Larry Ferlazzo’s Websites of the Day…

I read, hear, and even write a lot about “techniques” that are supposed to improve schools and classroom instruction. Often times, professional development books and workshops (and teacher hand-outs at staff meetings) are filled with zillions of them — how to use multiple intelligences, technology, specific instructional strategies with students that have special needs, etc.

These techniques are obviously important.

I wonder, though, if we teachers and our students, schools, and districts might be better off if we spent a little more time focusing on — for lack of being able to come up with better terms — our “cultural orientations” or basic “ways of thinking”?

What am I talking about?

Please bear with me as share my thinking on all this. Usually, I don’t post a piece like this which is more of a “process post” — I don’t necessarily have as much clarity as I would like, and, instead, am sharing my thoughts and hoping that feedback from readers will helping move my thinking along.

Last week marked the 100th anniversary of Peter Drucker’s birth. Drucker was the renowned business and management philosopher, writer, theorist, analyst. His thinking also says a lot to community organizing (my previous career) and teaching (my present one) Someone (and I’m sorry that I can’t remember who) wrote about National Public Radio’s coverage of this anniversary, which pointed out that his most important idea was:

the importance of a company having a sense of mission or a purpose, and that that’s not identical with its strategy, it’s not identical with its business model, it’s why it exists and what social good or greater good that it’s serving. That’s a very important Drucker idea.

When I’m talking about a “cultural orientation” or “way of thinking,” I think mean something like what Drucker meant. But something more than “whatever is good for kids.”

I’d like to give three examples of what I mean — in the classroom, in a school and, in the context of schools connecting with parents.

IN A CLASSROOM

In the first part of each school year, in most of my classes I lead a discussion with students asking what they want our class to be — “A Community of Learners” or a “Classroom of Students.” I write about this more extensively in my book “Teaching English Language Learners: Strategies That Work” (which will be out next summer), but I’ll give a short description here.

I write the two columns on the overhead and give some examples of the difference between the two. In a classroom of students, a teacher does most of the talking. In a Community Of Learners, students work in small groups and are co-teachers. In a “classroom” people laugh when others make mistakes, while in a “community” people are supported when they take risks. In a “classroom” the teacher has to be always be the one to keep people focused, while in a “community” students take responsibility to keep themselves focused.

Most students say their previous classes had been more like a “Classroom of Students.” I ask students to share what other differences they might see between the two types. Here are a couple of examples students said this year:

In a “classroom” “students start a fight and end up hurting each other.” In a “community” “they don’t start a fight, they talk it out.”

In a “classroom” “the only way to succeed is doing exactly what the teacher says.” In a “community” “you have more than one choice in succeeding.”

After adding to the list, students then decide which one they’d rather have. No one has every chosen a “classroom of students.”

By starting with this basic “cultural orientation” or “way of thinking,” students developed their own ways of approaching (I guess you could almost call it their own “techniques”) how the class would operate. It provided a framework for looking at numerous issues throughout the whole school year, and respected their judgment and wants.

IN A SCHOOL:

Ted Appel has done a tremendous job working with teachers over the past few years at our school to develop a “cultural orientation” or “way of thinking.”  Basically, it’s not acceptable for students to not do well — everybody succeeds.  That way of thinking operates almost universally among the faculty, and is amazingly prevalent among students as well.

Our tutoring project, where students hire (and fire) teachers of their choice, is an example of this way of thinking. We didn’t set-up an after-school tutoring center and then blame the students for not showing-up. Ted and our staff began with the thinking that some students needed help, and looked at what were the barriers to them getting the most effective assistance they could get so they could do well and thought outside the box.

IN A PARENT ENGAGEMENT STRATEGY

In my book, Building Parent Engagement In Schools, I highlight the differences between parent involvement and parent engagement.  Some of those differences include the primary “involvement” tool schools use is their mouths to talk, while the primary “engagement” tool is their ears to listen.  Involvement is often about one-way communication, while engagement can be about two-way conversation.   The invitation to involvement is often “irritating” — challenging parents to do something the schools want them to do, while with engagement it’s often “agitation” — challenging parents to do something that they say they want to do.

Obviously a few examples are useful to illustrate each of those parent engagement elements, but if schools are committed to that kind of criteria, they can judge their own possible actions against them.  They don’t necessarily need a long laundry list of what they should or shouldn’t do.

I guess all I’m wondering is how many schools and districts are skipping looking  these big kinds of cultural orientations or ways of thinking?

I wonder if there should be more of an investment in developing our compasses instead of giving us road maps?

What do you think?

Learning to Teach to Bridge the Achievement Gap is a nice article about strategies that a California school is using to assist its students learn.  It appeared today’s New York Times.

But, as I note in a post I have at my other blog, Engaging Parents In Schools, I have a “bone to pick” with the headline wording. I believe it helps perpetuate a myth that most schools can indeed “bridge” the achievement gap. You might want to check out the post.

In listening to the trio of Gingrich, Sharpton and Duncan on Meet The Press today, one of the things that struck me was this videotaped piece from Bruce Stewart, formerly the head of the private Sidwell Friends School in Washington, D.C.:

MR. BRUCE STEWART: When I began teaching in the ’60s, we had that population of people. And since then, because greater opportunities have opened up for young women and for minorities, there’s been a great brain drain from American schools. I think we want to get those people back. If you look at Singapore, look at Finland, the reason they consistently are testing their population of students in the top levels of international exams, it’s the quality of their teaching force. They all come from the top third of their colleges, universities. In the United States, our tendency today is to have that pool of teachers coming from the bottom third of college and universities and from the bottom third of those classes. That’s something we need to reverse and to change.

I’ve heard this kind of statistic about teachers coming from the bottom third of something or other before (though never about the bottom third of classes — I don’t know where he got that bizarre statistic from), and just ignored it. But hearing it on Meet The Press, from the director of a private school, got “my dander up” and I decided to look into where those numbers came from and how valid and reliable they were. It was quite a ride on a Sunday afternoon….

Here is what I found…

Tons of people use a McKinsey report as the reference for the statistic of teachers coming from the bottom third of colleges.  That report just uses a quote saying that:

“We are now recruiting our teachers from the bottom third of high school students going to college…” (p. 19)

It uses as its citation “Tough Choices Or Tough Times” , a report issued by The New Commission On The Skills Of The American Workforce in 2007.

So I went there. The link in the preceding paragraph only leads to a downloadable summary, which just stated the same statistic with no citation of a source. So, I went to Amazon, downloaded a Kindle Reader for my PC, and purchased the whole report.

That report uses as its source a “Report From The Department Of Education, National Center For Education Statistics, The Condition Of Education 2002.” It quotes the report as saying:

“A report by the National Council on Teacher Quality in 2004 said that the profession attracts a ‘disproportionately high number of candidates from the lower end of the distribution of academic ability.’ And, college graduates whose SAT or ACT scores were in the bottom quartile were more than twice as likely as those in the top quartile to have majored in education.”

Well, I couldn’t find that exact quote (but admittedly, I was getting a bit punch drunk by that time and might just have missed it) in the Condition of Education 2002, though page 91 has a lot of mathematical discussions of this topic, little of which I could understand (perhaps a math teacher can take a look?). I also found it interesting that I couldn’t find any other Condition of Education reports (they’re issued every year) that examine that topic.

However, I did find information on the National Council on Teacher Quality report that was quoted (which also based its critique on SAT and ACT scores), including criticism of its methodology – it apparently only included a portion of people who were going to be teachers.  In fact, it excluded that portion who typically score the highest on SAT (the link takes to you a NY Times article about it that gives details). Also, ironically, in the same year, the same National Council on Teacher Quality came out with another report basically dismissing SAT scores as a valid and reliable predictor of teacher effectiveness, saying:

“…measurable teacher attributes like SAT scores…account for only a small portion of why some teachers are more effective than others.” (p. 10)

So, after all that, what are my conclusions?

First, I’d love to find out where the Sidwell guy came-up with his numbers, since they seem to be flat-out wrong.

Second, I’d love for a math person to examine the numbers on page 91 of the report on the Condition of Education 2002 to tell me what it really says in plain English.

Third, based on what I read of the criticism of the National Council of Teacher Quality report, this “bottom one-third” number also appears to be flat-out wrong.

And fourth, even if their numbers were right (which they don’t appear to be), it’s all much ado about nothing because they themselves say it’s not a reliable predictor of teacher effectiveness.

In other words, this bottom-third thing does seem to me to be a bunch of baloney.

What do you think? Let me know if I’m right or wrong, please!

On Meet The Press today, Newt Gingrich shared what I thought was an excellent description of what students should leave with when they graduate from high school:

GREGORY: Newt Gingrich, what is the knowledge most worth having in 2010 if you are a high school graduate? What do you need to know? What should the end product look like?

REP. GINGRICH: Well, Jefferson said that religion, morality and knowledge being important, we need schools. That’s the Northwest Ordinance. So I’d say the first thing you need to know is about yourself and your own values and your own concerns. The second thing you have to know is a good work ethic and a ability to be honest. And the third thing you have to know is how to learn whatever you’re going to need to be successful.

Now, can he tell us how those qualities are assessed by the standardized tests  used to evaluate schools now and would be used to determine the teacher merit-pay he supports?

I just wrote a post in my other blog titled What Might Aesop’s Fables Say About Glitzy Media Parent Involvement Campaigns?

It’s obviously geared toward some parent involvement efforts, but can also be applicable to any efforts or programs that emphasize style over substance. I’m sure we’ve all seen a few of those in education circles.

You might want to check out that post…

Wordle is a free and easy web application that lets you paste text into it and then produces a “word cloud” illustrating the words that are used most with their size showing their frequency of use.

It’s pretty neat.

Here is the link to the Wordle for our book, “Building Parent Engagement In Schools.” I was having some difficulty resizing it to fit in this blog, which is why I’m just posting the link to it.

It certainly gives an accurate representation of what the book is all about.

Since the final edits are now completed for my next book, Teaching English Language Learners: Strategies That Work, I’ll be posting a Wordle of that one in the near future, too — presumably after I figure out how to display it in the blog

In case you’re interested, Education World just published a short piece I wrote titled “A Parent Engagement Model That Works.”

It gives a brief overview of my book.

Michigan State University Professor and author Yong Zhao has just written a piece on the “causes of education corruption.”

I’d strongly recommend you read his entire post, but would like to specifically share a quote he uses from from social scientist Donald Campbell, who has developed an interesting concept called Campbell’s Law:

Achievement tests may well be valuable indicators of general school achievement under conditions of normal teaching aimed at general competence. But when test scores become the goal of the teaching process, they both lose their value as indicators of educational status and distort the educational process in undesirable ways.

This might be something that, among others, Secretary Duncan and President Obama keep in mind.

Syndicated columnist Ruben Navarrete just wrote a foaming at the mouth rant against public schools and teachers (and how teachers view parents). You can read my thoughts at my other blog, Engaging Parents In Schools. The post is titled Boy, Did Ruben Navarrete Get Up On The Wrong Side Of The Bed This Morning!

The last “Bracey Report on the Condition of Public Education” is now available online. Education researcher Gerald Bracey passed away this fall.

In this final report, he takes issue with three positions many school “reformers” are taking:

1. High-quality schools can eliminate the achievement gap between whites and minorities.

2. Mayoral control of public schools is an improvement over the more common elected board governance systems.

3. Higher standards will improve the performance of public schools.

It’s definitely worth a read.

You may have heard about the bill that was just introduced by U.S. Sen. Patty Murray, a Democrat from Washington state, into the U.S. Congress that would provide $2.35 billion in funding for literacy programs in K-12 schools. You can read more about it at the Education Week piece titled U.S. Sen. Murray Introduces K-12 Literacy Bill.

Renowned ELL research Stephen Krashen left this comment on the Ed Week article:

Here we go again, more of what doesn’t work: “Providing students with explicit, systematic, and developmentally appropriate instruction in reading and writing, including but not limited to vocabulary development, phonemic awareness, reading comprehension …”. Only briefly mentioned: “the use of diverse texts” but not how they will be used. As usual, no mention of what really works, lots of good stories, read alouds, plenty of access to books, (libraries!!), exciting literature discussions …

The true reading crisis in the US are policy makers who do not read the research.

I read a story in Thomas Friedman’s column today that reminded me of this situation. He was referring to the Middle East conflict, but I think it also speaks to this continuing waste of dollars into less-than-useful literacy instructional techniques and programs:

“These two guys are watching a cowboy and Indian movie. And in the opening scene, an Indian is hiding behind a rock about to ambush the handsome cowboy,” he explained. “ ‘I bet that Indian is going to kill that cowboy,’ one guy says to the other. ‘Never happen,’ his friend answers. ‘The cowboy is not going to be killed in the opening scene.’ ‘I’ll bet you $10 he gets killed,’ the guy says. ‘I’ll take that bet,’ says his friend.

“Sure enough, a few minutes later, the cowboy is killed and the friend pays the $10. After the movie is over the guy says to his friend, ‘Look, I have to give you back your $10. I’d actually seen this movie before. I knew what was going to happen.’ His friend answers: ‘No, you can keep the $10. I’d seen the movie, too. I just thought it would end differently this time.’ ”

I’d bet on Krashen’s analysis that this is not going to end any differently than Reading First’s failure.

In response to my request for help in figuring out what President Obama was referring to in his speech this week when he spoke about a national competition to identify better assessments different from having students “fill out a bubble” (An Interesting Thing In Obama’s Speech This Week), “chalkdusty” shared an article that appeared in Education Week two weeks ago titled Experts, Public to Weigh In on Common Tests.

Unfortunately, the article certainly doesn’t leave the impression (at least, in my reading of it) that they are going to seriously consider new types of assessments.

The comments on the article are also worth reading. Here’s one left by renowned ELL researcher Stephen Krashen:

At a time when children are overwhelmed with tests, when schools are being turned into test-prep academies, and when worth-while programs are being eliminated because of severe budget cuts, we are planning even more tests, tests that will match grade-by-grade standards, and carry a “hefty price tag.”

Judging by some of the other posts, I am clearly not the only person who thinks this is nuts. And I am not the only one who thinks it makes more sense to invest in maintaining and improving our educational system rather than developing more and more precise tests, tests that will add little or nothing to what we already know.

(I found out what Obama was talking about. See So This Is What Obama Was Talking About….)

Unfortunately, this week President Obama echoed the typical stuff that has been coming out of his administration about schools in his speech at a Wisconsin school.

However, there was one part that I found intriguing. Maybe others know what he’s referring to in the last line of this excerpt. If you do, please leave a comment.

But what we want to do — what we want to do is finally get testing right. So it’s not about more tests, it’s about being smarter about our assessments. It’s about measuring not only whether our kids can master the basics, but whether they can solve challenging tasks, do they have the skills like critical thinking and teamwork and entrepreneurship; assessments that don’t just give us a snapshot of how a student is doing in a particular subject, but a big picture look at how they’re learning overall; and assessments that will help tell us if our kids have the knowledge and the skills to thrive when they graduate.

So we’re not just interested in can they fill out a bubble. What we want to do is to take a look generally — are kids learning and gaining the critical thinking skills that they need to succeed. Now, these are the kinds of assessments that our states should be putting in place, and we’re setting up a separate competition where they can win grants, extra grants to help them do just that.

I had not heard anything about this effort to have states compete to develop better assessments.  Is he serious?  Or is it just window-dressing to make all the bad stuff seem more palatable?

Sacramento Mayor Kevin Johnson and Washington, D.C. Schools Chancellor are apparently getting married, according to Education Week.

Ordinarily, I certainly wouldn’t be using space on this blog to talk about somebody getting married (well, I have to admit I might write a word or two if it’s one of my kids). However, when our mayor, who turned a public high school into a private charter; who is the midst of a campaign to change the city’s charter so that the mayor gains huge control over the city; and who I would bet is planning on trying for mayoral control of the schools at some point, is getting married to one of the most outspoken advocates of many initiatives that I think are not helpful to public schools and the teachers and students in them, I’ll make an exception.

I wonder what this news might mean for schools in Sacramento and in Washington, D.C.? Especially with Rhee’s recent troubles.

As I did in last year’sThe “Best” Articles About Education — 2008 and in the previous year’s The “Best” Articles About Education — 2007, I’ve put quotes around the word “Best” in the title of this list since I’m sure there are many, many articles about education I have not read and posted about this year. I’m particularly interested in hearing people’s suggestions for additions to this list.   This list, as the title says,  focuses on education policy issues.  I’ll have another one coming-up titled “The Best Articles (And Blog Posts) Offering Practical Advice To Teachers — 2009.”  I’ll also be writing “The Best Reflective Posts I’ve Written About My Teaching Practice — 2009.”

Unlike in previous year’s, though, I could not bring myself to rank them in order of preference — they all were just too good.

Where the titles of the articles or blog posts are self-explanatory, I haven’t included any additional description.

Here are my choices for The “Best” Articles (And Blog Posts) About Education — 2009:

Diane Ravitch wrote an excellent post titled What’s Wrong With Merit Pay.

Crazy Talk is the title of a great piece Doug Noon wrote for Change.Org a few months ago. It offers an excellent critique of Secretary Duncan’s plans.

Slate Magazine published what I think is an exceptionally insightful critique of KIPP Schools written by Sara Mosle.  It’s called The Educational Experiment We Really Need: What the Knowledge Is Power Program has yet to prove.

Claus von Zastrow has wrote great blog post titled Taking the Easy Way Out. He talks about the recent tendency of journalists (who really should know better) to claim there are easy answers to some of the challenges facing our schools.

The Mid-continent Research for Education and Learning’s blog shared the results of two pretty interesting surveys. In one, 500 recent drop outs were asked about the reasons they decided to drop out of school. The other survey collected data from over 23,000 3-5 minute visits around the country.

How can we close the achievement gap? You can read the answer to that question from my favorite writer on education reform issues, Richard Rothstein.

Does Slow and Steady Win the Race? A Conversation with Top Researcher Russ Whitehurst offers an exceptionally well-balanced perspective on school reform — one that’s well-worth reading.

Anthony Cody wrote an excellent post titled National Standards A Wild Goose Chase.

Poverty and Potential: Out-of-School Factors and School Success is a study released by The Great Lakes Center For Education Research and Practice. It details “out-of-school” factors that affect learning success.

A Textbook Example of What’s Wrong with Education is an excellent article by a former textbook editor. It tells, in horrifying detail, how publishers develop the textbooks our school districts buy.

Alice Mercer wrote an absolutely great post at our group blog, In Practice. It’s titled “Why Not Cure Poverty Instead?” and is outgrowth of a conversation about Ruby Payne.

The National Journal ran a piece  on paying students for increased test scores.  I was pleased to see a number of thoughtful responses criticizing the idea, and disappointed to see what people said in support.  I was particularly pleased with the response by Bob Peterson (from one of my favorite magazines, Rethinking Schools).

Extreme School Makeover: Creating the Conditions for Success is a blog post by Claus von Zastrow that is one of the best, and most reasonable, descriptions of what it might take to “turnaround” a troubled school.  He highlights the key elements of a successful strategy and makes it clear that there is no one single answer that will provide a solution — no matter what some “expert” school reformers might think.

David Cohen, a teacher from Palo Alto whom I know through the Teacher Leaders Network, co-wrote a great op ed piece in the  Sacramento Bee. It’s called “Test scores poor tool for teacher evaluation.”

Earlier in the year, there was quite a bit of commentary in the educational blogosphere about a not particularly helpful or insightful op-ed piece in the New York TImes by Nicholas Kristof.  In it, he touts the mythical figure that:

A Los Angeles study suggested that four consecutive years of having a teacher from the top 25 percent of the pool would erase the black-white testing gap.

There are three posts about Kristof’s column that I think are particularly thoughtful that I want to include here:

In Search Of The Top 25 Percent Teacher from Public School Insights

The Miracle Teacher, Revisited by Diane Ravitch at Bridging The Differences

We Need Schools That ‘Train’ Our Judgment by Deborah Meier, also at Bridging The Differences.

Larry Cuban wrote Fixing Urban Schools: Sprinters or Marathoners?. It’s about superintendents, and I shared it with our new one here.

State’s exit exams deserve a failing grade is an op ed piece by the late education researcher/author Gerald Bracey that appeared in the Sacramento Bee.

Education researcher David Berliner wrote an excellent guest post in The Answer Sheet, a Washington Post education blog. It’s called Why Rising Test Scores May Not Mean Increased Learning.

Blinded by Reform is an exceptionally well-balanced and reasonable critique of some of the questionable strategies Education Secretary Duncan and the Obama administration is pushing on schools. It’s written by Mike Rose, who is on the faculty of the UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies and the author of “Why School?: Reclaiming Education for All of Us.”

Do You Want To “Build Influence”? is not specifically about education policy, but does provide some ideas for those who want to change it.

The late education researcher Gerald Bracey published his last “Bracey Report on the Condition of Public Education.”

And, lastly, I’m going to include the piece I wrote at Public School Insights titled Parent Involvement or Parent Engagement? It’s an excerpt from my recent book, Building Parent Engagement In Schools.”

I’m also adding a short post I wrote about federal funding for literacy programs titled “I just thought it would end differently this time.”

Compasses Or Road Maps?

Suggestions and feedback, as always, are welcome.

If you found this post useful, you might want to look at previous “The Best…” lists and also consider subscribing to this blog for free.

“How Should Teacher Effectiveness Be Assessed?” is a question recently asked at the National Journal, and there are twenty-five responses from people in the education community. Several are pretty good, while I think others are pretty useless. It’s worth checking -out.

I’ve just written a post in my other blog, “Engaging Parents In School,” titled Parents & Schools In Los Angeles. It shares some reflections and questions I have about a recent decision the District made to let parents decide if they want their schools to become private charters.

I’d be very interested in hearing people’s comments on what I wrote, and perhaps sharing additional information you might have about what is going on there.

Blinded by Reform is an exceptionally well-balanced and reasonable critique of some of the questionable strategies Education Secretary Duncan and the Obama administration is pushing on schools.

It’s written by Mike Rose, who is on the faculty of the UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies and the author of “Why School?: Reclaiming Education for All of Us.”

Thanks to Mike Klonsky for the tip.

The Wall Street Journal just published an article about, and a video of, what the moderator called the “perfect panel” to discuss what change should happen in education. It’s titled Why We’re Failing Math and Science A panel of experts talks about what’s wrong with our education system—and how to fix it, though the panel’s comments certainly did not focus exclusively on math and science.

Who was on this “perfect” panel to discuss K-12 education? Three people, only one of which has ever spent any time working in a K-12 school (and Joel Klein’s experience was a minuscule amount of time in 1969). In addition to Klein, the Chancellor of schools in New York City, the panel included Amy Gutmann, president of the University of Pennsylvania; and Christopher Edley Jr., dean of the law school at the University of California at Berkeley.

In addition to alarmist and inaccurate claims that the United States is falling behind students in India and China in math and science scores (see Five Myths About U.S. Kids Outclassed by the Rest of the World from the Washington Post, which highlights research results done by faculty at Ms. Gutmann’s own university), panelists called for teacher merit pay, what sounds like a federal and state takeover of local school boards, and increased “competitiveness” through the creation of more charter schools.

One place to start with to hear some more reasonable recommendations for school changes — ones that have been developed by people who actually have experience working in K-12 schools — is by reading my interview with Claus von Zastrow from the Learning First Alliance and by reading his excellent blog.

You can get even more good ideas on school reform by reading the other blogs on The Best (& Most Thoughtful) Blogs On “Big Picture” Education Issues list and by reading the articles on The “Best” Articles About Education — 2008. Look for this year’s edition next month.

“Some Of These ‘Parent Academies’ Just Don’t Get It…” is a post I just wrote for my other blog, Engaging Parents In School.

There have been a lot of recent articles about schools starting “parent academies,” including one in TIME Magazine, and I vent my frustration at what I think are some major missed opportunities.