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.
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:
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.
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.
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:
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.
“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.
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.
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.
Yesterday, our governor signed a law eliminating a statewide ban against tying student test scores to teacher evaluations. As everyone involved in it has said, the reason for this change has been to increase the odds of California getting a portion of the federal government’s “Race To The Top” competitive funding program. The state might be able to get $200- $300 million dollars from that pot of money. The state budget for K-12 schools is in $50 billion territory. The state is considering more changes in state law for the same reasons.
Whether you agree or disagree with the idea of tying student test scores to teacher evaluations (I happen to disagree), it seems pretty clear that making educational policy decisions in an effort to get money is just not good practice.
During my nineteen year community organizing career prior to becoming a teacher, it wasn’t uncommon for us (and for many other groups) to try to craft funding requests to meet the desires of private foundation initiatives on issues that might, or might not, have reflected the real priorities identified by local residents. Doing so was never in the long-term interest of making long-term improvements in our communities, but sometimes we felt like we had to do so if local dues didn’t meet funding needs. Those requests were always for a proportionally far larger amount than $300 million of $50 billion, and we always knew it was a bad idea. And the vast majority of the time we were right.
If you want to argue for changes in state education law, do so because you think it will result in a better education for students. Don’t do it in order to increase the odds of getting some federal money. It’s undignified, bad policy, and terrible role-modeling for students, to boot!
“Unemployment and income losses can reduce educational achievement by threatening early childhood nutrition; reducing families’ abilities to provide a supportive learning environment (including adequate health care, summer activities, and stable housing); and by forcing a delay or abandonment of college plans.”
Even more importantly, he goes on to provide a sizable research base for these comments, and this article, too, is worth a look. These are more reasons why schools need to connect with parents to organize for community improvement issues.
Nearly nine-in-ten (89%) Latino young adults ages 16 to 25 say that a college education is important for success in life, yet only about half that number-48%-say that they themselves plan to get a college degree, according to a new national survey of 2,012 Latinos ages 16 and older by the Pew Hispanic Center conducted from Aug. 5 to Sept. 16, 2009.
The biggest reason for the gap between the high value Latinos place on education and their more modest aspirations to finish college appears to come from financial pressure to support a family, the survey finds.
Nearly three-quarters (74%) of all 16- to 25-year-old survey respondents who cut their education short during or right after high school say they did so because they had to support their family. Other reasons include poor English skills (cited by about half of respondents who cut short their education), a dislike of school and a feeling that they don’t need more education for the careers they want (each cited by about four-in-ten respondents who cut their education short).
In his guest post, he makes six key points, and he elaborates on each one. I’d strongly recommend you read his entire post. I’m just going to briefly quote each of the six:
1). Virtually all states have changed the passing score on tests so that more children are classified proficient.
2). School districts across the nation engage in excessive, perhaps unethical, and, in some cases, illegal test preparation. This results in higher test scores, but not necessarily greater learning.
3) Familiarity with the objectives and the items on a test invariably results in increased test scores.
4) The test items we use do not tap the knowledge we really want to assess.
5) Afraid they could be fired or their schools closed because of NCLB test scores, district and school administrators invent ways to prevent the poorest performing students from taking tests.
6) It is common for scores to go up because of cheating. For example, there are companies that look for anomalies in test scoring. They often find incidents such as a low-scoring student suddenly getting seven items right in a row, or a class in a low-performing school suddenly outperforming classes in a neighboring high-performing school. These may or may not be instances of cheating, but several hundred of these anomalies are associated with NCLB tests in many states.
“Schools should stop telling children to be nice and start teaching them to be good.”
Both the Core Knowledge’s commentary and the original post make some great points, and they are both worth reading. I do have two issues with it, though.
One is that it seems to be focused on seeing using literature as the primary way to do that, and I think there are plenty of avenues to help students learn this difference.
The second is that, unfortunately, she bases this idea on a quote from Charles Murray, a researcher who I think has done a fair amount of damage to education. It shouldn’t detract from the usefulness of the point but, as Claus von Zastrow says in a comment on the post, “the guy still creeps me out.”
I typically don’t “cross-post,” and won’t here, either. However, I think readers might find this post particularly interesting. I suspect we’re all going to start hearing a lot more about Conditional Cash Transfers (CCT’s), and it might be worth learning (if you don’t know already) how they might be used in attempts to affect parent and student behavior
I’ve posted before about the crucial difference between being “data-driven” and being “data-informed,” which I learned from Ted Appel, our principal.
Here’s an excerpt from that post, which I wrote earlier this month after state testing results came-in:
If schools are data-driven, they might make decisions like keeping students who are “borderline” between algebra and a higher-level of math in algebra so that they do well in the algebra state test. Or, in English, teachers might focus a lot of energy on teaching a “strand” that is heavy on the tests — even though it might not help the student become a life-long reader. In other words, the school can tend to focus on its institutional self-interest instead of what’s best for the students.
In schools that are data-informed, test results are just one more piece of information that can be helpful in determining future directions.
They asked a number of educators to answer the question: “What personal insight have you had about school leadership?”
I was one of those asked to respond. Here is what I said, and what the magazine printed:
“I’ve been teaching for five years following a 19-year career in community organizing, and I’ve found that effective leadership in schools works the same as elsewhere — it’s about having a vision and then, through listening and developing relationships, agitating others to modify that vision so that they make it their own.
It’s not about being a charismatic guru who sweeps everybody off their feet. That kind of cult of personality (no matter how well intentioned) is a house of cards that will collapse at the first sign of trouble or when that Dear Leader leaves.
And it’s not about knowing exactly what should be done and then being self-righteously indignant and whiny when other don’t follow your lead.
If you think your vision is valid, listen to the hopes and dreams of the people around you. Ask them what they think it’ll take to make their dreams happen. Incorporate those ideas into your vision, and help people see how they can realize their goals through working with you.”
How would you answer that same question:
“What personal insight have you had about school leadership?”
Please share your responses in the the comments section.
