February 27, 2007

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Teacher Voices

Filed under: Teaching by Leo Casey @ 8:18 am

A new New York City teacher blog, Teacher Voices, makes it debut with a timely piece on the problem of school safety. It is written by a Staten Island high school English teacher with a lively writing style, and is well worth a look.

February 26, 2007

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Bridging Differences

Filed under: Education by Leo Casey @ 11:42 am

Two of our favorite educators, Deborah Meier and Diane Ravitch, will be blogging together on an Education Week blog, Bridging Differences, dedicated to their dialogue. It starts with interesting personal biographies. Check it out.

And while you are at it, you should read what both women have to say, in different pieces, on the role of teacher unions in education — Deborah Meier’s “On Unions and Education,” from the Winter 2004 issue of Dissent, and Diane Ravitch’s “Why Teacher Unions Are Good for Teachers and the Public,” in the Winter 2006-2007 issue of the AFT’s American Educator.

February 24, 2007

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The Cult of the Quantifiable

Filed under: NCLB Testing by Leo Casey @ 11:50 am

In his latest contribution to the ongoing debate over the Aspen Commission’s NCLB report, Kevin Carey dismisses what he describes as our “the standardized attack on standardized tests.” For all of the failings of actually existing standardized tests, he opines, they provide needed information, albeit imperfect information, on student learning. And as information on student learning, they are the window through which we can observe the quality of teaching.

He then asks:

What level of imperfection can we tolerate, given the way the information will be used?… Leo clearly thinks that our current tests fall below that threshold. Okay, I’ll bite: how good does student assessment information — from standardized tests or any other source — have to be before it would be appropriate for use in determining teacher salaries? 100% perfect and unassailable in every way? If not perfect, how good? 95%? Let’s put a number on the table and then figure out what it would take to get there.

This passage, and the assumptions of Carey’s general position here, expresses a particular view of how one can meaningfully assess actual student learning. It is a not a view unique to Carey; it could just as easily have been written by a Checker Finn or a Rick Hess, and it informs the most problematic parts of the Aspen report. At the center of all of their work is the assumption that it is possible and desirable to capture the most important aspects of student learning through the metrics of standardized testing, whatever the flaws in the actually existing tests.

The single-minded focus on what is measurable in quantifiable terms [so-called 'hard data'] is often presented as the royal road, if not the only road, to educational accountability. In this respect, it commonly takes on the stern language of the superego, and invokes a ‘father knows best’ paternalism in addressing teachers and parents — just take note of Hess’ fixation with the metaphor of ‘tough love’ and Carey’s charming description of his view as the “grown up” one. But when one looks beyond the paternal language, what one finds is a educational world view which studiously ignores ‘best practices’ in other fields.

Consider the political arena. Carey, Finn and Hess know, without doubt, a large number of ‘hard nosed,’ no nonsense politicians and elected officials of the center to right. But between the three of them, it is questionable that they could produce even one politician who practices politics the way they want to practice education. In contemporary politics, it is axiomatic that one must combine quantifiable measures of public opinion [polls] with qualitative studies [most commonly focus groups]. Each tool produces different and distinct sets of knowledge: polls provide what might be called thin but generalizable knowledge, while focus groups provide what could be described as thick but specific knowledge. Polling data can tell us where different candidates and elected officials stand with the public, or public views of particular issues of the day; conducted over time, polls can identify trends in those standings. But what they can’t provide is robust and rich insights into why the public views the candidates and issues the way it does, how those different views are interconnected, and how they might change, if the public figure employed a particular approach. That sort of knowledge, the so-called ’soft data,’ can only be plumbed with tools of qualitative assessment such as focus groups. Politicians across the political spectrum understand very well the importance of possessing and using both sets of knowledge.

Educational assessments operate in analogous ways. The more rudimentary or elementary the skill, the easier it is to assess it definitively through quantifiable measures and standardized tests. There is no reason, as least in principle, why a standardized test could not provide reasonably accurate measures of basic reading comprehension, basic computational skills or the ability to recall and use discrete pieces of information. True, a great many standardized tests in use today do not meet that benchmark, but these failings are more a function of districts and states constructing such tests ‘on the cheap’ and misusing tests for purposes other than those for which they were designed. One can not ignore those shortcomings, or write them off as an acceptable margin of error in some statistical sense, as Carey wants to do, but they can not be an argument against a singular reliance on any standardized test. The real problem is more fundamental.

The most important skills we want our students to possess upon graduation from high school — how to write a persuasive essay which convincingly presents a logical argument with supporting illustrations; how to research a major issue, organize the evidence from the research and write a research paper which synthesizes the evidence in support of a thesis; how to deliver a coherent, convincing oral presentation; how to take a real life technical problem, and using the tools of analysis and computation, develop real life solutions — simply can not be meaningfully assessed through standardized tests. One needs performance assessments, necessarily qualitative in nature, to assess these skills. It is only in a careful evaluation of a written essay, for example, that one can assess the ability to write a strong persuasive essay. Note that these skills which can only be meaningfully assessed through actual performances are the very same skills that are indispensable for success in a post-secondary educational setting, and that are in demand in the global knowledge economy.

Qualitative, performance based assessments should not be mistaken for subjective assessments. Just as there are protocols and best practices which generally govern the operation of focus groups, there are generally recognized standards for what constitutes a proficient and an excellent essay. It is even possible to formalize those standards in the form of rubrics, thus maintaining a necessary level of rigor and maximizing the consistency of the assessment among different raters. What can’t be done is the reduction of the complex skills of essay writing to the form of a standardized test, where they can be quantified and neatly distributed along a normal curve.

Unlike some critics of standardardized tests, teacher unions are strong supporters of rigorous educational standards, which we believe essential to the advance of American education. Moreover, we do believe that there is a positive and necessary role for standardized tests in K-12 education. Diagnostic tests can be particularly helpful in identifying the problems an individual student is having in mastering a fundamental literacy or numeracy skill. And standardized achievement tests can provide useful data to be considered as one piece of evidence, weighed together with performance assessments, classroom performance and teacher observations, in making important decisions on a student’s promotion or graduation. The NAEP exams are useful checks on the achievement claims of local school districts, and provide very significant broad data on the state of American schools and education. [Indeed, part of the reason for the reliability of the NAEP exams is that they are not "high stakes," so students and teachers are not compelled to spend weeks of "test prep" in order to maximize their scores and the effects of testing anxiety are minimized.]

But when standardized tests are taken as the sole measure of a student’s learning, and when high stakes decisions concerning a student’s promotion or graduation are made solely or predominantly on the basis of a standardized test, an educational wrong is being perpetrated. Psychometricians, psychologists and other professionals of test design and use are emphatic in their insistence that to be legitimate, such decisions must be made on the basis of multiple forms of evidence of student learning. [See the Code of Fair Testing Practices in Education, prepared by the Joint Committee on Testing Practices, representing the American Counseling Association, the American Educational Research Association, the American Psychological Association, the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association, the National Association of School Psychologists, the National Association of Test Directors and the National Council on Measurement in Education.] High stakes decisions on the basis of standardized test scores are simply not the most complete, the most accurate and the fairest measures of a student’s learning.

Equally troubling, once a standardized test becomes high stakes, as the basis of promotion and graduation decisions, it drives what is taught. It becomes counter-productive for a secondary school teacher concerned with getting his or her students past such high stakes obstacles and through graduation to spend a great deal of time teaching to the most important skills we identified above, because the standardized tests the student must pass will not be measuring them. Only those teachers who can start from the presumption that their students will pass these tests as a matter of course are able to devote the requisite time and energy to the development of these skills. Let’s be clear here: given the high correlation between socio-economic status and standardized test performance, the teachers who have the time to teach to these essential higher order skills are the teachers of students from middle and high income families. Notwithstanding the rhetorical genuflection before the goal of bridging the achievement gap, the singular reliance upon standardized tests as the measure of student learning extends, rather than lessens, that gap.

A true and complete measure of a student’s learning, especially as the student moves up through the grades and the skills being acquired become more complex, requires qualitative assessment. The further a student advances in schooling, the less useful information standardized tests tell us about his or her learning. If our task is to prepare all students — and most especially students from high poverty backgrounds — to succeed in post-secondary education and in knowledge economy occupations, then we need to move beyond the cult of the quantifiable.

February 21, 2007

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Don’t Confuse Me With Any Facts

Filed under: Labor by Leo Casey @ 1:27 pm

Apple Computers CEO Steve Jobs and Dell Computers CEO Michael Dell had a recent joint appearance in Austin, Texas.

Jobs, sitting atop a non-union corporation, seized the occasion to attack teacher unions; Dell offered a different point of view. “I believe that what is wrong with our schools in this nation is that they have become unionized in the worst possible way,” Jobs said. “This unionization and lifetime employment of K-12 teachers is off-the-charts crazy.” Dell, who sat on his hands during Jobs’ anti-union comments, responded that unions were developed because “the employer was treating his employees unfairly and that was not good.”

In a reaction that would have made Pavlov proud, the anti-teacher union blogosphere has been disseminating Jobs’ — but not Dell’s — comments. If you have a lot of free time on your hands, check out the pro-corporate, anti-union Amen chorus here, here, and here.

There is a not so little fly in the ointment here. Jobs made his comments in the capitol of Texas, a “right to work” state where collective bargaining for public school educators is prohibited by law. If there is anything like the unthinking shibboleth of “life time employment of K-12 teachers” in Texas, Jobs is going to have to find a villain for his tale other than teacher unions. In fact, Edwize readers may remember the story we covered here last year of a Texas teacher of art who was fired for taking her students on a school approved trip to a museum of art, after a parental complaint of a naked statue — some life time employment. The tenor of Jobs’ comments about losing business in Texas suggests that he is quite oblivious to the status of collective bargaining in the Lone Star State, much less the ease with which Texas educators are fired for simply doing their jobs.

For that matter, there is a not insubstantial list of “right to work” states that prohibit collective bargaining for public school educators, mostly from the South and the former Confederacy: Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Colorado, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, New Mexico, North Carolina, South Carolina, Texas, Utah, Virginia, West Virginia and Wyoming. Note that anti-teacher union corporate partisans like Jobs never compare the educational performance of these “right to work states” to the educational performance of states with high levels of teacher unionization, despite the rather obvious counterfactual and terms of comparison.

Don’t confuse the anti-union crowd with any facts.

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Building Trust

Filed under: New Teacher Diaries by cmitchell @ 12:45 pm

No teacher training prepared me for this day. Textbooks, theories, graduate classes, the NYC Teaching Fellowship, my instructors, student teaching, none of these ever mentioned this possibility. I would not have predicted this would or could happen in my classroom in my first year of teaching. On Friday, for the entire period, one my students taught the day’s lesson in eighth grade mathematics. She asked me last week if she could teach a lesson on percentages (”I got this.”), and I said yes, let’s talk about it. A few days later, she presented me a lesson plan with sample problems and she said she would even make copies of worksheets. The next day, she revised the lesson plan and showed it to me without any worksheets. I gave my approval and we agreed she would teach the class on Thursday. When Wednesday arrived, I let her know that our class may not be meeting on Thursday, due to an eighth grade assembly, and if so, she would teach on Friday.

I was a bit anxious on Thursday, not knowing if my student would follow through on Friday. In the first trimester of school, she had been a ring leader of mischief in the classroom, cursed at me when I turned my back to write on the chalkboard, and was responsible for spreading lies about me to her classmates. Last fall, on my first day of absence from school, the entire class had a meeting with the principal to complain about me and possibly get me fired. As vocal as she is, I’m certain she was actively involved in arranging that meeting. Two weeks ago, I gave her a detention for disrupting my class as well as taking away her lunch pass for chewing gum. Instead of giving me her current lunch pass, she gave me a bogus expired one from seventh grade! She is also now serving an in-school suspension for cutting out of school one period early.

You may be wondering why in the world I would give the chalk to my chalkboard to such a student. I was handing over the key to my fiefdom! I, too, was unsure, if I had made the right decision. Yet, I knew she had the math ability and untapped potential to do this. I didn’t want to squash a student’s enthusiasm and initiative. After all, how often would a student volunteer to teach a class? I also really couldn’t afford to give up a period of valuable teaching time. We are now three weeks away from the state Math test and I am in a crunch to squeeze in all the lessons my students need to be properly prepared. Yet, this was an opportunity. I had to think fast, on the spot, when she asked me if she could teach a lesson on percents. My gut reaction, my instincts said yes, yes - give her a chance to develop confidence, let her know you believe in her. Despite her history of behavioral problems, set that aside and focus on the academics.

I prepared a back-up lesson on polynomials and copied a bunch of worksheets just in case she had forgotten her responsiblity or had some kind of excuse. I didn’t know yet if I could really trust her. I also thought of more percentage work to do in case her lesson didn’t take all period and the class would be left with nothing to do. Nothing is more disconcerting to a teacher that a classroom of kids with nothing to do.

On Friday, the class filed in as usual. I asked my student if she was prepared to teach the day’s lesson and she said yes. The class was suprised that this particular student would be teaching the class for the day. Immediate protests shot out as well as offers to do the same. So I could check the homework, I had prepared the Do Now with a percentage problem. No one volunteered to put the problem on the board, except my day’s teacher. It had been clear to me they needed more clarification and work in percentages and now it was more apparent. I demonstrated the solution. Afterwards, I introduced my students as “Dr. Jeanette” our guest lecturer from the mathematics department of Harvard University who would be teaching us from her speciality, fractions, decimals and percentages. She looked suprised at my introduction and came up to the board with her notes.

I stood at the side and watched. In the beginning, I had to remind the class to be respectful as they heckled her (”You should be fired!”). Then I sat in the back of the classroom as a student. I was amused watching her teach a proportion and not get any response from the class and then grow increasingly frustrated as no one was following along the lesson (”You try standing up here and teaching!!”) I couldn’t help but laugh out loud and say, “Now you know how I feel!” She persisted in explaining the proportion until the kids started to get it. It was an odd feeling sitting in my seat silently, receiving, not speaking. Was she modeling me or would she mock me? I felt a transfer of power, a shift in the dynamics of student-teacher. I was no longer the center of my classroom. My students were the center. It was an uncomfortable feeling giving up the reins. Here we were like two flying trapeze artists, I, ready to catch my student but also, I ,willing to let go. We both had to trust each other. We were both vulnerable. She, exposed, at the board in front of the class and myself, stripped of my authority in the back of the classroom. And we were flying through the air! We had done it together! I watched as my student-teacher walked around the room to confer with the other students. I was so proud to watch “Dr. Jeanette” scaffold percentage problems. I began to see through her eyes as she wrote numbers and operation symbols slowly on the board in childlike handwriting that was comforting, familiar and unintimidating. I saw the disparity between us - my textbook top-down ways and hers and how I had much further to go to meet my kids halfway. A new feeling was arising in the classroom between us all - an openness, a mutual acceptance, a vulnerability… true empathy for each other. I was so proud when three students came up to the board to solve the percentage problems in a new, relaxed manner. We were putting ourselves out there, weaknesses and all. There was nowhere to hide and no reason to either. The three students at the board were about to explain how they did the problems when I had to announce, “Time is up!” They were having so much fun, they lost track of time.

February 20, 2007

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More Dangerous Than Al Qaeda?

Filed under: Labor by Leo Casey @ 2:21 pm

Our friends at Think Progress report:

Last night on Fox News’s Hannity and Colmes, right-wing radio host Neal Boortz claimed that teachers unions are “destroying a generation” and are “much more dangerous than al Qaeda.” He stated, “Look, Al Qaeda, they could bring in a nuke into this country and kill 100,000 people with a well-placed nuke somewhere. Ok. We would recover from that. It would be a terrible tragedy, but the teachers unions in this country can destroy a generation.” Sean Hannity agreed, noting, “They are ruining our school system.”

A link to the video of the show can be found here.

A number of our union brothers and sisters died in the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. Some of the dead were members of our state affiliate, NYSUT. Others were first responders — police, fire, EMTs — who gave their lives in a valiant attempt to save others. In a number of cases, these responders were the literal brothers and sisters, fathers and mothers, and sons and daughters of UFT members. They all died in the public employee union tradition of service for others. We take great pride in being part of that tradition, and of doing our best to continue it in our daily work.

There is no need to defend who we are and what we do against this slander. Like the blood libel, its utterance bespeaks volumes of those who employ it, not their ostensible targets. The more that this trope becomes common on the American right , and not simply on its ‘lunatic fringe’ [Remember former Bush Education Secretary of Education Rod Paige's quip that the NEA was a "terrorist organization?"], the more they cast shame upon themselves.

February 19, 2007

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Paige’s Polemic

Filed under: Labor by Kombiz Lavasany @ 5:04 pm

John at the AFT previews Rod “the NEA is a terrorist orginization” Paige’s new book. Making Ann Coulter proud.

February 16, 2007

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Your Lying Eyes: When Educational Policy Advocacy Is Held Captive To Ideology

Filed under: Education by Leo Casey @ 6:24 pm

Over at The Quick and the Ed, Ed Sector designated hitter Kevin Carey objects to our take on the Aspen NCLB report, complaining of “a lot of distortions and flatly incorrect statements.” Carey’s contribution is worth dissecting, because it illustrates what happens when policy advocacy is held captive to ideology.

Take Carey’s first objection. Our statement that “Educational research affirms the absolute centrality of experienced, accomplished teachers to the education of young people, especally students living in poverty and at academic risk” is, he contends, a “gross distortion of what research says.” “Absolutely none of [the research] says that teacher experience is central to the education of young people,” he continues. “The research says that experience matters in the beginning of a teacher’s career, up to at most 10 years, and then not afterwards. And even when experience does matter, it accounts for only a small fraction of all the variance among teachers.”

On this question, let’s start with the real world of schools. In the work I do for the UFT, I have visited scores of high schools over the years, and have been involved, in one way or another, in numerous efforts to improve, transform or replace low performing schools. One of the first things I learned in this work was that there were two key statistical profiles which would always predict how academically successful a high school was: the grade level distribution of the student body, and the experience level of the faculty. A low performing high school had a rather disproportionate share of students in the ninth and tenth grades, and a disproportionate concentration of novice teachers with a correspondingly high rate of faculty turnover.

Here’s why that second profile — the experience level of the teachers — is absolutely central. Teaching is a difficult, demanding craft. Under optimum conditions of meaningful teacher education, good mentoring, strong supervisory supports, appropriate professional development and a safe, orderly school, it takes a minimum of three years to master the fundamental skills of teaching. In less than optimum conditions, it takes longer, and is all too often never accomplished. When a school is staffed with novice teachers, and experiences a high rate of turnover, there is a surfeit of teachers who have mastered the skills of teaching to mentor and guide the novices, and at the point when the novices may have learned even some of the teaching essentials, they are leaving. How can a school gain educational traction under those circumstances?

Now, as is often the case, good educational research confirms this common sense description of school reality. For one example, take a look at Kacey Guin’s “Chronic Teacher Turnover in Urban Elementary Schools,” which is easily available on-line, since it is published in the Educational Policy Analysis Archives. Guin’s point that the ‘retention crisis’ in education is highly concentrated in inner city, high poverty schools is worth highlighting here, for it means that the students who have the greatest need for the most skilled teachers are instead facing the largest numbers of novice teachers. The argument we made in the original Edwize post that drew Carey’s obections was exactly on this point, our belief that the recommendations of the Aspen report would take us in the wrong direction in fulfilling NCLB’s promise to bridge the achievement gap.

So when Carey disputes the notion that experienced, accomplished teachers are central to the education of young people, especially those living in poverty and at academic risk, it brings to mind the line in the old Richard Pryor movie, after Pryor’s wife finds him in bed with another woman. “Who are you going to believe,” Pryor says, “me or your lying eyes?”

Let’s deconstruct the twists and turns that Carey takes to support that position. He offers the confusing statement that “The research says that experience matters in the beginning of a teacher’s career, up to at most 10 years, and then not afterwards.” This is a garbled version of the fact that the learning curve in teaching is very steep at the start of a teaching career, when the novice is mastering the fundamental skills, and levels off after that initial 3 to 5 year period. From the viewpoint of mastery of the teaching craft, therefore, it makes sense to say that there is little difference between a 10 year and a 20 year teacher. But whether a teacher has 10, 15, 20 or 25 years of experience, what never disappears is the crucial differential between a novice teacher and an experienced teacher. An accurate description of the research would be that the gap between the skills of the novice teachers and the skills of more experienced teachers grows significantly through five years of experience, and thereafter levels off. This understanding is crucial: while an experienced teacher is not necessarily an accomplished teacher, only an experienced teacher can be an accomplished teacher. That’s why we used two qualifiers together in our original statement: experienced, accomplished teachers are absolutely central to a student’s education.

What’s happening here is that Carey is working backwards from an ill-conceived Ed Sector policy proposal to eliminate teacher salary differentials based on years of experience, made in its Frozen Assets report. In a massive leap of logic, the Frozen Assets reasoned that since teachers have sufficient experience to master the fundamentals of teaching by year five, there is no need to have salary differentials providing a retention incentive beyond that point. The problem, as we pointed out at Edwize, is that from the viewpoint of teaching quality, one needs the numbers of experienced teachers to substantially outweigh the numbers of novice teachers. In order to accomplish that end, one must retain experienced teachers after they master the fundamentals of the teaching craft. If one eliminates the incentives for the retention of experienced teachers at the very point they have finished climbing the steepest part of the teaching learning curve, the result will be highly counterproductive: one will be left is a teaching force disproportionately staffed by novices, and the tough lesson experience teaches us is that those novices will most likely be disproportionately concentrated in schools serving high poverty communities. Carey’s argument that teaching experience after year five is inconsequential might be best understood as a rearguard defense of the Frozen Assets proposal, which can only be defended by the notion that teaching experience is inconsequential.

But examined from the viewpoint of real schools, real teachers and real kids, the importance and centrality of teaching experience are undeniable. The problem here is that the starting point of Ed Sector policy advocacy is not schools, but the neo-liberal market ideology which takes as its guideposts the prevalent corporate way of doing business. When corporations tear up the existing American social contract, eviscerating pensions and decimating health care insurance, the Ed Sector response in reports like Frozen Assets is that public school teachers should join in the race to the bottom. The Ed Sector proposal to eliminate teaching experience from teacher salary schedules [where it is generally one, but not the only, basis for salary differentials], is based on a reading of how salaries are done in the corporate world. [However, as Sherman Dorn has pointed out, it is not even a very deep understanding of corporate practices.] The idea that one might craft teacher salary schedules to promote the end of retaining accomplished, experienced teachers for an entire professional career, in order to provide the highest quality education, is simply not on the Ed Sector ideological radar screen.

The other major point of Carey related to our discussion of “accomplished teaching.” We argued that ‘value added’ measures were not able to identify quality teaching at an individual teacher level. Carey’s response assumes in its premises the very point which most desperately needs a supporting argument. He begins by saying that accomplished teaching “consistently helps students increase learning” — not the most felicitous of definitions, but workable enough. But then he adds this qualifying phrase “as measured by standardized tests.” This ancillary point– that standardized tests provide meaningful measures of accomplished teaching, let alone of actual student learning — is precisely what it is contested, and not only by us. At the very least, one needs to make a compelling case for this point of view; smuggling it into your argument’s definitions just doesn’t do.

The issues here are legion, so much that even Ed Sector has published a report by Thomas Toch quite critical of the current state of affairs in the world of standardized testing. Let’s consider just a few of the important problems. Standardized tests currently in use are notoriously uneven in quality, and are used inappropriately for purposes other than those for which they were designed [i.e., tests designed for diagnostic purposes used to make high stakes promotion and graduation decisions, and vice versa]. There are enormous problems of the alignment between the standardized tests, on the one hand, and the curriculum and standards that states and school districts tell teachers to teach, on the other hand. There are few standardized tests in use that provide the sort of longitudunal data that the Aspen reports envisions using [the AFT calcuates that less than 25% of all American teachers teach classes where such data is now available], so a whole deluge of additional standardized tests would be required to implement it, at a time when American schools and students are already drowning in such tests, and test prep is more and more crowding out teaching and learning in our classrooms.

There are also serious questions about whether any standardized tests can measure what is truly important in learning. Many of the most important skills a student should be learning in K-12 education — how to write a persuasive essay which convincingly presents a logical argument with supporting illustrations; how to research a major issue, organize the evidence from the research and write a research paper which synthesizes the evidence; how to deliver a coherent, convincing oral presentation — simply can not be assessed through standardized, multiple choice tests. Yet success in post-secondary education and in knowledge economy jobs require those skills, and critical thinking and problem solving ability that can not be captured by multiple choices. Real teachers in real schools understand this only too well, but it escapes those who approach the problem with a pre-given ideology.

Even if ‘value added’ tools were able to provide meaningful measurements at an individual teacher level, and the Rand study clearly demonstrates that they can not, there is still the fundamental issue that as a measure of actual learning, these tools can only provide information which as good as the standardized tests that are being used. If you stick garbage data in, you are going to get garbage data out, no matter how sophisticated your statistical calculations are.

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Motivating Michael to Read

Filed under: New Teacher Diaries by Aardvark @ 8:30 am

Aardvark is the pseudonym for a second-year high school English teacher in the Bronx.
Michael stares blankly at the sky blue wall. His eyes glazed, his head cocked to one side, a spittle of drool works its way down the corner of his mouth. Catcher with a Glass Arm by Matt Christopher rests unopened, lifeless on his desk.

Michael and I used to have a good rapport. Then his classes were changed. He was still in my class, just with a different group, at a different time of day.

A 9th grader by credits, though the majority of Michael’s cohorts have moved on to 10th. Michael has an IEP, and he is a low level reader in both English and Spanish. I run a ramp-up style program modified for English Language Learners (ELL). Therefore I teach the seven habits of good readers, and we spend the first 20 minutes of each class reading silently. This is especially important because the students in each class span a wide range of reading levels. Additionally when the students take the English and History Regents, they will need to read quietly for long periods of time. This custom of reading at the beginning of class helps build their stamina.
I know not every student enjoys these moments of silence. However it is a mandatory part of the learning experience. The students get to select their own reading materials. Out of all three of my classes, Michael is the only student who refuses to read. It wasn’t always like this.

He used to show up early to class, open The Daily News and appear to be content. Sometimes I would sit next to him and we would read small parts of an article. Granted his comprehension was low, but at least he was trying and even better it seemed he was progressing. This was last year. Then his classes were switched. I noticed an immediate change. He didn’t want to do his work anymore. He became somehow convinced that I was responsible for the change and insisted on staring blankly at the wall for entire reading periods.

Since this change last year, we have had moments of light reading, but the following day he is back to the blank wall stare. Last Friday only a handful of students showed to my last period class. I had previously decided to go to the library, though I hadn’t told the students. Michael was one of the many who had decided to start the weekend early. To my surprise, when we arrived at the library, I found Michael and his friends hanging out there. How ironic I chuckled and decided to play it cool. “Hey Michael, I’m so happy you decided to meet us here.” (more…)

February 15, 2007

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Looking for honest feedback from my students

Filed under: New Teacher Diaries by Mr. Emden @ 7:20 pm

Mr. Emden is a pseudonym for a second-year high school teacher in Brooklyn.

As the first semester of this school year ended, I thought to seek some feedback from my students. I hoped to learn something from them that would inform my teaching next term. As I typed, printed and copied the handout to invite dissent in my classroom, I mentally steeled myself for candid, thoughtful criticism of my teaching practice. Passing it out around the semi-circle of tired, ready-for-Regents week Juniors I felt nervous.

“Take your time, be honest, and don’t write your name” I told them wondering just how much honesty we were all prepared for.

Since I have good relationships with most of my students, I didn’t think I’d need to head off anything nasty, but I worried that our rapport would push them to pull their punches. “Don’t worry about sparing my feelings. If I’m doing something wrong, you need to tell me so I can change it.” And I honestly believe that sometimes the hardest things to hear are the most important ones to listen to. “Remember not to write your name on this and be as honest as possible.”

“Won’t you recognize our handwriting from all of our other work?” Terrell, who has turned in precious few assignments since September, earnestly asked.

The time I took considering a response to his quip felt as long as the awkward silence created by a question that no one in the room could possibly answer. My lips curled to an ironic smirk as my mind pondered its options. (more…)

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