Race to the top?

I got in an argument today with my dad. He's becoming more and more of a curmudgeon these days (can't blame the guy, though).

The subject of our argument had to do with the conversation on Meet the Press this morning between Arne Duncan, Rev. Al Sharpton, and Newt Gingrich, a trio that has been touring the country to look at schools and talk about what direction education policy needs to take in the years ahead.

I just happened to catch this 20 minute conversation while I was walking on a treadmill in a hotel fitness center this morning. I don't have TV at home, so had it not been for the particular circumstances of this morning, I would never have seen this.

The first thing my dad said to me when I entered his living room later in the day was something that asked me to agree with him that the conversation on Meet the Press this morning was thoughtful, balanced, and thought-provoking.

Well, I had already discussed with my husband this morning over breakfast that this was not exactly my assessment of the Duncan/Gingrich/Sharpton Meet the Press dialogue. To me it was one more example of educational discourse that looks at our public schools only in terms of the extremes (it opened with stats about the public schools in Washington DC--while the stats are true and horribly sad, they contextualized the conversation within a view that public schooling in America is failing all of our kids dismally). There was a good amount of conversation that demonized teachers (without considering the horrible, impossible conditions that some teachers are asked to teach within--a massive failure of our system as a whole). There was anti-teacher union sentiment. There was a promise from Duncan that none of the Race to the Top money would be doled out to any state/district that didn't tie their reform plans to test scores.

In short, it was a group of politicians (with NO actual educators) sitting around discussing the needs of educational policy in our country.

My dad is proud of Obama for challenging the teachers' unions. Now, I'm not exactly the most fervent fan of teachers' unions, but they are there for a reason. Teachers have a history of being treated very badly by their school districts. My dad said to me, "you're a good teacher and everybody knows it--you don't need the protection of the teachers' union." Well, until I feel valued for my experience and expertise by my district administration because I see them placing a priority in all of their decision making on valuing teachers, I will still see a need for a teachers' union in my district. My dad made a sweeping statement writing off teachers' unions for protecting bad teachers. Sure, that happens, and I don't like it--but teachers' unions also protect the rest of us who work unbelievably hard.

I told my dad that so far Obama's educational direction is not really a dramatic change of course from the No Child Left Behind bus driven by W. What we certainly don't need is more mandated testing and holding teachers accountable to test scores. The tests are flawed for a whole range of reasons (see the link below for someone else's take on some of those reasons). I do not oppose higher standards or meaningful, rigorous assessment in public schools. I do not oppose requiring districts to examine their test score data by the sub groups of student population within their school and to use that test score data to identify the groups of students who are struggling the most and find ways to close those achievement gaps. In a nutshell, those are the requirements of NCLB, the most recent revision of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act that has been around since 1965 and responsible for scores of significant and important educational reforms in this country. What I have a problem with is the mandated high-stakes testing--meaning real world consequences for schools that don't make the grade on test scores.

If the tests were meaningful and rigorous with a minimum of fill-in-the-bubble multiple choice test questions, I might be able to get behind it. But they're not. We do not have a testing industry that can support meaningful tests at the scale that federal law requires. So we're left with the tests that are able to be scored efficiently.

But there is nothing efficient about measuring what students truly know and are able to do. It's a messy, complex, nuanced process. And that--as I tried to make the point to my dad today --is why I had a problem with Meet the Press this morning. There are probably scores of Americans who now think they are more educated in this issue after watching that program this morning. But they have no idea how nuanced and complex public education in America is. There is NO simple fix for reform. Each school and district is its own universe with its own unique community context that spills into the school in myriad ways to affect what happens in classrooms. I happen to work in a district situated in a research university town--you bet that spills into our classrooms. The community expectations are high enough that on the whole we believe our students can achieve. And most of them do. You might not believe what we are able to accomplish here at the high school level with many of our students. F. Scott often says that essentially our students are getting a private prep-school caliber education for free. And he's right.

But that doesn't mean that we can't still do better. And we want to. And pressure to tie all of our reform ideas to scores on our state test is not what will make for meaningful reform. Actually--we'll enact meaningful reform, unique to the needs of our students in our community, simply by working together to work on the problems particular to our school context (an achievement gap for our second-language learners, students in the non-IB/non-AP courses who are generally disengaged from school, an impending doom that threatens to bring budget cuts of 6 to 9 percent next year when we are already trying to manage huge class sizes...).

This was going to be just a short piece to direct your attention to the Open Letter to our President that I came across today in the Edurati Review because I believe it gets into some of the nuance that I thought was lacking from Meet the Press this morning. But apparently I had a lot to say (either that or I'm just avoiding the stack of grading and other things I have sitting here staring at me...).

By the way, speaking of the stack of stuff staring at me--in a few weeks, F. Scott and I have agreed to capture here (as well as we can) a typical week in each of our teaching worlds--all in the spirit of helping others to understand what it looks like to do the work that we do.

Signing off,
M. Shelley

Why federal "RTT" reforms won't work...

This is maybe the best articulation ever of why current reform efforts underway in our nation's capital will not work. Funny- it took someone who actually knows education to point it out.

Marion Brady on The One Reason Duncan's Race to the Top Will Fail at Valerie Strauss' Blog at The Washington Post.

Brady says (succinctly) all the things I have wanted to say for years. I think she has it nailed.

Thanks to Schools Matter for passing this along.

F. Scott

Real change?

I'm supposed to be writing a paper (the same paper I've assigned to my students to show up in rough draft form tomorrow). Procrastination sets in so I'm writing, but here instead.

In conversations with colleagues over the last few days, I've gotten to a place where I feel somewhat stuck. Or maybe overwhelmed.

It's one of those times where I feel like I just want to shut my classroom door and do my own thing despite what the rest of the school is doing.

But unless there's some way to enact real change in the rest of the school, I will not be able to realize the hopes and visions I have for my students.

See, I really truly want to figure out what it means to teach language arts to high school students in ways that will meaningfully prepare them for success in our ever-changing, complexifying world. The jargon for this is 21st century skills. What does it mean to create a 21st century high school?

I am willing to chase this question, even if it means I have to throw out everything I've done before and remake my classroom and my teaching.

But I'm not sure my colleagues are equally willing.

When I get little glimpses of what is possible--of cool ways to integrate technology to get students more engaged, of interesting potential for doing cross-disciplinary work, of the options that begin to surface when we consider putting aside the daily/weekly schedule that currently rules our lives in the traditional American high school--I get excited.

But these are changes on the level of paradigm shifting.

Paradigm shifting is really, really difficult.

For now, I feel somewhat stuck within the boundaries created by the ways the community where I teach defines the purposes and practices of school. There are definitions about these things--about what students do, about what teachers do, about what is supposed to be happening in classrooms, about what a day at school is supposed to look like--that we all share and buy into, that we live and exist within, that are as invisible (yet omnipresent) to us as the air we breathe. So within that context, it's really hard for me to make the real change that I would like to move toward.

So there is where I feel stuck. It's such a daunting prospect (paradigm shifting--questioning the air we breathe) that I don't even know where to start.

Signing off (to write that paper I need to write)--
M. Shelley

Out of the office, into the classroom

A great moment today at work (in a day that REALLY needed a great moment).

I was writing a paper to use as a model for my students in a fairly traditional 11th Grade class. They are working on an assignment in which they have to analyze a passage from a play by Shakespeare. So I chose a passage from a different play (one of my favorites- yes I am a literature geek). I wrote a paper (about 750 words- these are very short papers), and handed it off to my teammate to give it a read. We were sitting in my office and my office-mate (M. Shelly) joined in the conversation (I wasn't trying to cut her out, we just don't teach the same classes). Soon we were all involved in a conversation about not only my paper, but what we thought a paper like this should look like. What qualities made a paper like this good? We were, in essence, fully engaged in a writing conference, with my writing as the center of attention.

It was a really interesting experience from several different perspectives. First, writing this paper was tough. And I am a professional in this field, I know the play I was writing about, I know the passage cold (mostly have it memorized), and most days I am a pretty good writer. Even so, this is a tough assignment. It isn't tough to think about the passage, but to convert that thinking into a cogent, articulate and extremely focused piece of writing was really challenging. It was a good reminder that what we ask our students to do every day is hard. Even for our good students (and most of my students are very good at being students).

Second, it was interesting to have my writing worked over in the same way that I do my student's writing. I am serious about both writing and thinking about literature. I am a veteran of writing workshops, have my own committed writing practice, and have the toughest editor I know close to hand (I am married to her). It is tough to take criticism, even from people I know like and trust, in a neutral setting! And I really trust both the source of the criticism and the nature of the comments. I have no doubt that following my colleague's advice will improve my paper, and I still wanted to fight about it.

My students are worried about being 'right,' worried about what I will think of them, worried about what their peers will think of them, and all too often they don't really understand why I care about their writing, because they don't. They just want a grade and to move on. Or they want to know how to get to the 'right' answer- and that is tough when studying literature. For many, English class is a perennial mystery, where they never really get a grip on what it is we are doing, no matter how hard my colleagues and I try to make it transparent (yes, I know that there are just as many who love this class, but I am not as worried about them for immediate purposes). What must it be like to have a conference with me?

And third, in the middle of a really engaged conversation about my paper and papers like this in general- a thought struck me. I said to my colleagues, "Wee need to stop doing this in here (here being in our office) and do it in our classrooms." We need to model what it really takes to get good at writing, which was all the things we had in play in my office. I was genuinely committed to the writing (my geekiness knows no bounds), my colleagues we genuinely committed to helping me, and we had the freedom to have a real conversations because we had an already established relationship of trust and respect, making the office a safe place to float my writing.

So I guess the tough question is really, how do I get students to that place. That, of course, is a pretty complicated question. It would be great if the intertube out there had some answers. I am not sure it does. We did talk about how to arrange our schedules so that we could model these kinds of discussions for our students. That is a start.

I am actually not going to show my students a revised draft of the paper, at least not right away. I want them to see it in its raw first draft, without the benefit of the revision process. I took some notes, and Shelly wrote some things on the back of my draft, and I think I will take some suggestions from my students as well.

It was, far and away, the best part of my day.

F. Scott

A 'pick me up...'

I spent the last two days at the National School Board Association T+L conference in Denver. Other than the blizzard in Denver this week, it was a really invigorating time (though I guess you could say that the blizzard was invigorating). There were too many interesting ideas to list them all in one post, but there were some themes- at least for me.

Project based learning came up a lot, in several different contexts. It fit nicely with the thinking I have been doing about "Focus, frame and form." (Updates on that little experiment are forthcoming). Using technology (it was the T+L conference after all) as leverage to engage our students in the larger world, project based learning feels like something I have been headed towards for a while. I was mulling classroom ideas over to myself while listening to several presentations- always a good sign.

Frans Johanssen, author of The Medici Effect, who spoke on Wednesday morning, was everything you might hope for as a dynamic and engaging speaker. He definitely comes across as a guy you'd want to hang out with. His message about the nature of innovation was powerful, as was his admonition that we must be willing to fail in order to innovate. How often do we think/hear/feel that in our working lives? Rarely if ever, though it seems obvious once you think about it. Note to self- how to you say that to students? How do we encourage them to take risks? How do we make a place that's safe to take risks? In our school? In our classroom? In our own heads?

All the presentation addressed innovation, breaking barriers, learning that is meaningful to our students. It was great to hear/participate in some really rich conversations. I was also sorry that so little of this thinking is part of our national dialogue about education. No one in Denver was talking about testing. Everyone was talking about assessing in meaningful ways. Sounds like semantics, but it isn't. There is a difference.

Finally, this conference is, at least ostensibly, about technology. But much more of the conversation was about learning. Yes, up on the main floor three hundred companies were waiting to pitch you software, hardware or services that were technological in nature. But I had way fewer conversations about 'stuff' than I anticipated. It isn't about stuff. It is about what we want kids to know or be able to do, and how to get them there in a way that works.

So back to home. And tomorrow, back to school. I'm tired, but in a good way. With a bag full of ideas that I will have to sort through. Try a few out, maybe fail a time or two?

-F. Scott

Ed Sec Speaks- it can't be good.

Secretary of Education Arne Duncan will be speaking at Columbia Teacher's College tomorrow- according to CNN. He will apparently be calling for overhaul of teacher preparation to better "prepar(e) teachers for the realities of the 21st-century classroom." Given the initiatives of the Obama Administration in education policy, which have read like an uninterrupted continuation of the Bush administration, Arne Duncan talking about the 21st Century Classroom is a bit like the CEO of Hormel talking about animal rights. Though I am pretty sure that if the CEO of Hormel claimed to know something about pigs, and even claimed to like them, I would believe him. Whereas when Duncan claims to know anything about real students in the real world, it's awfully tough to buy his rap.

Over and over again, from our district to the Secretary of Education, we hear politicians make noise about 21st century education while pushing agendas that from a more nuanced perspective seem only designed to return us to the 18th century (at best).

Alfie Kohn had a great piece in District Administration in the February issue that said it way better than I.

-F. Scott

One more thing

In the midst of all of this stress today I got some horrible news.

One of my students from last year (and the year before--he was stuck with me for two years in a row) passed away on Friday. The circumstances of his death are not yet certain, but it may have been a suicide, and drugs and/or alcohol were likely involved.

The truth is that this kid struggled intensely in his life. He was in my class nearly every day the first year he was on my roster--but the second year, well, he disappeared pretty much halfway through first semester. His life was crashing in on him. He was one of those kids I never felt like I quite reached--never really knew well, never really convinced him that he deserved to be successful. It always seemed like there were much more significant things going on in his mind/world to care too much about what I asked him to do.

What this leaves for me today is just a pit of sadness in the center of everything. And a connection to times past where I learned about something that they don't teach you in methods classes in college. During a period of 10 months at the school where I taught about seven years ago, we lost seven students. The first was a student in my fifth hour freshman language arts class. It was a car accident in a highway construction zone. I had no idea how to handle this--how to deal with my own grief along side the grief on the faces of my students as we all noticed the violently empty desk in the middle of our classroom.

We muddled through and began to heal, and just about three weeks later, there was another tragic highway construction zone accident--this time with a car load of five of our students. Two died at the scene. The other three were lucky to have survived. In a school of 800 students, this is a lot of tragedy in three weeks. We were all stunned.

Instead of school for the rest of the school year (it was only about a week or so), my students and I talked about life, ate cookies, went on walks, and played games together. It was therapeutic, and we all needed it. Life curriculum trumped school curriculum.

The next school year we lost a student to a skateboarding/car accident (he was also one of mine), two students (a brother and sister) to a house fire, and another student to a terminal illness.

There is something nearly unbearable about attending a funeral or memorial service for a high school student, one that you can remember so clearly as full of life and possibility, eyes on the future, youth shining from their very souls.

And on Thursday evening, there I will be again, trying to grasp all of this. Death of youth.

This time it's different in some ways--instead of a sudden, unexpected disappearance of an energetic life force as was the case of my students about seven years back--here we have a possible suicide. I've not been through this ground before. How much pain must he have been dealing with in his life? As he was sitting in MY classroom? Did anything I ever asked him to do have any meaning to his life? Is there anything I could have done as his teacher to heal the pain?

I'm not suggesting I feel responsible. I just hope that I was somehow a positive spot in his world. That, in short, is really the best, truest goal I can have as a teacher.

The sadness from the students I lost before still creeps in on me once in a while. It catches me in the quiet moments--not as much as it used to, but it still catches me. This week, though, the sadness for this student's death now will creep and hover all around, omnipresent, just waiting for my attention to divert from whatever else I might be focused on at the moment so it can swallow my thoughts whole.

I'll let it. The grief needs acknowledgment.

And it's how I will be able to honor this student--by letting his passing sink in, by working to remember what I can about him, by hoping that he has finally reached some peace.

M. Shelley