The Treasure Hunter

Here’s Don Bellair’s response to Doug Garnett.  These two views are especially interesting  because they show how much our experience shapes our opinions.  I hope to post interesting responses from other readers in the future, but for now I plan to return to my own experiences and opionions.

(Doug–I work around a lot of Brits and everyone says “Cheers” for just about any reason.)

“Rich” metrics seems to mean nuanced understanding of test results. I think every human being is going to handle the result of a test differently–there are people out there who lean on numbers, and some of them are the aggressive parents of school-aged children. Teachers have to generate grading data–it rarely means very much, but it mollifies parents. And “objective” data is protection for teachers when administrators try to strong-arm undeserved grades for athletes or the children of privileged parents. The grades themselves, motivation more than evaluation for good teachers, help the kids identify how they stand in a class–pretty important in the kid’s world.

But in my teaching world, when a kid fails a test, it means I failed a kid. Conversely, when a kid aces one, it means I did my job. Every test that classroom teachers give is a “standardized” form for that class. Unless a teacher is designing individual tests (there are ways to do this without adding work to a writing teacher’s 80-hour week), the class test is always a standardized test. Always.

We can do some different things (watch for my book on reform) to give us information about a kid’s progress, but we are always going to need some universal tests that, while unable to identify individual intellect in non-academic areas, will identify collective progress in computational skills and reading comprehension, if only to provide information with which we can hold teachers and administrators accountable. THAT is the real reason we are even talking about this.

I think schools should redact kids’ names and publish ALL the test scores with only the teachers’ and administrators’ names. I would vote to never tell the parents or the kids their individual results, but that’s not going to happen. Some parents require evidence from teachers that they are raising flawless prodigies.

But writing is a different matter because it requires evaluations without test questions (although there is software that grades writing; it counts misspelled words and complex sentences). I cannot tell you how many times, late at night, I just made up numbers to try to keep a kid interested in my class or to send a signal, but deep in the pit of my heart, I felt guilty for not helping every kid improve every paper.

It is really hard to teach writing–I honestly don’t think many people know how. For my first few years, I didn’t. I think a lot of teachers get credit for stuff kids can already do…and those kids who can already write well sure are easier to “teach.”

But I was fortunate to be a young teacher in Kentucky when they launched the statewide education reform moment called KERA, where EVERY public school teacher in the state was required to have a basic understanding of what constituted good writing at different grade levels. We were ALL retrained (big $), even the middle school PE teachers. Grading was on a 1-6 scale, with six categories evaluated for each paper–cohesion, use of vocabulary, sentence structure, etc. We had to submit properly-graded portfolios to the state, where experts randomly checked them. Improperly-graded portfolios resulted in wide swaths of returned portfolios. It was expensive and difficult to achieve but, in Kentucky, we were finally working on the writing skills of ALL students.

To my surprise, I arrived in Oregon in 1996 to discover the schools in the midst of a statewide writing reform (CIM/CAM) that was exactly like the one I had been using in Kentucky. The problem with CIM/CAM: There were no teeth behind it. No sending portfolios for grading checks. No rewards or consequences. No training. I was required to attend ONE after-school training workshop in Oregon in seven years (where I demonstrated mastery of the evaluation process but was never asked to help my peers). I fear that is the fate of most reform. The reports that reach the public are filtered through PR specialists.

My (elusive) point is that real writing reform is possible in American public schools but requires lots of work that many people can’t or won’t do, flat out–but it is important to recognize that writing reform has little to do with these much-maligned “high-stakes tests” (and Dr. Yatvin’s ill-advised stand against CCSS). That argument is all about “teachers” unions and state legislators seeking to avoid responsibility for how they spend education funding. Cheers, y’all.

Yesterday, when I posted several thoughtful and well-written responses to pieces that had appeared recently on my blog, I never expected to get a response to a response.  But I did; from Doug Garnett, a business expert.  Although he and Don Bellairs, a talented educator, disagree on the usefulness of metrics in education, I think they are both wise and reasonable in their opinions.  Below is Doug’s response, and if Don wishes to answer him further, I will post that, too.

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Thanks, Don, for pointing out an issue for clarity. What I oppose is corporate style management of schools using high stakes standardized testing based metrics. I don’t think this sounds like a gun owner at all. But there’s a lot buried in that definition of what I oppose that didn’t come across clearly.

As an expert using metrics in marketing and business, I thoroughly endorse what you describe. The metaphor I use is that businesses want metrics to be a satellite image we can use to determine everything needed for success. In fact, we are explorers in St. Louis in 1840. We need to gather all the information (first hand accounts, maps, pieces of maps, theories, etc…) in order to make a wise journey into the wilderness and (hopefully) end up where we desire. Marketing is both an art and a science – and the science informs the art but is not complete by itself.

That sounds like how you use testing within the classroom — I thoroughly endorse that approach. In business, we make tremendous progress by using metrics as indicators that inform and guide our decisions. We fail when the metrics become the only thing considered.

You note you are looking for my reasoning “metrics are providing absolutes and will operate in a vacuum”. Excellent question. I’ll fill you in.

In your classroom, the metrics operate within context – you understand them in a rich environment and as just one of many indicators you use.

Once the metrics are published in the local paper, handed to state or federal legislators, are used as a political football, or adopted by a distant “philanthropical” foundation to justify their projects, they no longer live in a rich context – they are removed to the arid realm where only the metric matters. Now, distant from their true meaning, they are used with impunity to make big (high stakes) decisions about schools. (Don’t know if you’ve read about Campbell’s Law. But it describes the effect of this use of specific metrics.)

This is no different in corporations. In business what we see is that a good metric gets started by people who understand its strength and weakness and is very productive within their area. But at some point a politically motivated executive adopts that metric and it becomes a part of a high level “dashboard”. Then the game begins – where hitting metric targets is more important than company health. (Usually metric targets come with big bonuses making the game even more of a problem.) Suddenly, the metric means nothing.

Back to education: I want my sons to be able to communicate in writing. I presume you use metrics in the classroom to help judge their progress on the path to communicating in writing. But at the state and federal level, standardized test scores (which do NOT effectively evaluate communication – only tools that are part of writing) are presumed to be the ultimate judge of school success. Legislators lack the subtlety to understand, for example, what the metric does NOT measure and presume it is a complete summary of the topic.

Making massive spending and program choices based on this partial knowledge without rich understanding of of the context always leads to failure. Hence, my absolute sense of the topic.

I hope this makes a bit more sense. 🙂

Cheers…

…Doug

Over the time this blog has been in existence I have received many comments from readers. As long as they were not nonsense or a plug for a commercial product, I  approved them for publication. But, unfortunately, all comments appear at the bottom of the blog page and quickly fade when a new essay is posted.  Today, I am giving myslef a day off by posting  comments on two recent essays by readers who took the trouble to write thoughtful responses. I hope that other readers will read them and consider their points of view.  My plan is to do this again in the future as long as I continue to get serious and well written responses.

Responses  to “Learning to Sing and Read are Natural Human Developments”

Music can be a powerful component of a reading program. Dr. Timothy Rasinki, well-known expert in fluency, regularly advocates singing songs while looking at the text of those songs as an important practice for promoting fluency. (By the way he is not a half bad singer!). Some individuals who stutter are completely fluent when singing. So, you’re on to something. Proponents of analytic phonics have long considered the importance of meaning cues. Their critics quickly fall back and cite research showing the limitations of context clues. What those critics fail to consider (or research) is the power of crosschecking. I wrote a little song for my kids “Say the first sound, think of the clues, then you’ll know all the words to use.” It works for many of them. It’s designed to help students use both meaning and visual cues concurrently. It often helps those students who will simply do nothing, to take the first step in problem solving their word. That said- there are also children who thrive when synthetic phonics are used. Why must teachers choose one or the other? Why can’t teachers learn to teach both analytic and synthetic phonics, and use the approach that best works for the particular student they are helping? Kids are natural born problem solvers. Our job as teachers is to coach them into problem solving their words with whatever strategies work for them.

Sam Bommarito, retired reading specialist.

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I don’t think I learned as much about reading theory as I should have but I do know that it’s difficult to say there is any one way that children or adults learn to read. When I was in grad school we learned every method known to teach reading — we did it all. And it was a tremendous amount of work. I suppose if most children lived surrounded by books and people reading (modeling) and being read to, they would more easily learn to read. I personally learned to read at 5 because my mother read to me constantly. I memorized what was on the page. However, it wasn’t the best way to learn for me because I have to read every word, and I am terribly slow.  I rarely used phonics when I taught. I still think there are many better ways to teach including reading to them every day, telling stories, singing songs and memorizing rhymes and poems, providing lots of reading materials, teaching them sign language (rudimentary), making books, writing sentences that they say to tell about a picture, take dictation (in other words) about their dreams, encourage their telling stories, read the same book over and over, let them catch you reading all the time too — now I’m speaking as a parent. But many of these activities can take place in the classroom. We set up writing stations where young ones could pretend to write letters. Also, starting with tactile letters is fun. Writing down their favorite words, seeing if they recognize them next day. (Sylvia Ashton-Warner). This is from many years ago so my memories are rusty. But never did use phonics really.

Joan Kramer, blogger and retired educator

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Response to “Our Schools Are Not Businesses–And our Kids are not Products”

Mr. Garnett presents evidence for his anti-testing stance with rhetorical flair. I am having trouble ferreting out his reason for assuming metrics are providing absolutes and will operate in a vacuum outside other, less objective standards which are applied to most “evaluations” involving all aspects of education efficacy. Mr. Garnett has acquired this insight in his business environment; my understanding of the concept comes from the domain of the English lit classroom, where we teach kids about similes like Andrew Lang’s: “Statistics are used much like a drunk uses a lamppost: for support, not illumination.” Mr. Garnett’s life experiences and Andrew Lang’s poetic observation are inarguably worthy considerations lest we overvalue what we glean from the much-maligned “standardized” Good classroom teachers use tests not only to evaluate and rank students, but to motivate and increase self-awareness–both behaviorally and existentially. Mr. Garnett’s essay presumes that test results are used detrimentally; he would be nearer the truth if he argued that they CAN BE. This is self-evident, and a danger that requires built-in safe guards and steady diet of oversight and scrutiny. But numbers are the language of the physical world, and measurable, objective standards have a valuable function, especially in a domain like public education, where there lives some understandable concern about transparency and accountability. The anti-testing people must not realize how much they sound like the gun owners on this one.

Don Bellairs, blogger and retired educator

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Response to “The New Law is Better but Not Good Enough’

Educate, cultivate and advocate. A Nation At Risk was debunked by the Sandia Laboratory Report that never got published. Our public deserves accurate information on the true status of our educational system and how we got to where we are today. Not many people in Oregon know about what I call the test audit bill, HB 2715, co-authored by Reps. Lou Frederick and Shemia Fagan which tasks our Secretary of State to do an audit of our summative evaluation system. This bill has passed; it is one page in length and very specific as to what must be audited. I for one can not wait to see the required report back to the Oregon Dept. of Ed. and to our legislators. The audit could point the way towards a more sensible assessment system such as the highly effective assessment system being crafted by the ODE in collaboration with the OEA and the now defunct OEIB. I recommend that people take the time to write the Secretary of State, the Governor, and their legislators letting them know that HB 2713 is very important to the decision making process. Paul Pat Eck, Leader of AGHAST

My son, Alan, has been a big help to me ever since I started this blog.  After getting me through the technical stuff he moved on to alerting me about worthwhile articles on education.  Early this morning, he sent me one about home schooling from the New York Times, on line, which I wouldn’t have seen until tomorrow when it appears in print.

The Times article focuses on Rachel Papo, a professional photographer who is married and has young children of her own.  She and her family moved from New York City to a rural New York town in 2010.  There she had a first hand experience with home-schooled children, their parents, the environment, and the children’s daily activities.  They opened her mind and made her a believer. Below, in today’s post, I will quote sections of the article that focus on what Papo saw and her reactions, leaving out other information about Papo, and adding some of my own experiences as a school principal with home schooled children and their parents.

A few years ago in a cafe they frequented, Rachel Papo and her husband met a waitress and her 5-year-old daughter, True. “The child was vibrant, extremely special,” Papo remembers.  She was quite impressed and asked the mother about her child.

“She told me she’s homeschooled,” Papo said, meaning that True didn’t attend a traditional school, but instead, learned at home. “I literally didn’t know it existed. When I heard about it, I thought it was really strange, a really odd thing.  How can these kids be normal if they’re not part of the mainstream?” I wondered

On their first visit to their home, True changed Papo’s mind.

“I went to her home and there was a whole world there for me to photograph,” said Papo.  “She was incredible. She showed me everything in her house, everything around her house. I was running around after her. She had so much energy and life to her.”

Papo came to learn that many people choose homeschooling for religious reasons. But among those she met, people’s reasons were entirely their own.

“Each one was completely different than the other, and each had different reasons and approaches,” she said. “A lot were extremely educated. Some are certified teachers; some are world travelers. The children were really pretty remarkable.”

Some of the children kept a schedule, but some were more flexible. Some worked on the family farm, some studied in groups with other home schoolers. Many spent their days out in nature, learning about trees, plants and animals, or designed a curriculum around their own interests.

Her mind opened as she met more home-schooled children and learned how full and deliberate their days could be. While the days sometimes moved slower, every moment was a chance to learn — whether they were feeding ducks, baking cookies or reading books.

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Clearly Papo’s experience as she describes it does not cover the wide differences in home-schooling in America.  It shows one environment and its culture in which a particular group of parents and children are thriving.  It is not, in my opinion, typical.

Over several years as an elementary school principal I met only a few children who had been home schooled and their parents. Although I was never invited to observe the home-schooling those children experienced, I did see some of the results and got information from the children and their parents about how it was conducted.

My school in Wisconsin was in an upper middle class section of Madison, the state capital. During my 13 years there only one child left to be home-schooled, and that was because her mother felt she was too young to go on to middle school.  Instead, the mother planned a year of cultural experiences at home, around the city, and in other states. The next year the girl started middle school, and from what I heard, was doing quite well.

Later, I became the principal of a school in a rural area of Oregon where some people traveled to work in a city, others farmed or worked for local businesses, some were retired, and a few were unemployed.  Along with mostly substantial well-kept houses there was a trailer park and patches of old, decaying buildings.  During my tenure only two children left to be home schooled–both for religious reasons– but I was told that there were some others in the community who had left earlier or never attended our school and were being home-schooled.  Eventually, two of those children who had been home-schooled did enroll in our school and remained with us until they graduated.

From the parents of the returning children I heard the same story with only small variations: they couldn’t manage the job of teaching and their children weren’t learning or behaving well at home.  When those kids came to us they were behind both academically and socially.  Our teachers had to work with them as if they were handicapped. But in fact their only true handicaps were the lack of school and social experience.

Another boy’s situation stands out in my memory.  For two years in a row he started school with us, stayed a few weeks, and then his mother pulled him out to be home-schooled.  At first I didn’t understand what was going on, but then one of the teachers explained it to me.  All home-schooled kids in Oregon had to take the same yearly tests as the ones studying at school.  And, if they did not do well on the test, they were required to re-enroll in school.  But since there was no rule that they had to stay, this boy’s mother had kept him in school for only a short time  each year and then pulled him out again.  He was never with us long enough for us to get to know him, his educational needs, or his learning progress.

What I hope readers have seen in this comparison between Rachel Papo’s view of home schooling and mine is that it all depends on the parents’ knowledge, skills, and behavior and the local culture.  Home-schooling works when the people and the place are the right fit. It fails miserably when one or both are not.

Today’s post, first published a couple of weeks ago in the “Deseret News,” was written by Lynn Stoddard, a longtime educator and author of the book, “Educating for Human Greatness.”  As I read it, I could not help recalling my own experiences throughout my education years.  My system for getting good grades was to memorize the information provided in teachers’ lessons and textbooks and then to clear it out of my mind after any test or written paper, so I could prepare for the next onslaught of facts that did not have any usefulness or appeal for me.  Only when I read a piece of fiction or a poem that moved me did I find it worthwhile and easy to remember.  I’d be very pleased to hear from readers who strongly agree or disagree with Stoddard or me.

Memorable teaching, in its purest form, may be the act of stimulating and enlarging something we were all born with — curiosity.

“People cannot learn by having information pressed into their brains. Knowledge has to be pulled into the brain, not pushed in. First, one must create a state of mind that craves knowledge, interest and wonder. You can teach only by creating an urge to know.”

The author of these words, Victor Weisskopf, was a world-renowned Jewish scientist who escaped from Nazi Germany and helped develop the atomic bomb. He was known as a “memorable teacher.” He encouraged his physics students to ask questions by saying, “There is no such thing as a stupid question.” Weisskopf taught that it is by the use of questions that students pull information into their brains. He taught by creating an “urge to know.”

What is the difference between information that is pressed into a student’s brain and information that is pulled in? Is there a difference between required learning and self-chosen learning? Plato said, “Knowledge which is acquired under compulsion obtains no hold on the mind.”

This is reinforced by Christ’s words in the Bible, “Ask and it shall be given you; seek and ye shall find; knock and it shall be opened unto you.” We can interpret “ask,” “seek” and “knock” as ascending levels of the “urge to know.”

What happens if students are taught math and reading before they have a desire to know? It should be called “child abuse” for the damage it does. According to research done by Peter Gray of Boston College and others, too-early academic training results in long-term intellectual and psychological damage.

Early failure experiences result in young children hating school and losing confidence in their ability to learn, a precursor for many to later drop out and become burdens to society — in and out of prison. Schools that are based on pressing a standardized curriculum into students’ minds may also be the cause of bullying.

In later school years, required, assigned learning becomes shallow and temporary as students learn information to pass tests and discard it soon thereafter. It is becoming more and more evident that self-chosen knowledge, the kind that is “pulled in,” is the only kind that is deep and enduring.

Ever since the federal government started to take over public education and impose a curriculum, like Common Core, to be pressed into students’ heads, it has become increasingly difficult for teachers to cultivate an “urge to know” and encourage students to ask questions. Memorable teaching, the kind that makes a positive difference in people’s lives, has been getting less and less. (How many of your teachers do you fondly remember?)

If you are a concerned parent, legislator, school board member, teacher, administrator or student, ask for your freedom, as specified by the 10th Amendment, to develop a local school system that encourages and supports teachers to be the great, memorable people they want to be. With the recent abolishment of No Child Left Behind and removal of many tight government controls you can now innovate more openly. You can also work at transforming yourself into a great teacher, holding up examples like Weisskopf, Albert Einstein or Christ, the most memorable of them all. In so doing, you will make a difference in the lives of others and become memorable to them.