additionally, that year's AP class was an extremely talented group who knocked the final exam clear out of the park.

Fast forward to last year.  My score last year was based on a combination of my Regents (Introductory) Biology class and my AP Biology classes.  Because of a strange policy of piling students who are classified as learning disabled into the same class, last year's Regents Biology was half composed of students who have been identified with learning disabilities.  Many of these students were hard-working and wonderful to teach, but it's unsurprising that that part of my grade went down.  My two AP classes last year were a friendly, cheerful lot who also happened to be somewhat motivationally challenged, and who by the end of the school year were far more invested in playing Cards Against Humanity than they were in studying for my final.  So that accounts for the remainder of the decline in my score.

This year, my score was a composite once again between Regents and AP Biology, but this time my Regents classes were among the most talented, hardest-working freshman and sophomores I've ever had.  My AP class was small but outstanding, but because of the way the scoring is done, they would have to score on my (very difficult) final exam higher than a target determined by their score on the (far easier) Regents Biology exam for me to have that student's score count in my favor.  On the part of my assessment that came from my AP class, I got a grand total of three points of of a possible twenty -- mostly because of students who got an 81 or 82 on an exam where their target was 85.

So my three scores in three consecutive years have absolutely nothing to do with one another, and (I would argue) nothing whatsoever to do with my competence as a teacher.  But because there's no idea that is so stupid that someone can't tinker with it to make it even stupider, next year the State Department of Education has informed us that we'll be assessed a different way.  Our joy at hearing this pronouncement was short-lived, because once we heard how they're going to score us, we all rolled our eyes so hard it looked like the email was inducing grand mal seizures.

Next year, unless over half of your students are in classes that take a mandated state exam at the end of the year, 50% of your score will be based on an average of the "Big Five" exams, the ones that all students have to take to graduate -- English, US History, Algebra I, Global History, and Biology.   (The other half, fortunately, will be based on evaluation by an administrator.)  If you think you can't have read that correctly, you did; the half of the high school band teacher's grade (for example) will come from students' scores on exams that she had absolutely nothing to do with.  Even for me, who teaches one of the "big five" -- less than half of my students next year will be in Regents Biology, so I'll be getting the composite score, too.

But don't worry!  Because students mostly score pretty well on these exams, and the score will be calculated using the time-honored statistical technique of averaging averages, we'll all look like we're brilliant.  So in effect, they took an evaluation metric that was almost completely meaningless, and changed it so as to make it completely meaningless.

Because that's clearly how you want an evaluation system to work.

All of this, it must be said, comes from the drive toward "data-driven instruction" -- converting every damn thing we do into numbers.  Couple this with a push toward tying those numbers to tenure, retention, and merit pay, along with a fundamental distrust of the teachers themselves, and we now have a system that is so far removed from any measure of reliability that it's almost funny.

Almost.  Because NYSED, and other state educational agencies, look upon all of this as being deadly serious.  It's all very well for me -- a veteran teacher of nearly three decades who is looking to retire in the next few years -- to laugh about this.  I wouldn't be laughing if I were a new teacher, however, and I'd be laughing even less if I were a college student considering education as a profession.

In fact, it'd make me look closely at what other career options I had.

Knowing the score

New from the "Merciful Heavens, Please Tell Me We're Not Fighting This Nonsense Again" department, officials at the New York State Department of Education are proposing using student scores on AP exams and the SAT test as a means for evaluating teachers and administrators.

How many times does it need to be said?  Standardized test scores are not a measure of teacher effectiveness.  Okay, if I was completely incompetent, my AP Biology students would probably all tank the exam.  But beyond that, my students' scores are far more indicative of their ability to comprehend technical material, their curiosity, and their work ethic than it is of anything I happen to be doing.  I have had years where every single student in my class has gotten a score of 3 or above (usually sufficient to obtain college credit).  Other years, I have not had a single 5 (the highest score) and a commensurately high number of 1s and 2s.  What happened?  Was I competent one year and completely ineffective the next?

Add to that the fact that the College Board, in their infinite wisdom, completely restructured the exam four years ago, and I don't think the scores actually mean much of anything from the standpoint of what I am doing in class.

The SATs are even worse.  I used to teach SAT math prep courses in the evening until I became so frustrated by the "learn how to game the test" approach of most of the curricula we used that I decided to make extra pocket money a different way.  My considered opinion is that your SAT exam score tells you exactly one thing -- how well you did on the SAT test.  A study two years ago found little correlation between SAT score and success in college.  More troubling still is the fact that the one of the strongest correlations of SAT exam scores is with parental income; on average, students from the wealthiest families outperformed the students from the poorest families...

... by 400 points.

So is the idea here to further penalize teachers and administrators who work in schools in high-poverty areas?  Because that's sure as hell what it sounds like.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

New York State education officials are either unaware of these problems or else are ignoring them.  Ira Schwartz, Assistant Commissioner of Education, said in a memo, "The proposed changes would recognize efforts to encourage student participation and success in college preparation courses."

And unfairly penalize schools and teachers where other factors interfere with student success in these measures.  So Schwartz and Mary Ellen Elia, the State Commissioner, are either being disingenuous or else are once again proposing using standardized test scores as a way of instituting a top-down micromanagement approach that stifles creativity, destroys morale, and virtually eliminates local control.

"In December, the state’s education policymaking body suspended the use of those tests in teacher evaluations for the next four years," wrote Monica Disare in Chalkbeat New York.  "The moratorium is meant to give the education department time to redo the evaluation system.  This announcement, especially the references to SAT, AP, and other exams, offer early signs of how state officials will sort out that task and which new metrics they are exploring."

Also some early signs that what we're looking at is more of the same.  Evidently the Test 'Em Till They Can't See Straight approach, both here and in other states, has not been diminished despite objections from educators and the increasingly powerful opt-out movement.  You have to wonder what would make a difference.  Perhaps when they realize that they're driving experienced teachers from the profession, and discouraging college students from pursuing education as a career.

Or maybe that will just give them the impetus to gut the public school system completely, and replace it with corporate-run for-profit schools designed on the factory model.  Which is increasingly seeming like what they want.

A visit to the PARCC

The PARCC (Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers) test scores are coming in, and it ain't pretty.

PARCC is part of the whole Common Core, Test-Students-Till-They-Drop system that upper level educational administration seems so fond of lately.  I'll admit that the basic idea -- to provide all children with a common set of educational standards, and assess them all the same way -- sounds good.  Few could argue with a drive to raise standards, improve literacy, increase deep understanding of math.  In fact, part of its mission statement is, "PARCC helps ensure that all students, regardless of income, family background or geography, have equal access to a world-class education that will prepare them for success after high school in college and/or careers...  set(s) consistent expectations in English and mathematics for every student, and... provides a valid and reliable evaluation of each student’s progress toward them."

Sounds awesome, doesn't it?

But for an educational movement that comes out of a drive for equity and accountability, the implementation of these high-flying goals has been haphazard, and the assessments themselves are riddled with flaws.  The roll-out of new standards was rushed, leaving many teachers without adequate training and materials to deliver a completely new curriculum, and the end-of-year exams have been poorly aligned with curriculum expectations and, in some cases, at difficulty levels that are completely grade-level inappropriate.

This hasn't stopped the anti-public-school movement from treating those scores as if they were actually reliable.  The PARCC data for the state of Illinois were just released last week, and showed a considerable drop in average scores from previous assessments, prompting claims of incompetence against teachers and local administrators, withering criticisms of unions for protecting inadequate faculty members, and calls for defunding public schools and replacing them with charter schools and voucher systems.  It also prompted one Illinois teacher to write a concise list of the flaws in PARCC exams, which include the following:

• giving children exams on computers in schools that don't have functional computer labs for kids to practice on
• requiring all students to type their answers, thus adding "typing speed" as an unspoken parameter for success on the test
• vague standards that are assessed by highly specific exam questions, leaving teachers uncertain about the depth to which they are supposed to address concepts
• a "formative evaluation" on 75% of the standards, given 3/4 of the way through the school year -- but no information about which 75% of the standards would be tested
• no scores released on the formative evaluation until after the school year ended and students had taken the final ("summative") assessment, leaving one wondering who the scores were supposed to be "formative" for

And need I add that the scores on these flawed exams are being used not only to evaluate children, but to evaluate teachers, administrators, schools, and entire districts?

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

You know who stands to gain here?  Pearson Education, who holds the extremely lucrative contract for designing all the exams, pre-tests, practice tests, review materials, and curriculum guides.  States are spending millions of taxpayer dollars to purchase a framework for assessment that, to put it bluntly, does not work, and then using that framework as a weapon with which to destroy public schools.

It's not just the teachers who are beginning to realize this.  Some institutions are recognizing the inherent flaws in the design and administration of standardized tests -- and are rebelling against the stranglehold they have over the educational system.  Hampshire College, in Amherst, Massachusetts, chose last year to stop accepting SAT and ACT scores from applicants; its president, Jonathan Lash, stated outright that "standardized test scores do not predict... student success" and that "multiple-choice tests don't reveal much about a student."

US News & World Report, which each year releases its rankings of US colleges and universities, retaliated by deleting Hampshire from its rankings.  Lash reacted with a shoulder shrug: "We surveyed our students and learned not one of them had considered rankings when choosing to apply to colleges," Lash said.  "Instead they most cared about a college’s mission... At college fairs and information sessions, we don’t spend time answering high school families’ questions about our ranking and test score 'cut-offs.'  Instead we have conversations about the things that matter: What does our unique academic program look like, and what qualities does a student need to be successful at it?"

Lash said that the experiment thus far has been an unqualified success:

Without the scores, every other detail of the student’s application became more vivid. Their academic record over four years, letters of recommendation, essays, in-person interviews, and the optional creative supplements gave us a more complete portrait than we had seen before. Applicants gave more attention to their applications, including the optional components, putting us in a much better position to predict their likelihood of success here.

I have some hope that these sorts of decisions are indicators of a coming sea change in our attitudes towards paper-and-pencil exams.  But we have a long way to go.  PARCC and the Common Core aren't going anywhere soon; Pearson Education, and people like Secretary of Education Arne Duncan (who famously stated that the only people critical of Common Core exams were "white suburban moms who are upset because they have discovered that their kids aren't as brilliant as they thought") are still pushing flawed assessments down our throats, along with all of the other outcomes -- loss of diversity in curriculum, loss of teacher autonomy in curriculum design and implementation, and a drastic increase in anxiety over testing in the children themselves.

So the fight's not over, not by a longshot.  I can guarantee that the failing scores on PARCC assessments in Illinois are not going to lead any of the powers-that-be to come to the conclusion that it's the assessment itself that is at fault.  They have too much at stake, both philosophically and financially, to reverse course that easily.  

So the power is in the hands of the parents, which is why it is so critical that the opt-out movement not lose its momentum.

I'll end with a repeated call for action: opt your children right the hell out of all of the state-mandated standardized grade-level exams -- at least the ones that have no impact on your child's passing a course (which, honestly, is most of them).  Keep them home.  Give Pearson no data to work with.  State departments of education have made unilateral bad decisions about how to assess your children, and it's time to take the control of education back to the local level -- where it should be.

Time to vote with your feet.

Stop asking questions

I had a conversation with a student yesterday that illustrated all that is wrong-headed about public education.

Our school is fortunate enough to have an awesome selection of science electives, thanks to a forward-thinking principal we had ten years ago.  I teach an introductory neuroscience class, which is a great deal of fun for me and (I hope) the students -- we get to spend a semester looking at the intricacies and peculiarities of our brain and sensory processing systems.  The subject is one that seems to have a lot of intrinsic interest for high schoolers, and it's often the genesis of some pretty cool class discussions.

Last week I assigned them to read an article called "The Future of Brain-controlled Devices," about the possibility of brain-machine interfaces, and we discussed it in class yesterday.  What I had anticipated would be a ten-minute discussion of the scientific and ethical questions raised in the article turned into a whole period's worth.  The topics jumped, free-association-style, away from the subject at hand -- sensory enhancement, brain-to-brain connections ("machine-mediated telepathy"), virtual reality interfaces, restoration of sensorimotor abilities in the disabled -- and soon we found ourselves discussing the nature of seizure disorders, the role of sleep in memory consolidation, how the pleasure-reward circuit in the brain works, what happens when someone has a migraine, how visual pattern recognition works.

When the bell rang, one of my students chuckled, and said, in an amiable sort of fashion, "Wow.  We really got nothing accomplished this period."

I asked her what she meant.

She indicated the blank page in her science notebook.  "We didn't even write down any notes.  After we turned in the responses to the article, we just spent the rest of the period talking about random stuff."

I smiled and shrugged -- as I said, she's a nice kid and a good student, and didn't mean it as any kind of serious criticism -- but inwardly, I was a little appalled.  Here we have a senior in high school who has been taught, in her thirteen years in public schools, that a wide-ranging class discussion driven by the students' own curiosity, which never leaves the purview of the class's curriculum, somehow doesn't count unless they are made to write down lists of vocabulary words so they can study it later for the test.

These kids were focused and engaged, actively pursuing questions that they were interested in, driving their own learning and using me as a resource and a facilitator.  Not a single one tried to derail the conversation into other subjects; no one said, "So Mr. Bonnet, how do you think the New Orleans Saints are gonna do this year?"  We may have wandered off of the topic of brain-machine interfaces -- but would I really have been doing a better job as a teacher had I halted the discussion, and said, "Okay, stop asking questions.  On to the next topic, which is neurological disorders.  Get your notebooks out...."?

I think public schools, despite amazing obstacles, do a pretty damn good job of educating children.  But we do teach them an unintended lesson, one which some of them never unlearn.  It's the lesson that education is a passive enterprise, with the teacher as the knowledge donor and the student as recipient.  We tacitly pass along the message that if the information isn't on the test, they don't have to think about it, that it isn't worth knowing.  That we'll tell them what to write down, we'll decide for them what counts, that learning consists only of copying everything we write on our white boards into their notebooks.

And it's a notion that is fostered at every level.  If it's not a Quantifiable Outcome, if you can't measure it on a standardized test, to the federal and state departments of education, it does not exist.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

And just last week, the New York State Board of Regents voted to increase the impact of standardized tests by raising to 50% the contribution of exam scores to a teacher's end-of-year evaluation.  But we're apparently not supposed to ask questions about that, either.

You have to wonder why the powers-that-be in education seem so dead set against fostering creative, out-of-the-box thinking in children... or in the teachers themselves.

What does it mean to be truly educated?  It means having some kind of knowledge base, some fundamental set of facts at your disposal, sure.  But it's far more than that.  Education should foster creativity, drive, the ability to make new connections, the confidence and skill to be the author of your own understanding.  The If-It's-Not-On-The-Test-Don't-Waste-Your-Time mentality has warped what should be the true mission of schools -- to give children not only a set of tools, but a passion that will push them never to stop questioning, never to stop learning about the world around them.

And that memorize-and-test attitude has poisoned the children themselves.  I see it especially amongst the best and brightest, in the anxiety over scores, the fretting over learning every last definition, date, and detail.  Synthesis and questioning become a distraction.  They've learned their lessons well, and come away with the impression that minutiae are more important than curiosity.

We've come a long way from the original meaning of the word "education," which comes from a Latin verb meaning "to draw out of."  We've come to think of it as stuffing facts into children's minds, and after that, more facts still, and judge our success by how many of those facts they can successfully regurgitate on the end of the year tests.  How many opportunities for questioning, how many "teachable moments," are lost because we are chained to Student Learning Objectives and Measurable Outcomes?

I'll end with a quote from Socrates which I think sums the whole thing up:  "Education is not the filling of a vessel, it is the kindling of a flame."

Rules, ethics, and opting out

In the last few days, I've been prepping for the start of another school year.  My 29th, which boggles my mind a little.  And although I wouldn't turn down another three months of vacation, there's a part of me that's enjoying getting my classroom cleaned and ready, going through lessons and support materials, and wondering who's going to be in my classes this year and what joys and challenges they will bring along with them.

And as New York State teachers head toward the on-ramp, our Commissioner of Education is already beginning to polish up her own rhetoric in support of the Common Core and standardized exams, and against the opt-out movement.

This will be Commissioner MaryEllen Elia's first full school year in New York.  She comes to us from Florida, replacing Commissioner John King, who brilliantly illustrated the Peter Principle when he was promoted to the position of senior advisor to federal Secretary of Education Arne Duncan.  King, a toe-the-line demagogue who wouldn't hear any criticism of the haphazard fashion in which the Common Core and its attendant exams were rolled out in New York, is now in the position of seeing to it that the entire nation goes the same way.

Elia, unfortunately, seems cut from the same mold.

Three days ago she launched a campaign to fight the opt-out movement, which last year saw over 1.1 million participants across the state.  But instead of admitting that if the parents of over a million children are objecting to a policy, it might be time to reconsider it, she doubled down on her own stance -- and implied that the parents in the opt-out movement were simply uninformed.

"As you get more people involved in the process, you have more people understanding what’s going on and why you have assessments," Elia said.  "There are a lot of people that don’t know what the Common Core is...  We’re trying to pull together a tool kit, if you will, to support superintendents in how we can communicate in a much more effective way to people across the state.  I want the superintendents to understand the reflections and law that they can use as an information piece when they talk to people in their community … It’s important for them to be able to say, ‘Listen, it’s the law.’"

The problem is, it's not the law.  There is no law that mandates that students take tests, standardized or otherwise.  Republican Assemblyman Jim Tedisco, a vocal opponent of the standardized test movement, made this abundantly clear last year.  "They [NYSED and school districts] should be providing parents with the truths and the facts and their rights," Tedisco said in an interview.  "And their rights are yes, they can opt out of something they haven’t opted into. They can refuse something for their kids they’ve never opted into."

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

As far as the parents who choose opt-out being uninformed, Elia may have stirred up a hornet's nest.  Jessica McNair, co-founder of the advocacy group Opt Out CNY, said, "I think she has a lot to learn about the parents in New York State.  We’re not going to back down until we see tests that are developmentally appropriate, and tests that are decoupled from the teacher evaluations."

But for the teachers who are participating in the pushback, Elia had even harsher words.  Such behavior, she said, was unethical.

"I think opt-out is something that is not reasonable," she said, at a meeting of Educators4Excellence.  "I am absolutely shocked if, and I don’t know that this happened, but if any educators supported and encouraged opt-outs, I think it’s unethical."  She has even hinted that teachers who recommend opting out to students or parents could be charged with insubordination.

It's unethical to follow the deepest core value of education -- to do what's best for children?  I have been unequivocal in my support for the opt-out movement; at this point, it's the only leverage parents and educators have against an upper administration that has a long history of being blind and deaf to the concerns of the rank-and-filers who spend nine months of every year on the front lines, and who know best the needs of their students.  They have chosen instead to take away the rights of the local districts to oversee their own assessments and teacher evaluations, and ceded that power to corporations like Pearson Education, who have over and over demonstrated that they are incapable of providing metrics that mean anything.

As Carol Corbett Burris, former principal of South Side High School in Rockville Centre School District and winner of the 2010 New York State Educator of the Year Award, put it:

(T)here comes a time when rules must be broken — when adults, after exhausting all remedies, must be willing to break ranks and not comply.  That time is now.  The promise of a public school system, however imperfectly realized, is at risk of being destroyed.  The future of our children is hanging from testing’s high stakes.  The time to opt out is now.

In other words, if Ms. Elia believes that such actions are unethical, then we as educators should welcome that label as a badge of honor.

If that makes us insubordinate, so be it.

And to Ms. Elia, I can only give a warning.  If you think that by demeaning teachers and parents as unethical and uninformed you can break our resolve, you have a lot to learn.  You think 1.1 million non-compliant children is a lot?

If you don't back down with the rhetoric, and look at how the system itself is failing children, you haven't seen anything yet.

Knowing the score

One of the beautiful things about science is that it self-corrects.

If the data don't support the prevailing theory, you double-check the data to make sure you're not misinterpreting it, re-run the experiments to make sure they're well controlled, and then if you get the same results...

... you alter your model.

You have no other option.  Science is a method for understanding the world based upon logic and evidence.  If you accept that as a protocol for knowing the universe, you are dedicating yourself to following where it leads, even if you don't like the conclusions sometimes.

A pity, isn't it, that we can't introduce this approach into other fields?

Like, for example, education.  I'm a hard-core linguistics geek; in fact, my master's degree is in Scandinavian linguistics.  (Yes, I know, I teach biology.  It's a long story.)  So one of the things that galls me about education is the fact that we've known for decades that children learn languages better, more easily, and become more fluent the earlier you start them.  Kids put into language immersion classes in preschool learn a second language nearly as easily as the first, without tedious memorization of vocabulary lists and conjugations.

And when do most school districts begin language classes?  Middle school.  Right around the time kids' brains start getting bad at learning languages.

We don't need no scholarly research, educational leaders seem to be saying.  We've done it this way for years, and it's working just fine.

So with that scientific-method approach to analysis in mind, let's look at a piece of research regarding the current fad -- high-stakes standardized tests, now being used to evaluate not only students, but teachers, schools, and entire school districts.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Christopher Tienken, associate professor of Education Administration at Seton Hall University, has just published an interesting, and disturbing, paper in the Journal of Scholarship and Practice.  In it, he shows that he can predict how a school population will perform on standardized tests, using only U.S. Census data.

You read that right.  Give Tienken information on demographics, ethnic makeup, socioeconomic status, community size, and so on, he can tell you how the school will do on standardized tests before the students actually take them.  Tienken writes:

In all, our regression models begin with about 18-21 different indicators.  We clean the models and usually end up with 2-4 indicators that demonstrate the greatest predictive power.  Then we enter those indicators into an algorithm that most fourth-graders, with an understanding of order or operations, could construct and calculate. Not complicated stuff.

Our initial work at the 3rd-8th and 11th grade levels in NJ, and grades 3-8 in CT and Iowa have proven fairly accurate.  Our prediction accuracy ranges from 62% to over 80% of districts in a state, depending on the grade level and subject tested.

I hope you recognize how devastating this is to the claim that standardized tests tell you anything worth knowing about teacher competence.  If census data alone predicts student performance, then how are "underperforming" teachers supposed to improve their scores?  Tienken's research implies that poor teachers will suddenly become more competent... if they move to a different district.

Tienken doesn't mince words about the implications of his study:

The findings from these and other studies raise some serious questions about using results from state standardized tests to rank schools or compare them to other schools in terms of standardized test performance.  Our forthcoming results from a series of school level studies at the middle school level produced similar results and raise questions about the appropriateness of using state test results to rank or evaluate teachers or make any potentially life-impacting decisions about educators or children.

Now, Tienken isn't saying that teachers make no difference; we all, I think, can attest to the power of a truly skilled teacher in making a difference to a child's life.  I had three teachers who stand out as having turned the course of my life in some way -- my high school biology and creative writing teachers, and my first-year college calculus teacher.  Each of them engendered in me a passion for learning and a fascination with the topic, such that I looked forward to each and every class and wanted more when I was done.

But the point is, this sort of thing is not measurable with a standardized test.  The real value of truly gifted teachers is their capacity for making learning relevant and engaging, making dry academic subjects come to life.  And whatever standardized tests are measuring -- a point no one, even the policy wonks at the state and federal Departments of Education, seems to be entirely clear on -- they certainly don't measure that.

So teacher evaluation, astonishingly enough, is best done by a competent administrator, who knows the teacher, the subject, and the students, not by some paper-and-pencil exam.  Who'd'a thought.

And it'd be nice if the people in charge would look at Tienken's research, and do a forehead smack, and say, "Wow!  We were wrong!  Better reconsider how we're applying standardized test scores!"  But given that scientific rules of validity and analysis don't seem to apply to education, I have the feeling that the result of Tienken's study will be: nothing.  We will almost certainly keep moving down the same road, letting test scores drive more and more decision-making, up to and including teacher salaries and retention.

Can't let a little thing like facts get in the way of educational reform, after all.

A conspiracy of engineered failure

Robert Heinlein said, "Never attribute to conspiracy what is adequately explained by stupidity."  I think this is a pretty good rule of thumb.  It's not that conspiracies don't exist; it's more that humans aren't very good at them (e.g. Watergate), and we're much more likely to be acting from venial motives -- greed, duplicity, desire for power -- than we are to be engaging in some kind of deep and sinister plot.

That said, I'm beginning to wonder if the implementation of the Common Core isn't some kind of conspiracy.

Let's start with the fact that the Chief Operating Officer of the South Carolina Department of Education, Elizabeth Carpentier, is threatening parents who allow their children to opt out of state tests with thirty days in jail.

State Superintendent of Education Molly Spearman, asked about Carpentier's statements, declined to comment other than saying that there is "no statutory provision for parents to opt their children out of testing."

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Arne Duncan, Secretary of Education, has been making some veiled threats of his own.  "It’s just part of most kids’ education growing up,” he said, regarding the implementation of the Common Core standardized exams.  "Sometimes the adults make a big deal and that creates some trauma for the kids...  We think most states will do [meet their targets for participation].  If states don’t do that, then we have an obligation to step in."

So the implication is that everything is just hunky-dory with the Common Core curriculum and the tests, and the only parents that will opt out are overprotective mommies and daddies who can't stand to see their kids work hard.

Oh, and those mommies and daddies might have to go to jail if they allow their kids to opt out.

So we have threats coming from the powers-that-be, but there's a flipside to this.  If the curriculum and the tests were fair measures of student achievement or teacher competence, the opt-out movement might have less of a basis for their argument.  But the implementation of these exams, and their content, has been riddled with problems.  Psychologist Dr. Charlene Williams writes:

The 6th grade ELA practice performance task for the Smarter Balance was completely inappropriate for 11-12 year olds, requiring them to toggle between several screens (on small Ipad screens), and choose multiple pieces of evidence to evaluate, select, paraphrase, compare and contrast, as well as write a multiparagraph essay. Never mind that while practicing, toggling back to the articles caused the students’ written work on the essay to be erased (lost).

Williams goes on to challenge the exams' validity on every level:

1) There is no proven Construct Validity (does your test measure what you think it measures). 

2) Cut scores are determined by an unknown (arbitrary) process - labeling children as proficient or failing appears to not be based on any scientific process.  It is not scientific to arbitrarily decide what levels of your test scores actually mean in the real world.  Scientific measurement requires cross-validation with external measures that provide evidence for your claims (like grades, or independent in-depth measures of children’s educational achievement in a a smaller sample with highly experienced evaluators). 

3) Computer adaptive tests - there have been many concerns raised about how item difficulty has been decided. Children continue to progress on these tests if they continue to get a certain number the most recent answers correct. Educational measurement specialists (true academically trained professionals) and parents and children have observed that very often items following very difficult questions are significantly easier. This raises concerns that children’s scores are artificially deflated by unscientifically determined item difficulty determinations. 

4) Inter-rater reliability - No checks exist to independently determine whether the scoring administered by these testing companies has truly reliable and valid measurements of children’s answers... The assessments are not verifiable, because they are not permitted to be subject to independent scientific evaluation.

This last point is especially troubling.  Anything we get to hear about the exam content has to be "leaked," because the people who see the exams are prohibited from discussing them.  This mandate comes not from state Departments of Education, but from Pearson Education, the corporation who designs the tests.  Educator Elizabeth Phillips, in an op-ed piece for The New York Times, writes:

I’d like to tell you what was wrong with the tests my students took last week, but I can’t. Pearson’s $32 million contract with New York State to design the exams prohibits the state from making the tests public and imposes a gag order on educators who administer them.  So teachers watched hundreds of thousands of children in grades 3 to 8 sit for between 70 and 180 minutes per day for three days taking a state English Language Arts exam that does a poor job of testing reading comprehension, and yet we’re not allowed to point out what the problems were.

But some educators care more about their students than they do about threats of repercussions by a rich corporation who is pulling the strings of upper-level administration in every state in the United States... and those educators have uncovered some frightening facts.  For example, a teacher who (understandably) wants to remain anonymous performed a reading-level analysis on a passage from the 4th grade ELA assessment, and found that it had a lexile score of 1140 -- corresponding to appropriateness for the average reading ability of an 8th grader.

The skew between the difficulty level of the exam material, and the grade for which it was targeted, prompted New York educator Stephanie Santagada to write a letter to Governor Andrew Cuomo using vocabulary culled directly from the 4th, 6th, and 8th grade reading assessments:

There is a man in Albany, who I surmise, by his clamorous paroxysms, has an extreme aversion to educators.  He sees teachers as curs, or likens them to mangy dogs.  Methinks he suffers from a rare form of psychopathology in which he absconds with our dignity by enacting laws counterintuitive to the orthodoxy of educational leadership.  We have given him sufferance for far too long.  He’s currently taking a circuitous path to DC, but he will no doubt soon find himself in litigious waters.  The time has come to bowdlerize his posits, send him many furlongs away, and maroon him there, maybe Cuba?

So yeah, I'm beginning to think there's more here than simple incompetence.  The people in charge are not stupid, and one thing these people excel at is number crunching.  I flatly refuse to believe that the inclusion of a passage that is four grade levels too hard in the ELA assessment was a simple blunder.  Which leads us into into some scary territory, because that implies that the other problems may not be accidents, either.

But why would Federal and State Departments of Education, with the collusion of a lot of elected officials like our own aforementioned governor, do this?  Cuomo himself tipped their hand earlier this year, when he said that he wanted to change the teacher evaluation system -- because too many teachers were achieving high scores by the previous metric.

So the reason for all this, I believe, is that the powers-that-be are deliberately setting students up to fail, in order to show up public education itself as a failure -- in an effort to destroy the entire edifice. Replacing it, more than likely, with a network of charter schools that are run by privately-chosen (i.e. not elected) boards, and which will have a vested interest in buying in to programs, curricula, and assessments created by for-profit corporations like Pearson.

The whole thing, I think, boils down to money, and who is lining whose pockets.  So in the end, it does turn out to be venial motives -- greed and political power.

I could be wrong.  It might be that what we're looking at is the educational equivalent of the Keystone Kops, running around frantically and bonking into walls and falling over.  That's certainly what it looked like at first.  But now, with the time we've had to smooth over problems, develop exams, streamline administration, we shouldn't be seeing these kind of mistakes.  Giving so many tests might still be a mistake, of course; but the fact that the exams themselves are so deeply, fundamentally, and obviously flawed, coupled with the gag order against discussing them, has the hallmark of deliberate downward manipulation of the scores.

Which means that it is even more important for parents to defy the threats, and opt their children out, and for educators to come forward with the content and administration problems of the exams themselves.

Public education itself might be at stake.

Civil disobedience and standardized tests

I begin the unit on ethics in my Critical Thinking class today.  I always look forward to this; it seems to me to be the heart of the curriculum.  And one of the many questions we wrestle with is what the difference is (or whether there is a difference) between the words ethical, moral, justifiable, legal, and right.

It's the legal one I've been thinking about this morning, especially apropos of the action taken by the New York State legislature last week.  They rubber-stamped Governor Andrew Cuomo's budget -- which means, among other things, accepting his mandates about public education, including tying 50% of a teacher's numerical evaluation score to his/her students' performance on a single standardized test, and requiring that observations by administrators be done by individuals from outside the school (i.e., not the teacher's own principal or supervisor).

I've already explained, in some detail, why I think this is a terrible idea.  To recap as succinctly as possible: standardized tests don't measure much of anything other than your ability to take standardized tests; it makes our state's education system beholden to multi-million-dollar exam-prep firms like Pearson Education; it does not account for variables such as differences in funding and poverty level; it does not differentiate between teachers who teach classes that nearly everyone passes the assessment for (such as AP classes) and ones where nearly everyone does not (such as 15/1 special education classes); and it puts administrators in the tough place of evaluating teachers they don't know teaching curricula they have not overseen.

Despite all of the flaws, we now are looking at this evaluation system being used to determine tenure and retention -- and, ultimately, as a tool to revoke tenure for established teachers.

But none of that apparently mattered.  The legislature caved and passed the budget, and its ancillary requirements for schools, by an overwhelming margin, even though some of the members apparently hadn't read what they were voting on.  Assemblywoman JoAnne Simon said, after its passage, "The budget adopted by the Senate and Assembly and signed by the Governor no longer links teacher performance evaluations to standardized test scores and outside evaluators," a statement that in complete cluelessness ranks right up there with Michigan Representative Joe Forbes's famous comment, "Mr. Speaker, what bill did we just pass?"

But if you've been reading my blog, you know all of that.  The question is, what do we do now?

And this is when we run into conflicts with defining the words I'm going to be throwing at my Critical Thinking classes this week.

Because I believe it's time for a little civil disobedience.

Schools are mandated by the state to give standardized tests.  Different ones, depending on the state, but all state Departments of Education require students to sit for some battery of exams each year.  Here in New York, we have various reading and mathematics exams in elementary and middle school, and in high school the subject-specific "Regents exams."  And what I'm going to suggest puts me (as an employee of a public school) in the realm of doing something dubiously ethical, and the school district (should it get involved in an official capacity) in downright illegal territory:

We need to have students opt out of all state-mandated exams.

Not just a few students, and not just a few exams.  Not only the low-stakes ones, the ones not tied to grades, like the elementary reading assessments.  All of the state-mandated exams.  If the State Department of Education is going to use exam data to evaluate teachers in a way that nearly everyone who's analyzed it thinks is completely specious, then we should give them no data to work with.

Of course, it's the parents who have to be on board to do that; it's their children who are the ones who will be affected.  But well-reasoned discussion and polite protest and letter-writing campaigns had exactly zero effect.  This is the point where we need to raise the stakes.

What if we threw an exam, and no one showed up?

Maybe it's time we find out.  If Governor Cuomo and his lackeys in the legislature want to destroy public education -- and by this time, it is apparent to me that this is their goal -- then we need to blunt their weapon.

We're heading into testing season, starting with the grades 3-8 English/Language Arts exams starting the week of April 13th, and the grades 3-8 Mathematics exams the week after that.  So I'm making an appeal: parents, keep your kids home.  All kids.  Opt right the hell out.  If the school contacts you and asks why your child missed the exam, tell them (s)he was sick.  If they offer to reschedule it, tell them your child will be sick that day, too, I'm ever so sorry.

Is it risky?  Sure.  But the result of doing nothing is riskier; losing talented teachers from "failing schools" because they are being penalized for teaching disadvantaged children, unfairly targeting teachers of remedial or special education classes, discouraging young, intelligent, and energetic college students from pursuing a career in education because it's simply too insecure.  Ask yourself how else we are going to make a point to a governor who seems bound and determined to destroy the foundations of public education.

Think about it.  If there's a better way, go for it.

But if not: keep your kids home.  Let the empty seats speak for us, and then see what he does.

Ball's in your court, Cuomo.

NOTE:  For anyone who is interested in opt-out information, including a downloadable refusal letter for parents, go here.

Civil disobedience as a moral imperative

Let me just say at the outset that I'm a law-abiding sort.  With the exception of getting pulled over twice for driving too fast, I've never had a single unpleasant run-in with the cops.  And both times I got caught speeding, I was able to argue my way out of a ticket.

While I'd like to think that my history of clean living is because I have a respect for authority and the rule of law, some of it is due to the simple fact that I hate complications and conflict.  If I come up to a stop sign in broad daylight, and it's clear that no oncoming car on either side is within a quarter-mile of the intersection, I'd rather stop, look both ways, and then go rather than run the stop sign and risk having a third opportunity to explain my actions to a cop.

But my question of the day is: are there times when deliberately, knowingly breaking the law is the right thing to do?

I'm talking, of course, about civil disobedience.  And in my opinion, sometimes putting your own legal record, safety, or (perhaps) life at risk to make a higher point is not only the right thing, it comes close to a moral imperative.

A 2010 sit-in in Budapest protesting forced evictions of the poor [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

The whole idea of breaking the law to bring attention to a greater wrong has been much on my mind lately, for two entirely different causes, both of which will be immediately evident to regular readers of this blog.  The first one is the "opt-out" possibility for standardized testing, which is coming to a head in a lot of states, most recently New Mexico -- where state education officials are using combative language to make the point that exempting students from standardized tests is illegal, and districts that do not compel all children to sit for mandated exams risk losing their funding.  A number of districts are rebelling, some even providing pre-printed forms to parents to sign that exempt their children from the PARCC (Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers) exams.

And none did it with such panache as the Las Cruces School District, where the forms were printed with the statements, "Federal and state laws require all students to participate in state accountability assessments," and "These laws do not offer an exemption or right of refusal to test."  One has to wonder how close they were to adding, "But this form allows parents to exempt their kids anyway," and "You can kiss the Las Cruces School District's rosy-red ass, policy wonks."

The other area in my life in which civil disobedience is making some demands is in our area's attempts to block the storage of LPG (liquified petroleum gas) in unstable salt caverns beneath Seneca Lake.  Over 200 people, including my wife, have been arrested and charged with trespassing for blockading the gates of the facility, and I'm likely to be in the next round.  (Apparently they're not marching the protesters off in handcuffs, which I find kind of disappointing.  Such a missed opportunity for a photo-op.  But if someone can get a photograph of me being arrested, when it happens, I'll certainly find a way to post it here.)

Of course, what I'm talking about here is mild compared to the penalties you can incur in other countries.  Protesting against repressive governments in other countries can get you jailed and/or tortured, being that that's what repressive governments do.  Deliberately breaking the law to make a point reaches its pinnacle of risk in places like Saudi Arabia, where last week a young man was sentenced to death by public beheading for tearing up a qu'ran, hitting it with a shoe, and uttering curses against the prophet Muhammad.  Apparently the man is an atheist -- or, as they call them in that part of the world, an "apostate" -- and he was demonstrating his contempt for religion in general, and Islam in particular, by his actions.

And Saudi law being what it is, in a few weeks he'll almost certainly find himself kneeling in the city square of his home town of Hafr al-Batin, and his head will be severed with a sword.

Which brings up the question of when a cause is important enough to risk your own life.  Or, to put it another way, when is something legal, and at the same time so ethically wrong, that putting yourself in harm's way is the right thing to do?

Not easy questions to answer.  Human morality being the shaky thing it sometimes is, it's easy to conceive of someone breaking the law for his/her own selfish ends, and then justifying it by calling it civil disobedience.  It's also true that one person's civil disobedience is another person's immorality -- as in the parents who are putting other children at risk of disease by their insistence on their right not to vaccinate their own kids.

These are difficult things to sort out.  The best choice is to do a lot of soul-searching before you embark on such a course of action, not only to be certain you understand the risk, but to make sure that you're not engaging in equivocation to rationalize away something that you really shouldn't have done in the first place.  As we discuss at length in my Critical Thinking classes, morality is a deeply personal thing, and unfortunately the words "moral," "ethical," and "legal" don't always line up the way we might hope.  I'll end with a quote from that exemplar of the willingness to put one's life at risk for a higher cause, Martin Luther King, Jr., who wrote, in Letter from the Birmingham Jail:

There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over, and men are no longer willing to be plunged into the abyss of despair.  I hope, sirs, you can understand our legitimate and unavoidable impatience.  You express a great deal of anxiety over our willingness to break laws.  This is certainly a legitimate concern.  Since we so diligently urge people to obey the Supreme Court's decision of 1954 outlawing segregation in the public schools, at first glance it may seem rather paradoxical for us consciously to break laws.  One may well ask: "How can you advocate breaking some laws and obeying others?"  The answer lies in the fact that there are two types of laws: just and unjust.  I would be the first to advocate obeying just laws.  One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws.  Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that "an unjust law is no law at all."

Standardized incompetence

Why is it that the people trying to "fix the education system" seem hell-bent on making it worse?

It's a mysterious phenomenon.  There is now a mountain of evidence that (for example) standardized test scores are unreliable measures of both student progress and teacher competence, and yet we are increasingly using exactly those metrics for gauging both.  In my home state of New York, 20% of my "final grade" as a teacher is mandated to come from high-stakes standardized tests (in my case, the Living Environment Regents Exam, which may be the most poorly-constructed exam I've ever seen).

So given that we've had incontrovertible evidence that it's a bad idea to put the futures of our students and the careers of our teachers in the hands of the corporations who are paid big bucks to write ineffective standardized tests, what do you think would make sense, as a next step?

1. Reduce the emphasis on those tests, and go with measures devised to assess growth, creativity, and critical thinking.
2. Make the standardized test scores have an even higher impact by giving them more weight in end-year assessments for both students and teachers.

If you went for option #2, all I can say is, you understand the system of educational oversight all too well.  This latest idiotic idea was proposed by New York Chancellor of Schools Merryl Tisch, who wants test scores to trump everything else, including the evaluations of teachers done by competent school administrators.

In Tisch's own words, she proposes to:

... (e)liminate the locally selected measures subcomponent, established through local collective bargaining. The data reveal that the locally-negotiated process for assigning points and setting targets in this subcomponent do not differentiate performance in terms of the composite ratings that teachers and principals receive. Instead, assign 40 percentage points to student growth on State assessments and other comparable measures of student growth – including performance-based assessments.

And what is her rationale for proposing this?  It is, she says, because too many teachers were rated as competent by the previous metric.  The number rated "ineffective," Tisch said, was simply too low.  In other words: if the metric says that most teachers are doing their jobs, then the metric has to be inaccurate.

She also proposes monetary incentives for "high-performing teachers" and "teachers taking leadership roles," thus pitting one teacher against another in terms of who gets the highest-performing classes.

Let me take my own situation as an example.  This year, I am teaching only one section of Regents Biology (which I steadfastly refuse to call "Living Environment," largely because the last "paradigm shift" we had in New York State was called "Raising the Bar," and they "raised the bar" in my course by renaming it, which was considered raising the bar because "Living Environment" has more letters than "Biology" does).  In our school, primarily because of staffing and financial issues, we have gone to a model of dealing with special-needs students called "co-teaching."  Co-teaching allows the district to put virtually all of the "classified" (i.e. special education) students together in one class, and then to assign a special education co-teacher to be in the classroom with the subject-area teacher.

This year, I got the "co-taught" class.  Half of my 24 students are "classified."  In this class, I have students who read on the fifth grade level.  I have students who have behavioral disabilities.  I have an autistic child who shuts down whenever things get stressful, which averages four days out of five.  I have ten students who have yet to pass a single quiz this year, despite extra help from myself and the co-teacher, and "modifications" (i.e., quizzes that have been adjusted to be easier to pass).

This is one of the classes on which I will be evaluated this year.  What do you think my chance of being rated "effective" is going to be?  If there was a monetary incentive this year, I'd be unwise to make advanced plans for spending it.

Don't get me wrong.  I love the kids in that class.  They are, by and large, sweet, cooperative, funny, and earnest.  My co-teacher is a wonderful educator, and we have a great working relationship.  But to call the two of us incompetent because we can't get this group of kids to pass the state assessment is to ignore the reality that we cannot treat teachers like factory workers, and kids like widgets that have to be made to a particular specification.

The ironic piece of all of this is how completely obvious this is to anyone who has spent any time in a public school, and how mysterious it all seems to the people in charge.  Merryl Tisch, for example, has in her career spent only seven years teaching children -- and these were years spent in wealthy private schools.  I would humbly suggest that perhaps, wild idea though it may be, we should have the people in charge of public education be individuals who have devoted their lives to teaching children, of all sorts of backgrounds, in public schools.

I would also humbly suggest that Ms. Tisch doesn't know what the hell she's doing.  Nor did our former Commissioner, John King, who oversaw both the APPR (Annual Professional Performance Review) and Common Core implementation disasters that have taken place in New York over the last couple of years.  But since in government, you can't screw something up badly enough to stop you from getting promoted, King is now going to work as a top assistant to U. S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan.

How have we gotten here, to treating teachers like untrustworthy assembly-line workers, and children like little cookie-cutter images?  It doesn't take being a teacher to see how absurd the latter is; anyone who has children of their own knows that they develop at different rates, excel at different things, have different problems, different stumbling blocks.  The idea that anyone could take a random group of tenth graders (for example), and get them to the same place at the same time, is moronic.

And the idea that if the kids aren't all at the same place at the same time by the end of the year, it's the teacher's fault, is somewhere beyond moronic, in that ethereal realm that there really isn't a word in the English language to describe.

I think the answer about how we got here is twofold.  First, people want a uniform product.  That 1950s-mentality, construction-line model is sunk deep into the American psyche.  And if we can't achieve it, we naturally look around for scapegoats.  Teachers are convenient in that regard, aren't they?

The second reason, though, is more pernicious, and it is, to state it bluntly, the almighty dollar.  It's financially expedient to blame the teachers, turn everything into numbers, and act as if those numbers mean something real.  By doing so, you (1) pretend that the problem is fixable without actually changing anything substantive; (2) frustrate the absolute hell out of experienced teachers, who then get out of the profession, saving districts money; (3) avoid considering solutions that might truly work, like reducing class sizes, creating classrooms with differentiated instruction to better meet the needs of children with different abilities and challenges, and allowing schools to beef up programs that encourage creativity, such as music and art.

Nope.  That's not the way, say policy wonks like Tisch.  Test the little buggers to a fare-thee-well, because that somehow will tell you what is really going on, both with the kids and with the teachers who are trying their best to teach them, despite larger classes, less funding, and more absurd busy-work from state agencies.  Reduce funding via state taxes, and simultaneously put a cap on local levies, thus forcing school boards into the Hobson's choice of cutting virtually the only thing they have control over, which is staffing.  (And guess what goes first?  The aforementioned "non-core" subjects like art and music.)

But the wonks keep rising to the top, and the teachers keep saying this sort of thing, and keep getting ignored.  To pay attention to us would be to admit that we're on the wrong course, and have been on the wrong course for some time.  Which would mean that our educational leaders have achieved a score of...

... ineffective.  And we can't have that, right?

Of course, right.

The Common Core Gay Agenda Standards

Regular readers of this blog will know that I am no apologist for the Common Core.  I've seen its implementation in my own school district, and heard all too much about how it is affecting other ones.  While the heart of the "new standards" is well-meant, its reliance on numerical metrics and high-stakes standardized tests has been nothing short of devastating.

But little did I know that there is another reason to despise the Common Core, one that I would never have thought of in my entire life, despite the fact that I spend my days steeped in wacko woo-woo bullshit.  If you had told me, "Dream up the most ridiculous argument against the Common Core you can think of.  C'mon, pull out all the stops.  It should make 'Ancient Aliens Built Stonehenge' look like rocket science," I don't think I'd have thought of this.

Ready?

A Florida state representative is claiming that we shouldn't implement the Common Core, because it will turn your kids gay.

I'm not making this up, although I wish like hell that I was.  Representative Charles Van Zant, speaking at something called "Operation Education Conference" in Orlando, had this to say, and if you don't believe me, you can watch the video on the link I provided:

Our new Secretary of Education recently appointed AIR [American Institutes for Research] to receive a 220 million dollar contract for end-of-course exam testing, to prepare those tests.  Please, go on their website.  Click the link to what they're doing with youth, and you will see what their agenda really is.  They are promoting, as hard as they can, any youth that is interested in the LGBT agenda, and even name it two-hyphen-S, which they define as 'having two spirits.'  The bible says a lot about being double-minded.  These people, that will now receive 220 million dollars from the state of Florida unless this is stopped, will promote double-mindedness in state education, and attract every one of your children to become as homosexual as they possibly can.   

I'm sorry to report that to you...  I really hate to bring you that news, but you need to know.

*brief pause to clean up coffee splatters from computer monitor*

I think my favorite part of this was when Representative Van Zant said that the test developers want children "to become as homosexual as they possibly can."  What does this even mean?  Is there some kind of gradation of homosexuality, from, say, Neil Patrick Harris all the way up through Dr. Frank N. Furter?

And how, exactly, are standardized tests supposed to accomplish this?  Will there be some kind of subliminal message in reading passages, such that, if you take the first letter of each word, it spells out, "I EMBRACE THE GAY AGENDA?"  Will there be a cryptic code on the bubble sheets, that if you decode it, reads, "I solemnly swear to abandon heterosexuality from here on, so help me Freddie Mercury?"

Or is it just that somewhere on the exam, there will be some kind of portrayal of a gay person in other than a negative light?

Can't have that, after all.

I keep thinking that sooner or later, our elected officials will run out of completely boneheaded statements to make.  I keep hoping that they will exhaust their reserves of idiocy on topics such as climate change and evolution, and stay away from other subjects.  Most fervently, I keep espousing the optimistic position that we will eventually start electing people who have IQs higher than their pants size.

To judge by Representative Van Zant, however, it appears that my hopes may be ill-founded.

The turning of the tide

Sometimes writing this blog seems like whispering into a windstorm.

There are so many loopy ideas out there that attacking them is like taking on the Hydra -- cut one down, and there are nine more lurching up to take its place.  Now, to be fair, they're not all equally destructive; my attitude is that if you'd like to believe in Bigfoot, or ghosts, or astrology, there's no real harm in it as long as you don't mind people like me laughing in your general direction sometimes.

On the other hand, there are some crackpot ideas that cause direct harm, and to me, this crosses a line.  At that point, I tend to stop poking gentle fun, and start getting hostile.  These include homeopathy, anti-vaxx, and treating mental illness as if it were demonic possession (and, of course, as if demons themselves were real).

But nothing makes my blood boil like attacks on education.  Not only are we talking about my career, here; we're talking about the children.  We're talking about the young people who will grow up to lead our country, our next generation of doctors, nurses, technicians, scientists, scholars, and lawyers.

The whole battle has become increasingly heated lately, to the point that the powers-that-be on the state and federal level are feeling a little... beleaguered.  And they should be.  They have sold out to corporate interests, to the likes of Pearson Education and the Educational Testing Service.  They have ceded our nation's future to a group of men and women who believe that only that which is quantifiable is real, who value test scores above creativity and depth of understanding, and who believe that it is fair to hook the evaluation of educators to these same meaningless streams of numbers.

But the chickens are coming home to roost.  Parents are, in increasing numbers, opting their children out of high-stakes standardized tests.  No, I'm sorry, my child won't be in school today.  He's sick.  Oh, he has a standardized test today, and it'll have to be rescheduled for three weeks from Tuesday?

I'm sorry, he's going to be sick that day, too.

Teachers, too, are fighting back, where they can.  Unfortunately, school districts' hands are often tied by capricious laws that link funding to cooperation with poorly-thought-out state mandates.  But our voices are getting louder.  Just last week, a New Jersey teacher named Melissa Tomlinson confronted New Jersey governor Chris Christie at a rally, asking him, "Why do you portray our schools as failure factories?"

He shouted at her, "Because they are!"

Tomlinson, undaunted, threw back at him his record of defunding public education, a record that included cuts of over one billion dollars in his first year in office.  At this point, Christie lost it completely, screaming at her, "I am tired of you people!  What do you want?  Just do your job!"

Another teacher, Mark Naison, had the following to say about the encounter:

What do I want? What do 'we people' want? We want to be allowed to teach. Do you know that the past two months has been spent of our time preparing and completing paperwork for the Student Growth Objectives? Assessments were created and administered to our students on material that we have not even taught yet. Can you imagine how that made us feel? The students felt like they were worthless for not having any clue how to complete the assessments. The teachers felt like horrible monsters for having to make the students endure this. How is that helping the development of a child? How will that help them see the value in their own self-worth. This futile exercise took time away from planning and preparing meaningful lessons as well as the time spent in class actually completing the assessments. The evaluations have no statistical worth and has even been recognized as such by the NJ Department of Education.

Christie's not the only one who's under siege for his support of destructive educational policy.  Oklahoma governor Mary Fallin has come under criticism from several fronts over her support of a teacher assessment model that gives each school a grade of A through F based solely upon students' performance on standardized tests.  Schools scoring in the D to F range can be closed, the entire teaching staff fired (with a maximum 50% rehire rate), and then reopened -- under state control.

This, despite a joint study by the University of Oklahoma and Oklahoma State University found that what schools are doing is only responsible for 20-30% of student achievement -- the remainder being accounted for by factors outside of school control, such as socioeconomic status and parental support.  A spokesperson for the governor, Alex Weintz, said that he was "dismayed" to find that teachers' unions were using the report to discredit the A-F evaluation model, and that the governor "does not support" the findings of the report.

"It’s not helpful to anyone’s cause," Weintz said.  "It seems to be some opponents are absolutely bent on undermining the credibility of the entire system.  The fact of the matter is this grading system, regardless of whether or not you believe it should have been put together differently, is the law."

Regardless, apparently, of whether or not the grading system actually reflects anything real.

Then, just two days ago, Dr. Gary Johnson, Director of Special Education Advocacy and Instruction at the Early Life Child Psychology and Education Center in Utah, testified before the Wisconsin State Legislature -- and said that the tests associated with the new Common Core Learning Standards amount to "cognitive child abuse."  The exams, he said, have little in the way of norming or peer review, and no validation studies -- meaning that using the scores to evaluate anything would be questionable, but using them to draw conclusions on the success or failure of schools is downright absurd.  "The US Department of Education's testing policies are like The Wild Wild West," Johnson said.  "They are doing what they want with no accountability, no constraints, and no oversight."

Here in my home state of New York, the backlash against the people who put us in our current predicament has been so strong that there have been demands that Commissioner of Education John King resign -- the latest from the New York State Allies for Public Education.

Troubled times, these.  It's easy to lose hope, and heaven knows my morale lately has been at its lowest since I can remember.  But there are signs that the tide might be turning.  My post last week about the lack of trust in educators got hits from all over New York State, and beyond -- and responses that included support from principals, superintendents, and school board members.  As a result of what I wrote, I've been invited to be part of a regional panel that will look at the teacher evaluation model, and other current issues in education.  All around me, I see people organizing, participating in peaceful resistance, speaking their minds and refusing to be silenced.

And perhaps this will, finally, be enough to turn things around.  Maybe we can break the stranglehold on education wielded by the top-down micromanagers, the b-b stackers in the state and federal departments of education who have never taught a day in their lives, but who think they know best how to educate children and evaluate teachers.  This is not a fight against accountability, as it has been characterized by the besieged politicians who still support the current model, and who are (sadly) still in charge of crafting educational policy; this is a demand for reasonable accountability, for an approach to education that gives every child a chance to excel, for assessments that generate statistics which actually mean something.

So I'm trying to stay optimistic, here, and toward that end I keep telling myself, over and over, that wonderful quote from Mohandas Gandhi: