Why Data Drives (Instead of Informing)

According to Justin Baeder, “Data is merely one tool at the disposal of skilled, experienced, and knowledgeable professionals.”

The crux of the matter is no one is confident that our classrooms are indeed staffed by “skilled, experienced, and knowledgeable professionals.” In fact, just the opposite. Districts routinely reject expert teachers in favor of novices, whether traditionally or alternatively certified. Even more unbelievable, it is possible for expert teachers to encounter insurmountable obstacles to certification in other states.

No wonder expert teachers end up selling insurance.

No matter how much we debate teacher accountability and the control, or lack thereof, that teachers have over the variables which affect academic achievement, it is beyond dispute that teachers have a huge impact on quality of instruction. The first thing our society needs to do is value education, not only in word, but in deed, by ascribing to teachers the highest esteem. Only then will schools of education be able to become way more selective. Then our most able students might be attracted to a career in teaching.

Right now, about half our education students are idealistic and highly able, and the other half are pragmatically looking for a job. There needs to be a lot more of the first group. Nevertheless, Mr. Baeder's points about the role of data are well-taken. Data is in the driver's seat because teachers are not.

“Do Education Schools Give Too Many A's?”

That is the question posed by a recent EdWeek article and answered in the affirmative by a recent study out of the University of Missouri which found that students majoring in education at public universities receive “significantly higher grades” than other majors at the same universities.

Several years ago a prominent local newspaper asked for and got a massive Excel file containing the grades all professors gave for an academic year at one of the state universities. As a courtesy, the university emailed the same Excel file to all the professors, and thus I acquired a copy. No student names were divulged; grades were aggregated by class, then section, and then sorted into grade categories without cross-referencing student majors. Nevertheless, it was very clear that education grades are one to two grade points higher than other course grades. Only rarely does an education professor hand out anything but an A. The main exceptions were the “Math for Elementary Teachers” classes, taught not by members of the education department, but by mathematics faculty. Frequently, as many as 50% of the students fail this gatekeeper class on the first attempt.

In this particular state university, students must pass “Math for Elementary Teachers” in order to apply to the College of Education. I have seen students repeat the class three and four times. One student, exultant that she had finally passed, confided to me that she passed only because the professor got bogged down in multiplication and never covered fractions, decimals and percents, the topics she failed the previous times. What grade does this student aspire to teach? Fifth, the grade that is all about fractions, decimals, and percents. And what did this student propose to do to overcome her evident math weakness? “I'll figure it out when the time comes,” she said. It made me wonder how many elementary teachers are trying to figure it out in classrooms all over the country.

Fact is, if they have not figured it out before they graduate, they probably never will. Targeted intervention has been a disappointment.

At the end of the second year of implementation, the PD program did not have a statistically significant impact on teacher knowledge.

Teachers cannot teach what they themselves do not know. Even more startling, the math teachers in the study were middle school teachers, not generalists like elementary teachers. Nevertheless, what makes the study somewhat generalizable to elementary teachers is that only 23 percent of the middle school teachers in the study majored in math or a math-related subject.

I am guessing the professor stuck on multiplication faced a dilemma. He was stuck because so many class members were struggling. Does he slow down in hopes of achieving mastery, or does he press on and cover the required material even though he knows he is probably guaranteeing failure? He actually has two dilemmas. If he presses on and fails the repeaters, some of them might abandon education. But the department wants the tuition money. Slowing down is a win-win for the professor and the department. The professor artificially passes students. They give him glowing evaluations and he gets to keep his job. The department is assured of receiving tuition dollars until students so passed graduate. However, it is an eventual lose-lose for the student and later as a teacher, the teacher's students.

High education grades are a puzzlement considering that education students typically have lower SAT and GRE scores. I recall a challenging professor in my grad student days. The class was educational statistics. My classmates complained bitterly and even circulated a petition to replace the professor with someone “easier.” One classmate said with a straight face, “If we wanted to work hard, we would have majored in something besides education.” I wrote a letter to the chancellor defending the professor and angering my classmates who insisted that we needed to present a united front. The professor lost his job anyway. The university decided there was no point in keeping a professor if students refused to sign up for his class in the future because of the scuttlebutt. Need I mention that the object lesson was not lost on the rest of the education professors.

At the end of our studies, my cohort held a thesis party where we drank tea, ate cookies and passed around our theses. I was shocked at the low quality of the theses and embarrassed that all these people would get the same degree as me for a lot less work. I worked hard on my research, and the data later became the basis for a widely adopted curriculum design. I had all A's for my course work, but so did the rest of my cohort. Big deal. I felt that their degrees, acquired so easily, devalued my degree. Only later did I discover the universal low status of education degrees.

Some of my classmates have since become education professors themselves. Some critics of the Missouri study think the reason education students get higher grades is because they are taught by experienced trained educators. Not. In 2009, I did a small exploratory study examining curricula vitae of education professors. More than half listed no significant teaching experience on their curriculum vitae.

At this point in my life, I have observed three education departments either as a student or as a professor. It seems to me the grade inflation is a kind of mutual symbiosis. Both the professors and the students have an unwritten understanding: students get As, professors get glowing student evaluations.

Me, I did not get the memo. (Well, maybe I did, but I ignored it.) The first time I taught a curriculum class, I gave the students, predominantly seniors, a list of all the assignments for the class and the due date of each. The next day half the students dropped because there was too much work. They signed up for classes with a lot less work. Come time for the midterm, an open book test, most of them brought no book to class. Based on their experience in other education classes, many had not bothered to purchase it. Of those who had brought the book, it was perfectly obvious they had never opened it, even though there had been assignments that (supposedly) required at least a little bit of information from the book.

I returned their midterms with no grades. I gave a lesson on writing essays, because according to them, no one had ever explained what “compare and contrast” means, or how to defend an opinion. They believed that an opinion piece could never be downgraded because “everyone is entitled to their own opinion” and “opinions cannot be wrong.” The idea that they were being graded on how well they defended their opinion was news to them. I was accused of being unfair for not telling them my grading criteria, as if defense of opinion was not a self-evident criterion. I gave them a second chance to write their midterms, but with the additional requirement that the tests must be typed, proofread, and properly cited. I gave them a week. Most simply typed up the exact same garbage I had returned the week before. At least they corrected the spelling.

Then there was the student who missed the final exam because she went to The Price Is Right. She acted surprised when she failed the class. She went to the chair and complained that I was destroying her dream to be a teacher.

I wondered what some of the other professors were doing, and when I became a university supervisor of student teachers, I found out. My charges uniformly expressed surprise at the superior quality of my feedback after observing their lessons. They often asked why their methods classes (especially math methods) did not teach them any of this stuff. I asked them what they had done in their methods class.

“We just played with manipulatives.”

“What did you think of that?”

“We loved it. It was fun.”

“What do you think now?”

“I think we should have not given our instructor such great evaluations. S(he) didn't teach us what we needed to know.”


One education professor, who had been the state Teacher of the Year (don't start me on what a bogus award that is), thought his science methods students should complete science fair projects and display them at the upcoming science fair. The professor's idea was that teachers should be more in touch with students by completing the same assignments.

Fair enough, however the education students produced no better displays than fourth graders, and in many cases, their work was much worse. Okay fine, but did their grades reflect the quality of the work? In what was probably a tactical error on the professor's part, he had posted grades and notes on the backs of the project boards where I read them. Each and every education student got an A. Each and every student got a nice comment, like, “You will make a wonderful teacher.”

Punitive student evaluations are only one problem. The professor who does not play ball will have other serious problems. In another class of mine, eight students failed. In utter shock, they went to the department chair who took it upon herself to forge my signature on grade change forms for them. When I confronted the chair, she said the students who failed were in a scholarship program to foster higher rates of university attendance among certain populations. If they did not maintain at least C averages, they would lose their scholarships, and the department would lose their tuition money. Naturally, the relationship between the chair and myself was never the same.

As another EdWeek article points out, “It is common knowledge that graduates of university-based teacher education programs find their student-teaching experiences more valuable than their other coursework.” Perhaps if the course work were more relevant, practical and rigorous, education students might feel they had gotten their money's worth, and our schools would have true professionals for whom administrators would not feel the need to buy scripted curriculum.

Do Education Schools Give Too Many A's? Yes, yes, a thousand times yes.

These Wings Don't Fly

“Some people see the glass half full. Others see it half empty. I see a glass that’s twice as big as it needs to be.” ~ George Carlin

The pervasive either-or dichotomy syndrome debilitates constructive debate in nearly every arena of societal concern. Like Dr. Dolittle's push-me-pull-me, framing issues as a choice of only either this or that halts progress and hampers solution making. Education is no exception.
Either-or dichotomies are a convenient rhetorical device. Present one choice in positive language, the other in negative language, and let human emotion take over. Very few issues can be analyzed as simple either-or options, least of all, an issue as complex as education with its more than a score of stakeholders, each with their own competing interests.

The main problem with the either/or dichotomy syndrome is that it prevents people from considering alternatives. It pushes otherwise moderate people into wings: right/left, whole language/phonics, vouchers/traditional funding, and so many more. Often alternatives do not even occur to people standing fully in the wings. “Thinking outside the box” frequently means nothing more than having the ability to reject either/or frames. Once rejected, the mind is free to conceive of alternatives.

As it is, complicated issues in education are dumbed down to a "right" and a "left" side. People end up emotionally offensive or defensive. The false dichotomies serve only as diversions. Each side spends all its time depicting their side as the positive one and the opposing side as negative. Therefore, arguing about dichotomies is counterproductive. The task is not to take sides, but to reject the dichotomies themselves.

The choice is NOT between:
either pro-union or anti-union
either pro-standardized testing or anti-standardized testing
either publics schools or private schools
either pro-charter or anti-charter
either phonics or whole language
either whole class novel/basal reader or individual student choice
either direct instruction or constructivism
either individual answers or choral response
either pro-calculators or anti-calculators
either teacher-directed or student-directed
either competition or cooperation
either lecture or hands-on
either "an autonomous professional entrusted with crafting engaging but occasionally idiosyncratic lessons" or "a standardized, curriculum-centered enterprise,...our practice is in turn videotaped to evaluate our use of the prescribed methods."
either vibrant creativity or stifling rigidity
either rote memorization or googling information
either teachers as professionals or teachers as hired laborers
either complete autonomy or micromanagement
either teacher-facilitated or teacher-delivered
...
At the risk of being cliché, the sooner we start thinking outside box by rejecting either/or formulations, the better.

Interference, Phonics Wars and ELLs

Interference is the idea that prior learning can interfere with new learning. In linguistics, interference, also known as the negative transfer of habits, is usually implicated in the difficulty people have learning a second language. Nearly every adult student of a second language can tell stories of the intriguing ways their native language influences acquisition of the target language.

Interference may create accents. Few adults, no matter how proficient, can entirely rid their second language speech of traces of their native language. The mother tongue is so powerful. In fact, children who grow up as linguistic minorities may hear their mother tongue from no one except their mother, and yet grow up to be fully bilingual in both the minority and the majority language. Such native speakers of more than one language are everywhere in the world.

Therefore, I am not surprised to find out that Cantonese-speaking children do not rely as much on phonics to read English as children whose mother languages are English or Spanish. The intriguing (but not surprising) part of the findings is that Cantonese-speaking children rely on phonics as much as 50 percent. Clearly phonics helps them read.

During the 1980's, I conducted a study in Japan with Japanese seventh grade English language learners. I found that, without exception, I could readily attribute their English encoding errors to the Japanese phoneme encoding system. Japanese seventh graders did not simply misspell English words. They actually processed English phonemes as if they were Japanese phonemes, and then expressed English words by transcribing Japanese phonemes using English letters. Students often reported they could not hear the difference between certain Japanese and English phonemes.

At that time their English teachers did not utilize phonics in their English instruction. Even as the phonics wars were raging in America, the Japanese teachers of English had never even heard of phonics. They did teach the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) to their students on the premise that it would help them learn English, but I observed that IPA was just one more set of symbols to learn. I did not see IPA helping students at all.

I further discovered that phonics instruction materials published in English-speaking countries confused students more often than they helped. Japanese text uses a mix of three writing systems, hiragana, katakana and kanji.

Hiragana expresses the sounds of Japanese using letters. Each letter stands for a syllable, not separate consonants and vowels. Katakana is also a syllabary containing a counterpart to each hiragana symbol and pronounced exactly the same as the corresponding hiragana symbol. Katakana is generally used for non-Japanese words like “makudonarudo”* (McDonalds). Kanji are Chinese characters. Japanese mixes all three writing systems together. For example, I ate a hamburger would be written watashi(in kanji) wa(in hiragana) hambaga(in katakana) wo(in hiragana) tabe(in kanji)mashita(in hiragana).

I ended up creating a phonics program designed for Japanese students, and subsequently training Japanese teachers to use the materials. Many teachers and students found the idea that you could actually sound out English words amazing. They had long thought that learning to read English must be as tedious an undertaking as learning to read the ubiquitous Chinese characters. They were thrilled to find that while they must memorize some English words, most words, probably 85 percent, follow a particular and predictable pattern. Students who learned the patterns could decode many more words than they could relying on discrete memorization alone.

At least Japanese students have the concept of sounding out words because they sound out hiragana and katakana words all the time. Mandarin Chinese has a few phonetic characters, such as the three characters that “spell” out chocolate (chao-ke-li)*, but Chinese is all about memorizing many characters. Chinese has 405 discrete syllables, but over 10,000 characters because each syllable can take on one of four tones and many, many syllables have multiple meanings, each expressed with a different character.

I believe that if Yuuko Uchikoshi, the assistant professor of education at the University of California, Davis, who conducted the study with Cantonese-speaking children, were to replicate her study with Japanese-speaking children, she may find that Japanese children rely more on decoding than the Cantonese-speaking children because they already sound out hiragana and katakana. She may also want to consider that all Chinese, whatever their native language, receive their education in Mandarin, not their native language.

The use of decoding depends on the linguistic community of the child, and appears to fall on a continuum from the phonetic systems of English and Spanish speakers, to the mixed system of the Japanese, to the almost entirely ideographic system of the Chinese.

Some people believe the lesser dependence on decoding manifested by the Cantonese-speaking children should be construed as ammunition in the phonics wars. Sadly, even though a truce was called long ago, some people still fight and see studies such as this one as recommending less phonics and more sight reading. More likely, the study supports the continued use of phonics as a reading tool without diminishing the value of sight reading as another tool.

*I have transcribed Japanese and Chinese syllables and words using English letters as an aid to non-speakers. The Japanese transcription is called "Romaji" and the Chinese transcription is called "Pinyin."

About Homework (with bonus lesson on area of a circle)

In the midst of extreme busyness, I left a short, hurried post nearly four weeks ago about how I recently became the temporary legal guardian of a sixth grader. Now it is spring break and I am even busier, but I have managed to carve out half an hour to write. I do not remember being so busy with the demands of a child when I was raising my own kids.

Attitudes of School Officials

Although I have teaching experience in elementary and even preschool, I spent most of my thirty-five-year career in secondary school settings. Suddenly, I have been spending a lot of time interacting with an elementary school. The classroom teacher and the school secretary do not know I am a teacher. The way they choose to interact with me is quite interesting, if somewhat condescending. I can only surmise that school people, intentionally or not, treat parents as if parents are basically ignorant. I apologize if this observation offends some. I completely understand that some parents are difficult, but it was disconcerting to have the teacher or secretary dispute with me almost from the get-go as if I knew nothing about the child.

Homework

Homework? What homework? In spite of the (shall we say) whining that kids these days are overly burdened with homework, I am just not seeing it. My ward brings very little homework home. Alfie Kohn, an educator with whom I am generally on the same page, has been crusading against homework for years. Just a few weeks ago, he sounded similar alarms, making it sound as if any and all homework is bad, bad, bad.

Funny thing I actually agree with most of his points. I absolutely detest homework as busy work. I remember when my own third-grade child came home with an assignment to write out the sevens ten times. His teacher knew that he could recite the times tables on demand, so the assignment was a complete waste of his time. In an effort to salvage some usefulness, he decided to type it in order to he could use the assignment as an excuse to practice the ten-key pad on the right side of his keyboard. His teacher gave him an “F” and scolded him for shortcutting the assignment. “You could have written it once,” she said, “and then simply copied and pasted.”

Nevertheless, homework does have a useful place, especially when used to generate fodder for idea generation during class discussion, as when the student measures the circumference, diameter and radius of ten round things. Or perhaps the student writes up a report of an experiment done in class in order to prepare to discuss the findings with the rest of the class the next day. The homework my ward brought home was generally useless, but certainly not time consuming. The teacher says she is only allowed to give 20 minutes of language arts and twenty minutes of math per day. The teacher does not even expect sixth graders to write their last name on their papers.

Homework as Practice

Normally, if a student has acquired the concept, it does not take a lot of practice to reinforce it. In my experience, homework as practice often means the student has not acquired the concept. The younger the student, the more control the teacher has over acquisition (but it must always be remembered that the teacher does not have total control). Anyway, homework as practice at the elementary level is worse than useless if the student has not acquired the underlying concept. Such students spend the twenty minutes reinforcing the wrong learning. It would also be helpful if elementary math teachers actually had what Liping Ma calls the “profound understanding of fundamental mathematics.”

Area of a Circle

My ward brought home a worksheet to practice finding the area of a circle. From her point of view, it was nothing but plug and chug. She asked me what “pi” meant. We spent a little time developing the concept of pi. Then we cut up a paper plate into pie slivers and arranged them, point up point down, into a sort of parallelogram with scalloped edges. I asked her what shape it reminded her of. Not surprisingly, she answered, “Rectangle.”

I asked her how to find the area of a rectangle. “Length times width” she replied.

“Right. So what part of the circle is the width of this rectangle?”

“The radius.”

“Right. What part of the circle is the length?”

She thought a bit and offered, “Half the circumference?”

“Exactly so. Then instead of length times width, what can we write?”

I began writing “A = r,” whereupon she shouted, “times 1/2C.”

We continued along these lines until we had written A = r X ½ X ∏ X 2 X r. Then r times r equals r squared. ½ times 2 equals 1. When she was done substituting, she had A = ∏r^2.

“Okay,” I said, “Look at your worksheet.”

To her amazement, the formula for the area of a circle was exactly what she had written. She had figured it out herself. That is the sort of success that builds genuine self-esteem. My disappointment came when I described this experience to her math teacher. He had no idea what I was talking about.

Back In Elementary School

I recently became the temporary legal guardian of an elementary child. Consequently, although I am a secondary teacher, I have been spending a lot of time interacting with an elementary school from the perspective of a parent. I plan to write about it in the near future. I want to look at the ease with which schools impose false "mandatory requirements" on parents, how students sabotage good instructional ideas like individual white boards in math class, the challenge for an upper elementary teacher who wants students to profoundly understand math but have inherited kids all over the map, just to name a few topics.

In the near future, I will be writing less on policy and offering more in the way of specific resources, such as curriculum, reviews and tips.

The Real US Teacher Supply Problem

The main problem with the teacher supply is that 50% of education majors are great. They are smart, academically able, motivated for all the right reasons—just wonderful. Sure they are green, but everyone has to start at the beginning. This essay is not about them. Then there are the other 50%. Some of them may be plenty smart, but they are the antithesis of the great 50% and what is worse, motivated by all the wrong reasons.

I taught three teacher education courses: Math for Elementary Teachers, First Language Acquisition, and Early Childhood Curriculum. I taught these courses after decades of classroom teaching experience. I am not even going to discuss how hard it is for a teacher who offers nothing but experience to even land a university teaching gig, except to point out how silly it is for colleges of education to turn away experience in favor of a PhD, and how ironic that a teacher who chose to stay in the classroom is at an extreme disadvantage when it comes time to pass on their wisdom.

Aspiring teachers have lots of hoops to jump through. Significantly, none of the hoops poses much of a challenge. The hoops are proforma, doing little more than keeping the line moving forward in an orderly fashion. Everyone eventually gets on the Ferris wheel.

College Entrance Hoop

I have asked countless students why they want to be teachers. The answers they give range from heart-warming to pathetic. One said it was either teaching or the Army. Several have said it was because they flunked out of Hotel Management or Business. Many consider teaching their last viable option for employment. Furthermore, regardless of your opinion of the SAT, it is well-documented that education students tend to have lower scores than students in most other majors. Colleges of education need to become more selective. The last time I said so at a faculty meeting, the chair said that it was a great idea but the school could not afford the hit on tuition.

Education students are notoriously weak in mathematics. At one university, 95% percent of all elementary education students were unable to score 70% or better on a straightforward computation pretest of first through sixth grade math. Meanwhile, Math for Elementary Teachers students complain about how unfair of the university to make them jump through the worthless hoop of studying elementary math. “We learned all that in elementary school,” they say, “The university is wasting our time and our tuition money.” They say this even after they see their scores on the pretest.

Math for Elementary Teachers Hoop

The colleges of education are well aware of the fact that education students do not possess what Liping Ma calls “profound understanding of fundamental mathematics.” Most colleges of education require education students to take a series of elementary math courses. 50% of each section will likely fail the class. They will repeat until they pass. One student asked me to congratulate her when she passed on her third attempt. Then she confessed sheepishly, “But I passed because that professor skipped fractions and decimals.” I was aghast. “You failed fractions and decimals in my class,” I said. “What grade do you want to teach?” “Fifth grade,” she said. I was aghast again. “Fifth grade is all about fractions and decimals. What are you going to do?” “I guess I'll figure it out when the time comes,” she replied. Sadly, she is all too typical of THAT 50%.

College Graduation Hoop

Perhaps you are certain a student like her will never graduate. You would be wrong. That 50% will graduate with near 4.0 GPA in their education courses. They will have struggled to maintain a 2.0 in all their other university coursework. I know this because the university sent the local newspaper a massive spreadsheet containing a year's worth of grades, with copies to every professor.

Student Teaching Hoop

Maybe you think the 50% will wash out during their student teaching placements. They won't. The university supervisors responsible for observing and evaluating student teachers are generally non-tenured adjunct professors. They are under tremendous pressure to push the 50% on through. University supervisors who actually have halfway rigorous evaluation standards may very likely lose their jobs due to off-the-record complaints because “it just wouldn't be right to wash out students who have invested so much time and money into becoming a teacher.” Students, with rare exceptions, cannot fail. Students failure would put the school of education cash cow at risk.

Teacher Certification Hoop

Surely, the 50% will be stopped at the state certification gateway. Not at all. Many state departments of education have agreements with the state colleges of education. Anyone who graduates from a state college automatically gets a teaching credential. Ironically, the proven veteran of long experience who moves to a new state may be able to get a new state credential but will not be able to keep it. When the new credential expires for lack of employment, the experienced teacher will be falsely considered unqualified.

Job Interview Hoop

Of course no principal will hire those poorly qualified and unmotivated teachers from the 50%. Wrong again. Principals (and the general public) consider mere possession of a teaching credential to be prima facie evidence of quality. In fact, principals will hire one of the 50% over an experienced, proven applicant because the novice is cheaper. Thus the 50% occupy an awful lot of our nation's classrooms. “Teachers with 10 or fewer years’ experience now constitute over 52 percent of our teaching force.”

No wonder school administrators do not defer to the knowledge, judgment, experience, and professionalism of their faculty, since 50% do not belong there in the first place. No wonder publishers have made big business out of scripted curriculum. Teachers, a strange hybrid of employee and professional, want the esteem due a professional. To the extent that selection and training is weak, the profession is demeaned.