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by on January 25, 2012 2 Comments

Obama Says: Stop Teaching to the Test; Teach With Creativity and Passion

In his 2012 State of the Union address, President Obama included a section of his speech that focused on education, not only K-12, but he also challenged colleges and universities to be more creative about how they work with students, and as well as the hundreds of thousands of young students who are not yet American citizens, and “live every day with the threat of deportation.”

I want to focus on some of the comments that the President made in his address.  Keep in mind that I believe that President Obama is struggling with how to deal with education because the policies of the U.S. Department of Education (ED) conflict with some of core beliefs that I quoted in a letter to the President that I posted here.  In his book Dreams from My Father, President Obama talked about his desire to become involved with the public schools in Chicago.  Here is the quote and the context of what I believe represents his core beliefs about students and learning:

I want to recall a section in that chapter for my readers that was very powerful, and supports the humanistic paradigm that I am proposing here. You and your colleague & friend Johnnie had decided to visit a high school, and the principal of the school introduced you to one of the school counselors, Mr. Asante Moran. He was, according to the principal, interested in establishing a mentorship program for young men in the school.

In his office, which was decorated with African themes, you discovered that Mr. Moran had visited Kenya 15 years earlier, and he indicated that it had a profound effect on him. In the course of your short meeting with Mr. Moran, he clearly told you that real education was not happening for black children, and then he offered you his view on what “real education” might be. Here is what he said on that Spring day in 1987:

Just think about what a real education for these children would involve. It would start by giving a child an understanding of himself, his world, his culture, his community. That’s the starting point of any educational process. That’s what makes a child hungry to learn—the promise of being part of something, of mastering his environment. But for the black child, everything’s turned upside down. From day one, what’s he learning about? Someone else’s history. Someone else’s culture. Not only that, this culture he’s supposed to learn is the same culture that’s systematically rejected him, denied his humanity (p. 158, Dreams from My Father).

Starting with the child as he or she is, and helping them connect to their environment—this is the core of humanistic teaching.  Most teachers know and try and act on this humanistic philosophy, but for many, it is an upstream battle.

The Department of Education is not a platform that suggests that learning should start with the child.  The cornerstone of the current Department of Education is the Race to the Top program and the new Waiver Program of the No Child Left Behind Act.  In these two programs, education for the child is a two-fold top down endeavor in which (1)  states must adopt a one-size fits-all set of standards (Common Core State Standards) that all children should attain regardless of where students live and (2) students must be subjected to high-stakes tests that will be used to determine their progress and graduation.  And to top it off, all states that want to continue to receive Federal funds through these two programs must use student achievement data to evaluate the effectiveness of teachers.

This approach has resulted in an educational system that is data driven so much so that it is in the best of interests of schools, administrators, and teachers to insist that  teaching to the test is a priority.  Remarkably the ED insists that states must tie student achievement scores to teacher evaluation, even when the prestigious National Academies of Sciences doesn’t think this is a good idea.  What we have seen is abusive behavior toward teachers resulting in psychological assaults, or what has become known as “teacher bashing.”

Did the President Open the Door?

Did President Obama, in his address last night, open the door to to a more creative approach to teaching?

In his address, the President made a few comments about teachers and teaching that might just reveal that he is interested in opening the door questioning some of the basic tenets of the ED.  Here are a few sentences from his address:

At a time when other countries are doubling down on education, tight budgets have forced states to lay off thousands of teachers.  We know a good teacher can increase the lifetime income of a classroom by over $250,000.  A great teacher can offer an escape from poverty to the child who dreams beyond his circumstance.  Every person in this chamber can point to a teacher who changed the trajectory of their lives.  Most teachers work tirelessly, with modest pay, sometimes digging into their own pocket for school supplies — just to make a difference.

Teachers matter.  So instead of bashing them, or defending the status quo, let’s offer schools a deal.  Give them the resources to keep good teachers on the job, and reward the best ones.  And in return, grant schools flexibility:  to teach with creativity and passion; to stop teaching to the test; and to replace teachers who just aren’t helping kids learn.  That’s a bargain worth making.  (Emphasis mine).

For Obama to say that teachers should teach creativity, and stop teaching to the test is a remarkable statement give how the Department of Education is advocating high-stakes tests based on a common set of standards.  Many researchers would argue that continuing to use high-stakes tests will not result in teachers not teaching to the test.  Until high-stakes tests are banned from being used to make decisions about student learning and teacher performance, we will continue to be immobilized.

Did Obama open the door to altering the fixed and seemingly unchanging policies of NCLB and the Race to the Top?

I don’t know.  But if he would confer with Governor Brown of California, he might hear an alternate view.  California has rejected asking for a waiver on the NCLB act not only for the added billions it will cost, but because the deeper elements of NCLB and Race to the Top contradict some of Brown’s beliefs. He has stated that  principals and teachers know more about education, and that the testing syndrome that we have created not only takes a lot of time to administer (not to mention the cost), but appears to curb teachers creativity and engagement with students.

Diane Ravitch wrote about her recent her travels and speeches in California.  She wonders whether California will start a national revolt against bad ideas.  I do hope that Obama comes in contact with Brown, and California’s progressive superintendent of education.

 

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by on January 22, 2012 Leave a Comment

Which System is Broken: American Public Schools or the U.S. Congress?

It has been in vogue for at least a decade, maybe longer, to question American teacher’s abilities to educate its youth.  According to some politicians, America has had a series of Sputnik moments, starting in 1957 with the launch of the world’s first satellite, to most recently our annual penchant to ogle over the test score results that happen in Shanghai, Finland or Korea.  Think tank “scholars” use these test results to keep telling us that the sky is falling in the education of American youth.  Doomsday is straight ahead.

Many of these think tank’s believe that the American school system is broken and needs to be reformed.  The NCLB act, the signature education reform initiative of the Bush administration has created a system of education that pits teachers and unions against politicians, U.S. and state department’s of education, and well funded corporations and private foundations.  The deal is that if we could just get rid of the “bad” teachers, our students would learn so much more.  By using high-stakes tests in a few subject areas, and then statistically manipulating the achievement test data from one year to the next, we can determine the value-added affect of each teacher, and use this to weed out the “bad” teachers, and reward the good ones.

The problem is that the statistical use of the value added measure is unreliable, and very inconsistent even with the same teacher.  How could we possibly let the politicians, and bureaucrats get away with this when there is little to no research to support their reform efforts.  As I have written elsewhere, high-stakes test should be banned, and the decision making put back into the hands of those of who know students best: teachers and principals in the schools of America.

Now, back to the headline: Which system is broken: American public schools or the U.S. Congress.

I personally don’t think either is broken.  But, the American public school system has a lot more going for it than Congress.

For example, in a very recent Gallup survey of American citizen’s confidence in various entities in its country, 72% of American’s had either a great deal or quite a lot of confidence in American public schools.

They had 12% confidence in the Congress.

If politicians and other bureaucrats think that the American system of education is broken, what do they think of the system they are working in?

Every time international test score from PISA or TIMSS are released, American students score near the middle, and politicians and think tank experts use this data to show how far behind the U.S. is compared to other countries, especially in mathematics and science.  I say this is preposterous, and so does Yong Zhao, Presidential Chair and Associate Dean for Global Education, University of Oregon.  He analyzes American education in the context of comparing American education to the education in other countries, especially China in his book Catching Up or Leading the Way: American Education in the Age of Globalization.  He suggests that reform proponents, business executives and politicians have misjudged American education, and have convinced themselves that The Grass is Greener in other countries.

If science and mathematics teaching and learning is inferior to learning in so many other countries, how do we explain, as Dr. Zhao wrote, this from President Obama in a State of the Union speech:

America still has the largest, most prosperous economy in the world. No workers — no workers are more productive than ours.  No country has more successful companies, or grants more patents to inventors and entrepreneurs.  We’re the home to the world’s best colleges and universities, where more students come to study than any place on Earth.

What do you think about American public school education compared to the work that is done in the U.S. Congress?  Do you have more confidence in teachers, or politicians?  What is the basis for your choice?  Tell us what you think.

 

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by on January 20, 2012 3 Comments

The Education Bellwether Governor

In 1982, John Naisbitt published, Megatrends, a book about trends that were transforming our lives.  In the book he identified five states as “bellweather” states—states that were setting trends for the rest of the nation.  The “bellwether” states he identified in 1982 were California, Florida, Washington, Colorado, and Connecticut.

Anthony Cody, on his blog Living in Dialog talked about education comments made by Governor Jerry Brown.  Cody picked up what Governor Brown was saying, and shows how Brown’s ideas might take California in a different direction, bucking the trend to standardized education, and test the heck out of American students.

Brown believes that decision-making for schools should be centered in those closest to students—-school boards, principals, and teachers, not the people who staff the federal and state departments of education.

He also is calling for a reduction in the number of tests that are given each year, so that results can be used in a formative way as apposed to the high-stakes environment of our test-crazed culture.

Brown has suggested that evaluation should include more qualitative measures, such as including school visits to classrooms to see what teachers are actually doing.  But the most important thing that he said was “My hunch is that principals and teachers know the most…”

Anthony Cody has documented Brown’s views on education, and you can read them here, here, and here.

A bellwether is any entity in a given arena that serves to create or influence trends or to presage future happenings (Wikipedia).  Is California’s governor a bellwether governor?

It’s hard to say, but given his views as expressed above, and the activist momentum that is gaining ground in California, there is hope that over the next year or so, we will see some action on these front.  Would there be a movement to suspend high-stakes testing?  Would the locus of control move from the department of education to the science department?

What do you think?  Do you believe that California’s governor has ideas that might be a good sign for educational reform?  What other bellwether governor’s are out there?

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by on January 14, 2012 1 Comment

Standards-Based and High-Stakes Science Education: Frivolous, Capricious & Unreasonable?

Science educators, especially during the past 50 years, have been instrumental in developing curriculum and teaching methods that are intelligent, prudent, reflective, and thoughtful.  Underlying science education has been the well-advised and deliberate attempt to encourage inquiry- and problem-based teaching.  Not only has this been on solid ground in the U.S., but in most nations of the world.

Working Out How Students Learn

During this time, researchers in science education, and in the newly established field of the learning sciences began to work out some of the principles that help us understand how people learn.  Much of this work is described in several publications, including How People Learn (National Academy Press, 2000) by Bransford, Brown and Cocking.

The term that has recently emerged to help us understand how people is the learning sciences, which is an interdisciplinary field including cognitive science, educational psychology, computer science, anthropology, sociology, information sciences, neurosciences, education, design studies, instructional design and other fields.

The research in the learning sciences has led to several findings about how people learn (Bransford, Brown, & Cocking, 2000).

1. Students come to the classroom with preconceptions about how the world works.  If their initial understanding is not engaged, they may fail to grasp the new concepts that are taught, or they may learn them for purposes of a test but revert to their preconceptions outside the classroom. 

If you have 30 students in your biology class, you know that not all of the students come into your course with the same preconceptions.  Do we think that it is possible for all of them to leave the class with the same level of “knowing?”

2. To develop competence in an area of inquiry, students must have a deep foundation of factual knowledge, understand facts and ideas in the context of a conceptual framework, and organize knowledge in ways that facilitate retrieval and application. 

This principle, which comes from research comparing experts and novices in a field of study, does not mean that students should be fed a diet of factual information.  The principle worked out here means that students must be engaged in active learning and given many opportunities to learn with understanding, to use inquiry to explore ideas, and be engaged with other students in solving problems.

By the way, the test questions that constitute the high-stakes tests are random questions that require memory and guesswork.  Instead of helping students develop conceptual frameworks within science (or any other subject), the high-stakes testing syndrome reinforces the notion that we are testing nothing more than factual knowledge, completely out of context.  How can this process possibly measure the kind of deep understanding that ought to characterize schooling in a democracy.

3. A “metacognitive” approach to instruction can help students learn to take control of their own learning by defining learning goals and monitoring their progress in achieving them.

Many science teachers know that metacognitive tools really help their students understand science.  However, because we are shooting for an end of the year test that requires bubbling an answer form, helping students be reflective and try and take responsibility for their learning goes by the wayside.  Metacognition requires “internal conversation” and teachers who encourage this in their students are pushing hard to overcome the day-to-day pressure to teach to the test.  Helping students be reflective thinker takes time.  Reflective activities such as journal keeping, reflective postings on the Internet, and small group discussions might not fit into a teacher’s schedule if the real premium is on well the students do on “the test.”

The model of teaching that seems to capture these three principles is constructivism.

Constructivism explains learning as a meaning-making process dependent on prior knowledge and individual interpretation. Thus, constructivism is the theoretical framework that supports the enduring push for teaching science by inquiry methods. If teaching were merely the process of communicating a message, then we could simply tell students key ideas (such as the definition of scientific theory) and achieve the instructional objective.

Is What We Are Doing Frivolous, Capricious, and Unreasonable?

So, why is it that science education in K-12 schools has accepted and acceded to standards-based and high-stakes testing that characterizes teaching and learning in today’s schools?

Why has education accepted the notion that one set of learning standards can be used with all students, regardless of where they live?  Why do we continue to administer high-stakes achievement tests to determine whether or not a student has learned?  Why do we assume that these tests measure student learning and that the one responsible for student progress is the teacher when we know that about 70% of the effect on learning is from outside the classroom? Why?

The Next Generation Science Standards, which the developers claim is state led, are far from the realities of classrooms and teachers, and represent a collection of performance objectives that are expected to be learned by all students, regardless of where they live.  The evidence is that where you live has a profound effect on learning, more so than the effectiveness of teachers.  Creating one set of science standards for nation of 15,000 school districts simply does not make sense.

If we want professional societies to develop science standards, all well and good.  But, the selection and implementation of standards should be a local decision made by teachers who have the knowledge and understanding of their students.

Research in the learning sciences would argue against using high-stakes tests.  These high-stakes tests are  frivolous, capricious and unreasonable. The tests are not a measure of what students learn.  They are a collection of discrete test items, written by strangers, that are used in disparate classrooms around the country. State department officials have convinced themselves that their tests are measuring not only student learning, but can be used to compare student scores from one year to the next, and make assertions about learning progress.  I don’t think so.

Community Based Education

The learning sciences can be used as the rationale for more local control over teaching and curriculum development.  Teachers are the ones who know how to implement the findings of the learning sciences to make science learning active and inquiry-based focused on helping students understand science and know how to use science to solve problems.  We need to get out the way and let professional teachers do their work.

The preposterous continuation of holding students and teachers hostage by making them follow someone else’s standards, and someone else’s high-stakes tests makes no sense, except to the officials at state and federal departments of education, and the core group of corporate meddlers.

What do think about standards-based science education?  Do you think high-stakes, end of the year tests should be used?  Do they measure student achievement in your courses?  

Standards-Based and High-Stakes Science Education: Frivolous, Capricious & Unreasonable?  Tell us what you think. 

 

 

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by on January 13, 2012 4 Comments

NCLB Waivers: The Details in the Devil’s Bargain

This post was also published on Anthony Cody’s blog, Living in Dialog at Education Week, January 15, 2012.

The U.S. Department of Education (DOE) wants to insure that every teacher in the U.S. is evaluated on the basis on student progress on high-stakes achievement tests.  To achieve this, the DOE will issues waivers on some aspects of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) in exchange for a state-wide system to evaluate teachers using tests.

In this post I provide details and opinions on this development.

Waivers In the News

The NCLB waivers has become a newsworthy item.  Here are links to a few articles published recently.

 ESEA Flexibility Requests

This all started when 11 states had asked for waivers, after the DOE announced they would offer a “flexibility package” from some provisions of  No Child Left Behind, especially ones the states felt they couldn’t reach by the target dates set by NCLB.  States submitted what is called an ESEA Flexibility Request.  This link will take you to a Word document which spells out exactly what should be in the request, and how it should be organized.  It’s really a template that all states must use to get the waiver.

Here are links to ESEA Flexibility Requests Received so far.

Colorado [PDF, 65MB], Florida [PDF, 81MB], Georgia [PDF, 36MB], Indiana [PDF, 50MB], Kentucky [PDF, 25MB],Massachusetts [PDF, 18MB], Minnesota [PDF, 812KB], New Jersey [PDF, 63MB], New Mexico [PDF, 63MB],Oklahoma [PDF, 46MB] and Tennessee [PDF, 52MB] each submitted a request for ESEA Flexibility on November 14, 2011.  You can read the entire request for each of these states by following the links to the states.

Flexibility is asking and spelling out the waivers that each state requests, and then assuring that they will meet the principles identified by the DOE.

Principles Exchanged for Waivers

I downloaded the 249 page Georgia Flexibility Report to find out what really is in these reports, and why some states are all for them, and why some states are very skeptical of the NCLB waivers.  My comments in this section are based on an examination of the Georgia report.  I live in Georgia, and am professor emeritus of science education at Georgia State University, and have had more than 30 years of experience in education in Georgia.

Georgia was a Race to the Top (RTT) winner, and has had a head start on the principles that are described below that they must implement and meet in order to get waivers on NCLB.

There are three principles that all states who request a waiver must adopt.  They must detail how they will develop, and implement each of these principles in all schools by 2017.  Examination of the principles exposes the sheer weight of bureacratic rules, high-stakes tests, teacher evaluation measures, and the inordinate number of officials controlling public education far from the day-to-day lives of students and teachers.

Principle 1: Adopt College and Career Ready Standards

College and career ready standards means that the state will adopt the Common Core State Standards in mathematics and reading/language arts. In Georgia’s case the GaDOE is partnering with Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to support the “transition” to the Common Core State Standards.  The state agrees to develop and administer annual, statewide, aligned, high-quality assessments that measure student growth.

The Common Core State Standards, which were written by Achieve, Inc., have been adopted by most states.  Achieve is busy at work writing the new Science Standards, and they no doubt will be adopted by all states.  But, keep in mind that Achieve is also writing the tests based on these sets of national standards, and so down the road, we will see a set of national tests.  And, it doesn’t matter where students live, they all must live up to this single of standards in each curriculum area.

Coming along will a new portfolio of high-stakes tests written by Achieve.

Principle 2: State-Developed Differentiated Recognition, Accountability and Support

This is a big one.  The state agrees to provide meaningful information about school performance, student achievement and graduation rates, closes gaps for all schools across the state, and targets schools that need help. Priority schools (the lowest performing), and Focus schools (schools that contribute to the achievement gap) will be targeted.  Reward school—you guessed it, a school that has exceptional performance.  There is even a plan to compensate high performing schools.

One of the sub-principles driving each state is setting performance standards for high school and elementary/middle schools.  To do this, the states (at least as shown in the Georgia proposal) use a prescribed formula to get to the Performance Targets in 2017.  Here is the formula or algorithm that Georgia uses to determine annual growth that school must meet in each subject area.

Annual Growth = (100% – 2011 Proficiency Rate)/6

As an example in high school biology in Georgia, the annual growth would be:  100% – 69.1 = 30.9/6 = 5.15.   69.1 was the 2011 proficiency rate.  So, if you are teaching biology in Georgia, proficiency rates must increase by 5.15 so that by 2017, the rate will be 84.  It seems to me that this kind of thinking urges that teachers teach to the test to make sure that their students can answer correctly the questions on the high-stakes bubble tests.  There is no theory underlying the notion of annual growth, and how these scores relate to the research in the learning sciences.

Go any state department of education website in the U.S. and you will find a treasure drove of data on student test scores by year, content area, grade level and school.  At the Assessment page on the Georgia Department of Education website you will find endless Excel data tables by grade level, subject area, and school which you can download.

Principle 3: Supporting Effective Instruction and Leadership (Guidelines for Principal and Teacher Evaluation)   

This principle is the one that is being picked up in newspapers, and on blogs around the country.  Fundamentally, it means that teacher and administrator evaluation will be tied in some way to student progress on achievement tests.  Using student progress on achievement test scores as a measure of teacher effectiveness is riddled with problems, and inconsistencies.  The tests themselves are developed by testing corporations that have little or no vested interest in the local school and its curriculum, students, teachers, or parents.

The decisions being made are far removed from communities that make up the school districts, and collectively are the building blocks of the state education system.  Everything that is being done is from the top-down by bureaucrats who once were part of local schools, but have moved to central command centers in the state capitals of the U.S., and from their vantage points, look out, and make decisions for thousands of students and teachers.

Okay. Here is a multiple choice question for you to consider:

DEM, LEM, and TEM are:
a. Nicknames for the latest X-Box game superheroes
b. Abbreviations for newly discovered planets outside the solar system
c. Names of three new political parties in the State of Georgia
d. Acronyms for Georgia’s system wide approach to effectiveness and accountability

Well. How did you do? The answer is “d,” and you can find these terms in charts and discussions in the State of Georgia’s first proposal for The Race to the Top competition and in the Georgia ESEA Flexibility Request.  A DEM is the acronym for District Effectiveness Measure; LEM is the acronym for Leader Effectiveness Measure; and TEM—you guessed it, is the acronym for Teacher Effectiveness Measure. All of these measures will have a significant student growth component, and of course the state will develop a “establish a clear and transparent approach to measuring student growth.” Now, if you believe this, I’ll sell you a bridge!  You can read more about this here.

Summing Up

I have read Georgia’s Race to the Top grant proposal and the Flexibility Request.  What have done?  We’ve lost our way in the world of reform led by people who know very little about the lived world of students and teachers.  To improve schooling, reform has to led from the ground up by educators working at local levels.

I rigorously object to the Race to the Top, to the notion of college and career ready standards, and the use of high-stakes tests for making life changing decisions about students, teachers and administrators.  I’ve written much on this, and I have summarized research and analysis in two eBooks that are available here:

Achieving a New Generation of Science Standards

The Enigma of High-Stakes Testing in Science

What do you think about the the way in which states are receiving waivers?  Or are they?  Does complying with the principles identified above lessen the control that the Federal Government has on local education?  Tell us what you think.
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