Wednesday, November 17, 2010

The runaway train of educational policy...

This opinion piece in the NYTimes made me think. It's about the economy, but I see parallels to what's happening in education lately too.

Brooks argues:
"The economic approach embraced by the most prominent liberals over the past few years is mostly mechanical. The economy is treated like a big machine; the people in it like rational, utility maximizing cogs. The performance of the economic machine can be predicted with quantitative macroeconomic models. [...] Everything is rigorous. Everything is science."

When I saw Ravitch speak about her latest book recently, she wondered how a liberal President could have embraced ideas about education (measure and punish, teacher accountability, wide sweeping top-down measures to control what happens in classrooms, etc.) that were not in essence liberal. I wonder if there's some connection here to what Brooks is saying about the dominate liberal thinking toward fixing our economy, an approach that for the most part excludes "psychology, emotion, and morality"--concepts that he says he would expect in liberal thinking on the economy.

Maybe. All I know is that education thinking at the policy level is heading in the wrong direction. My state is proposing an "assessment system" that will mandate not just a state-developed summative assessment at the end of the school year, but quarterly interim assessments (that's now FIVE state tests each year) and formative assessments that are ongoing. If these are delivered to the schools from the state, by the way, they are actually no longer formative assessments which work (the research tells us) because they are contextual, immediate, and respond to factors that emerge in the daily life of a classroom. And this interim assessment thing--there's no body of research (yet) to show that they work in the ways that proponents claim they do. I just can't imagine that five state tests in a year are going to improve things in my classroom and make my students more successful, even if it does bring up their test scores.

It's like no one at the policy level is actually thinking about this stuff. There's no thought in the realm of "psychology, emotion, or morality"--how might all this testing affect teachers and students psychologically, emotionally, or morally? Who can actually teach and learn when they are being forced to do so? Where's the love of learning?

Without that (a love of learning), there is no learning actually.

Anybody know how to stop this runaway train?

You should read the rest of Brooks' argument and see what parallels you're seeing to educational policy right now. And let me know what you think.

M. Shelley

Friday, November 5, 2010

Where did the semester go?

Greetings blogosphere.

It feels as if the school year just started, and now we're down to four weeks of classes left before semester finals. I'm not sure exactly where all the time went. And the cold weather hasn't really hit here yet (we're waaaaay overdue for our first snow of the year and we're looking at record breaking warmth this weekend) so it doesn't feel like we could possibly be on the cusp of the Thanksgiving break.

The fall musical hits this weekend at our school. And I'm not going this year (even though one of the leads is a student I've had in my class for three years now). Why? I feel overwhelmed, so much so that I couldn't even manage the details of filling out the form for my complementary tickets to the musical.

So overwhelmed that I haven't been here to write for weeks.
So overwhelmed that I haven't touched my book proposal on my dissertation since summer.

I discussed this with one of our special education teachers this week in the mail room. The special education teachers have a unique view of the school; due to their role as support system to the students on their case load, these teachers are in and out of many teachers' classrooms. This particular teacher told me that it seems like everyone is overwhelmed this year. We spent a few moments wondering about this together, and I've been thinking about this since that conversation, trying to figure this out.

Are the planets aligned just so? Are the stars broadcasting signals that are disrupting the daily existence of classroom teachers this fall? I wish it were something so innocuous.

I wonder, actually, if we're feeling the weight of doing more and more and more. Around here the abysmal budget situation has raised our class sizes. We're being bombarded across the country (even in the major movie theaters now) with the message that all the problems in education are our fault so we need to prove ourselves in the court of public opinion. Must raise test scores. Must prove our "effectiveness" (even when no one knows how to actually measure that meaningfully). Must raise standards. Must differentiate more. Must document all interventions that we've already been doing as a natural course of being a good teacher. Must do more more more more more.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not against doing many of these things we're being asked to do--like differentiating more and pushing my students toward more rigorous thinking and figuring out how to meaningfully measure my actual effectiveness in inspiring my students to be stronger readers, writers, and thinkers. But the sum effect of all of these messages is absolutely a heavy load that teachers carry around with them, a load that seems to be getting heavier and heavier.

Maybe this is why I had such a hard time transitioning back to school this year. I usually slide happily into the school year, but perhaps this year the load that I had to pick up as I walked back into the school building was edging toward too much for me to handle alongside my job that already requires so much of me to do well?

I hate calling what I do a "job." It's what I do as a human being; it's who I am. I can't imagine my life without it. But all this other stuff...

--M. Shelley