Larry Ferlazzo’s Websites of the Day…

Nancy Flanagan has borrowed an idea from comedian Bill Maher and written her “New Rules” for education.

The post, and the comments, are a must read.

After reading them (and leaving your suggestions for general education rules there) come back and leave any you can think of for teaching English Language Learners over here!

By now, most people have heard about Education Secretary Duncan’s comment that Hurricane Katrina was “the best thing that happened to the education system in New Orleans.” He apologized today — several days after making the remark.

His comment elicited quite a bit of reaction — to say the least.

Valerie Strauss at the Washington Post, for example, wrote:

By the time we find ourselves praising a natural catastrophe for education reform, we are in big trouble. Such talk is the last refuge of someone bereft of new policy ideas.

At nearly the same time of this controversy, Mayor Bloomberg was closing “failed” schools in New York City. Diane Ravitch writes:

It is odd that school leaders feel triumphant when they close schools, as though they were not responsible for them. They enjoy the role of executioner, shirking any responsibility for the schools in their care. Every time a school is closed, those at the top should hang their heads in shame for their inability or refusal to offer timely assistance. Instead they exult in the failure of schools that are entrusted to their stewardship.

Both of these events, in turn, reminded me of an interview The Wall Street Journal did with Eli Broad (who funds the kind of school reform supported by Duncan and Bloomberg and who now has a presence in Sacramento) last summer. Here’s an excerpt:

…he is enthusiastic about all the change that is possible when urban school districts go bankrupt—as Oakland, Calif., did a few years ago—”or what happened in New Orleans, which is the equivalent of bankruptcy.”

I’m no expert in urban planning but, from what I know of it, these perspectives sound eerily similar to what I know about the countless failed “urban renewal” projects done in cities over the past sixty years — technocrats wanting to wipe the slate clean and instill their unproven vision of what is best instead of engaging with the people who are already there. And then, those people who are already there get pushed-out. We’ve already seen that with documented evidence that it’s not uncommon for the “successful” examples proclaimed by proponents to have entirely different student bodies than those who had been there before.

Check-out this 1955 video advocating for urban renewal in Pittsburgh. Anything sound familiar?

What do you think, am I pushing the parallel too far?

I posted yesterday about the South Carolina Lt. Governor’s idea to have benefits such as food aid yanked from families if they didn’t attend PTA meetings.

Mr. Layman in South Carolina sent me a link to a column their local paper published that I thought was incredibly thoughtful and insightful. It was written by a local professor and was titled Bauer’s comments reflect our own misconceptions.

It does a great job of looking at how schools often work in low-income communities.

I just finished reading the First Semester Final Projects from my mainstream ninth-grade English class, and am just incredibly impressed and touched by the caliber of their reflections. You can see it here

I spend a lot of time in class encouraging students to reflect on what they’re thinking and doing; what they’ve thought and done; and what they’re going to think and do. The final slide in the presentation I posted last week (see Update on My ELL Book) says “No Cockroaches” with an illustration representing Kafka’s Metamorphosis. That’s because one of the reasons I think the main character in that novel turned into a cockroach is because of his functioning in the world without any kind of reflection on the world and his role in it. It’s something we emphasized a lot in my community organizing career, too.

I talk at length about using reflection in the classroom in my upcoming book, English Language Learners: Teaching Strategies That Work. In fact, there’s an entire chapter devoted to it.

One of the best parts (in my opinion) of the final project entails students completing this section:

________________________________ was my best moment in class because ________________________________. I helped

make it my best moment by _______________________________________.

_______________________________was my worst moment in class because ______________________________. I could have

made it better by _____________________________________.

Two answers particularly struck me tonight:

One student wrote:

Seeing my first grade was my best moment in class because I had never got an A before. I helped make it my best moment by studying and turning in all my work.

Another wrote this (some background: each Friday I highlight a student and share reasons why I’m glad he/she is in the class — everyone gets this “Student of the Week” designation during the year):

Standing up to get a sucker was my best moment in class because I got to hear some good things about myself. I helped make it my best moment by working hard all week.

One of the other questions on the Project asked students to reflect on some of the “experimental” lessons we’ve done so far this semester – on the brain, self-control, goal-setting and visualizing success (by the way, my upcoming third book will be sharing a lot more ideas and lessons like these).

The ones on the brain, self-control and goal-setting were all quite popular (the visualizing success one — not so much). Here’s what one student wrote about the goal-setting exercise:

I liked the goal settings because when you set goals it seems like it makes me work harder to accomplish my goal.

In addition to this final project, this week students wrote an essay response to a writing prompt, completed two clozes, and each of them read to me to assess reading fluency (all are done several times a year to measure growth) . Most of the ninth-grade English teachers at our school use similar assessments.

I believe that these kinds of assessments provide an accurate measurement of student academic growth and their increased ability and willingness to be life-long learners — much more so than multiple-choice standardized tests.

It would be nice if the Obama administration’s supposed national competition to identify better assessments would take this sort of thing under serious consideration, but I’m not holding my breath.

An article in Educational Leadership is a year-old, but it’s new to me and certainly worth sharing. It’s called The New Stupid, and has the subtitle “Educators have made great strides in using data. But danger lies ahead for those who misunderstand what data can and can’t do.” It’s written by Frederick M. Hess.

It’s an article worth reading (though I do have concerns about some of its points), and relates to what I’ve written about being “Data-Driven” Versus “Data-Informed.”

Here are a couple of excerpts:

…the key is not to retreat from data but to truly embrace the data by asking hard questions, considering organizational realities, and contemplating unintended consequences. Absent sensible restraint, it is not difficult to envision a raft of poor judgments governing staffing, operations, and instruction—all in the name of “data-driven decision making.”

and…

First, educators should be wary of allowing data or research to substitute for good judgment. When presented with persuasive findings or promising new programs, it is still vital to ask the simple questions: What are the presumed benefits of adopting this program or reform? What are the costs? How confident are we that the promised results are replicable? What contextual factors might complicate projections? Data-driven decision making does not simply require good data; it also requires good decisions.

I’d love to hear the perspectives of others…

There’s a new book out that’s getting a fair amount of attention. It’s called Organizing Schools for Improvement: Lessons From Chicago, and was published this month by the University of Chicago Press.

Education Week just ran an article on it, but it’s only accessible to subscribers. One of the authors has written a blog post, though, that provides a good summary of the book. You can also access an excerpt at Google Books.

The author’s conclusions sound good to me, but, I have to say, the first thing that came to my mind when I read about them was, “Doesn’t everybody who works in schools know this already?”

They describe the importance of five “essential supports”:

The key ingredients, which we call the “essential supports,” are school leadership, parent and community ties, professional capacity of the faculty, school learning climate, and instructional guidance. Schools that measured strong in all five supports were at least 10 times more likely than schools with just one or two strengths to achieve substantial gains in reading and math

Of course, knowing something and having the political will and support to get it implemented are always two different things.

I was struck, though, by what the authors wrote about parent-community ties, and have written more about that in my other blog, Engaging Parents In School.

Mike Klonsky reports on a public radio debate between the chief spokesman for Education Secretary Duncan and my favorite education writer, Richard Rothstein.

I’d encourage you to read Mike’s analysis of the discussion, which he titles “Punching A Marshmallow.”

He’s also kind enough to provide a link to a recording of the debate, titled “Will The ‘Race To The Top’ Leave No Child Behind?” The discussion starts at the eight minute mark.

I’ve had concerns for a long time about Teach For America, the national organization that recruits college students from prestigious universities to teach in inner-city schools for two years.

Claus von Zastrow informs, clarifies, and enlightens — as he so often does skillfully — us all on this topic in his post “Why the Love/Hate Relationship with TFA?”

His post helped me get clearer that my issues are not necessarily with TFAers but, instead, with how the media often portrays them and how some “school reformers” might use them.

Sylvia Martinez has written a post sharing a speech King gave to the United Federation of Teachers, and commenting that she thinks it reflects a perspective that would include critiquing initiatives like the Race To The Top because it is “designed to create winners and losers in an education “game.””

While a college student in 1947, Martin Luther King also wrote a column in the campus newspaper and titled it “The Purpose of Education.” I wonder if this excerpt from King’s column (you can read the complete piece at Stanford’s collection of his papers), might raise similar questions:

Education must enable one to sift and weigh evidence, to discern the true from the false, the real from the unreal, and the facts from the fiction.

The function of education, therefore, is to teach one to think intensively and to think critically. But education which stops with efficiency may prove the greatest menace to society….

The complete education gives one not only power of concentration, but worthy objectives upon which to concentrate. The broad education will, therefore, transmit to one not only the accumulated knowledge of the race but also the accumulated experience of social living.

Will Somebody Tell Secretary Duncan’s Staff That There Are “Regular” Public Schools Engaging Parents, Too? is the title of a piece I just posted over at my other blog, Engaging Parents In School.

It’s a quasi-rant questioning why a staffperson from the Department of Education only highlighted parent involvement efforts from schools that could either pick-and-choose student enrollment and/or completely hire new staff for their school.

I was struck by the lead paragraph in a Chicago Tribune story yesterday (Board approves revamp of Ind. teacher licensing). It said:

The state panel overseeing teacher licensing has approved new rules Indiana’s state superintendent says will allow future educators to spend less time learning how to teach and more time focused on subject matter.

Maybe I’m missing something, but it seems to me that this kind of move is going in the opposite direction of where we need to go to help increase student achievement. I’m sure lots of people know a lot more information than me about the areas I teach. I just think the key to effective teaching is not the content information I have in my head, but the ability and skills to help students find the motivation within themselves to want learn about the subject matter. I don’t have to be an expert in that content subject in order to make that happen.

I don’t know much about science and math, but in the semester of teaching when I had a self-contained class of retained seventh-graders, I think I did a fairly effective job of helping engage and learn in those subjects — even though I was generally only a handful of pages ahead of them in the texts.

On the other hand, during my teacher credentialing program we had a person teaching us about ed tech who forgot more about technology than I’ll ever learn teaching us, and most of us were completely lost in that class.

As in most things, I’m not suggesting that it has to be an either/or position. There needs to be a balance. I’m concerned that what is happening in Indiana, and what might be happening in “alternative credentialing” programs, might have that balance out of whack.

The dictionary says the definition of power is “the ability to act.” Some say that information is power. I don’t agree. I think it’s what you do with that information is what determines if you have power — what actions you take. And, in the context of being an educator, it’s not the information I know that determines how much power I have — it’s my ability to share it, to help others want it, and to help them figure out how they can also get it on their own so they can be life-long learners.

What do you think?

Seth Godin wrote a short post today titled “Without Them” today that has been constantly re-circulated on Twitter — usually with a positive comment attached to it.

I personally think it is the wrong advice most of the time for those of us who who want to effectively make social or institutional change.

He basically says that if you have an idea you want to try, and it meets some resistance, you should just do it, “cause a ruckus and work things out later.”

He ends his post with “I’m going. Come along if you like.”

I speak directly to this perspective in my post “A Few Simple Ways To Introduce Reluctant Colleagues To Technology:”

In my community organizing career, I learned that a key to engaging people to move beyond their comfort zone is to first build a relationship — a reciprocal one. A relationship entails eliciting from others their hopes and dreams, along with sharing your own. It involves finding learning the frustrations and challenges that people are experiencing. It involves looking for ways to help the other person realize those hopes and dreams and get beyond those challenges. And, if educational technology can genuinely help in those ways, then building a relationship means framing the invitation to try it in a way that speaks to what the other person wants, which may not be the way you would prefer to frame it.

Obviously, sometimes doing what Godin recommends has and will work — certainly in my community organizing career we met plenty of nay-sayers. And, of course, like most of us, there have been times when I’ve followed the advice “It’s easier to ask for forgiveness than permission.” However, I think even in those circumstances, there are many more choices than the ones he lists: “you can fail by going along with that and not doing it, or you can do it, cause a ruckus and work things out later.”

Listening to criticisms, asking more probing questions of those who disagree, refining your plan of action before you move forward taking into account what you hear — these are all additional ways to respond.

Being provocative can be an effective teaching tool, one that I often use. When it’s done in a classroom setting, however, a subsequent conversation can leave time for clarification. However, sometimes when it’s done in writing (especially in a venue like Godin’s blog that apparently doesn’t allow people to leave comments), it can provide not very helpful guidance.

Here’s another quote from my post that I referenced earlier:

Many years ago I helped operate a soup kitchen on San Jose’s (CA) Skid Row. We were well-meaning, but not the most responsible neighbors. On day I was sweeping around the passed-out men and women on our front porch when a police car drove-up. An officer got out and started yelling me, saying that we couldn’t control thing and they received many complaints about us. As the officer continued, one of the men on the porch pulled himself up on the railing and yelled out, “Officer, Larry tries. He tries hard. We just don’t listen to him!”

I’ve often thought about that incident during my nineteen year career as a community organizer and six years as a public school teacher. I’ve framed the lesson I learned that day as a question, “Do I want to be right? Or do I want to be effective?”

Of course, that question is another provocative one — it doesn’t have to be either/or.

And I would say the same for Godin’s post.

Yesterday, I shared a piece written by a Washington Post columnist who was commenting on article the Post ran highlighting the test scores in Chicago under Secretary Duncan’s reign were not that great (See “Why Duncan’s record in Chicago is a problem”).

I finally had a moment today to actually read the Post article on the test scores, and saw this absolutely great quote from Secretary Duncan:

“Obviously, you always want to get better faster,” Duncan said in an interview when asked about the federal math scores. “I was focused on outcomes — improving graduation rates, making sure that students who graduated had a chance to pursue higher ed. You can have the best test scores in the world, but if kids aren’t going that next step, you’re not changing their lives.”

I agree with that priority completely. I just hope he keeps that in mind before he next talks about (and/or acts on) tying test score improvement to teacher pay and federal education aid.

Why Duncan’s record in Chicago is a problem is a excellent post from Washington Post education reporter/blogger Valerie Strauss.

She comments on a piece by another Post reporter reviewing Education Secretary Duncan’s tenure as head of Chicago schools, which was decidedly mixed.

I’d encourage you to read her entire piece, but here’s an excerpt:

Duncan himself did not call his work as Chicago schools chief an educational miracle, but he never stopped others, including Obama, from making more of it than there really was.

My point? Progress is hard. Progress is uneven. Progress takes different approaches.

No one person has the answer for everybody.

Yet Duncan has decided on specific routes for progress that school districts must take in order to win some of the billions of dollars in federal funds he is dangling–$3.5 billion in grants for systems to turn around weak schools and $4 billion for states to pursue innovation.

This is why so many people are upset at Duncan — especially those who had hoped Obama would change the educational dynamic of Bush’s “No Child Left Behind” era, with its emphasis on high-stakes standardized tests and charter schools.

They had hoped Duncan would take the country away from NCLB. Instead, he seems to be ratcheting it up, based on a record in Chicago that is hardly shining.

So here we go again. Most unfortunately.

Dumb Arguments for Stupid Ideas is a post worth reading by Alexander Hoffman at Gotham Schools.

It relates to my post last week titled Academic Research Has Its Place, But It Also Has To Be Kept In Its Place.

I’d encourage you to read the entire post. Here’s an excerpt:

Some issues do not need to researched (e.g. buzz cuts for teachers). Some ideas can be dealt with well without research, though research can be useful and at times can be necessary.

We do not need to research the policy to know that it is a bad idea. We can tell that a lot of kids will not get Metrocards. Lower income families will not be as able to take advantage of school choice. And we can easily predict that many kids will be absent or grossly tardy due to a lack of money to pay for the bus or subway. We do not need to do research, or to soberly analyze the results, to thoughtfully examine this proposal.

Thanks to Alexander Russo for the tip.

I like education writer Richard Rothstein a lot, as you can see from some previous posts.

I just learned that an excerpt from his excellent book, Class and Schools: Using Social, Economic, and Educational Reform To Close The Black-White Achievement Gap. is available online.

I also included several quotes from his book in my own, Building Parent Engagement In Schools. I use his research to help reinforce why schools need to work with parents to respond to the major impediments to student achievement outside the schoolhouse walls.

Thanks to Susan Ohanian for the tip.

Sacramento Mayor Kevin Johnson has just announced the creation of a group called Stand Up for Sacramento Schools that will, among other things, “establish a report card to grade Sacramento schools.” The Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation has committed $500,000 to the new nonprofit.

There are lots of “wheels within wheels” in this story — Johnson’s history of starting charter schools himself, his sponsorship of an initiative to give him more power than most mayors of other cities, his upcoming marriage to Michelle Rhee, the Broad Foundation’s education agenda.

I also think it’s an interesting coincidence that this announcement of a report card on Sacramento schools comes at roughly the same time another “report card” called “Leaders and Laggards” was unveiled nationally. One of the groups issuing these grades is the Center For American Progress, which receives a lot of support for its education work from the Broad Foundation. You can read an excellent analysis of this report from my Teacher Leaders Network colleague Bob Williams. I wonder if the our local report card might use some of the same questionable criteria?

Of course, this is all conjecture, and it’s too early to tell how this all will play out here. I hope that my concerns turn-out to be unfounded and that this new group, instead, becomes a positive force for school improvement.

California’s “Race To The Top” & Parents is a piece I just posted at my other blog, Engaging Parents In School.

You might find it interesting.

I was re-reading an article that Malcolm Gladwell wrote a couple of years ago titled Open Secrets, which has some intriguing pieces in it about the differences between a “puzzle” and a “mystery.” He gives credit to security expert Gregory F. Treverton for initially defining the difference, and Treverton wrote about it in Smithsonian Magazine (Risks and Riddles).

I’m wondering if this distinction might help inform the ongoing debates about “school reform.”

Let me first share some quotes from Gladwell:

The national-security expert Gregory Treverton has famously made a distinction between puzzles and mysteries. Osama bin Laden’s whereabouts are a puzzle. We can’t find him because we don’t have enough information. The key to the puzzle will probably come from someone close to bin Laden, and until we can find that source bin Laden will remain at large.

The distinction is not trivial. If you consider the motivation and methods behind the attacks of September 11th to be mainly a puzzle, for instance, then the logical response is to increase the collection of intelligence, recruit more spies, add to the volume of information we have about Al Qaeda. If you consider September 11th a mystery, though, you’d have to wonder whether adding to the volume of information will only make things worse. You’d want to improve the analysis within the intelligence community; you’d want more thoughtful and skeptical people with the skills to look more closely at what we already know about Al Qaeda. You’d want to send the counterterrorism team from the C.I.A. on a golfing trip twice a month with the counterterrorism teams from the F.B.I. and the N.S.A. and the Defense Department, so they could get to know one another and compare notes.

Here are some passages from Treverton’s piece:

A mystery cannot be answered; it can only be framed, by identifying the critical factors and applying some sense of how they have interacted in the past and might interact in the future. A mystery is an attempt to define ambiguities.

Puzzle-solving is frustrated by a lack of information. By contrast, mysteries often grow out of too much information.

I’m not entirely convinced it has to be an either/or perspective and, in fact, think it can be damaging to look at any situation as black or white. But I wonder if worshiping at the alter of school data, as some appear to do, tilts us too far in the direction of looking at how to improve schools (and their teachers, administrators, and students) as a puzzle with primarily technical solutions, including daily prescribed curriculum, all-powerful standardized tests, and national standards.

Instead, I wonder if it would be better if we look at more as a mystery where data has its place, but it also has to be kept in its place. I’ve written about the distinction between being data-driven and being data-informed. It seems to me that being data-informed, recognizing that education might be a place where one size does not fit all, and encouraging school staff, parents and students to use their judgment and develop collaborative action might be a better direction in which to go.

What do you think? Does the puzzle/mystery framework hold any validity from your perspective?

Earlier this week our principal initiated a discussion at the School Site Council on Small Learning Communities (SLC’s). His thinking was that we’ve been doing them for six years, and take them for granted, but that it’s important to reflect on their usefulness periodically.

I think his point is well-taken, and we had a very good discussion at the meeting. I also realized that I’ve never really shared in this blog about how our school is organized into Small Learning Communities, and how I (and the vast majority of our teachers, students, parents and administrators) believe that it’s a critical piece of our schools’ success.

The idea of SLC’s is to create “schools within schools.” We have a total population of 2200 students that are divided into seven Small Learning Communities of about 300 students and twenty teachers (very roughly) each. Those students and teachers — for the most part — stay together year after year. There are some “global” classes where students from different SLC’s take classes together, but all English, Math, Social Studies and Biology classes are taught exclusively within these SLC’s. Students also take one class each year that specifically relates to the theme of that SLC (Information Technology — which is where I teach — Construction & Design; International & Environmental Studies; Medical & Health Sciences; Public Services; Law & Social Justice; and Arts & Communications). Also, for the most part, the SLC’s are physically-located in different sections of the school. Each SLC has their own counselor, and the teachers and counselor meet as a group twice-a-month for an hour-and-a-half (academic departments meeting twice-a-month and all faculty meet every-other month). Each SLC also has a “Lead Teacher” who functions as a de facto teacher/administrator and who handles student scheduling for that SLC and has other responsibilities.

The benefits behind this organization are almost too numerous to mention. Really, no student falls through the cracks. There’s plenty of research (I share much of it in my upcoming book, English Language Learners: Teaching Strategies That Work, that highlights the importance of relationships in learning, and SLC’s are a huge asset in developing those. I not only interact with my students in class, but I see them all day as they walk to different classes, and I’ll maintain that communication for all of their four years at school. If a student is having some challenges one day in the morning, I can let his/her next teachers know since they’re only a few feet away. If a student did something particularly noteworthy that morning, I can let other teachers know so they can make comments to the student throughout the day. At every SLC meeting, we discuss students and can develop joint interventions. And, of course, students themselves can develop more solid relationships with their peers.

There are many schools that use SLC’s, though not all necessarily maintain the same level of “purity” (keeping so many classes with only students from that SLC). It can be expensive. It costs our school nearly $1 million above what we get from the standard funding formulas this year (which were obviously reduced from previous years). Those funds have come in the past from restructuring grants the district has received, and now from the Quality Education Investment Act (QEIA).

It’s worth every penny.

You can get more information on Small Learning Communities in general here and here.