by on February 21, 2012 Leave a Comment

A Perfect Storm Hits Public Schools

Guest Post by Steven Sellers Lapham

Note: Steven Sellers Lapham and Jack Hassard worked together on this post.

Public schools in America are under attack from many directions, and the U.S. Department of Education (ED) seems bent on delivering a lethal one-two-three punch. This decade will likely witness more neighborhood schools shutting down, crowded classrooms, excellent teachers fired, and children fobbed off to “online learning programs.” Let’s recall that Prince Edward County, Virginia closed its schools 1959-64, creating a “lost generation” of children who were hobbled, as adults, by years of missed education. Today, a school district in Delaware County, Pennsylvania, cash strapped and unable to pay its teachers, is being kept open only by a federal court order.

We now face the prospect of a school closing because the local tax base has withered, the state government is under water, and the federal government has deemed the school to be unworthy of aid due to lackluster scores on high-stakes student tests. ED, which should be the strongest defender of public schools, is making the problem worse.

Punch #1: Punish the Poor.

The slogan “Race to the Top” is social Darwinism at its most ugly: Reward those who are doing well (inevitably, schools in wealthier neighborhoods) and punish those who are struggling (predictably, schools in America’s poorer neighborhoods). A child in Oklahoma, Mississippi, or North Dakota should not have to rely on a state administrator’s clever grant-writing skills in order to receive a good education. Certainly, some grant monies should be available for innovation and experimentation in schools. But to make “success” the guiding star of educational policy is wrong.

Punch #2: Death by Paperwork.

States might avoid the draconian punishments of the No Child Left Behind law (NCLB) by applying to ED for a “waiver.” The mad rush is on. To date, eleven states have submitted a “flexibility report.” Georgia’s is 249 pages. California estimates that enacting all of the waiver requirements (unfunded mandates) would cost at least $2 billion and has declined to apply. ED could make the waiver process useful by placing a 1,000-word limit on applications (a bit longer than this essay) and asking only for a brief description of a state’s educational goals. This would free up teachers and administrators to do real work.

Punch #3: Absurd Metrics.

Teacher evaluations will be based on “student growth.” There is, however, no scientific basis for doing this. The practice contradicts a 2011 National Academy of Science report, “Incentives and Test-Based Accountability in Education.”

Using test scores to measure the efforts of teachers is a pseudoscience akin to phrenology of the 1800s, which purported to measure one’s intelligence according to the shape of one’s skull. It also brings to mind journalists and social scientists of the 1920-60s who misued prison statistics to “prove” that black people are genetically inclined toward criminal behavior.  In his Harvard University Press book, Khalil Gibran Muhammad established how a racial and racist, ‘scientific’ discourse promoted this idea.  Today, we use high-stakes test scores to “prove” that embattled schools are “failures,” and that hard-working professionals aren’t working hard enough.

There are many reasons why student test scores might not mount endlessly upward, such as an influx of non-English speaking immigrants; a rise in divorces; the town’s factory closes; family transience; a rise in home foreclosures; a sad absence of parents, who are serving in Afghanistan; etc. Or maybe the for-profit company that created the test got a little sloppy when it wrote the test questions, skewing the results. These powerful influences cannot be adequately controlled in a statistical analysis on the small scale of a single school district, a single school, and least of all, a single teacher.

Pushing Back

We must ban the use of standardized tests to make high-stakes decisions of any kind. Standardized test scores might be used ethically as a diagnostic tool (“Apply first aid here!”), but never as an excuse for punishment (“Bleed the patient dry!”). As a study by Fairtest has revealed, the system has placed an inhumane burden on teachers and administrators on the ground, resulting in cheating scandals in 32 states and the District of Columbia. Valerie Strauss reports that the “misuse of standardized tests mandated by public officials has created a climate in which increasing numbers of educators feel they have no choice but to cross ethical lines.”

Of course, teachers, like any professional group, should be evaluated and held to high standards. Experienced teachers and administrators in the school itself have personal knowledge of the teacher, students, local community and curriculum. Peer observation and evaluation have been a part of healthy educational settings for centuries. There are rigorous protocols for teacher evaluation provided by professional and subject-discipline associations. Let’s use those.

In New York State, 1,200 principals (and even more teachers) have signed a letter protesting the use of students’ test scores to evaluate their job performance. California, with more public school students than any other state, has jumped ship. So has Pennsylvania, apparently. “The emphasis on testing under the waiver plan is as heavy-handed as it has been under NCLB,” said educational historian Diane Ravitch, who served as assistant secretary of education.

Replacing NCLB with a new law could propel our nation’s educational standing. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan’s most cherished goal is to return the United States to first place in the percentage of the population who graduate from college. To do that, let’s provide every child who could benefit from daycare with free admission to Head Start, which is the most powerful predictor of success for children born into poverty. Then we can strive to make every school in every neighborhood in America a center of excitement and excellence, not just the chosen few.

Until Congress passes a new federal education law, ED can write its rules and marshal its resources to assist students, teachers, and schools – and stop punishing them. And it can adopt a new slogan to match this new ethic. How about “Raise All Boats!”

Have the Federal Government’s education acts (No Child Left Behind and the Race to the Top) created conditions that have led to the “perfect storm” hitting American education?  What do you think?

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– Steven Sellers Lapham is an editor at a nonprofit educational association. The opinions expressed are his own.

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by on February 16, 2012 Leave a Comment

Test-Based Reform: What Values are we Adding?

Post 2.  Read Post 1 here.

This post  was published on Anthony Cody’s blog, Living in Dialogue.

Practicing teachers, clinical professors, and researchers who work in the field know that assessing teachers or students requires much more than simply looking at test scores.  And indeed, researchers who have examined the value-added assessment system which purports to measure the “teacher effect” on student achievement test scores, question it’s validity and more important reliability.

The Data Used to Make High-Stakes Decisions on Teachers and Students

Value Added Effect

For example, Terry Hibpshman, of the  Kentucky Education Professional Standards Board, did an in-depth review of value-added models and concludes that even though VAM has been implemented in some locations (Tennessee, and Dallas), the methodologies “should not be considered mature or well-formed at this point in its history.”  Dr. Hibpshman goes on to explain that VAM models, by their very nature, are extremely complex, and unless one understands the statistical nature of these models, people are quick to make policy decisions without understanding the limitations of these models.

That said, the U.S. Department of Education (ED) has figured out a way to mandate linking student achievement test scores to teacher assessment using VAM.  If one reads the details of the NCLB Waivers, states must implement teacher and administrator evaluation that is tied in some way to student progress on high-stakes achievement tests.  This was initially a requirement for states receiving Race to the Top funds.  The Secretary of Education figured out a way to hold all states accountable to using VAM, because since he knew most states were chomping at the bit to reduce the hold the U.S. Department of Education because of the nutty No Child Left Behind act.  Now, any state getting a NCLB Waiver will have to use VAM as part of their assessment of teachers and administrators.

Now we have created a situation where states will use a system that has not been shown to be scientifically valid or reliable (VAM) by using high-stakes test scores which assume that the results on these tests tell us what students have learned in the course being tested, but also how much the teacher contributed (value added) to student progress.

Willis D. Hawley and Jacqueline Jordan Irvine, explain why students’ cultural identities are integral to “measuring” teacher effectiveness.

Drs. Hawley and Irvine  believe that the practices that teachers use should be part of any teacher assessment system.  Teaching practices, to be used in teacher assessment, need to be observed, or need to be described by teachers themselves.  In particular, the authors suggest that there are teaching practices that are called “culturally responsive pedagogy (CRP), and that these need to be included in any “high-stakes teaching evaluation.”

As Hawley and Irvine point out, culturally response teachers,

  • understand that all students, regardless of race or ethnicity, bring their culturally influenced cognition, behavior, and dispositions to school.
  • understand how semantics, accents, dialect, and discussion modes affect face-to-face interactions.
  • know how to adapt and employ multiple representations of subject-matter knowledge using students’ everyday lived experiences.

Hawley and Irvine identify six examples of CRP that taken individually can make a huge difference in embodying the racial and ethnical effects on student learning.  These practices are not new, but they reflect a more indirect approach to teaching and learning, and in all cases, the nature of the students is seen as fundamental in teaching.  Highly effective teachers use practices such as these, and they should be an integral part of the assessment of teachers.

  • Learning from family and community engagement
  • Developing caring relationships with students
  • Engaging and motivating students
  • Assessing student performance
  • Grouping students for instruction
  • Selecting and effectively using learning resources

Finally, we should add that the Board on Testing and Assessment (BOTA) of The National Academies issued a letter to the Department of Education on the Race to the Top Fund (RTTT).  The essence of the letter was a critique of the RTTT Fund’s insistence on linking student test scores to teacher effectiveness.  In the letter, the BOTA had this to say:

The initiative should support research based on data that links student test scores with their teachers, but should not prematurely promote the use of value-added approaches, which evaluate teachers based on gains in their students’ performance, to reward or punish teachers.

Achievement Test Scores

Do they measure what students have learned in a course of study?

Are achievement tests that are used as high-stakes assessments at the end of the school year a valid  measure of the curriculum standards specific to each teacher’s classroom, or are they estimates of what the curriculum should be, and estimates of what students should learn?

High-stakes test scores that are reported for students, schools, and districts are far from the reality of what students do and should learn.  We’ve been fooled into believing that test scores are valid measures of student performance.  Let’s look into this claim.

Let’s say we want to design a high-stakes test for mathematics for 8th graders in the state of Georgia.  The first item of business is to check the Georgia mathematics standards for grade 8.   According to the Georgia Department of Education , 8th graders:

will  understand various numerical representations, including square roots, exponents and scientific notation; use and apply geometric properties of plane figures, including congruence and the Pythagorean theorem; use symbolic algebra to represent situations and solve problems, especially those that involve linear relationships; solve linear equations, systems of linear equations and inequalities; use equations, tables and graphs to analyze and interpret linear functions; use and understand set theory and simple counting techniques; determine the theoretical probability of simple events; and make inferences from statistical data, particularly data that can be modeled by linear functions.

Please note this is only a summary of the 8th grade math standards!

There are 98 standards for 8th grade.  You can only create a test that a student can take in 1.5 – 3 hours.  We have to worry about student test stamina.  How long can an 8th grader sit for goodness sake.  Let’s say that we design a test with 75 items for the 98 standards.  First we note that not all of the curriculum can be “covered” in a single test, so the test makers must make a decision about which standards not to test.  We then realize if we are going to “test’ all of the standards, we only allocate one test item per standard, and then use the results on the test to claim that we have measured what a student has learned in 8th grade mathematics.  All done in one day, when in fact the student was enrolled in course that was at least 170 days of instruction.

The Long and Short of It All

We’ve created a standards-based testing system that is remarkably short on telling us what students have learned. We have also learned that the statistical model (Value Added Model) that has been shown to be inconsistent, and of questionable reliability.

How can we possibly use data from a complex system, the education of American students, to determine what the contribution of a teacher has on student learning?

What is the “tell” that creates this information on a teacher?  None.

There is more to teaching than simply preparing students for the test. There is attitude and effort, collaboration and teamwork, and the development of character.  There is inquiry, problem solving, creativity and innovation.

There is also more to preparing people to become teachers than dropping them into classroom with little or no preparation.  Why do we have it in our head that teaching requires little to no preparation.  Why do we entrust children with teachers who not licensed, when in the state of Georgia, a manicurist must take 9 months of intense training and pass two tests?

Do you think that a teacher’s effectiveness can be measured by using a complicated mathematical model that is based on student test scores?

 

 

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by on February 16, 2012 3 Comments

Test-Based Reform: Where is the Common Core Leading Us?

Part 1

Posted on Anthony Cody’s Living in Dialogue blog.

In a post last week, I reported that Georgia’s Cobb County School System rejected the superintendent’s proposal to hire 50 Teacher for America teachers for schools located in South Cobb.  Many of the South Cobb schools are underperforming schools.  I suggested that this was a good decision, but also indicated that it was done by default.  The default is, that the proposal never made it to agenda of the board and thus was withdrawn for the time being.  Is this another avoidance tactic?

Today, we expand our thinking to explore the nature of the achievement data that is used to make decisions about student progress and teacher effectiveness.  Our over obsession with test data has led to the narrowing of curriculum, and led to the goal of education to single a outcome—the improvement of test scores.  Period.

In the next post the challenge of teacher education is investigated, and the data is to show that high quality teaching results from teacher preparation programs that are clinically and experientially based.  Recommendations are then made for how alternative teacher education programs (including Teach for America) can be improved.

The Simple Mindedness of Test-Based Reform 

One of the serious issues plaguing education is that so many of us want a simplistic solutions to such a complex and diverse system.  We’ve been convinced that test score is a valid measure of student achievement, so much so that we willing to use the test scores to reward or punish students, teachers and schools.

Does One Size Fits All?

Have we made producing workers as the purpose of schooling? Is schools performance the basic tasks of creating enough workers with “adequate” abilities and the right attitude to become an employee?  (M. Peterson, 2009, http://www.wholeschooling.net/, extracted February 15, 2012).

The approach is, test- and standards-based reform seems to mean that school improvement is only based on a minimum set of core standards.

Achieve, Inc., has already developed the Common Core State Standards in Mathematics and Reading/Language Arts, and now in the writing phase of creating the Next Generation of Science Standards.  And right behind the common standards are the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC), a state consortium led again by Achieve, Inc. to develop the next generation K-12 assessments in English and math.  Does this work? Does one size fitsall?

This model is rooted in the myth that the United States is not competitive in the global market place because our students don’t perform at high enough levels on guess what: achievement tests.  The truth is that the U.S. is very competitive, and has been for decades.  With basing their thinking on test scores, politicians and think tank types have convinced the public that American schools are a failure, and the one kind of reform that will help us “race to the top” is driven by just one fact: we must raise test scores, and they must be raised every year.  Get a grip.

Competitiveness of U.S. Citizens. The United States is economically competitive as reported in the World Economic Forum’s 2010-2011 Global-Competitiveness report, and as reported by Iris Rotberg in her book Balancing Change and Tradition in Global Education Reform.  According to the World Economic Forum report, the U.S. is one of only 35 countries in the world that are at the highest stage of development—the innovation-driven economy.

The United States now ranks fifth in the world in global competitiveness.  This ranking has fallen one position, from a higher 4th to a lower 5th in the last year.  At this time, the U.S. economy is the largest in the world.  However, the World Economic Forum researchers have concluded that the U.S. economic competitiveness has weaknesses.  The report reads that the weaknesses include the business communities’ criticism of the public and private institutions, that there is a great lack of trust in politicians, and a lack of a strong relationships between government and business.   And the U.S. debt continues to grow. (World Economic Forum Report, 2011 – 2012. www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_GCR_Report_2011-12.pdf, p. 14, extracted February 15, 2012). 

According to the World Economic Forum, student test scores on international tests in reading, mathematics and science were not related to the weakening of the U.S.’s ability to compete. Period.

In Balancing Change and Tradition in Global Education Reform, Iris C. Rotberg, Research Professor of Education Policy at The George Washington University, concluded that continuing to use student test scores is not a valid argument to understand a nation’s competitiveness.  According to Rotberg, a nation’s competitiveness is too complicated, and is impacted by other variables as identified in the World Economic Report.  She puts it this way:

Other variables, such as outsourcing to gain access to lower-wage employees, the climate and incentives for innovation, tax rates, health-care and retirement costs, the extent of government subsidies or partnerships, protectionism, intellectual-property enforcement, natural resources, and exchange rates overwhelm mathematics and science scores in predicting economic competitiveness.

There is ample evidence that student test scores are not a barometer of U.S. economic growth, or depression.  U.S. test scores did not cause or contribute to the Great Recession, any more than they caused the Economic Boom of the 1990s.

For example, I have included a graph below which shows the United States GDP growth rate from 1957 (the year of Sputnik) to 2012.  If you scroll down to Table 2, which shows the NAEP trends in 13 year old math scores, you’ll note that student math scores rose during the last 39 years, while the GDP rose and fell during the same period of time.  What caused the GDP fluctuations?  Student test scores?  I don’t think so.

Table 1. U.S. GDP 1957 – 2012.  Source: http://www.tradingeconomics.com/united-states/gdp-growth, extracted February 15, 2012.

Rising Test Scores. We’ve been raising test scores ever since the National Assessment of Education Progress  (NAEP) began administering low-stakes tests in 1969 to a nationally representative sample of American students at grades 4, 8, and 12 for main assessments, and ages 9, 13, and 17 for long term assessments. For example, the trend in mathematics scores for 13-year old students has shown an overall increase in scores since 1973, when testing began by NAEP.  The data for 9 year-olds follows the same trend, while the for 17 year olds there is not a significant difference from 1973 – 2008, although it is higher now.   Long term trends in reading slowly rose from 1971 – 2008, in the same manner as mathematics scores.  The same can be said about science scores.

Table 2. Trend in 13 year old math scores 1973 – 20008.  SOURCE: U.S. Department of Education, Institute of Education Sciences, National Center for Education Statistics, National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), various years, 1973–2008 Long-Term Trend Mathematics Assessments.

Achievement Gaps. The achievement gap that exists between students by race/ethnicity is shown in Table 3 and by family income as shown in Table 4.  The NAEP data shows that compared to 2004, there was no significant change in the average scores of White, Black, or Hispanic students at age 17.  This is significant because this was the period during which the No Child Left Behind Act was implemented.  One of the underlying premises of the act was to decrease the gap among white, Black and Hispanic students.  The data shows that this did not happen.

Family income also has a powerful impact on achievement scores.  As shown in Table 4, there are significant differences the achievement scores on NAEP tests from 203 – 2011 based on family income.  Family income is determined by eligibility for free or reduced lunches.  As shown in the graph, the differences are quite apparent.  Abbott and Joireman have shown that family income level may contribute more to the disparity among students scores than race/ethnicity. Gerald Coles reports on Anthony Cody’s Living in Dialogue blog that the achievement gap between the rich and the poor has grown, especially in the last decade.

It isn’t enough to simply acknowledge the gap that exists among groups by race/ethnicity or family income.  We must go deeper and ask why and how the present form of educational reform, which purported to help solve the problem, has actually contributed to preventing any progress.

Lisa Delpit, Eminent Scholar and Executive Director of the Center for Urban Education and Innovation at Florida International University, and author of Other People’s Children: Cultural Conflict in the Classroom, and the forthcoming book, Multiplication is for White People: Raising Expectations for Other People’s Children, suggests that the “programmed, mechanistic strategies designed to achieve the programmed, mechanistic goal of raising test scores” strips away the humanity that should be the basis for education (Delpit, Other People’s Children, 2005).  The present obsession with standards and test scores has driven us further away from realistic goals that she calls for.  She puts it this way:

Nowhere is the result more glaring than in urban classrooms serving low-income children of color, where low test scores meet programmed, scripted teaching.  The reductionism spawned has created settings in which teachers and students are treated as nonthinking objects to be manipulated and “managed.”

Dr. Delpit explains that she is more concerned now with the development of the character of students than she was years before.  The reductionist goals of the present reform movement are not serving most children in American schools.  She speaks about Hyde Schools as an exemplar of schools that focus on the character of students, not on their test scores.  In her first book, Other People’s Children she quotes the founder of the Hyde Schools, Joe Gauld explaining that the message to students is:

  • that they have an important purpose on this earth and the unique potential to fulfill it.
  • that their true worth is measured not by their social status, intellect, or talents, but by the strength of their character
  • that we admire their attitude and effort, and care less about their actual achievements, because these will come with time if they develop character traits like those emblazoned  on the Hyde School shield: courage, integrity, concern, curiosity, and leadership.

Schools, like the Hyde Schools, base their work and curriculum of a set of goals that are very different than the narrow interpretation of our test- and standards-based school culture.  As Hyde Schools director and founder Joseph A. Gauld explains:

Over the years, making academic proficiency the purpose of American education has shifted the benefits of learning away from students and families, onto schools, colleges, businesses, and the education industry itself.

In her new book, Dr. Delpit reminds us that there is no achievement gap at birth, and is concerned that the conversation about student’s education has become limited and restricted.  She asks:

  • What happened to the societal desire to instill character?
  • To develop creativity?
  • To cultivate courage and kindness?
  • How can we look at a small bundle of profound potential and see only a number describing inadequacy?

Dr. Delpit believes that classrooms can be created that speak to “children’s strengths rather than hammering them with their weakness, and about building connections to cultures and communities.” (Delpit, 2012, p. XXI).

Dr. Coles suggests that family income or wealth can make significant differences in ending the achievement gap.  Work that provides a family with a decent income, work with reasonable hours, health care for all citizens, housing, and college education—these would help children in ways that Dr. Delpit documents so well in her research.

 

Table 3. Trend in NAEP Mathematics Average Scores for 17-year-old students, by race/ethnicity. SOURCE: U.S. Department of Education, Institute of Education Sciences, National Center for Education Statistics, National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), various years, 1973–2008 Long-Term Trend Mathematics Assessments.  Click on the graph to go to the NAEP site where you can explore the data.

Table 4. Average 2003 – 2011 Mathematics Scores for 8th Graders by Family Income as Determined by Eligibility for Free or Reduced Lunches. Click on the graph to go to the NAEP site where you can explore the data.

What do you think about test- and standards-based reform?  Should we continue using high-stakes tests?

 

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by on February 9, 2012 3 Comments

Hip Hop Generation, Science Education & Reform

The current wave of reform in science education is not in the best interests of the diverse cultures that comprise the population of the United States.  The reform is standards- and test-based, and seeks to create schooling that ignores differences in people, and instead creates an outline of what is to learned for all students regardless of where they live.

During my career as a teacher, I have been an advocate forhumanistic education, which is a person-centered approach in which teachers create environments that are experiential and ones in which discovering, valuing, and exploring underscore the activities of students.

While doing research for the first edition of the Art of Teaching Science, I became aware of Dr. Christopher Emdin, through his research in science education.  In particular it was Emdin’s research that focused on science education in urban classrooms.

In the first publication that I found written by Dr. Emdin, entitled Exploring the context of urban science classrooms the concepts of corporate and communal classroom organizations were introduced.

Corporate vs Communal Teaching

Corporate classroom organization occurs when students and teachers are involved with subject matter and functioning that follow a factory or production mode of social interaction.  The primary goal in corporate classes is to maintain order and to achieve specific results, such as scores on achievement tests.

Communal classrooms involve students and teachers working with subject matter through interactions that focus on interpersonal relationships, community and the collective betterment of the group.

Hip-Hop Generation

Find Christopher Emdin's Book on Amazon

Recently Dr. Emdin published a ground-breaking book entitled Urban Science Education for the Hip-Hop Generation.  The book provides essential tools for the urban science educator and researcher, according to the publisher.  But it is much more than that.

Christopher Emdin say this about the philosophy that under-girds his book:

In urban classroom, the culture of the school is generally different from the culture of the students.  In addition, a majority of students are either African American or Latino/a while their teachers are mostly White.  Culturally, urban youth are mostly immersed in a generally communal and distinctly hip-hop based way of knowing and being.  By this, I mean that the shared realities that come with being socioeconomically deprived areas brings urban youth together in ways that transcend race/ethnicity and embraces their collective connections to hip-hop.  Concurrently, hip-hop is falsely interpreted as being counter to the objectives of school, or seen as “outside of” school culture.

In the current conversation about educational reform, and in particular, science education reform, the thinking reflected in Emdin’s book should be fundamental reading for science teachers and teacher educators, as well the corporate types that are aggressively pushing the corporate take over of schooling which relies on a very traditional model of teaching.

Hip-Hop and Reform of Education

As I pointed out at the beginning of this piece, my interest was piqued after reading Emdin’s research comparing and contrasting the corporate vs the communal organization of classrooms.  I would expand this to include whole school systems.

The danger we face is that American education is being led to adopt and solidify, through common standards and common assessments, a corporate management style of classrooms and schools.  Teachers and students are together in the service of reaching the goals and objectives (standards) set by outside groups (although only one group wrote the Common Core State Standards in Mathematics and English/Language arts & the same company is writing the common science standards—Achieve, Inc.).  To meet these standards, the same organizations have developed bubble type achievement tests, and mandated that all students should reach the same level of proficiency regardless of where they live.

Emdin’s approach is to encourage classrooms that are organized as communal systems in which teachers and students work with subject matter through interactions that focus on interpersonal relationships, community, and the collective betterment of the group.

It is obvious that the corporate approach would see hip-hop as something outside of schooling, and reject it as a legitimate form of communication inside education.  Of course, this is a huge mistake.  One of the biggest problems that beginning teachers have who are hired to teach in urban classrooms is their lack of knowledge of their students’ culture, and how to work with students in a culture very different than their own.

The county in which I live in Georgia just turned down the superintendent’s request to hire 50 Teach for America Teachers and place them in south Cobb schools, which reflect the urban culture described above, especially since most of the students in these schools are Latino/a.  The decision needless to say was a controversial one.  The TFA is a large corporate entity that places “teachers” in full time teaching positions in urban schools.  However the TFA teachers have no prior training in teaching other than a four week summer program prior to employment.  TFA will tell you that their teachers help urban students learn more (on achievement tests) than other beginning teachers.  There is little to no evidence to support this.  But because TFA teachers are from prestigious schools and are bright and smart, the common sense notion is that they are the kind of teachers needed for urban schools, like the schools in South Cobb.

Not so according to many teachers in Cobb County and its school board.  Not only is there is a budget shortage in Cobb (as in most other districts), but by hiring 50 TFA teachers would mean that 50 experienced teachers would have to go.  Those who embrace the TFA mantra tell us that they will deliver the best and the brightest, and the most inexperienced professionals for America’s urban schools.   Its not solving the problem, and the teachers and school board in Cobb made the right decision.

Communal Teaching and Reform

The kind of teaching environment that Emdin suggests for urban schools is a communal one.  Communal classrooms involve students and teachers working with subject matter through interactions that focus on interpersonal relationships, community and the collective betterment of the group.  This type of teaching requires not only an understanding of the student’s culture, but the courage and willingness to create classrooms that are based on relationships, empathy, and understanding, and there is substantial evidence that in order to do this the best and most experienced teachers are needed.  Putting unlicensed and inexperienced teachers in urban classrooms is more of an experiment being carried out by TFA rather than a solution to urban schooling.

Emdin provides insight for us as to go about being a teacher in urban classrooms.  Because Emdin places great emphasis encouraging teachers to understand their urban students and he says this:

…it is necessary to understand how students know, feel, and experience the world by becoming familiar with where students come from and consciously immersing oneself in their culture.  This immersion in student culture, even for teachers who may perceive themselves to be outsiders to hip-hop, simply requires taking the time to visit, observe, and study student culture.

Dr. Emdin suggests that classrooms should be viewed as a “space with its own reality.”  In particular he urges us to focus on the “experiences of hip-hop participants as a conduit through which they can connect to science.”  Using the concept “reality pedagogy” teaching in the urban classroom means creating a new dialogue in which the student’s beliefs and behaviors are considered normal, and that the experiences within the hip-hop culture can actually be the way to learning science.

You might want to follow this link to a review of Urban Science Education for the Hip-Hop Generation by Jose M. Rios in Democracy & Education.

What do you think about Dr. Emdin’s ideas about teaching and learning in the urban classroom?  What experiences would you like to share with us about teaching?

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by on February 7, 2012 3 Comments

The Fordham Report on Science Standards Gets a “D”

Even reports published by prestigious institutions can be flawed and deserve a low grade.  In my own view, this is the case for the Fordham Institute’s new report entitled The State of State Science Standards that was published recently.

Yet when you do a Google search for “Fordham review science standards” there are hundreds of links to articles and blog posts that reference the Fordham report.   Nearly all of these posts accept at face value the results and conclusions that the Fordham Institute makes about the state of the science standards in the United States.  According to the Fordham report (which grades all states on a scale of A – F):

The results of this rigorous analysis paint a fresh—but still bleak—picture. A majority of the states’ standards remain mediocre to awful. In fact, the average grade across all  states is—once again—a thoroughly undistinguished C.

The map of the United States shows the grades that Fordham assigned each state, grading the state A if it was outstanding, and an F if it was awful.

According to the report only California and the District of Columbia had really strong sets of standards, and they scored a straight A. In this scoring exercise, only four other states earned high enough scores to get a grade of A-. Fordham reported that only 25% of the states received grades of B or better, meaning the other 75% of the states have a lot of work to do to improve their standards—according to the Fordham report.

Titles of blog posts paint a picture of science education that is not very flattering. Here are a few:

These are typical of the kinds of reporting about the “state of the state science standards.”  In the Fordham world, science education in America is in sad shape.  They offer solace to states that did not receive high marks, however. They can look to California or to the District of Columbia for a Model A set of science standards, and then re-write them to move the standards into Fordham’s concept of grade A science standards.

But, should we accept the Fordham score card as being a valid and reliable assessment of the state of the state science standards?

The short answer is no.

The long answer is discussed below the map.

Grades for State Science Standards, 2012. Source: State of the State Science Standards, Fordham Institute, p. 6.

Analysis of the Fordham Criteria Used to Assess Science Standards

According to the Fordham report, their

experts employed new and improved content-specific criteria as well as the “common grading metric” that has been used for all of the reports in this cycle of Fordham standards reviews.  (p.5)  Application of those criteria and the common metric yields—for every state in every subject—a two-part score: a tally from zero to seven for “content and rigor,” and a tally from zero to three for “clarity and specificity.” These were combined such that each set of standards obtained a total number grade (up to ten), which was then converted to a letter grade, A – F. (p. 6, The State of State Science Standards)

In the Fordham report there is a section of Methods, Criteria and Grading Metric in which the authors report that they devised  content-specific critieria against which the science standards in each state were evaluated.  The authors divided the science content into learning expectations through grade eight (lists of statements divided into Physical Science, Earth and Space Science, and Life Science) , and learning expectations for grades nine through 12 (lists of statements for physics, chemistry, Earth and Space science, and life science).

I was shocked when I read and then analyzed the criteria that Fordham used to analyze the state science standards.  There are about 100 statements of the content that Fordham thinks students should learn in science K – 12.  Lets call them Fordham’s science standards.  They are roughly divided equally among the seven categories identified above (3 categories of science at the K – 8 level, and 4 categories of science at the 9 – 12 level.

Sample Fordham Science Content Statements

Here are some examples of the Fordham science standards taken from different content categories in the Fordham Report.

  • Know some of the evidence that electricity and magnetism are closely related (physical science)
  • Trace major events in the history of life on earth, and understand that the diversity of life (including human life) results from biological evolution (life science)
  • Recognize Earth as one planet among its solar system neighbors (earth science)
  • Be able to use Lewis dot structures to predict the shapes and polarities of simple molecules (chemistry)
  • Know the basic structures of chromosomes and genes down to the molecular level (biology)

I analyzed all of the Fordham statements using Bloom’s Taxonomy of Educational Objectives.  I did this because the Fordham statements are written as if they were extracted from the 1960s and 1970s when Bloom’s Taxonomy was used to write educational objectives which we called standards years later.  There are other ways to analyze (science) standards.  I’ll deal with them in another post.  For now, lets use Bloom.

Low Cognitive Level Found in the Fordham Science Criteria

What did I find?  The Fordham standards are low level, mediocre at best, and do not include affective or psycho-motor objectives.  I analyzed each Fordham statement using the Bloom categories in the Cognitive, Affective and Psycho-motor Domain.  Table 1 shows how the 100 Fordham science standards are distributed among the various categories of Bloom.

Ninety percent of all of the Fordham science criteria fall into the lowest levels of Bloom’s Taxonomy in the cognitive domain.  Indeed, 52% of the statements are at the lowest level (Knowledge) which includes primarily the recall of data or information.  Twenty-eight percent of the Fordham science statements were written at the Comprehension level, and only 10% at the Application level.  What this means is that the authors wrote their own science standards at a very low level.  In fact of the 100 statements only 10% were at the higher levels.  No statements were identified at the synthesis level, which in science is awful.  Only one science standard was found at the highest level of evaluation.  Cognitively, the Fordham standards are not much to write home about.  And it is amazing, given the low level of the Fordham standards that any state would score lower than their own standards.

The Fordham authors state that quantitative thinking and problem solving are critical to science teaching, yet when you read their criteria, there is no support for this statement.

If they really used the science content criteria that they list in their report to evaluate state science standards, it seems unreasonable that any state would score lower than their own criteria.  The Fordham science content statements are in general examples of very old ways of stating objectives, and do not even reflect the National Science Education Standards which were written in the 1990s.  Indeed, they made no attempt to integrate the most recent work done by the National Research Council’s publication, A Framework for K-12 Science Education.

The Fordham list of science content is a sham, and for states to be held to their standards is not only unprofessional, but a disgrace.

When you study the Fordham standards, you find no mention of affective goals of science teaching, nor any real reference to psycho-motor skills.  Students should be engaged with laboratory and hands-on manipulation of equipment, yet the Fordham group choose not to write anything in this area.  Attitudes toward science and technology are important aspects of science teaching, and to ignore them does not represent good practice.

Table 1. Level of Thinking in the Fordham Science Standards

    (Criteria Used to Evaluate U.S. State Science Standards)

Category of Objectives

Bloom’s Outcome Verbs

 Number of Fordham Science Standards % of Fordham Science Standards

Cognitive Domain
1.0 Knowledge Define, describe, identify, list, name

52

52
2.0 Comprehension Classify, explains, estimates, illustrates, restates

28

28
3.0 Application Applies, assesses, collects, computes, constructs, determines, relates, shows, uses

10

10
4.0 Analysis Analyze, break down, compare, contrast, distinguish, separates

9

9
5.0 Synthesis Adapts, creates, designs, formulates, hypothesizes, invents, revises

0

0
6.0 Evaluation Appraises, compares & contrasts, concludes, criticizes, defends, interprets

1

1

Affective Domain
Receiving, Responding, Organizing, Internalizing values Asks, answers, adheres, acting

0

0

Psycho-motor Domain
Perceiving, responding, set, mechanical uses, complex responses Choosing, readiness to act, performing math equation, using personal skills as with a computer, assembling

0

0

Science Inquiry: Little to None in the Fordham Report

One of the areas that is completely missing in the lists of science to be learned are standards for science inquiry.   What is amusing here is that the Fordham authors criticized the states for “poor integration of scientific inquiry.”  If any group showed poor integration of inquiry into the standards, it has to be the Fordham group.  They do mention one inquiry science outcome or objective, yet they slam the states for not integrating science inquiry.  They need to get their own house in order before they go around the country laying it on the states.

The Fordham Institute doesn’t have much faith in inquiry science teaching.  One of the authors of the current report (Dr. Paul Gross) reviewed the NRC Framework for K-12 Science Education, and published the review through the Fordham Institute.  In a recent post about Gross’s report I wrote this:

Gross also observes that, to their credit, the authors “wisely dismiss what has long been held indispensable for K-12 science: “inquiry-based education.”  I am not sure where Gross gets this idea that the NRC report dismisses inquiry-based education because inquiry is prominently identified in the NRC report and in fact the authors of the Framework state that in “all inquiry-based approaches to science teaching, our expectation is that students will themselves engage in the practices and not merely learn about them secondhand.”  The Fordham report is totally off-base here.  The Framework does support inquiry-based learning, and indeed devotes an entire Dimension of its report to inquiry in its section on practices.

Gross claims that the NRC Framework authors “wisely demote what has long been held the essential condition of K-12 science: ‘Inquiry-based learning.’”  The report does NOT demote inquiry, and in fact devotes considerable space to discussions of the Practices of science and engineering, which is another way of talking about inquiry. In fact, inquiry can found in 71 instances in the Framework.  It seems to me that Gross and the Fordham Foundation is trying to make the case that Practices and Crosscutting ideas are accessories, and that the part of the Framework that should be taken seriously is the Disciplinary Core Ideas, or Dimension 3.  This will result is a set of science standards that are only based on 1/3 of the Framework’s recommendations.

So, for the Fordham Institute to make statements about how science inquiry is NOT integrated with content is absurd.

Undermining Evolution:  Who Would Know From the Fordham Content Criteria?

According to the Fordham authors, the way the science standards in U.S. states are written, creates an undermining of evolution.  This is an odd conclusion that they make because their own science criteria has only one science standard that deals with evolution and it is this statement:

Trace major events in the history of life on earth, and understand that the diversity of life (including human life) results from biological evolution (life science)

If anyone is undermining evolution with regards to science standards, it has to be the Fordham Institute itself.  How could they possibly do an honest review of biology and evolution when they make ONLY one statement about evolution.  Yes, they could scan through the online versions of each state’s science standards and look for examples of how evolution is approached or not.

In the section of their report where they identify four ways the science standards go wrong, an undermining of evolution is identified as problem 1.  Yet, when you read this section, its more like a history lesson on science education’s controversy over the teaching of evolution in the context of religious views as presented by creationism, intelligent design and critical thinking about controversial issues.  Their comments are not the result of an analysis of the state science standards, but a reflection on the current status of the teaching of evolution.  This author does not disagree with their conclusions here, but does not agree that these statements emerged from an analysis of science education standards in America.

What is the Status of Your State Science Standards?

You will find a review of your state’s science standards in the Fordham Institute report.  I decided to review the Georgia section of the Fordham report.  Georgia didn’t do too well.  It received a grade of C.  The report was criticized for its unevenness and disorganization, and was considered mediocre in general.  The evaluation ranged from spotty to excellent to pretty bad.

Yet when you go to the Georgia Standards online, a different picture emerges.  If you compare the list of science content criteria listed in the Fordham report to the standards that outlined in the Georgia report, there is no comparison.  The Georgia standards are more comprehensive than the science content criteria that the Fordham report identifies.  There is a stronger presence of science process and the nature of science.

The Fordham group was not pleased with the fact that Georgia science educators offer a wide range of courses at the high school level in addition to the traditional courses in biology, chemistry and physics.  Georgia science teachers developed additional courses such as astronomy, botany, earth systems, ecology, geology, and microbiology.

My score for Georgia would an A.  What score would you give your state?

What do think of this analysis of the Fordham Institute on The State of State Science Standards?  Do you agree with the report, or do you see what I am exploring as exposing some of the fallacy in their reporting.  Tell us what you think. 

 

 

 

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