NCTE Elementary Section

Adequate Yearly Progress

2008-10-02T07:16:00.001-06:00

One of the requirements of No Child Left Behind is that schools make Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP). The US Department of Education defines AYP as follows.

Under No Child Left Behind, each state has developed and implemented measurements for determining whether its schools and local educational agencies (LEAs) are making adequate yearly progress (AYP). AYP is an individual state's measure of progress toward the goal of 100 percent of students achieving to state academic standards in at least reading/language arts and math. It sets the minimum level of proficiency that the state, its school districts, and schools must achieve each year on annual tests and related academic indicators. Parents whose children are attending Title I (low-income) schools that do not make AYP over a period of years are given options to transfer their child to another school or obtain free tutoring (supplemental educational services).

Of course, the goal of 100% of students (including ELL and special education students) achieving state academic standards is impossible. According to MassPartners for Public Schools, 74% of public schools in Massachusetts will fail to meet AYP by 2014. Since Massachusetts tends toward the top in various categories of academic achievement the situation will be worse in other states.

In the meantime, parents who children attend low income schools that do not meet AYP over a period of years can elect to transfer their children to another school or obtain free tutoring. But not all parents can take advantage of the possibility of transferring to other schools. Some schools find that only parents with means can easily arrange to move their children to other schools.

But what’s ridiculous about the demand for AYP is that it fails to recognize the extraordinary challenges that some schools face. Schools with large ELL and special education populations will have little chance to meet the standard of 100% proficiency (if students meet the standard for proficiency it seems unlikely they qualify for special education. The same is true for ELL students).

Yesterday I heard about a school which serves new immigrants that has failed to meet AYP goals for at least two years and now faces being reorganized. The principal and teachers are being told that they have failed their students because they have been unable to get students who speak little if any English when they arrive at the school to reach academic proficiency. Certainly these teachers and the principal should be held accountable to some standard but not the standard of academic proficiency. This is grossly unfair and points to the urgency of revising (or scrapping) at least some of the provisions of No Child Left Behind.

Faith and the Power of Free Markets

2008-09-16T08:07:00.006-06:00

In his book, One market under God: Extreme Capitalism, Market Populism, and the End of Economic Democracy, Thomas Frank documents the quasi-religious faith many Americans place in the power of the free market to regulate the economy and the behavior of ordinary people. This faith in the power of free markets stands behind a wide range of educational reforms including teacher merit pay, charter schools, vouchers, and paying students for doing well on tests (or just coming to school). Vouchers, for example, are based on the assumption that schools will (necessarily) have to reform themselves if they have to compete for students. Chronically underperforming schools will disappear because parents (read: consumers) will not choose them for their children. In a free market environment schools will have to respond to market demands (for higher test scores) by either improving or going out of business.

This faith in the power of the free market to reform schools is largely ideological, unsupported by research. The evidence does not support the claim that free markets necessarily result in higher quality. The de-regulation the broadcast industry, for example, certainly has not resulted in better TV programming (we get over 300 channels and still can’t find much worth watching).

But reports on the economy over the last few months ought to shake the faith of even the most committed believers in the power of unfettered free markets. The commitment to unregulated free market capitalism has left financial markets in shambles and most of us are going to suffer the pain. My 401K plan has taken a beating the last six months or so.

This experience ought to give us all pause when we consider educational reforms based on unquestioned faith in free markets. As current events indicate, the invisible hand of the free market is capable of delivering a painful blow.

Who is responsible when children fail in school

2008-09-10T06:14:00.003-06:00

The (un)comic strip Mallard Fillmore is continuing its attack on teachers for a second straight week. Yesterday the National Public Radio show, On Point, featured educational reform (as if schools haven’t suffered from enough reform). There is also a blog on Slate.com that has been featuring stories of educational reform. Yesterday, Barack Obama outlined his vision of educational reform. Perhaps the reform story that has gotten the most attention lately is the effort of Washington, DC School Superintendent Michelle Rhee’s to push for merit pay for Washington teachers. I’m not opposed to merit pay in principle. I work at an institution where pay increases are largely based on merit. The problem with merit pay for teachers is how to determine which teachers are meritorious.

The most common approach rewards (or punishes) teachers based on student test scores. This approach ignores the complexities of student learning. It is difficult to claim, for example, that gains made by a particular fourth grade student are attributable only to the efforts of her fourth grade teacher. Learning does not follow a neat trajectory even in the best of circumstances. More worrisome is the assumption that the fourth grade teacher should be held solely responsible for students who don’t do so well as if previous teachers no longer influence student learning. Or that class size, curriculum, classroom resources, and school learning climate don’t matter. Or that, in the case of schools districts like Washington, DC which serve large numbers of poor children, that the conditions of poverty don’t affect student achievement.

When students fail in school it isn’t just the teacher’s fault. Many students fail despite the best efforts of teachers. Nor can the blame be placed solely on students themselves or their parents. When students in poor urban schools like Washington fail it is everyone’s responsibility. It may take a village to raise a child, but it takes a nation to allow her to fail.

Get Ready for some Teacher Bashing

2008-09-04T06:41:00.001-06:00

The Boston Globe carries a cartoon strip called “Mallard Fillmore” which presents itself as a conservative alternative to Doonesbury. Except that “Mallard Fillmore” is neither clever nor funny. But it does give some idea of what’s on the minds of conservatives and this week it’s teacher bashing in its most mean-spirited form. This week’s strip is set up as series of examples of “teacher speak” and “translations.” Yesterday, the teacher speak was “I'm not going to make you memorize a bunch of dull, dry dates and places….” Translation: “I have no idea when or where anything happened.” Today is worse: Teacher speak: “Real communism has never been tried….” Translation: “I was stoned for most of the 20th century.” I’ve heard the accusation before that progressive educational practices are evidence that teachers are lazy, but this is the first time I’ve seen teachers libeled as “dope heads.” That the comic strip can get away with this is a measure of teachers’ low standing with even the readers of the Boston Globe.

And while teachers are being maligned in an unfunny, third-rate comic strip, a series of articles this week in Slate indicates that some educational reformers are gearing up to push hard for merit pay which is also based on the assumption that teachers need incentives to work harder. Teachers certainly deserve more pay, but the teachers I work with cannot possibly work harder.

My advice to teachers is to get ready for another round of serious teacher bashing as reformers get ready to push once again for market-based solutions to educational problems -- at the expense of teachers.

Being Political

2008-09-02T13:17:00.001-06:00

Politics is dominating the news as the presidential election nears. In the context of the upcoming elections, being political means keeping abreast of the campaigns and taking the time to vote in November. But we educators need to be willing to go beyond just casting our ballots and do what we can to influence candidates’ positions. After all, one of the big issues in the campaign is about us. Writing in Slate today, Paul Tough writes: “The next big debate in the politics of education is going to be about teachers: how to attract them, how to compensate them, how to evaluate them, how to fire them, and, perhaps most importantly, how to get good ones in front of the students who need their help the most.”

Most of us assume that one of the political parties is more sympathetic to the voices of teachers and I think that’s true. Still, neither party has been willing to give teachers much credit or trust. In his acceptance speech at the recent Democratic Convention in Denver Barack Obama gave some indication of his education priorities. “I’ll recruit an army of new teachers and pay them higher salaries and give them more support. And in exchange, I’ll ask for higher standards and more accountability.”

I like the parts about recruiting teachers and higher salaries. I’m a bit uneasy about the desire for “higher standards” and “more accountability.” To me, the desire for “higher standards” implies that teachers are at fault. If only teachers had higher standards students would do a lot better. And “more accountability.” What do we make of this? Isn’t the demand for accountability (in terms of higher test scores) part of the problem?

The point I want to make is that over the last twenty years or so neither political party has been particularly warm to teachers. NCLB has been described as “George Bush’s policy” but Ted Kennedy has been an enthusiastic support of this legislation. So, again, we must write to our congressional representatives and let them know what teachers think about “standards” and “accountability.” I’m sure most agree with me that teachers MUST be accountable for student learning but tests scores are a poor measure of what students have learned.

Dollars for Scholars and Texas justice

2008-08-26T05:28:00.002-06:00

As I was paging through the Boston Globe one morning last week my eyes were drawn to a headline that startled me: “Racial disparity found in school paddlings.” Pardon my ignorance but I really didn’t know that students were still being spanked in school. In turns out that although the majority of states and over 100 countries have banned spanking in school, it is still widespread across the U.S. South, especially in Texas and Mississippi. I was less surprised, but still very disappointed to read that African American and Native American were more than twice as likely to be spanked than their white classmates (I am well aware that similar racial injustices are common in northern schools). It also turns out that students with “exceptionalities” are also more likely to be paddled than their classmates. Overall, I’m more than a little shocked that we allow school personnel to use any form of corporal punishment in the year 2008. I went to elementary school in the 1950s and 60s (I even had nuns) and I never saw a fellow student spanked or even slapped with a ruler (something I’ve always heard nuns were famous for although I thought the nuns were scary enough without rulers). In any case, I do not see how fear helps to create a positive learning environment.

Another indication of how little respect some people have for students comes from another story I read in the Globe about the Harrold Independent School District in Texas which has authorized its teachers to carry concealed handguns to class. (I wonder if teachers who share their guns during “show and tell” will have fewer discipline problems?) If teaching is about relationships – and I think that it is – what kind of relationship can students build with teachers who are armed? This is nuts!

Finally, I read in the New York Times that in New York City they’re finding that paying students to do well on tests is having mixed results. This doesn’t surprise me but, again, where is the respect? Is it respectful to pay urban students to do well in school but expect that students in suburban schools will be engaged by learning for its own sake? In any case, how much will you have to pay students to overcome dreary schools and tedious curricula common in so many urban schools? Money is no substitute for respect.

Exporting our worst educational practices

2008-08-19T07:23:00.003-06:00

I just returned from six weeks in Toronto where I taught a course on inclusive educatin at the University of Toronto/OISE. Teaching at OISE gave me a chance to re-immerse myself in the Canadian educational scene. I had taught at York University in Toronto from 1984-1998 before moving to Boston College. When I moved to Toronto in the mid-1980s Ontario was a leader in progressive education, particularly holistic literacy practices. There were no US-style basal readers in Canadian classrooms. Students were not subjected to frequent standardized testing. Teachers exercised considerable professional discretion and most elementary teachers were generally familiar with Frank Smith, Ken and Yetta Goodman, Jerry Harste and other progressive literacy theorists. What was particularly impressive is that this stance toward teachers, students, and literacy theory was emphasized in Ontario Ministry of Education documents and policy.

But things have changed as educational policy in Ontario and the other provinces looks more and more like educational policy in the US. Students are now tested regularly in reading and math and many teachers emphasize the literacy test over broader notions of teaching students to read and write. One of my former colleagues at York University told me that her daughter’s third-grade teacher devoted at least two reading periods a week to having her students take practice tests. My students at OISE indicated that this is no longer uncommon. Increasingly teachers and administrators focus on test scores as schools across Canada are ranked by the Fraser Institute on the basis of their test scores. Canadian literacy education is looking more and more like literacy education in the US as the Canadians emulate many of our worst practices.

Being more like the US in this regard benefits neither Canadian school children nor Canadian teachers. In this environment Canadian teachers find it more difficult to address the needs of individual students. They also find it more difficult to find professional satisfaction in their work as their ability to exercise discretion has been diminished. This is a concrete example of the negative effects of globalization in which education is just another product.

How I yearn for the good old days….

More on Inclusive Education: Making Children Smart

2008-06-24T07:05:00.001-06:00

In her book, What we call smart: A new narrative for intelligence and learning, Lynda Miller discusses four principles that I believe are fundamental to creating inclusive schools and classrooms.

(1) everyone is taken to be smart and capable of learning;
(2) everyone is seen to be motivated by unique and often different things;
(3) individual variation is accepted as normal, not as a disorder;
(4) discovering each person’s individual story is the starting point for designing
meaningful and relevant instruction. (L. Miller, 1993, p. 75)

For now I’d like to address just the first principle: “everyone is taken to be smart and capable of learning.” This principle has important implications for how we think about learning success and failure. First, if we recognize that ALL the children we work with are “smart” – and there is plenty of evidence that all children are very smart indeed – then we will be suspicious of evidence to the contrary. When a child seems unable to make sense of what she’s read, instead of asking “what’s wrong with her?” we might ask, “what’s going on here?” What conditions made it possible for her to conclude that meaning was not at the core of the reading process? What conditions were in place to create this struggling reader and how do we change them?

Put differently, what conditions are necessary to enable this student to be “smart?” There is a substantial body of literature indicating that the conditions of learning are often very different for successful learners and students who fail in school. Successful learners are much more likely, for example, to engage in meaningful curricular opportunities than less successful learners. Some would argue that struggling readers, for example, need to focus on isolated – and less meaningful – skill instruction before they’re ready to engage with meaningful texts. I would argue that engaging in meaningful reading is one of the conditions that makes good readers “smart.” The same conditions are necessary to make struggling readers smart. In other words, when students struggle in school we need to examine the curriculum and how we interact with students and not just assume that school struggles indicate that something is wrong with students.

Reference

Miller, L. (1993). What we call smart: A new narrative for intelligence and learning. San Diego: Singular Publishing Group.

Creating Inclusive Schools and Classrooms

2008-06-17T06:51:00.003-06:00

I’ve been thinking a lot about inclusion lately. One reason is that I’m getting ready to teach a course on inclusion at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE) in Toronto this summer. My wife, a speech and language pathologist in a Boston area school, has also made me think hard about inclusion when she shares a now daily report on a little boy in one of her schools whose behavior seems to demand exclusion. So how do we create inclusive schools and classrooms that are congenial to the diverse range of ethnic, cultural, and linguistic backgrounds and life experiences and abilities students bring with them to school?

From my perspective, inclusion isn’t about special methods or getting all teachers the right sort of training although these things can help. Inclusion is about school structures, how schools and classrooms are organized. For example, large classes organized around one-size-fits all curricula will never be congenial to the needs of many students, especially students who are not the “average” students curriculum developers imagined (and this means most students).

So how do we create inclusive schools and classrooms?

Many children need small group and individualized instruction (actually all children need this but some need it more than others). How do we create structures that enable teachers to provide these kinds of instructional opportunities?

All children need to find ways to connect classroom learning to their experiences. How do we create a literacy curriculum that allows children to draw on their out-of-school experiences?

All children need to be able to draw on their linguistic resources in support of their learning. How do we enable students to draw on their own language to make sense of school learning?

All children need to feel that their language, culture, background knowledge and experience are respected. How do we counter the disrespect inherent in so many school reforms (no recess, zero tolerance, tedious focus on meaningless skills, and so on)?

All children require instruction that responds to their individual needs and abilities. How can we create assessments that focus on what children know, not what they don’t know?

Inclusive schools are welcoming places. How do create schools where all children feel safe from physical and psychological violence including racism, sexism, and homophobia?

Are there students who can’t be included? This is heresy for some inclusion educators, but I suspect we’ll never be able to accommodate the needs of all students in some classroom environments.

What about exclusion as a means of achieving broader forms of political and economic inclusion? Here I’m thinking about the move in some places to gender segregated classrooms or so-called Black-focused schools?

My guess is that we need very different kinds of classroom structures to achieve these goals. Hopefully, the questions I posed will stimulate some conversation (write a comment) and, for the next month or so I’ll keep writing about these issues.

Endangered species

2008-06-10T06:17:00.002-06:00

The other day I stumbled upon an excellent article by David Pearson in the Journal of Literacy Education entitled, “An endangered species act for literacy education.” The basic thrust of the article is captured in the following quote:

Three principles and practices we have compromised even though we never meant to . . .
. Insistence on transfer of learning, faith in teacher prerogative, and regard for individual
differences as the hallmark of learning and assessment – have all but disappeared from the
educational landscape. (p. 145)

On the transfer of learning issue Pearson is referring to the NCLB inspired fixation on students’ performance on various reading assessments without any regard for whether reading as measured by various assessments actually predicts other kinds of reading. Does DIBELS predict how well students will read connected text, for example. (Bess Altwerger and her colleagues have provided convincing evidence that it does not.)

Loss of teacher prerogative refers to the increasing tendency toward whole-class, teacher-proof literacy curricula. Pearson refers to Dick Allington’s work which indicates that effective literacy educators are knowledgeable about literacy and in a position to exercise professional discretion in their day-to-day work with individual students. The presumption that teaching should be guided by “scientifically-based” reading research is misguided since this kind of research addresses the performance of groups of students (represented by the average), not individuals. We must rely on the professional judgments of teachers – informed by their knowledge of appropriate theory and research, their experience, and their ongoing assessments of students – to provide for the individual needs of students in their classrooms.

Loss of regard for individual differences as the hallmark of learning and assessment is related to teacher prerogative. The tendency toward whole-class instruction makes it difficult for teachers to consider the needs of individual students. Whole-class reading instruction leads many teachers to teach skills and strategies many students have already mastered or aren’t ready to learn. The notion that we should leave “no child behind” is inarguable. In practice, however, No Child Left Behind has resulted in practices and policies that have left many children behind and prevented others from getting too far ahead.

References

Pearson, P.D. (2007). An endangered species act for literacy education. Journal of Literacy Research, 39(2), 145-162.

A Lack of Respect

2008-06-03T05:47:00.001-06:00

I’ve read a couple of seemingly disparate stories recently that are linked by a common theme. The first was a New York Times article that described the use of electronic monitoring devices to discourage truancy in students with a history of truant behavior. Quoting from the article:

“Jaime Pacheco rolled out of bed at dawn last week to the blaring chorus of two alarms. Then Jaime, a15-year-old high school freshman, smoothed his striped comforter, dumped two scoops of kibble for the dogs out back and strapped a G.P.S. monitor to his belt.
By 7:15, Jaime was in the passenger seat of his grandmother’s sport-utility vehicle, holding the little black monitor out the window for the satellite to register. A few miles down the road, at Bryan Adams High School in East Dallas, he got out of the car, said goodbye to his grandmother and paused to press a button on the unit three times. A green light flashed, and then Jaime headed for the cafeteria with plenty of time before the morning bell.”

The article went on to conclude that electronic monitoring is seen by some educators as a promising tool for improving school attendance.

The second article is a piece from the Boston Globe that documents resistance in some affluent communities to full-day kindergarten. Here’s an illustrative quote from the article:

“A growing chorus of parents now say they want their children home more, and accuse school districts pushing full-day kindergarten of depriving them of quality time together. They say that those districts are meddling in the fundamentals of parenting, such as how much structure to build into young children's lives and how much time to leave unfettered.”

The article cited the warmer reception full-day kindergarten has received in many urban settings where longer school days for five year olds has been linked to improved academic outcomes (at least that’s the hope).

Here’s what I think these two articles have in common: a lack of respect for children and childhood as a special time of life. Electronic monitoring may improve attendance but does so by treating students as criminals. Full-day kindergarten may relieve parent concerns about daycare and provide more time for learning, but is it developmentally appropriate? Should all five years olds be spending six hours a day engaged in structured – and increasingly – academic activities?

Just because these practices “work” does not mean that they are moral, ethical, or even sensible.

What Kind of People Does High Stakes Testing Make Our Students Into?

2008-05-27T06:48:00.003-06:00

I’ve just finished reading an excellent doctoral dissertation by Steven Van Zoost. Van Zoost is a secondary teacher in Nova Scotia and he is about to complete a doctoral program at the University of South Australia. The evidence from his dissertation is that Steven is a good and caring teacher who relies on authentic assessment to gauge student progress in his classroom. While he is committed to authentic assessment, his dissertation asks: what kind of people do authentic assessment practices make his students into?

This is a question we might well ask about the assessment practices that dominate in the United States. What kind of people do high stakes achievement tests make our students into? We might also wonder what kind of people these sorts of assessments make teachers into.

Arguably, testing practices in this country make students into winners and losers. No matter how well students learn, no matter how hard they work, some students will fail relative to their peers. NCLB may include the goal that all students pass state achievement tests by 2014 but this doesn’t mean that we expect all children to achieve at the same level. In the end, we identify the best students in terms of the failures of other students. If everyone was successful, we wouldn’t know who was “the best.” This is the real worry about grade inflation. There aren’t enough failures.

To the degree that high stakes tests lead to teach-to-test curriculum, these assessment practices construct students as empty vessels to be filled with skills and facts that will be on the test. Students may (or may not) do better on the tests, but they aren’t better readers and writers, for example.

The emphasis on skills and facts that will be on the test also turns students, even kindergarteners, into little workers who have no time for recess or frills like art and music. The push to full day kindergarten and extended school days are based on the assumption that too much unstructured free time diminishes learning. This affects not only the learning identities of individual children, but also the meaning of childhood.

High stakes testing is turning many teachers, particularly those working in underperforming schools, into highly stressed technicians who are pressured into putting test scores above meaningful student learning. Nichols and Berliner (2007) indicate the enormous pressure of high stakes testing is also turning at least some teachers (and administrators) into cheaters.

Resistance to the narrow range of teaching and learning identities made available in high stakes testing environments is turning many teachers into “former teachers” and many students into “dropouts.”

Poor Boys

2008-05-20T06:31:00.002-06:00

Today’s New York Times and Washington Post both feature articles summarizing a recent report commissioned by the American Association of University Women entitled, “Where the girls are.” According to the Post the authors of the report found that: the literacy gap between boys and girls is not new nor is it increasing; a gender gap still exists favoring boys in math; the percentages of students scoring at higher levels of proficiency on the NAEP are rising for both boys and girls; students from lower-income families are less likely to be proficient in math and reading but gender differences vary significantly by race and ethnicity; there is virtually no difference between boys and girls entering college immediately after high school. Further, to the degree that the academic performance of girls has improved over the last several decades (in math, for example), these gains have not been achieved at the expense of boys (“Where the girls are,” Executive Summary).

Whatever the facts, there is a widespread perception that there is a “boy crisis” in our schools. The Washington Post quotes incoming Secretary of Education in Massachusetts, Paul Reville who observes that “we just have a variety of indicators that should cause us to be alarmed and to recognize that there is a real gap, and quite possibly a growing gap, between boys and girls that is going to take some concerted effort.” To alleviate this “crisis” gender segregated schools and classrooms have been established in Boston and elsewhere in the nation. Presumably, all male classes will focus on pedagogical practices that are most effective with boys. It is further assumed that all male schools and classrooms can encourage boys by focusing on writing topics, for example, that are most interesting to boys.

The problem is, of course, that there are no pedagogical practices that are effective with all boys (or all girls). There are no interests shared only by boys – and not girls. Nor do all boys respond to stricter discipline or even male teachers. Whether or not there is a “boy crisis” in our schools, no educational reform can proceed on the assumption that there are essential gender differences between boys and girls. There are not. But there are significant individuals differences among boys and girls which suggest that all students are best served when we can structure schools and classrooms to better meet the needs of INDIVIDUAL students. Reading and Writing Workshops, for example, give teachers opportunities to work with students individually and in small groups based on careful, ongoing assessment of each student’s needs. Whole class instruction and one-size-fits-all curricula do not.

I have another worry about single-sex classrooms and schools. Public education isn’t just about educational achievement. In the ideal, public schools allow people from different backgrounds and different experiences to get to know each other. Segregated schooling of any kind (by gender, race, ethnicity, language, etc.) does little to promote understanding and respect for the differences that makes each of us interesting people, and, increasingly, separate us. Unfortunately, as Jonathon Kozol documents in his book, Shame of the Nation, racially and economically segregated schools are already a plague on American education and, more seriously, American democracy. Same-sex schools and classrooms may only make this situation worse.

Disheartening: Teaching Children What They Already Know

2008-05-13T06:49:00.000-06:00

At Boston College students in our teacher education Masters program must complete an “inquiry project” in their practicum classrooms. To celebrate this achievement, each year Boston College hosts a “community of learners” mini-conference where students share their projects.

This year I sat at a table with seven students who shared their projects with me and with each other. I must say, it was a pretty disheartening experience. Our program at BC emphasizes teaching reading in the context of rich, challenging literature; yet all these students shared projects that focused on decontextualized phonics and sight word instruction. We may stress holistic approaches to reading at BC, but in their classrooms the emphasis was on skills, skills, and more skills. It was particularly discouraging to hear a student named Anne (who had been in one of my classes) rave about a new phonics program her (suburban) school had adopted. All students in grades K-2 now spend 30 minutes a day on phonics and, according to Anne, next year the program will be extended to 3rd grade.

Research indicates that lots of kids enter first grade with strong phonics skills and many of these children already read independently. This may be particularly true in affluent, suburban schools like Anne’s. Putting aside my objection to decontextualized phonics instruction, why are the teachers in Anne’s school – and in other schools across the country – teaching so many children what they already know? Why would we force potentially hundreds of hours of phonics instruction (in Anne’s school children will have had over 350 hours of phonics instruction by the time they complete 3rd grade) on children who already read independently? The only answer I can come up with is this. Many schools have stopped asking how well children read and instead ask: “How do they do on DIBELS?”

No wonder David Pearson has warned that “DIBELS is the worst thing to happen to the teaching of reading since the development of flashcards” (p. v).

The Trouble with DIBELS

2008-05-06T06:07:00.002-06:00

I’ve been grading my students’ research papers the last few days and I’ve been surprised how many students made some reference to the use of DIBELS in their schools. What particularly surprised me was the fact that some of these students taught in affluent, high-achieving schools. I had assumed that DIBELS was mainly used in underachieving, Reading First schools. It seems that I was wrong.

In the forward to Ken Goodman’s book, The Truth About DIBELS: What It Is - What It Does, David Pearson warns that “DIBELS is the worst thing to happen to the teaching of reading since the development of flashcards” (p. v). Pearson takes this strong stance because, in his opinion, “DIBELS shapes instruction in ways that are bad for students” and “bad for teachers.” Pearson believes that DIBELS is bad for students because it shapes instruction in ways that do not promote students’ development as readers and bad for teaches because it requires that teachers shape instruction “based on criteria that are not consistent with our best knowledge about the nature of reading development” (p. v).

Perhaps the most widely used – and troubling – DIBELS measure is Oral Reading Fluency which produces a measure of students’ reading speed and accuracy (number of words read correctly per minute). What’s troubling is the behavioral theory of reading that underpins this measure. DIBELS is informed by a developmental model of reading that assumes learning to read is a matter of learning to sound out letters and words to a level of “automaticity” and, once children read with sufficient fluency (speed and accuracy), they will be able to comprehend what they’ve read.

The theory of reading underpinning DIBELS predicts that fluent readers should be good comprehenders and, conversely, students who are not fluent (do not read with sufficient speed and accuracy) should be poor comprehenders. In their book, Rereading Fluency: Process, Practice, and Policy, Bess Altwerger, Nancy Jordan, and Nancy Rankie Shelton report a study they conducted that, among other things, examines the relationship between reading fluency and reading comprehension. What they found was that some of the best comprehenders read slowly. Similarly, some of the most fluent readers (those who read the most words correctly in one minute) were among the poorest comprehenders.

Altwerger, Jordan, and Shelton’s research challenges the basic theoretical assumptions underlying DIBELS. Their research also reinforces the argument that “scientifically-based research” isn’t just about sound methods. It is also about sound theory and the theory of reading on which DIBELS is based is fundamentally flawed.

Reading First called "Ineffective"

2008-05-02T06:58:00.003-06:00

I’ve been trying to post every Tuesday morning, but this was too good to wait four days. Today’s New York Times reports that “President Bush’s $1 billion a year [Reading First] initiative to teach reading to low-income children has not helped improve their reading comprehension, according to a Department of Education report released on Thursday.” The Times’ article goes on: “Reading First did not improve students’ reading comprehension . . . The program did not increase the percentages of students in grades one, two or three whose reading comprehension scores were at or above grade level.”

This isn’t the good part. The poor performance of low-income children is a crisis in American education. I welcome federal dollars to support reading in low-income schools. The problem with Reading First is that it is has been plagued by serious conflicts of interest and a very narrow, behavioral view of reading.

Here’s the good part. The Times also reported that Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings had “no comment” on the report. However, Amanda Farris, a deputy assistant secretary of education, defended Reading First saying “that one of the consistent messages Ms. Spellings has heard from educators, principals and state administrators “is about the effectiveness of the Reading First program in their schools.”

The No Child Left Behind Act mentions “scientifically-based reading instruction” over 100 times. Education officials in the Bush administration have repeatedly challenged teachers to embrace reading practices that have been scientifically proven. Schools of Education have been severely criticized for not teaching future teachers “the science of reading.” Reading First itself claims to focus on “putting [scientifically-proven] proven methods of early reading instruction in classrooms.” Yet, an administration official contradicts a large “scientific” study that concludes that Reading First is ineffective by citing all the people who have told Margaret Spellings that the program is working. This is delicious.

I think this episode makes it very clear that “scientifically-based research” is valued by education officials in the Bush administration only when it supports their preferred instructional practices. From the administration’s point of view, only research that supports an exclusive emphasis on phonics in early reading instruction has merit. I guess when you just know that it’s true you don’t really need research.

Extended School Days

2008-04-29T09:55:00.002-06:00

The lead editorial in yesterday morning’s Boston Globe urged Massachusetts’ lawmakers to approve a proposal that would double the funding available to support extended school days in Massachusetts’ schools. According to the Globe, “alert urban educators recognize that expanding learning time allows them to close the achievement gap between minority and white students.” The Globe editors also claimed that longer schools day will offer time for the art and enrichment programs “that are often lost to the demands of the standard six-hour school day.”

Extended school days have become one of the latest fads in urban schools desperate to improve the achievement of poor and minority students. The achievement gap between White and Black and Hispanic students is a real crisis in American education. There is little evidence, however, that longer school days can make much of a difference in remedying the achievement gap. A report from the non-profit Education Sector , for example, indicates that more academic time in which students are engaged correlates with higher achievement . . . but longer school days do not.”

The issue isn’t more time in the school day, but what happens during the hours that are available in urban schools. And the evidence indicates that time in many urban schools is spent very differently from how time is used in more affluent, suburban schools. Too often, students in urban are plagued by impoverished, basic skill curricula that limit their reading and writing development. While urban students are drilled in atomistic reading skills, their suburban counterparts are reading and discussing challenging, engaging texts. While students in low-performing urban schools are practicing writing for the test, students in high-achieving suburban schools are learning to write for a wide range of purposes and audiences. The rich get richer and the poor get instruction in skills, skills, and more skills.

As for the claim that longer school days will provide space in the curriculum for art and music, I’ll believe that when I see it. The current evidence indicates that, in low-performing, urban schools, if it isn’t tested, it won’t be taught. In many schools even science and social studies are largely ignored because they aren’t tested (see Nichols & Berliner's new book, Collaterall Damage).

In their book, Breakthrough, Fullan, Hill, and Crévola conclude that the goal of education for all students in the 21st century must be “learning to learn, about becoming independent thinkers and learners. It’s about problem solving, teamwork, knowledge of the world, adaptability, and comfort in a global system of technologies, conflict, and complexity” (p. 3). The key for achieving this lofty goal for students in urban schools is not more time, but engaging, high expectation curricula typically found in highly successful suburban school districts.

Bushisms and Campbell's Law

2008-04-22T05:44:00.002-06:00

President Bush is famous for his “Bushisms,” what Slate calls his “accidental wit and wisdom.” My favorite Bushism is the time he invoked The Who by saying, "There's an old saying in Tennessee — I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee — that says, fool me once, shame on — shame on you. Fool me — you can't get fooled again." Here’s a Bushism most educators will remember. “You teach a child to read, and he or her will be able to pass a literacy test.” This one is only sort of funny since “passing the literacy test” has become the goal of reading instruction in many school districts across the country.

In one of my classes at Boston College we’ve been reading and talking about genre theory as it applies to the teaching of reading and writing. Last Wednesday during a discussion of an article we’d all read one of my students (I’ll call her Marsha), a veteran teacher in a large urban school district, shared a personal anecdote. Marsha said she had been telling her principal about some of the articles on genre she’d been reading and what genre theory had to say about how they taught writing in their school. The principal told her that she wasn’t to worry about different ways to teach writing in her classroom. Her job was to “teach the (state) writing test.” (“Teach a child to write and he or she will be able to pass the writing test.”)

I’m currently reading a book by Sharon Nichols and David Berliner called Collateral damage: How high stakes testing corrupts America’s schools. I recommend it. In Collateral damage, Nichols and Berliner refer often to “Campbell’s Law” which stipulates that “the more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it was intended to monitor” (pp. 26-27). Nobody has to tell Marsha’s how high stakes testing is distorting and corrupting the teaching of writing in her school.

In today’s Boston Globe there’s a comic (“F Minus”) in which a man is seated at a table across from a potential employer who says, “The job you’re applying for will require you to know long division, state capitals, and cursive writing.” The cartoon caption reads, “Dale’s fourth-grade education pays off.” I suggest substituting this caption with a different one: Thank goodness this was on the state test.

Language and Children Living in Poverty

2008-04-14T06:21:00.003-06:00

All poor children are not alike. They do not share the same culture. They do not share common language practices. They do share economic deprivations but even then poor families tend to move in and out of poverty. Poor children are also at higher risk for academic failure but, as Jonathon Kozol has documented, children living in poverty are rarely offered the same, high quality educational opportunities experienced by their more affluent peers.

Yet school districts serving large numbers of poor children continue to undertake initiatives that implicitly blame the poor for their economic, social, and academic struggles. A recent article in the Boston Globe (“With babies, words for wisdom,” April 2, 2008) described Boston’s “Early Words” program that seeks to increase the amount of talk low-income parents direct to their children. According to the Globe, the rationale for this initiative comes Betty Hart and Todd Risley’s 1995 study that “showed that by age 3, most middle-class children had much larger vocabularies than children from low-income families. Middle-class parents speak, on average, 300 more words per hour to their children, according to the [Hart and Risley] study.” (See my earlier blog on Hart and Risley.)

I’m all for parents talking to their children. What troubles me is the presumption that low-income parents don’t talk to their children. It seems more that a little unreasonable to make general claims about parents and children living in poverty based on Hart and Risley’s study of six poor families from Kansas City, all of whom were Black. It would be very hard to argue that these families have much in common with poor families here in Boston or anywhere else in the country.

I think we should focus less on what poor parents may or may not be saying to their children and consider the frightful toll poverty takes on poor children and their families. Recent research by neuroscientists, for example, indicates that the heightened stress levels associated with living in poverty may impair the brain development of children, limiting their future life chances (“Here and Now,” March 6, 2008). This line of research makes it pretty clear that the problem for poor children is poverty, not parents who are poor.

Outrageous Claims

2008-04-08T05:56:00.005-06:00

I seemed to have lost the blogging habit but I’ve been waiting for some inspiration to get me back on track. The inspiration came when I was Googling my name on Internet (another story) and came across the following quote from a chapter by Devery Mock and James Kaufman (2004) in a book entitled Controversial therapies for developmental disabilities: Fad, fashion, and science in professional practice (Jacobson, Foxx, & Mulick, 2004). Here’s the quote: “The 1980s whole-language instructional approach was introduced by reformers who openly and explicitly rejected the value of quantitative evidence of effectiveness and held to the belief that learning to read is as simple as learning to speak” (p. 119). For these assertions Mock and Kaufman cite Elaine Garan, Ken Goodman, and ME (it is an honor to be linked to Ken Goodman and I'm sure Elaine agrees).

The assertion that Goodman, Garan, Dudley-Marling or other whole-language theorists reject quantitative evidence out of hand simply is untrue. It is true, however, that many literacy theorists do reject the quantification of certain reading behaviors that misrepresent the reading process that has been verified in numerous research studies. For example, I can’t accept the quantification of reading fluency in a way that separates reading from meaning (see Rereading Fluency: Process, Practice, and Policy by Altwerger, Jordan & Shelton). This just isn’t what readers do in the process of reading text.

Similarly, it is not true that Goodman, Garan or anyone else I know “hold to the belief” that learning to read is as simple as learning to speak. First of all, learning to speak isn’t so simple. Learning to speak is an extraordinarily complex process that has never been adequately described by linguists or psychologists. Second, many whole language folks have argued that there are language-learning principles derived from research on oral language acquisition that can be generalized to written language acquisition. This is not, however, the same as saying that these are identical processes or that learning to read is “as simple” as learning to talk.

Mock and Kaufman go on to claim that 1994 NAEP data show that "40% of fourth graders instructed using a whole language approach were unable to read grade-appropriate texts" (p. 119). This is particularly curious since no such data are available for whole language classrooms. Further, Mock and Kaufman lament that whole language practices were "so universally adopted in the absence of credible evidence" (p. 119). "Universally adopted?" Where? Whole language has influenced reading instruction but it has NEVER been a dominant reading practice in the United States.

There are fair criticisms that can be leveled at whole language and some of these criticisms have contributed to the ongoing development of whole language theory and practice. Caricatures about whole language theorists and practitioners who reject research and equate oral and written language learning are neither fair nor helpful.

Stopping the Re-authorization of NCLB

2007-12-31T10:16:00.000-06:00

A recent article in the New York Times documents the rising opposition to the re-authorization of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) which has stalled. Democrats tend to oppose NCLB because of concerns from teacher unions that NCLB has undercut the professionalism of teachers. Many Republicans oppose NCLB because they believe it intrudes on the role of states to make educational policy.

This situation gives hope to those of us who feel that NCLB has harmed teachers and students across the US by limiting the professional discretion of teachers and by denying students in low achieving schools access to challenging, high expectation curricula. It is also clear that NCLB has failed to alleviate the so-called achievement gap. As I wrote in an earlier posting, based on the most recent NAEP report, “at the current rate of improvement since 1992, it will take another 135 years for the average performance of Black students to pull even with White students. Using the same logic, it will take 375 years for the average performance of Hispanic students to catch up to their White classmates.”

Given the current political realities, the time couldn’t be better for NCTE members and other teachers of the English language arts to contact their congressional representatives to voice their opposition to the re-authorization of No Child Left Behind. When I was a member of NCTE’s Executive Committee we heard from a number of congressional staffers that they rarely hear from teachers. Now is the time for our voices to be heard. Contact your representatives but be clear that we are in favor of high standards, but not standardized testing and uniform curricula. We also favor accountability for teachers but not an accountability based on test scores.

So let us resolve in the new year to make a difference in American education by making our voices heard by contacting our congressional representatives to oppose the re-authorization of No Child Left Behind. This is a real chance to turn things around for ourselves and our students.

Being Accountable to Children's Needs

2007-12-21T08:43:00.000-06:00

I just finished grading exams and papers. For my reading methods course, I ask my Boston College students to write about how they will teach reading when they have their own classrooms. I’m particularly interested in they’re being able to provide a rationale for how they will teach reading. Certainly, I hope that they will be able to cite a research base that supports their decision-making, but I expect more than that. I also want my students to be able to talk about theories of reading (how people read and how they learn to read) that inform their reading program. Do they believe that reading is the fluent, linear processing of visual information (a cognitive-psychological view)? If so, how does their instruction – and the research base they cite to support their reading program – comport with this model of reading? If they view reading as a range of sociocultural processes that vary according to the text, the reader’s purpose, the cultural context, and so on, how does this affect their instructional decision-making and the research they draw on to support their work? Is their reading program theoretically coherent or does it include (theoretically) contradictory practices that send confusing signals to developing readers? To my chagrin, my students sometimes argue that their teaching will draw on both cognitive-psychological and sociocultural views of reading.

In any case, I think it is a reasonable expectation that all teachers of reading be able to provide a clear rationale for their instructional decisions. What they do as teachers of reading should make sense (that is, it should have some theoretical support), have a research base, and, perhaps most importantly, be based on the assessed needs of individual children. This is something else I tell my students (over and over and over again): what they teach must address the individual needs of their students. They should not teach what students already know nor should they teach what students are not ready to learn. Put differently, teachers should be held accountable for showing that their reading instruction supports INDIVIDUAL students’ developing reading abilities within a theoretical coherent framework. Regrettably, narrow standards and high stakes testing often leads to whole class approaches to reading that do not consider the needs and abilities of individual children.

Negative Portrayals of the Poor

2007-11-25T20:30:00.000-06:00

One of my students and I have been writing a critique of a study by Betty Hart and Todd Risley that attributes the high proportion of academic failures among poor students to limited language opportunities in their homes. Hart and Risley claim, for example, that by age 3, children in professional families have heard more than 30 million words spoken in their homes, children in working-class families 20 million words, and the children in poor families only 10 million words. This particular finding has been widely quoted in the professional literature and the popular press and has been used to support calls for universal pre-school, especially for poor children.

When we submitted a conference proposal based on this critique one of the reviewers complained, “you just don’t like Hart and Risley’s negative portrayal of the poor.” The reviewer was right. I don’t like negative portrayals of families living in poverty that blame the poor for their academic and economic struggles. I don’t like Ruby Payne’s program based on the assumption that the poor share a dysfunctional “culture of poverty.” Nor do I like family literacy programs that portray the literacy environment in poor families as deficient. And I certainly don’t care for the repeated claim that children in poor families fail in school because of linguistic and cultural deficiencies in their homes.

All children come to school with an amazing repertoire of language and literacy skills although not all children come to school with the same experiences. The problem is when the differences between middle-class and non-middle-class families are portrayed as deficiencies. No good ever comes from teachers viewing their students and their families as deficient. There is considerable evidence that successful teachers of poor and minority students respect their students and the communities from which they come. Deficit-based approaches to teaching poor students are inherently disrespectful.

A respectful approach to literacy instruction for students from non-dominant groups begins by acknowledging the literacy experiences students bring with them to school. Respectful language arts instruction recruits students’ cultural and linguistic resources in support of school learning. Respectful literacy instruction challenges children attending under resourced schools with the same rich, high expectation curricula common in more affluent schools. Finally, a respectful literacy curriculum addresses crucial literacy skills in the context of schooling.

In the context of a respectful language arts program, parents aren’t the problem, the problem (teaching children school literacy practices) is the problem.

Improving Academic Achievement with Cell Phones

2007-11-13T17:18:00.000-06:00

A recent article in the New York Times (“Reaching out to students when they talk and text,” November 13, 2007) describes a planned campaign in New York City Public Schools to improve the academic performance of students in underachieving schools using mentoring and various incentives for high performance. According to the Times article, the incentives will include “free concerts and sporting events and free minutes and ringtones for their phones.” That’s another part of the program. Each student in participating schools will be given a cell phone even though the Mayor of NYC has banned cell phones in City schools.

The program will also include the use of text messages created by an advertising agency that promote academic achievement. This is an effort to “rebrand” educational achievement. The article cites a study undertaken by the NYC schools that many poor Black and Latino students in the city’s poorest neighborhoods “had a difficult time understanding that doing well in school can provide tangible, long-term benefits.”

I guess the problem is that academic achievement has a bad “rep.”

Apparently, the antidote to under resourced schools, impoverished curricula, a shortage of “highly qualified” teachers, and the material effects of poverty is an advertising campaign. This all seems incredibly naïve to me. And, if the stakes weren’t so high, I might find such blind faith in the power of advertising charming.

But the stakes are very high and ads and incentives miss the more important point. Students in high poverty schools need better facilities. They need better teachers. And, most of all, they need challenging, high expectation curricula.

Sarah Michaels and I are currently examining data we collected in a South Bronx elementary school that used Shared Inquiry and Accountable Talk as part of its reading program. In this program, students read and discussed challenging texts, using textual evidence to make sophisticated arguments. We also found that, during the time students were involved in Shared Inquiry, reading scores increased and teachers’ perceptions of their students’ learning potential were transformed. Our findings are consistent with the work of Jeannie Oakes and other urban scholars who have demonstrated the power of high expectation curricula to turn around low achieving schools.

Maybe if I had the cell phone numbers of NYC school officials I could text them.

Homework 2

2007-11-07T09:52:00.001-06:00

In my last posting I wrote about homework. I wrote that there is little research supporting the efficacy of homework in the elementary grades. I also cited evidence from my own research that homework can seriously disrupt the lives of many families, depriving parents of the pleasures of parenthood. But I want to address a particular kind of homework practice, what I’ll call “school-to-home” literacy practices.

School-to-home literacy includes various efforts to encourage parents to read with their children at home, to set aside time for children to read independently, or for parents to model reading for their children. These school-to-home literacy practices are motivated by the sense that children do better in school when their parents provide rich reading experiences in the home. There is also the worry that some parents, particularly poor urban parents whose children experience higher levels of academic failure, need lots of guidance to help them provide appropriate literacy experiences in their homes.

Because I was curious about the degree to which various home-to-school literacy practices were considerate of the values, beliefs, and time demands of urban parents, I undertook a study of how parents perceived these initiatives. Toward this end, we interviewed African American and immigrant, ESL parents in two large, underperforming urban districts not far from Boston College.

What we found was that school-to-home literacy practices, as experienced by the parents we interviewed, did not always fit well with family routines, cultural values, or expectations. We also found that the interaction between parents and schools was marked by a one-way model of school-home communication that provided few opportunities for school-to-home literacy initiatives to respond to the needs of individual families.

One of conclusions I drew from this study is that, although we may believe that practices like shared and independent reading in the home are crucial literacy experiences, there is no reason to believe that parents will automatically share this belief. Moreover, merely asking parents to embrace school literacy practices common in middle-class homes does not mean that non-middle-class parents can or will embrace these practices.

So what is a teacher to do? Here are a few suggestions I have come up with.

Teachers should be clear with parents that there are kinds of school literacy practices that are quite different from out-of-school literacies. Encouraging/modeling independent reading, for example, is more than something fun to do after the homework has been completed. But we can’t just tell parents what to do. We must also persuade them that it is important.

Teachers/schools should be clear about the kinds of support they can offer parents to encourage family literacy practices particularly supportive of schooling, how to read with their children, for example. But we need to leave it to parents to determine what they are able to do. In other words, teachers must be prepared to accept the possibility that some school-to-literacy practices don’t fit well with cultural patterns in the home. Other parents may just not have the time to do one more thing.

If teachers feel that there are crucial literacy experiences (shared and independent reading, storybook reading) all children need to have then they should make space for these experience IN SCHOOL.

Teachers must recognize the various literacy practices students have experienced in their homes and find ways to build on students’ knowledge of literacy. ALL children come to school knowing something about literacy. We need to discover what children know and build on that.

Finally, recognizing that the home literacy practices of some students (i.e., middle-class students) more closely match school literacy practices than the home literacy experiences of other students, teachers MUST be much more explicit about how school literacy practices work.

The burdens of homework on parents and children

2007-11-01T05:59:00.000-06:00

This past week-end the Boston Globe published an article (Sara Rimer, “Less homework, more Yoga,” October 31, 2007) about the principal at Needham (MA) High School who has undertaken a number of measures to reduce stress among his students including “homework free” days to help students catch up on their school work. Apparently, this has provided fodder to conservative commentators like Rush Limbaugh who have accused the Needham principal of “coddling” students.

Homework continues to be the subject of heated debates among parents, students, politicians, educational reformers, and the general public. Newt Gingrich once argued that children who weren’t required to do at least two hours of homework every night “were being cheated for the rest of their lives.” A new book by Alfie Kohn (The homework myth, Da Capo Press), on the other hand, presents a mountain of research evidence documenting the negative effects of homework on parents and children. But I suspect most people are likely to ignore the research and side with Gingrich on this issue even if they might wonder about the requirement of two hours of homework for every child.

When my children were younger I learned to loath homework that disrupted our family routines and often created nearly unbearable tensions in our household. Thinking about the time my daughter lost a major homework assignment that took weeks to complete in fourth grade still makes me sick to my stomach.

Motivated by our experience with homework I undertook an interview study with 24 parents of elementary aged children who struggled in school to learn how these parents experienced homework (A family affair: When school troubles come home, Heinemann). Over and over again parents shared stories of stress and turmoil. In these households, homework created tensions between parents and children and mothers and fathers. Several parents claimed that tensions around homework had permanently damaged their relationships with their children and sent a few couples to marriage counseling. It was worst for the single mothers who struggled to work, manage their households, and support their children’s schooling. In general, homework robbed the mothers and fathers I interviewed of many of the pleasures of parenthood.

So why are parents, teachers, and the general public so supportive of homework, even in the earliest grades? I suspect most people believe that, whatever its downside, homework
supports academic achievement. But an extensive body of research indicates otherwise. Homework has not been shown to have beneficial effects for elementary students and the benefits for high school students are modest at best. And, as my research shows, homework often has a negative effect on the emotional lives of parents and children.

There are critics of American schooling who argue that the cure all for educational failures is “scientifically-based” research. I don’t agree for reasons I’ve discussed in previous blogs, but I have to wonder why we persist to push homework in the early grades in the absence of research support.

The Tyranny of the Norm (or, it’s normal to be different)

2007-10-12T08:58:00.000-06:00

According to the Boston Globe (“Student takes his C to federal court,” October 4, 2007), a student at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst has gone to court to challenge a grade in one of his courses. The student determined he had done “A” work in the course but, because the final grade was computed “on a curve,” he got a “C” for his final grade. Lots of high school and college teachers grade “on a curve.” It’s more or less assumed that the bell curve provides a natural description of most human behaviors, including academic performance. The idea that, in general, human behavior distributes “normally” is a powerful idea that stands behind whole-class instruction (most kids cluster around the average), special education (students who depart significantly from the norm require a “special” education), educational testing (students are often compared to the “average” student at their grade level), educational research (statistical comparisons between groups or instructional interventions are based on the mean), and, sometimes, grading practices.

One of my doctoral students and I have been researching the history of the normal curve. Almost everyone assumes that the normal curve is an accurate model for representing variation in human behavior, but does the evidence actually support this common-sense assumption? As it turns out, some physical characteristics like height do distribute along a bell-shaped, normal curve. The vast majority of human behaviors do not, however, distribute normally. Weight doesn’t. Running speed and reaction time don’t. It’s not clear that intelligence or academic achievement distribute normally, either. Standardized tests are designed to produce normal distributions so the degree to which traits like intelligence and academic achievement distribute normally says more about the skill of the people who construct tests than it does about the human condition (and, even then, actual test scores often do not produce normal distributions). So, as it turns out, normal distributions are not the norm and this has been apparent to a few statisticians and social science researchers for over 100 years.

If the normal curve is a myth, as we believe that it is, then beliefs and practices based on the assumption of normality must be challenged. One particularly troubling practice that emerges from the “myth of normality” is the use of means (or averages) to represent groups of people, especially school children. The problem of using averages to represent the performance of children in our schools is that averages obscure the natural variation that characterizes the behavior of human beings. The claim that boys do less well in school than girls does not consider the fact that many boys do very well in school (better than most girls) and many girls do poorly in school (worse than most boys). Similarly, research on fourth grade readers or students with learning disabilities, for instance, obscures the individual needs of real children who are not statistical averages.

The assumption of normality has led to a range of educational practices and research that ignore the variety of ways children learn and the wide range of experiences they have in and out of school. We need to replace the notion that it’s normal to be average with the idea that it’s normal to be different. This will lead us to shift the focus of research and instruction from the mythical average student to the needs of individual learners.

Remedying the Achievement Gap

2007-10-05T08:32:00.000-06:00

The recently released results of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) reveal a persistent achievement gap between Black and Hispanic students and their White counterparts. The data also indicate that the achievement gap has held fairly steady since the results of the first NAEP were released 15 years ago.

Why has the achievement gap proven to be such an intractable problem? Presumably, No Child Left Behind (NCLB) was drafted specifically to ameliorate the chronic underachievement of poor Black and Hispanic children, especially in reading.

My sense is that NCLB has promoted teaching practices that largely sustain the achievement gap. NCLB and related programs like Reading First promote circumscribed, skills-focused reading curricula that deny students in under-performing schools the rich reading experiences routinely provided to students in more affluent, higher-performing schools. It’s no surprise that students in poor urban and rural schools are plagued by a “fourth-grade reading slump.” An obsession with discrete skill instruction to the near exclusion of reading connected text virtually insures that many underachieving students will struggle when the expectation changes from learning to read to reading to learn.

I don’t understand why many policy makers think that students in underachieving schools – places overpopulated by poor Black and Hispanic children – require qualitatively different reading curricula from students in high performing schools. If students in high performing schools have lots of opportunities to read and discuss engaging texts – and they do – then this is what students in low performing schools need, too. If high achieving students have time for sustained engagement with various kinds of texts through practices like sustained silent reading – and they do – then this at least as important for low achieving students.

The antidote to the achievement gap then is high expectation curricula informed by the practices and opportunities common in high achieving schools. The evidence that the rich and varied curricula found in high achieving schools “work” is obvious: the students in these schools do very well academically. The evidence that low expectation curricula common in underachieving schools do not is equally obvious.

The Latest NAEP Results and No Child Left Behind

2007-09-26T12:21:00.000-06:00

The results of the latest National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), the “nation’s report card,” were released yesterday. The NAEP report indicates that here have been modest gains in reading achievement for 4th and 8th graders since 1992 when the NAEP was first administered. These gains generally hold for all groups – Whites, Blacks, and Hispanics and males and females. But the data also reveal the persistence of the so-called “achievement gap” between White students and Black and Hispanic students. For example, although the gap in reading achievement between White and Black students has narrowed slightly since 1992, the average reading scores for Black students in 8th grade still lag 27 points behind their White classmates, down from a 30 point gap in 1992. The difference between White and Hispanic in 8th grade is now 25 points, down from 26 points in 1992.

The primary goal of the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) legislation was to eliminate the achievement gap, particularly in reading, by focusing on children too often “left behind.” The report of the National Reading Panel, Reading First grants, and the establishment of the What Works Clearinghouse were all intended to help achieve this worthy goal. Following the release of the NAEP report yesterday, President Bush called the results “outstanding,” adding that the NAEP scores confirm that No Child Left Behind is working” (New York Times, “Scores Show Mixed Results for Bush Education Law,” September 25, 2007).

My reading of the NAEP report is less optimistic. At the current rate of improvement since 1992, it will take another 135 years for the average performance of Black students to pull even with White students. Using the same logic, it will take 375 years for the average performance of Hispanic students to catch up to their White classmates. A cynic might conclude that NCLB is working to maintain existing educational inequities.

What works: Not for Everyone

2007-09-20T05:37:00.000-06:00

A recently released review of beginning reading programs from the What Works Clearinghouse found that few commercial reading programs could claim evidence that they are effective in raising student achievement (Kathleen Manzo, Education Week, “Reading Curricula Don’t Make Cut for Federal Review, August 15, 2007). This isn’t particularly surprising to those who have studied commercial reading programs, but it raises a question that is seldom asked: what does it mean to claim that a reading intervention “works?”
To begin with, no reading intervention has been found to be effective with all children, all of the time. So a reading strategy that “works” does not work for everyone. From a statistical point of view, strategies work only for a mythical average student. The reliance on means for determining statistical significance obscures the fact that a strategy that was found to work did not work for everyone and may even have been detrimental for some.
The claim that a reading intervention works must be further qualified with the phrase, “compared to what?” Typically, reading research compares one intervention to one or two other interventions. In some cases, the intervention may actually be compared to nothing (i.e., the intervention is better than no intervention). In any case, a strategy that works only works better than the interventions to which it was compared and, even then, because of the reliance on the mythical average student, a strategy that didn’t work could still be effective for some children.
Finally, the assertion that a reading intervention works begs the question, “works at what?” Some researchers will be satisfied that an intervention was effective if it improved students’ performance sounding out nonsense words. Others will only be satisfied if the intervention improved students’ reading comprehension and, even then, reading researchers have different views on the meaning of reading comprehension.
So to say that a reading intervention works really means that the intervention was effective for some children compared to one or two other interventions on measures the reading researcher(s) – but likely not all reading researchers – believed were related to reading.
From this perspective, the ultimate arbiter of “what works?” is the teacher who determines the efficacy of various reading interventions with individual children in her/his classroom.

Taking Responsibility (Don't do as I do)

2007-09-06T10:09:00.000-06:00

Accountability is the linchpin of the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) legislation. This is as it should be. Teachers are professionals and they must be accountable for student learning. There has, however, been considerable debate over the meaning of accountability in the context of NCLB including what teachers should be accountable for and how they should be held accountable. As a keen observer of American politics I think that teachers can learn a lot by observing how members of the Bush administration take responsibility for their actions.

When, for example, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) recently released a report that gave the Iraqi government failing grades for not meeting a series of political benchmarks, the White House complained that the GAO’s standards were “too high.” Following this example, I suggest that teachers whose students do poorly on state achievement tests utilize the same tactic. Claim that the test makers’ standards were just too high.

Alberto Gonzalez, Scooter Libby, and even the President have attempted to deflect criticism of failed policies and inept performance by occasionally asserting, “I don’t recall….” When teachers are chastised for their students’ failures, I suggest they consider a similar defense: “I don’t remember that student.”

Accountability in Washington often involves blaming failure on somebody else. The failure to aid the victims of Hurricane Katrina? The fault of state and local officials. Recommending Harriet Myers for the Supreme Court? It was John Roberts’ idea. When students fail, I suggest that teachers consider blaming parents, administrators, students, or even custodians (“my classroom was too dirty for learning to occur”).

But sometimes teachers need to be prepared for the ultimate gesture of accountability. Teachers must be ready to tell parents, administrators, and students that they take full responsibility for low test scores. There is no better way to show that they are doing a “heck of a job.”

“Failing our geniuses, poor Black and Hispanic students, boys, girls, students with disabilities….”

2007-08-31T06:50:00.000-06:00

In a recent article in Time magazine (“Failing our geniuses,” August 16, 2007), John Cloud writes about an education system so focused on the goal of minimal proficiency for all students that “we may be squandering a national resource: our best young minds.” The problem, according to Cloud, is an “education system [that] has little idea how to cultivate its most promising students.” Although I was put off by the elitist themes in the Time article, Cloud does have a point. There are lots of students, not just gifted students, whose needs are not met by the trend toward one-size-fits-all curricula focused on bringing all children to the level of minimum proficiency. Lately, many educators and educational policy makers have argued that schools do not do a very good job of meeting the needs of boys. This follows more than two decades of research showing that many girls are poorly served by public schools. The persistent achievement gap, in which poor Black and Hispanic children, on average, under perform relative to their White counterparts, provides strong evidence that schools aren’t meeting the needs of many poor and minority students. The continued expansion of special education is further evidence that significant numbers of children are poorly served by public schools.

I have a somewhat different perspective on public schooling in this country. I think there is lots of evidence that many students – boys, girls, Blacks, Hispanics, special ed. and gifted students – are well served by their teachers and schools. Still, increasingly standardized curricula inspired by No Child Left Behind make it difficult for many teachers to accommodate the diverse needs and backgrounds of their students. The problem isn’t teachers, students, school administrators, or teacher educators but inflexible structures that imagine homogeneous groups of mostly “average” students who are expected to learn the same things, at the same time, at the same rate. To truly meet the needs of all students, pushing all students as far as they can go as learners, we need to create classroom structures that are congenial to the range of students in our classrooms. Readers and Writers Workshops, for example, provide teachers with large blocks of time to collect rich assessment data and to work with students individually and in small groups. However classrooms are organized, teachers must have the flexibility to provide instructional support that responds to the needs of individual students and the opportunity to conduct the kind of assessment that insures that instruction is targeted to what students need to learn. I believe that flexible classroom structures targeted to the learning of individual students can accommodate even “our best young minds.”

Uniform(ed) Schooling

2007-08-21T13:31:00.000-06:00

When I was a young boy growing up in Cleveland in 1950s, when the cold war was at its height, there was no shortage of propaganda on the evils of communism. Media images portrayed the dreary, humorless existence of men, women, and children unfortunate enough to live behind the Iron or Bamboo curtains. In these popular images, there was no room for joy or laughter, self-expression, or personal or political freedom. For me, the most persuasive portrait of human misery in China or the Soviet Union was captured in films depicting life in Chinese classrooms. Even now I have no idea if these films were real or not. But the image of school children dressed in military-style uniforms, sitting rigidly in their seats, chanting patriotic slogans, and being abused by unvarying, insipid lessons terrified me. From my perspective in the Midwestern United States, this was the antithesis of the personal freedom that was the birthright of Americans (as a 10 year old in Ohio I was unaware of the legalized racism in parts of the country that denied African Americans their birthright).

This all came to mind as I was reading a recent article in USA Today (Carol Motsinger, “Ironing out policies on school uniforms,” August 6, 2007) about the increasing trend in American schools to require children to wear uniforms. According to the article, one in four public elementary schools and one in eight public middle and high schools now require school uniforms. There is evidence that this trend is particularly prevalent in under-performing rural and urban schools serving large numbers of poor and minority students. Apparently, left to their own designs children choose clothing that will distract their classmates from learning although this doesn’t seem to be a worry in more affluent public schools.

Along the same line, Jonothan Kozol’s (2006) book, The Shame of the Nation, documents numerous instances where urban students begin their school day by chanting mind-numbing, “motivational” slogans. In a Seattle school Kozol visited, the entire student body stood and chanted “I have confidence that I can learn” 30 times at a morning assembly. Slogans are big in many versions of urban school reform.

And then there is the tendency toward dreary, one-size-fits-curricula in urban schools, a trend evident in the growing popularity of scripted reading programs in underachieving schools.

Taken together, classrooms overpopulated by poor children of color wearing identical school uniforms, taught through uniform curricular practices, and chanting mindless slogans paint a picture that for me is no less disturbing than the images of Chinese school children from my youth. Politicians and educational policy makers often situate the need for educational reforms in the context of globalization. US companies need better educated workers to compete in a global economy. At least that’s the claim. The irony is that the desire for economic success in a globalized economy may be undermining fundamental American ideals, at least for Americans already disadvantaged by poverty and discrimination.

Accountability in No Child Left Behind

2007-08-13T15:00:00.000-06:00

As the Congressional vote to reauthorize No Child Left Behind (NCLB) gets closer, we can expect the debate over NCLB to intensify. Most of my colleagues in the NCTE leadership are extremely critical of NCLB and the effects it has had on American education. I share this dissatisfaction with NCLB. Still, NCLB has had a few positive effects. The requirement for disaggregating testing data by race, for example, has shone a bright and useful light on shameful racial disparities in our schools. The demand that all children be taught by “highly qualified” teachers is also worthwhile even if I am disappointed by the way the Bush administration has defined “highly qualified” so that it means minimally qualified. I also think it is entirely reasonable that teachers be held accountable for teaching all the children in their classrooms. But accountable for what? In its present form, NCLB holds teachers accountable for improving student performance on state achievement tests. This form of accountability has led to narrow, test-focused instruction that has diminished the quality of literacy education for many students, especially students in low-performing schools. Arguably, the fourth-grade reading slump that plagues urban schools is a function of an over emphasis on discrete reading skills measured by state tests at the expense of wide reading of engaging literature. Test-based accountability has also had a negative effect on teacher discretion as more and more teachers are being asked to teach reading through the use of prescriptive reading programs. Again, my complaint isn’t whether teachers should be held accountable, but what they should be held accountable for. Therefore, I would like to propose a different model of accountability that would not be based primarily on test scores. I would like every teacher to be accountable for documenting to parents and school administrators that they have pushed every child in their class as far as they could go as readers and writers during the time they were in the teacher’s class. The documentation of student progress would have to be based on regular, wide-ranging assessments of students’ reading and writing. Further, if students were not making adequate progress teachers would also have to show how they adapted or modified instruction based on their ongoing assessment of students’ needs. This model of accountability is based on the assumption that instruction and assessment – and accountability – must be focused on the individual needs of each and every student.

This is a far more rigorous standard of accountability than is called for in the current version of NCLB but I think this model of accountability would go much further in insuring that no child IS left behind.

The Effect of Talking Trash, Part 2

2007-08-09T07:12:00.000-06:00

Writing in the New York Times, Anna Jane Grossman recently wrote about parents’ resistance to the Junie B. Jones series (July 26, 2007, “Is Junie B. Jones Talking Trash?”). In a previous posting, I took issue with Grossman’s characterization of whole language, but there is another issue that Grossman discusses that I’d like to comment on. According to Grossman, some parents are banning Junie B. from their homes because they’re worried that Junie B. Jones is a poor model for their children. The problem is Junie B.’s mischievous behavior and her non-standard language (she uses words like “funnest” and “runned” and her adverbs often lack the “ly,” for example). But will exposure to Junie B.’s naughty behavior and non-standard English undermine children’s morals or their language development? Lots of folks seem to think so. The popular press routinely reports on the dangerous influences of reading materials on children’s language, morals, and learning. Children’s books featuring dialect or informal language registers promote “bad” English. Reading books in Spanish discourages literacy in English (Governor Arnold Swartzenneger asked Hispanics to stop watching Spanish television programming). Reading instant messages encourages unconventional spelling. Harry Potter promotes Satanism. Books including gay characters forward a “homosexual agenda.” And on and on. The common thread in all this criticism is a lack of faith in children. Children may be impressionable but they can distinguish between fictional texts and reality. They can distinguish between good and bad behavior. And they’ll make their own lifestyle choices, influenced by their family’s religious and cultural values and their biological endowments. But, most of all, they know that language use varies according to the context. Informal and non-standard forms of English are appropriate to some settings like conversations between friends. More formal, standard forms are especially appropriate to schooling. These same forms are wildly inappropriate in most settings outside of school. Children learn to vary what they say and how they say it at a very early age. Eventually, they learn that spelling conventions also vary according to the context. IM-ing is not a threat to western civilization. Parents and teachers need to have faith in children’s remarkable abilities as language learners while helping children figure out which language forms are most appropriate for which settings. Our goal is to push student to learn a range of oral and written language forms appropriate to a wide variety of audiences and settings.

The Effect of Talking Trash

2007-07-31T19:32:00.001-06:00

In a recent article in the New York Times (July 26, 2007, “Is Junie B. Jones Talking Trash?”), Anna Jane Grossman raises a couple of issues that demand a response. Grossman acknowledges that popularity of the Junie B. Jones series, but argues that “more than a few parents have taken issue with Junie B.” (Section G, p. 1). At issue, apparently, is Junie B.’s mischievous behavior and, especially, her non-standard grammar (she uses words like “funnest” and “runned” and her adverbs often lack the “ly,” for example). The reaction to Junie B. Jones has reached the point where Barbara Park, the author of the Junie B. series, is now among the American Library Association’s 10 Most Challenged Authors.
Grossman characterizes controversy over Junie B. Jones as a “pint—size version of the lingering education battle between advocates of phonics, who believe that children should be taught proper spelling and grammar from the outset, and those who favor whole language, a literacy method that accepts misspellings and other errors as long as children are engaged in reading and writing.” I want to know is where Grossman found these people, presumably teachers, who “favor whole language,” but accept “misspellings and other errors?” Are there really whole language teachers out there who just accept students’ errors? If so, then the critics of whole language practices are right. But this is not my experience. Good whole language teachers don’t “accept” errors although they likely recognize students’ developmental attempts to spell unknown words using their knowledge of letter-sound relationships and the conventions of the English spelling system. Effective whole language teachers recognize that insisting on word perfect spelling can limit students’ writing fluency by discouraging students from including in their writing words they don’t know how to spell conventionally. These same teachers take a similar stance on grammar, preferring students write in non-standard English rather than not writing at all. This does not mean, however, that whole language teachers “accept” unconventional spellings or non-standard grammar. Good writing teachers acknowledge students’ existing knowledge of language forms and use this knowledge to push students to become more effective writers. But the goal is NOT that students simply learn conventional spellings and standard grammar. The goal of writing instruction is to teach students to learn forms of writing appropriate to their purposes and audiences. Sometimes this means using academic language associated with schooling as in the case of research reports. But effective writers also learn that the academic language of schooling is inappropriate for some purposes and audiences. It would be odd, for example, if I wrote friendly emails using the same forms I use for journal articles. For teachers, this isn’t a matter of accepting or not accepting particular spellings or grammatical forms but providing students with the explicit support and direction they need to learn how to use writing to fulfill a range of purposes with a variety of audiences. This is what good whole language teachers do.

We get no respect

2007-04-13T11:48:00.000-06:00

Rodney Dangerfield, who died in 2004, was one of my all-time favorite stand-up comedians. To me, his signature line, “I get no respect,” never grew old. Rodney never seemed to run out of material. Still, if Rodney Dangerfield had been a teacher he would have discovered the mother lode of disrespect. The teachers I work with never seem to run out of “I get no respect” stories, either. I’m beginning to feel the same way. The last few years there has been a steady drumbeat of criticism of teacher education. For many critics, a host of educational problems can be laid at the feet of teacher educators who, it is claimed, have emphasized trendy, feel good pedagogies over teaching practices that have been proven to “work.” Perhaps the most widely-reported critique of the way reading is taught in teacher education programs (“What Education Schools Aren't Teaching About Reading--and What Elementary Teachers Aren't Learning”) was produced last year by the National Council of Teacher Quality (NCTQ). NCTQ describes itself as an organization that advocates for educational reforms at the federal, state, and local levels to produce more effective teachers. The NCTQ Board of Directors and Advisory Board are dominated by conservative critics of public education who have long advocated for market-based solutions to educational reform.
NCTQ’s report on how prospective teachers are taught to teach reading begins with the assumption that how reading should be taught is a settled question. To support this assertion, the authors of the NCTQ report point to the National Reading Panel. The authors of the report then ask whether the teaching of reading in schools of education is faithful to the findings of the National Reading Panel. To answer this question, they examined course syllabi and assigned readings from reading methods courses at 72 colleges and universities across the US. Based on this less-than-rigorous survey, the authors concluded that most universities are not teaching prospective teachers the “science of reading.” But, despite the lack of rigor, the basic findings of the NCTQ survey have been reported in newspapers across the country. Once again, teacher educators get “no respect.”

What should NCTE members and other progressive educators make of the NCTQ report? The most important thing to do is to be informed. The NCTQ report must be read critically. Readers of the report shouldn’t accept (or reject) the NCTQ findings without considering the point of view from which the report is written or without assessing the quality of the research. My sense is that the authors of the report subscribe to a narrow, behavioral view of reading and reading instruction that is not widely accepted among reading theorists and researchers. Further, I’d argue that the NCTQ report doesn’t meet even minimal standards for research so I think it’s fairly ironic that the authors of the report take such a strong position on “scientifically-based” research.

Two of my colleagues at Boston College and I have written a detailed critique of the NCTQ report which can be access via the NCTE Council Chronicle website. URL: http://www.ncte.org/pubs/chron/perspectives/127003.htm

Blame the Teachers

2007-04-04T16:14:00.000-06:00

When students who attend poorly resourced schools with overcrowded classrooms underachieve academically it is teachers who are blamed. When American school children fare poorly on international comparisons in math, science, and reading teachers are faulted even though these comparisons are often unfair. When it is found that, on average, girls are outperforming boys on various measures of academic achievement the “blame” is placed on female teachers who are insufficiently considerate of boys’ needs. When Massachusetts introduced its new teacher test several years ago the prospective teachers who failed that test were labeled “idiots” by a leading Massachusetts politician even though the content of the test had been kept secret and the test did not align with state curricular frameworks. High stakes tests and prescriptive curricula are often justified on the basis of claims that teachers are too easily taken in by educational fads. Given this trend, it isn’t much of a leap to imagine that, when high stakes testing and prescriptive reading and math programs fail to remedy the achievement gap teachers – not publishers, politicians, or policy makers – will be blamed. A recent article USA Today referenced in the NCTE InBox offers a glimpse of the kind of criticism teachers can expect in the not-too-distant future.

The USA Today article (“Study gives teachers barely passing grade in classroom,” (March 29, 2007) summarizes a study published in Science Magazine which concludes that US elementary teachers spend “too much time on basic reading and math skills and not enough on problem-solving, reasoning, science and social studies.” I agree. Many teachers are spending far too much time on the reading and math skills that are the focus of state tests to the exclusion of higher order problem-solving, science and social studies. I’ll go even further. Many teachers focus on basic reading and math skills to the exclusion of higher levels of reading and math. Some students spend far more time sounding out words than they do reading authentic texts. Many beginning readers may not even read texts in school at all. But it is difficult to fault teachers who are forced to follow prescriptive, teach-to-the-test curricula. If, in the context of No Child Left Behind, problem solving, science, and social studies (not to mention art, music, and even recess) are being pushed out of the school day, let’s put the blame where it belongs. The real culprits are politicians and policy makers who have taken curricular decision-making out of the hands of teachers and placed it in the hands of test developers and textbook publishers. I’m not above blaming individual teachers when students fail to learn. I was certainly dissatisfied with some of my children’s elementary teachers. But individual teachers can only be held accountable when they have some control over their work and, regrettably, many teachers in schools today have relatively little control over their work or students’ learning.

"Onerous" Testing in Public Schools

2007-04-02T08:10:00.001-06:00

My wife’s mother bought her a subscription to the Wall Street Journal for Christmas. The generous explanation for this gift is that my mother-in-law wanted to encourage the development of my wife’s investment skills. The less generous reading of my mother-in-law’s motives suggests that she bought the Journal as an antidote to my liberal views. In this case, the Wall Street Journal is the equivalent of a garlic necklace for warding off vampires. Ironically, when I’m sufficiently desperate for reading material I sometimes read the Wall Street Journal’s Op-Ed pages.

On Saturday the Wall Street Journal published an Op-Ed piece by Brendan Miniter, a regular contributor to the opinion page of the Journal, bemoaning the defeat of a school choice bill in South Carolina (“A Day Late,” March 31, 2007, p. A10). There was nothing remarkable about the topic of this piece since the Wall Street Journal has consistently championed school choice as an essential element of educational reform. No, what grabbed my attention was Mr. Miniter’s assertion that opponents of school choice in South Carolina “attempted to derail ‘opportunity scholarships’ [an Orwellian term for a kind of voucher plan] by attaching restrictions that no private school could live with” (p. A10). And just what were these intolerable restrictions? “Requirements for teacher accreditation, submission to onerous state testing, and limits on tuition,” said Mr. Miniter.

In the context of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) teacher quality and state testing are presented as fundamental to “fixing” American public schools. Recent calls to relax the testing requirements of NCLB are being fiercely resisted by the Bush administration. But for the Wall Street Journal and other proponents of vouchers who would see taxpayer dollars flow to private schools in the form of vouchers teacher certification and (onerous) testing are “restrictions that no private school could live with.” For people possessing unquestioned faith in market forces to solve a range of human problems including disproportionate educational failures among poor and minority students I guess this makes some sense. Still, I’m mystified why state testing is “onerous” in the context of private schooling and a cornerstone of reform in the context of public schooling. Why such faith in (often uncertified) private school teachers and so little trust in “highly qualified” teachers working in public schools? I certainly agree that many parents are sending their children to private schools to escape “onerous” state testing practices that dumb down the curriculum. This is one of the reasons we sent our children to a Waldorf School. But why aren’t these same testing practices viewed as “onerous” for the children and teachers who work in public schools? Maybe the problem is that folks like Brendan Miniter just aren’t talking to the right people. My guess is that if they talked to the children and teachers who daily endure the tedium of test-based curricula they would discover that high stakes testing practices are equally despised in public school settings.

Improving Schools

2007-03-10T08:49:00.000-06:00

The chancellor of the New York City Public Schools recently announced a new plan to hold principals accountable for improved student performance on standardized exams. ( New York Times, Metro Section, Tuesday March 6th 2007). The Department of Education is paying IBM 80 million dollars to develop a new storehouse for data that will track each of the city’s 1.1 million students. IBM. 80 million dollars. Data storehouse.

It’s hard to believe we are talking about places where young children fall in love with Stuart Little, create Valentines for their classmates, cut pizzas to learn fractions and give out cupcakes on their birthdays. And the result of all that data collection will be a letter grade. Yes, each school will become known as an A to F. That ought to make the real estate agents revise their neighborhood advertisements.

We don’t need better storehouses for data. We need better schoolhouses for children. Principals don’t become better leaders because they are graded. They become better leaders because they know quality instruction and they know how to attract, inspire and support wonderful teachers.

What would you do to improve the education of 1.1 million students if you had 80 million dollars in your pocket? I’d be tempted to add to my shopping cart such essential educational items as luxurious classroom libraries, more plentiful and effective professional development, as well as sufficient funds for field trips- here in New York City- to all our museums, historical sites and Broadway shows. Then too, I’d want all students to have access to such life-affirming and life-changing experiences as quality instruction in art, drama and music. Or cooking, carpentry, gardening, playing chess, etc. (Students immersed in a world of fascinating studies do become committed readers, writers, mathematicians, scientists, and overall problem solvers. Isn’t that what schools are for? Isn’t that what all parents, those who work at IBM and those who teach in our schools and those who drive our buses and those who cut our hair, isn’t that what all parents want for their children?).

Yes, I’d be tempted to place those high-ticket items on my shopping list, but above all I would use that money to encourage the folks with the most instructional know-how in our city, our best classroom teachers, to want to become principals. I know of no other way to close the achievement gap than to improve instruction. I know of no other way to improve instruction than to have brilliant instructional leaders at the helm of every school. I know of no other way to attract quality teachers than to have a principal who knows how to hire, inspire, and support those great teachers.

(Such brilliant leaders, even on shoestring budgets, but with their priorities in order, often find ways to provide abundant classroom libraries, field trips and specialty classes. And they themselves can offer powerful professional development).

Some of that 80 million, of course, would be used to finance administrative degrees. Some would be used to raise salaries. But some must be used to restore the role of principal to instructional leader. Surely, we can come up with ways to remove the mounds of bureaucratic trivia that are now drowning city principals. If we work hard to attract wonderful educators into the principals’ office, wouldn’t it be shameful if they then had no time to be in classrooms?

Brilliant teachers will not aspire to administrative positions if they know that their days will be filled with answering e-mails, filing reports, filling in surveys, hosting evaluators, and of course, staring at data reports until their eyes burn.

If all schools, in all neighborhoods, in all towns and all cities are ever to be considered “A +,” we must rethink our priorities. Schools don’t become better because we have better systems for data collection. Schools become better because all the adults involved in that community are relentless about improving teaching and learning.

Here we go again

2007-03-09T07:24:00.000-06:00

I was more than a little dismayed when I read the following in this morning’s New York Times. “Surrounded by five first graders learning to read at Hawthorne Elementary here, Stacey Hodiewicz listened as one boy struggled over a word.

“’Pumpkin,’ ventured the boy, Parker Kuehni.

“’Look at the word,’ the teacher suggested. Using a method known as whole language, she prompted him to consider the word’s size. “Is it long enough to be pumpkin?’”

These are the lead paragraphs in an article entitled, “In war over teaching reading, a U.S.-local clash” (Schemo, 2007). The article details a conflict over the teaching of reading in Madison, Wisconsin. Apparently, the Madison Public Schools refusal to accept Reading First guidelines cost the district $2 million in Reading First funds. As a former resident of Madison, I’m pleased that Madison has rejected the federal intrusion into local reading instruction (“Way to go, Madison.”). Still, I’m disappointed that Madison should be punished to the tune of $2 million for attempting to maintain some semblance of local control over curricular decision-making. I’m also frustrated – very frustrated – by the way the New York Times article positions whole language instruction as antithetical to phonics. This isn’t new, of course. Whole language has long been presented in the media as anti-phonics. Whole language has taken on such a negative connotation that Heinemann, a publisher long associated with whole language, no longer permits its authors to use the dreaded phrase (“whole language”). A former dean took my affiliation with whole language as a prima facie evidence that I did not teach my students at Boston College how to teach phonics. And, despite my best efforts, my own students frequently write about the desirability of combining phonics and whole language when they become teachers. So this has reached the “I’m-sick-and-tired-of-this-and-I’m-not-going-to-take-it-anymore” stage.

No one – and I mean NO ONE – believes that phonics isn’t part of what mature readers do and what beginning readers must learn to do. People do not read with their eyes closed. They attend to the print. However, they simultaneously attend to meaning, the grammatical structure of texts, and their knowledge of the world. And it’s a good thing too since the rules governing the representation of sounds in written English (i.e., phonics) aren’t particularly reliable. But, again, whole language teachers do not ignore phonics. Nor do whole language teachers reject the explicit teaching of phonics. Whole language teachers I know might respond to the child who read “pumpkin” for “pea” by going back the child’s miscue (oral reading error) and asking, “does this make sense?” However, they might also go back to “pumpkin,” cover up “kin” and ask the child to read “pump,” then cover up “pump” and ask the child to read “kin.” “What does it say now?” “Pumpkin.” If that same child regularly had difficulty breaking words into syllables, the teacher might design activities to help the child learn this skill. They might also design other activities to help the child learn how phonics works in the process of reading. In my “Teaching Reading” class at Boston College I use Words their way (Bear, Invernizzi, Templeton, Johnnson, 2003), which is chock full of word analysis strategies, as one of my primary texts. The issue is not whether whole language teachers address phonics. They do. But they differ from the folks who believe that beginning reading instruction must focus solely on isolated phonics instruction, sometimes to the degree that books are seen as an impediment to learning to read. The issue isn’t whether phonics should be taught but when and how. For whole language teachers, phonics skills are best learned in the context of reading connected text since this is how readers actually use these skills. Whole language teachers teach reading this way because their work is informed by a coherent, research-based theory of reading which indicates that this is how people actually read.

There are grounds for legitimate debates in the teaching of reading. But characterizing these debates in terms of pro- or anti-phonics is uninformed nonsense.

References

Bear, D.R., Invernizzi, M., Templeton, S., & Johnston, F. (2003). Words their way (3rd. ed). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.

Schemo, D.J. (March 9, 2007). “In war over teaching reading, a U.S.-local clash.” New York Times (Online). Available at
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/09/education/09reading.html?hp

Teacher Quality and Heroic teachers

2007-01-22T10:14:00.000-06:00

Writing in the New York Times, Tom Moore, a 10th grade history teacher in the Bronx, laments Hilary Swank’s portrayal of a courageous and committed teacher in the movie Freedom Writers ("Classroom Distinctions," January 19, 2007). Freedom Writers is the true story of a freshman English teacher who uses writing to reach a group of students living in poverty-stricken, gang-infested neighborhoods. Freedom Writers is merely one of the more recent entries in a long history of films portraying idealistic, inspirational teachers who manage engage troubled, unmotivated students (e.g., Blackboard Jungle, To Sir with Love, Conrack, Dangerous Minds). Over the week-end, I saw another film in this genre, the History Boys, which portrays a group of working class boys whose love of learning (and entry to exclusive Oxford University) is nurtured by caring, quirky, and intellectually challenging teachers.

Quoting from Tom Moore’s thoughtful Op-ed piece, “the great misconception of these films is not that actual schools are more chaotic and decrepit — many schools in poor neighborhoods are clean and orderly yet still don’t have enough teachers or money for supplies. No, the most dangerous message such films promote is that what schools really need are heroes. This is the Myth of the Great Teacher.” The myth of the heroic teacher who, against all odds, reaches her or his students resonates in the popular imagination and recent public policy. The notion of teacher quality embodied in No Child Left Behind presumes that quality teachers are virtually the only factor in student achievement. If teachers are smart enough, tough enough, demanding enough, caring enough, work hard enough, even the most disadvantaged children will learn.

I work with future teachers every day and I believe that the bright, caring, and committed students with whom I work will make a difference in the lives of their students. But students in poor, urban communities do not need heroes who will save them from their communities and culture. The myth of the heroic teacher insults students, their families, and the communities from which they must be “saved.” More to the point, in the end, teachers, no matter how bright, hard working, or demanding will be insufficient to overcome the effects of crippling poverty, under-resourced schools, or pervasive racism. Educational policies that rely solely on better teachers cannot succeed.

Why can't all students have respect?

2007-01-11T14:04:00.000-06:00

Recently, I was asked to participate in a review of the English language arts program in a Boston-area school district. What made this particularly interesting was the fact that the school district was Weston, Massachusetts which Wikipedia lists as one of America’s “100 richest places.” I’ve never been particularly comfortable with the rich so I was a bit uneasy about spending two days in what I imagined would be schools overpopulated by rich, over privileged, white kids.

What I saw in the Weston Schools generally confirmed my expectations. I observed smart, articulate teachers and bright, talented (and overwhelmingly white) students working in wonderful facilities. But it wasn’t the beautiful physical spaces and rich teaching resources that impressed me most during my two days in the Weston Public Schools. What really struck me was the level of respect teachers had for their students. When Weston students talked, teachers listened, even if the talk was somewhat off-task. Teachers engaged their students in thoughtful discussions and challenging work. There weren’t a lot of silly rules here, either. If a student wanted to go to the bathroom or get a drink, for example, they merely signed out.

I once heard a sermon by a Unitarian minister in which he argued that “respect begets respect.” This is how it was in Weston. Weston’s school administrators treated teachers as thoughtful professionals who they expected would draw on their expertise and experience to plan lessons and work with students. Teachers, in turn, treated their students as the bright, interesting people they are. The students – at least in my presence – treated the teachers and each other with similar respect. And, of course, the beautiful facilities evidenced the respect the Weston community has for its children and their teachers.

The beautiful, well-cared-for facilities, well-equipped classrooms, and small class sizes in Weston contrast sharply with the dreary, under-resourced urban schools I often visit. And, if “respect” is a dominant motif in rich, suburban schools like Weston, “disrespect” frequently dominates the experience of students and teachers in many urban schools. Tedious, scripted curricula, rigid behavioral policies, poorly maintained facilities and under-resourced classrooms found in many urban schools suggest a fundamental lack of respect for students and teachers working in these schools.

My experience in Weston is a dramatic illustration of the “savage inequalities” that Jonathon Kozol has documented. But I don’t begrudge the Weston students and staff their wonderful facilities, extensive learning resources, and humane working conditions. They deserve them. I just wish students in Boston, Cleveland, New York, Detroit, Chicago, St. Louis, and Los Angeles had the same advantages. The students and teachers in these communities deserve them, too.