Nothing Personal, Just Money and Politics

In an article headlined, A Popular Principal, Wounded by Government’s Good Intentions, the New York Times tells the appalling story of a highly effective principal dismissed from her position so that her school could qualify for millions of Federal dollars.

Ms. Irvine's job woes serve as a cautionary tale of the perils of top-down, one-size solutions in a country without a tradition of nationally centralized education oversight. By all accounts, Ms. Irvine is a great principal. Her accomplishments at the school are legion: she rolled out many enrichment programs, developed a new arts curriculum, created community partnerships, and reinvented the school as an arts magnet. None of it counts in the face of the school's low test scores. What is more, it is not like her raw material started out with advantages.

The New York Times used the wrong adjective in their headline. It should read, “A Highly Effective Principal, Wounded by Government's Good Intentions.” That she is also popular is beside the point.

At the heart of things is whether the testing system under the federal No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 can fairly assess schools full of middle-class children, as well as a school like Wheeler, with a 97 percent poverty rate and large numbers of refugees, many with little previous education.

...snip...

About half the 230 students are foreign-born, collectively speaking 30 languages. Many have been traumatized; a third see one of the school’s three caseworkers. During Ms. Irvine’s tenure, suspensions were reduced to 7 last year, from 100.

Japan's education system must surely be one of the most rigid of nationally centralized systems. The Ministry of Education has policies for everything. It has been said every student, no matter where in the country, is on the same page of the textbook on any particular school day. That assertion only slightly overstates the case. Every teacher in every school hews closely to the national curriculum, using one of a handful of nationally approved textbooks. For example, only six textbooks are approved for use in middle school English classes. Nevertheless, Japanese administrators may make discretionary judgments on a “ke-subaike-su” (case-by-case) basis. How did the supposedly more creative and individualistic American officials respond?

Justin Hamilton, a spokesman for the United States Department of Education, noted that districts don’t have to apply for the grants, that the rules are clear and that federal officials do not remove principals.

A school with as many immigrants as Ms. Irvine's requires a customized assessment. By definition, a standardized test normed to an American population will be unable to capture the knowledge and experience of immigrants. I have a true story about an American boy born to middle-class parents living in Japan. He went to Japanese pre-school and kindergarten. His mother wanted to enroll him into first grade at an American school. The first grade teacher gave the boy a readiness “test” which consisted of asking him questions about an American fairy tale.

The boy “failed” because he did not know who Rumpelstiltskin was. Never mind that the teacher had never heard of Momotaro, a famous character from a Japanese fairy tale. Never mind the boy was reading and doing math at higher levels than his peers. Because the Japanese and American academic calendars are very different, there was only two months left to the American school year. She admitted the boy conditionally into the first grade with the caveat that he would probably be starting first grade over in September. Imagine her surprise when this same boy scored in the 99th percentile on every section of the first grade Stanford 9 test just a month later.

So often reading tests can become experience tests when given to students outside the intended population -- like immigrants.

Students take the reading test after one year in the country. Ms. Irvine tells a story about Mr. Mudasigana’s son Oscar and the fifth-grade test.
Oscar needed 20 minutes to read a passage on Neil Armstrong landing his Eagle spacecraft on the moon; it should have taken 5 minutes, she said, but Oscar was determined, reading out loud to himself.

The first question asked whether the passage was fact or fiction. “He said, ‘Oh, Mrs. Irvine, man don’t go on the moon, man don’t go on the back of eagles, this is not true,’ ” she recalled. “So he got the five follow-up questions wrong — penalized for a lack of experience.”

Meanwhile, the community is deeply impressed with the school, regardless of its test scores. Many middle class parents have enrolled their children, so many that half the children in the early grades will be middle class. Even if the school does nothing more, when these kids take the standardized test, the results will show dramatic improvement. Will Ms. Irvine get her job back then? Does she have a job now?

The district has replaced Ms. Irvine with an interim principal and will conduct a search for a replacement.

And Ms. Irvine, who hoped to finish her career on the front lines, working with children, will be Burlington’s new school improvement administrator.

On the other hand, if Ms. Irvine has successfully set her school on a sustainable growth path, perhaps she should go and work the same magic on other schools in dire need of her skills. Furthermore, she should spare not a moment's thought about the opinions of some segments of education society who seem bent on belittling achievement.

Yes, What About Student Accountability?

Brian Toporek began by asking, “What About Student Accountability?”

If college professors hold students 100 percent accountable for their own learning, shouldn't K-12 teachers ease students into taking responsibility for their own education? That's the question Daniel Willingham, a psychology professor from the University of Virginia, asks in a guest post on the Washington Post's Answer Sheet blog.

Willingham notes that among his university colleagues, the professors aren't concerned with whether students show up to class or study. "Most professors figure that their job is to teach well. Whether the student learns or not is up to him or her," he says.

First, I would quibble with the statement “professors aren't concerned with whether students show up to class or study. 'Most professors figure that their job is to teach well. Whether the student learns or not is up to him or her.'”

When I was a college student, professors did not assign "homework." We assigned it to ourselves. We did as many math problems as it took to get comfortable. We asked about the problems we could not solve. In a typical class period, there would be questions about maybe three or four of the problems. Students who did not do the work on their own initiative would suffer the natural consequences at test time.

I had one professor, an immigrant from kindergarten, who assigned and collected homework from her college students. The students vilified her for treating them as children. Students say they wish to be treated like adults, but today, professors who treat students as I was typically treated (that is, like and adult) when I was a student are likely to find themselves in front of the department chair defending their practice.

The university is no longer a university. It has become a customer-driven marketplace where the customer is always right. In my student days, complaining students got nowhere with the administration even if their complaints were warranted. Consequently, there were sometimes abuses of power. However, the wholesale adoption of the market model has not produced better outcomes.

As Judith Steele points out in her comment, "All teachers of college students are familiar with these common behaviors and habits that result in low or failing grades: late arrival to class, high absenteeism, no book purchased, work not turned in, unprepared for class, sleeping in class, and the ubiquitous texting in class."

Yes, we are all familiar with these common behaviors. Dr. Willingham even introduced his article with his own anecdote.

Not long ago a student told me a story about taking the SAT. Students were to bring a photo I.D., and the girl in front of her in line had not brought one. When she was told that she couldn’t take the test without the i.d., she was incredulous. She literally did not believe that there would be a consequence for her forgetfulness. She assumed that there would be a Plan B for people like her. When it became clear that plan B was “go home and next time, bring your I.D.,” she was angry and scornful.

I see this attitude not infrequently in freshmen I teach.

Many university departments now expect professors to organize their class as if it were a high school with multiple graded homework assignments, weekly quizzes, attendance taking, etc. and a lot of hand holding. Students complain loudly in class if the professor assigns what some of them believe to be too many problems. Actually, I am willing to hold their hands and lead them across the academic bridge to accountability and achievement that I am building for them. Many refuse to cross. They often go to the department chair and essentially get teleported. Beam me up, Scotty. Administrators tell professors to ensure somehow that every student passes, regardless of the quality of work.

Of course, starting in junior high, students in my day were held increasingly accountable for our own grades and learning. Today, teachers just say, "Just wait till you get to college" instead of training immature adolescents to become relatively mature 18-year old scholars.

However, I am sympathetic. Without administrative support, (and lack of administrative support is the number one reason teachers leave teaching), teachers have difficulty doing their jobs and training the children in the way they should go. In some school environments, maintaining control is all a teacher can manage. I once had a principal who allowed no D's or F's. He simply changed the grades of those recalcitrant teachers who gave what students earned.

I mentor a young, talented and reflective high school teacher who teaches in a well equipped school located in a high income area. Her main struggle and frustration is student behavior. There is something seriously wrong as long as administrators hold teachers more responsible for student behavior than the students themselves (and their parents).

Bryan Toporek ended by asking, "But how would you propose capturing that idea of student accountability in a revamped teacher evaluation process?" I added the following comment to his post.

Before capturing "that idea" of student accountability, ie, the idea that students are responsible for their own learning, I propose a more fundamental idea of student accountability.

Students should be held accountable for their behavior...I don't care how "bored" a student is, boredom is never an acceptable reason for disruptive behavior and disrespecting the teacher. Administrators need to be strong enough to stand up to parents who excuse their child's behavior on account of so-called "boredom." What many teachers mean by lack of administrative support is lack of classroom management support and caving to parents.

Let students be held accountable for their behavior first, and accountability for learning may well take care of itself.

MacDuff: The New New Math

ASUs Cognitive Instruction in Mathematical Modeling (CIMM), makes a huge claim: the ability to render “all the notoriously difficult” mathematics topics like fractions, negative numbers, place value, and exponents “trivial.” Those pesky math topics well deserve their reputation. The trouble students have with understanding math can usually be traced to misconceptions with fractions, negative numbers, place value, and exponents. In fact, textbook adoption committees can save precious time by limiting evaluation to these particular topics.

Math Teachers Do Not Understand Math

The mountain of documentation that teachers are not learning the math we expect them to teach, especially at the elementary level, grows higher every day. I touched on this point in my report on calculator research with young children. The National Council of Teachers of Mathematics has gone on record recommending calculator use in the earliest grades with the important caveat, “under the guidance of skilled teachers.” Ah yes, skilled math teachers, where are they to be found? By all accounts, skilled math teachers are not to be found in our elementary schools. Hence, the subtitle of my report, “A Moot Point Without Skilled Teachers.” Targeted efforts to improve the content knowledge of our teachers have proven disappointing.

Dr. Robert MacDuff discussed the lack of skilled math teachers and the failure of teachers to master math content in spite of all efforts in his essay entitled, “the Math Problem.” His intriguing title means he believes the problem is with the math content itself. Dr. MacDuff asks, “Could mathematics itself be flawed?” Whatever could he mean? Is he proposing to fix mathematics? In a word, yes, Dr. MacDuff suggests retooling math content from scratch.

Our research suggests that the problem lies in the difficulties imposed on the students by asking them to learn a flawed mathematics content.  Their difficulties in turn, lead to a drastic underestimation of their capabilities and thence to shortchanging them in their education.  The solution therefore requires a profound re-thinking of the foundations and assumptions of mathematics itself. 

Whoa, that's ambitious. Dr. MacDuff would start by considering collections of objects.

The system of ideas that is emerging from this process can be described as a “mathematics of quantity”, which takes as its starting point the consideration of collections of objects. 

I have been on the education merry-go-round for quite a while and I remember when one of the carousel horses was New Math, which took for its starting point, set theory. What are sets, but collections of objects? Was Dr. MacDuff proposing a return to the detested New Math? Let's see.

This approach separates the learning of mathematics into four major subsections: conceptual understanding (grouping structure), symbol construction (algorithmic manipulations), problem solving and mathematical reasoning.  As defined here, conceptual understanding and mathematical reasoning are not to be found in standard approaches to mathematics education.  And yet these are the critical components.

Teach Real-World Math

Dr. MacDuff is not suggesting the use of real world applications, although he is not precluding them either. “Real-world” means the idea that math is happening all around us. Number sense (and mathematics) starts, not with numerals, but with collections of objects, Piagetan conservation of quantity and relationships between quantities.

Some math teachers do emphasize conceptual understanding and mathematical reasoning in their teaching practice. A student may be lucky to draw only one or two such teachers sometime between kindergarten and high school. However, the traditional American approach makes conceptual understanding and mathematical reasoning the servant of algorithms, not its master. In other words, many teachers try to use mathematical reasoning to help students memorize the algorithms rather than guiding students to learn the math for which the conventional algorithm becomes one of many possible problem-solving strategies.

I deplore the current drive to push first grade curriculum into kindergarten. Teachers give kindergarten children pencils and paper and teach them conventional algorithms. The children spend the first few weeks of kindergarten learning to write numerals. Some of them even appear to master the so-called math they are taught. If they dependably get right answers, they internalize the idea that they are good at math, when in actuality they may not understand math at all.

It is possible to execute an algorithm with no real understanding. How many adults have any idea what is mathematically happening when they perform an algorithm like long division? The math mis-education is further compounded when non-math explanations are routinely substituted for and identified as math explanations. A good example is the typical explanation for the division of fractions. Ask any good math student and you will be led through division of fractions as multiplication by the reciprocal, a non math explanation for why the trick mathematically works. Or how about multiplication of decimals? Mathematically you are not counting decimal places; something mathematical is happening that makes counting decimal places work.

Start Math Instruction by Avoiding Numerals

Children can learn lots and lots of math without ever picking up a pencil and paper. In fact, making kids write math before they have mastered the mathematical relationships creates learning obstacles the children may or may not overcome. Meanwhile, many of these same children, the ones who get right answers, have been told by our education establishment that they are good in math, and they believe it. In the plainest terms, schools have been lying to students about their math abilities forever. For thirty years, I have preached this idea about math education like an evangelist.

I teach Algebra. I cannot tell you how many math whizzes show up to Algebra without the slightest clue about the concept of place value. Sure, they can name the place of any given digit, but naming is a far cry from understanding the mechanism of place value and its importance in mathematics. I almost always redo elementary math with students before we launch into the “real” subject matter of my class, algebra.

According to Dr. MacDuff, one part of the brain deals with math, while another part of the brain deals with numerals (like “12”) and yet another part of the brain deals with linguistic representation of numbers (like “twelve”). The traditional approach to math stimulates the wrong parts of the brain. No wonder so few students (and their teachers who were once students) get it.

Dr. MacDuff is not proposing a return to New Math. He is proposing a structural retooling of the math curriculum so that we actually stimulate the part of the brain the deals with math. Some of us have taught that way all along. Dr. MacDuff proposes to make my idiosyncratic methods the system-wide norm. Allelujah!

Summer School: What's Old is New

EdWeek is reporting that across the nation “dreaded summer school” is at risk.

With summer having officially arrived this week, children are heading to camp, the beach, the pool, and in some cases, back to the classroom for the dreaded summer school. If it’s available, that is.

While some districts downsize, and even eliminate, summer school, other districts are reinventing it.

...at least a handful of places, such as Baltimore, Cincinnati, and Pittsburgh, are also thinking anew about summer school as an experience that will prove far more engaging and meaningful for young people...The centerpiece of the effort in Pittsburgh this year is the new Summer Dreamers Academy, billed as a “camp” available for free to all rising 6th, 7th, and 8th graders...The five-week, all-day program that begins next month will feature a literacy curriculum in the mornings designed to be fun and engaging. In the afternoons, “campers” will have a wide choice of activities, from judo and kayaking to music theater and video-game design.

What strikes me is the delighted tone of the article, as if fun and engaging summer school is a new and innovative idea. I fondly remember my elementary summer school classes, lo, nearly half a century ago. I always eagerly anticipated summer school, a time when I would get to learn new things never offered during the regular school year. I studied archeology, sculpture, theater, special math topics, archery, sports clinics, photography, oil painting, all kinds of other great stuff, and for free. Of course, California was a solvent state then.

Now that I am grown up, I know that summer school served another important purpose. It kept my brain actively learning.

Research has long suggested that summer can take a heavy toll on student learning.
A report issued last week by the National Summer Learning Association, titled “A New Vision for Summer School,” says that since 1906, more than 40 empirical studies have found evidence of a pattern of “summer learning loss,” particularly for low-income youths.
One 2007 study, for instance, found that about two-thirds of the reading achievement gap between 9th graders of low and high socioeconomic standing in Baltimore public schools could be traced to what they learned, or failed to learn, over their childhood summers. ("Much of Learning Gap Blamed on Summer," July 18, 2007.)

Apparently educators have known since 1906 that “summer learning loss” not only persistently occurs, but is more pronounced among children from less affluent families who cannot afford summer enrichment activities. Furthermore, this summer learning loss is estimated to account for around two-thirds of the achievement gap between more and less affluent students. It stands to reason that providing summer school to all could substantially close that gap.

Summer would also be a great time to pursue community-school corroboration. Instructors could be drawn from the community. Grants could fund the programs. And working parents would be thrilled, especially if they could apply summer childcare dollars to programs that enrich their children while keeping them off the street.

Storming Educational Barricades

On June 22, 2010, the well-respected educator and sought-out Washington DC dinner party guest, Diane Ravitch, wrote, "Even privately managed charter schools are affected negatively by high-stakes testing; to claim ever-rising test scores, they are prompted to avoid low-performing students, thus bypassing the very students that charters were originally intended to serve."

A comment to her blog asked, “Have you ever managed to come up with any evidence for this claim?”

The very next comment pounced, “You have the whole Internet at your disposal. Surely you know that DR doesn't have to provide footnotes on what is now common knowledge for most literate people?”

Is the notion that charter schools are avoiding low-performing students a common knowledge fact? A perusal of the “whole Internet” suggests that what is common knowledge is that charter schools have long been accused of creaming the crop and pushing out low achievers in order to artificially raise their academic achievement when compared to regular public schools. Whether the accusation has research merit is not so clear.

A Mathematica study commissioned by the Knowledge is Power Program (KIPP) charter schools examined twenty-two KIPP schools and found no basis for the accusation. I am well aware that the study will be heralded by charter school supporters and dismissed by charter school detractors. The grounds for dismissal will be the perceived conflict of interest in KIPP commissioning a flattering study of itself. Charter school detractors would love it if the study were damning and would be quick to generalize the results to all charter schools. As it stands, charter school supporters will be happy to likewise generalize the study's conclusions.

Which brings me to my point. As long as those of us seeking education reform continue to cherish one position or another, we will fail to come to the consensus society so desperately needs before the forward trail can be blazed. Large swaths of American society either do not care about education or feel they have too little power or influence to make any difference. It is a true pity so many of those who feel “unempowered” are in fact, teachers and parents. Anthony Cody is one teacher who has been trying hard to be heard.

Among those who deeply care, many of the most vociferous can absolutely be classified along political lines: the right who love charter schools and the left who hate them. The constant bickering between them neutralizes any positive effects. The KIPP study is a case in point. Supporters of charters rush to embrace and extend its conclusions while opponents focus on finding flaws. I say, go ahead and enumerate flaws. But do not stop there. Let us have better designed studies that take previous flaws into account. And let us not be so foolish or short-sighted to think that if we and our friends believe we have debunked a study that we can ignore it because its merits are inconvenient to our politics.

I completely understand the conflict of interest question. Many years ago a marine biologist friend of mine was hired by Suntory Whiskey to conduct research on the environmental impact of their distilleries upon the ocean where they dump the waste. My friend wrote a most uncomplimentary report. She was fired and the report never saw the light of day. Would KIPP have suppressed the study if it did not like the conclusions? I do not know. I remember when early studies of charter schools consistently found that the academic achievement of charter school students surpassed that of public school students. The most recent studies show regression to the mean. In the early, heady days of charters, some people made the question political and immediately erected defensive barricades. The favorite barricade has been the accusation that charters cream the crop.

In my work with both charter schools and regular public schools, I have observed that charter schools do not cream the crop or push out low achievers. In fact, parents of cream and parents of low achievers both flock to charter schools. Parents of high achievers believe that charter schools are better than regular public schools and therefore their high achieving child will be challenged and rise to even greater heights. The parents of low achievers flock to charter schools because they often believe their child is a bored underachiever who needs the extra competence and challenge they expect their child will find in the charter school to turn from being a low achiever to a high achiever. For their part, charter schools take students from both groups because, just like regular public schools, their state funding depends on enrollment numbers. Besides, self-study is not inherently bad. The school accreditation process depends on schools studying themselves and writing up what they find.

I am aware that both sides collect anecdotes as if the matter will be decided by a sort of vote, that is, the side with more anecdotes wins. Reasonable people would reject such a method of decision making as ridiculous, but in reality we act like tallying up anecdotes is exactly the way to make big decisions. The health care debate was replete with anecdotes. It did not work. The pro health care reform camp and the anti heath care reform camp simply ignored each others anecdotes.

Data supporting the so-called common knowledge that charters cream the crop is inconclusive. More importantly, we should be looking for data to inform our opinions, not to confirm ourselves in our prejudgments. We need to detach ourselves from partisan political positions on education and study the issue, if not dispassionately, at least with a conscious effort to identify our own cherished opinions and set them aside for the time being.

How Narratives Impede Education Reform

Patrick McGuinn is right. There are two narratives, and that is part of the problem. It sets up yet another dangerous either-or dichotomy where every fact and opinion must be squeezed through one sieve or another.

Meanwhile, all over the country, in individual local schools, effective education reform takes place apart from public awareness. Typically, the these local reformers are responding to the internal culture and politics of their school, making scalability a challenge, if not impossible.

Perhaps it is time to put aside partisan politics and narratives, and think hard about what we as a society want for the future of American education, because, as Deborah Meier points out, we are deciding on our shared future. The key word is “shared.” As it stands, we are divided, playing an evenly matched tug-of-war. No wonder nothing moves. Many education stakeholders are ambivalent about involvement. They want to be deeply involved, but distrust the process because important stakeholders, like teachers and parents, are shut out. Stakeholders do not esteem and trust each other.

So while stakeholders say they want to be empowered, normally the empowerment is worthless, consisting of false choices, like whether to have chocolate or vanilla ice cream. Early charter schools showed us what empowerment could look like. Early studies of charter schools found many local instances of excellence. These days there are too many operators with, shall we say, impure motives. The charter school movement has experienced serious regression toward the mean. Trust has been lost.

In-the-trenches educators have a lot to offer, but policy makers do not listen. We need to avoid over-simplified narratives that can be summed up in a couple a phrases, and begin to wrestle with the complexity of the issue. We got where we are today through a series of smaller actions taken beyond their usefulness. For example, I remember when education defined as the ability to locate information took hold. At the time, I was all for it. No body can know everything, but knowing how to find what you do not know is essential. It was not long though before I started getting students in my classes who did not have enough basic memorized knowledge to use as a foundation for an information search.

We do this all the time---create dichotomies and then swing from one to the other. Education decisions have been made locally for a very long time. I believe education reform must start with local initiative and relational trust. Supposedly, the purpose of the Race to the Top was to give local schools the ability to design their own reform and win funding to implement it. I was part of a local successful reform that did not have a technology piece, a merit pay piece or a community buy-in piece. We teachers just did it. I think the dynamic of how our efforts succeeded in the absence of left-right divisiveness is worth considering and perhaps applying to other local, yet different circumstances.

We Don't Need Educational Bells and Whistles

Among the many reasons education reform is stalled, one of the most prominent must be the appeal of adding bells and whistles to a broken-down car. A case in point is adding social media to schools. Social media plays into the myth that we can improve education by merely incorporating technology. People (somewhere, sometime) have received excellent educations for millenia even without any of what we recognize today as technology.

I once taught math to a group of multi-generational Vietnamese refugees. The experience changed my entire outlook on the subject of school finances. We sat under the trees. Everybody had a lapboard, pencils and paper I provided. I had the only textbook, a small chalkboard, chalk and eraser, all of which I also provided, and any “manipulatives” I chose to bring. Even on such a shoestring, I guarantee I delivered a high-quality education experience to all. No “technology,” not even a calculator. Amazing, huh.

Would it have been nice to have an overhead projector, or a smart board? Sure, but not necessary. How about a mimeograph machine, a xerox machine, computer printouts? Also lovely, but the students were perfectly capable of copying the problems from my little blackboard. Filmstrips, videos, DVDs? Again, nice, but not essential.

If our education system is like a car whose engine does not run, adding technology is like hoping that plugging in a GPS will somehow cause the engine to turn over. Incorporating bells and whistles like Facebook, Skype, Twitter, Second Life, whatever, will not help. The car is still going nowhere.

Analogies always break down somewhere. Our education system is not really like a single car. It is more like a bunch of scooters, some of which run nicely and some do not run at all. The kids on the scooters that run may be doing fine, but if America is to compete, all the scooters need to run nicely. Once all the scooters are running well, we can add a roof to the scooters and enhance the experience for all. Again, adding a roof to a non-running scooter will not make it run.

Before we begin spending tons of money on enhancements like technology, we need to use whatever resources we have to ensure every child is receiving a high quality education. Funny thing, money is no object, nor is it an obstacle. It is a matter of where we, as a society, place our priorities. As Suze Orman's signature line puts it, people first, then things.