The Treasure Hunter

A while ago I posted a piece on jargon explaining that there were different kinds, some honest and useful, others dishonest and harmful. Still, we must understand that jargon is put before us all the time by politicians, advertisers, and ideologues to serve their own purposes. For example, in reading the commentary by Michael Petrilli that I wrote about on November 9th I was struck by some of his jargon, and that moved me to write again about educational jargon today. However, not everything I mention below came from Petrilli; there are many others spitting out jargon today in an effort to persuade those people unfamiliar with the realities of education to get tougher on public schools and their teachers or to abandon public education altogether.

Let me begin with Petrilli’s jargon. He refers to the obedient kids in schools as the hard-working students, and the ones following the rules. Those who misbehave to any extent are the chronic disrupters who hurt the high achievers, the ones who comply with all rules and teacher demands. What Petrilli wants to do is to separate the disobedient students from the compliant ones by creating tracked classrooms or sending the latter to high quality charter schools, one of which he identifies as the Success Academies (their name is, in itself, jargon). He says,”If the Success Academies and schools like it (sic) didn’t exist, many of those hard-working, high-achieving students” the compliant ones, would be stuck in “chaotic, low-performing public schools“, high poverty schools.

Moving on from Petrilli’s jargon, I will list below just a few other pieces of jargon that I missed last time, followed by their true meanings. Mostly they come from private groups that support charter schools or policy makers and pundits who understand little about good teaching or real student learning.

Value-added assessments: Teachers should be judged in part by comparing students’ current test scores to those of the previous year. To what extent the teacher is responsible for the gains—or lack thereof—is debatable

Student Achievement: High stakes test scores are the only valid evidence of learning

The Common Core Standards are more rigorous than previous state standards  The CCSS are indeed more difficult than those of most states, but not necessarily more appropriate for the designated grade levels or more in line with college or workplace expectations.

NCLB waivers: The DOE has allowed some states to substitute their own plans for school improvement for the requirements of NCLB, as long as those plans are just as demanding or even more so.

Tough Love: Strict behavioral demands and harsh punishments for students who don’t don’t comply with schools’ or teachers’ expectations.

Data Driven Instruction: School officials using previous test scores and heaven-knows-what other numbers to decide what and how teachers should teach.

Accountability: Schools doing what the DOE and state legislatures want them to do.

Foolish Parents, lazy teachers, and  corrupt teachers unions:  Those who advocate for opting-out students from high stakes tests.

If you readers have noticed others in your states, please let me know and I will post them as an addendum.

Although I have been determined to post today’s essay for a long time, I have also been nervous about how pompous it may sound to many readers.  What has moved me to take the risk is the continuing idiocy of evaluating teachers on students’ test scores, evenwhen they didn’t actually teach some of those students.  To me the basic principle of teacher evaluation today is utterly without validity because it is not possible for one person to control the behavior of another unless the first person is a master and the second is a slave.  Even that doesn’t work all the time.

Most of us, I think, can name the qualities that go into being a good cook, a good friend, or a good driver. But could we convert those qualities into quantities?  Would each quality have the same weight? And what if our two best friends had different qualities, that when tallied up showed a wide discrepancy?  What if one friend added up to a 95 and the other added up to 63?

All of this must seem hopelessly complicated and, very likely, inane. Who would want to measure one friend against another? But that is exactly the inanity going on in states and school districts bent on measuring the quality of students on their test scores.  Even worse than that is the practice of judging the quality of teachers by their students’ test scores so one teacher can be labeled “effective” and another “failing.”

To make matters worse, the people setting up the measurement formulas don’t seem to know what the qualities of a good teacher are. Most of them can name only the ability to generate high student test scores, while the rest go blank after adding the ability to manage classroom behavior.

Although I can’t resolve the numbers dilemma, I can, from my own  experience as a teacher and a principal, name a set of qualities that reflect my beliefs about teacher quality, and I want to do that here.  To me the most important one is the ability to inspire students to delve more deeply into the things taught in class, whether that is math, writing, science, or civility.

To help you get a fuller picture of my concept of teaching excellence, below is a list of  teacher qualities that I believe are important. They are what I looked for in my teachers when I was a principal.  Be warned, however, that they were never a “rubric” for me and should not be one for today’s principals or other evaluators.  They are ideals that very few of us can live up to all the time, the “A plusses” of performance.  And even if some teachers could do them all, every day over the years, an evaluator might not recognize them or give them the same value I do.

A good teacher

1.  Is aware, if the class size is reasonable, of each student’s academic strengths and weaknesses and home or community problems

2. Establishes a system of small group and independent learning that allows students to experience the roles of leader, follower, partner, and innovator

3. Plans lessons designed to cover the range of students’ instructional needs, connect to their interests, and strengthen their current knowledge and skills or move them into new territory

4. Adjusts lessons while teaching in response to students’ questions and actions

5. Makes an effort to include positive suggestions for improvement when critiquing student work

6. Demonstrates respect and trust for students and expects them to give the same back to her/him and their classmates

7. Discusses problems with behavior, attendance, or classwork with students privately, out of respect for their rights and dignity.

8. Develops professional relationships with fellow teachers inside the school or with teachers elsewhere

9. Develops good communication and partnership relationships with parents to serve the best interests of students

10. Continually works to improve and expand one’s own professional knowledge and skills.

Although I suspect that my list is still incomplete, it is long enough to convey my concept of good teaching and make clear why it can’t be measured or even perceived by evaluators who don’t know a teacher’s work firsthand through many classroom visits and observations of outside the classroom actions.

In any school the ideal evaluator is a good principal who has the time to visit classrooms regularly and observe teachers informally in many different situations.  As a result of  those efforts a good principal knows which teachers to move into positions of greater responsibility, which ones need help to improve, and those few who  are not suited to continue in this important profession.

I am well aware that throughout this essay I have been speaking of ideals, not reality.  Neither I or the teachers I supervised met all those ideals all the time.  But we tried, and we recognized many of our own weaknesses as individuals and as a group.  We did our best to respect, support, and forgive each other, knowing that– like our students– we were still learners.

After the debacle in a South Carolina classroom a couple of weeks ago, it really cheered me up to read the article below in the Washington Post.  I hope it makes you smile too.

On Monday afternoon, D.C. police officers broke up two groups of fighting teenagers. A few minutes later, a female officer approached the lingering crowd and told the teens to disperse.

That’s when Aaliyah Taylor, a 17-year-old senior at Ballou High School, walked up to the officer and started playing “Watch Me (Whip/Nae Nae)” on her phone. Then she did the Nae Nae dance. The officer, according to Taylor, laughed and said she had far better dance moves than that.

What happened from there on the 200 block of K Street SW was  a rather imprssive dance-off between the police officer and the teen, and an example of positive community policing at a time when national attention is focused on discriminatory and abusive police tactics. The onlooking teens caught the dance battle on their cell phones while a song by rapper Dlow played in the background.

“Instead of us fighting, she tried to turn it around and make it something fun,” Taylor said. “I never expected cops to be that cool. There are some good cops.” Taylor said the officer told the group that if the teens won the dance-off, they could stay. If the officer won, they would have to leave.

The two danced for a few minutes face-to-face–stanky leg and all— and Taylor said the officer would have kept going, but she got tired. Both Taylor and the officer declared themselves the victors, hugged and everyone left the area. “I mostly hold my head down when I dance, so I didn’t really see her,” Taylor said. “But when I looked at the video after, I was like ‘Oh, she has some moves.’”

When reached by phone, the officer in the video said she did not want to be identified because she didn’t  want to make the story about her. “It’s kind of embarrassing that this became so big,” she said. “This is what we do everyday.” The officer has been with the force for about three years and recently returned from a tour of duty in Iraq.

Marinos Marinos, the secretary of the D.C. police union, said these sorts of personal interactions between officers and residents aren’t unusual — it’s just that most don’t make it to the Internet. “We are humans just like everyone else,” Marinos said. “Everyday we come in contact with thousands of citizens and almost all of them have positive outcomes.”

D.C. Police Chief Cathy Lanier wrote in a statement. that “the viral video today of the First District Officer positively engaging with teens and diffusing the conflict yesterday in a manner that appropriately resolved the call is reflective of the many positive police-community interactions that take place daily in Washington, D.C.”

For Taylor, she said the dance-off marked her first positive interaction with police officers in her  neighborhood. She has six sisters and one brother and, according to Taylor, all have been arrested or detained for non-violent offenses like breaking curfew. Taylor, who said she’s never been arrested, recalls her siblings saying that the officers acted unnecessarily rude and rough during their arrests.

Those experiences, Taylor said, had shaped her perception of police officers. “I thought all cops were cruel because that’s how I saw them,” Taylor said. “I’ve now seen there are good cops out there.”

D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser celebrated the officer’s dance moves on Twitter Wednesday, saying “DC has innovative ways” to keep the city safer and stronger.

As for the who actually had the better moves? Marinos said the officer had about 40 pounds of equipment and clothes on her, so it likely wasn’t even a fair competition.

Today I am posting a commentary by Michael Petrilli, president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a conservative think tank, that appeared yesterday in our local newspaper, The Oregonian.  Shortly after reading it I wrote a “Letter to the Editor,” which I am also posting.  If you want to read more from me on the same topics Petrilli addresses, go back to the archives of this blog and read “Compatibility Based Classrooms” and “Double Header Today: Dealing with Kids Misbehavior.”

          Disruptive Students Hurt High Achievers Most

Low-income strivers — impoverished families who follow the rules and work hard to climb the ladder to the middle class — may be the most underserved population in America today.

In few realms is that more evident than education reform. For 20 years, national policies have focused largely on the lowest-performing students, often to the detriment of their higher-achieving, low-income peers. Recently, many cities — including Chicago, Philadelphia and Syracuse, New York — have made a goal of reducing the number of school suspensions and other tough-love approaches to school discipline, with little concern for the impact on the kids who come to school ready to follow the rules. These efforts have received vocal support from the federal Department of Education. Policymakers and educators say they are doing this in the name of equity. But when everyone in a school is harmed by some students’ unruly behavior, it’s a strange notion of fairness indeed.

Imagine that we wanted to prioritize the needs of low-income students who demonstrated the aptitude to achieve at high levels and a willingness to work hard — the kids with the best shot to use a solid education to put poverty behind. What might we do?

First, we would put in place “universal screening” tests to look for gifted students in early elementary schools. We would ask all schools, including those with a high percentage of poor students, to identify at least 10 percent of their students for special programs, and then allow these kids the opportunity to spend part of their day learning with other high-achieving peers, and to go faster or deeper into the curriculum. A recent study by David Card of the University of California at Berkeley and Laura Giuliano of the University of Miami demonstrated that this sort of approach is particularly effective for high-achieving, low-income students.

By middle school, we would embrace tracking so that poor, bright students had access to the same challenging courses that affluent high achievers regularly enjoy, and that are essential if young people are going to get on a trajectory for success in Advanced Placement classes in high school and at more selective colleges.

Finally, we would ensure that schools were safe and orderly places to be — balancing the educational needs of disruptive students with the equally valuable needs of their rule-abiding peers.

Yet in most cities we do very few of these things. This is in large part because many progressives are convinced that any sort of tracking is classist and racist, and amounts to giving up on certain kids, and they have worked to ban it. (Ironically, political leaders in the poorest neighborhoods themselves are asking for more schools for the gifted and talented.) Most accountability systems still work on getting low-performing students up to basic proficiency in reading and math, rather than pushing schools to help all students get as far as they can.

Meanwhile, discipline “reforms” are focused overwhelmingly on reducing punishments, often with little attention to the potential downside for learning in the classroom. Yet as common sense — and solid research — tells us, that downside is real. For instance, a study by the group Public Agenda found that 85 percent of teachers and 73 percent of parents felt the “school experience of most students suffers at the expense of a few chronic offenders.” A study published by the National Bureau of Economic Research showed that when disruptive students from New Orleans landed in Houston schools after Katrina, they “increased native absenteeism and disciplinary problems.”

Frustrated that the traditional public schools aren’t willing to prioritize their children’s needs, many low-income strivers have turned to high-quality charter schools instead. But now those are under attack, too. In recent weeks, the “PBS Newshour” and “New York Times” had highly critical coverage of Success Academies, charter schools in New York City that have shown excellent results in improving student performance. The reports focused on the academies’ suspending students aggressively and removing those who are chronic disrupters. There were similar controversies over the relatively high rates of suspensions and expulsions at charters in Chicago and Washington in recent years.

The casual observer might wonder: What’s wrong with that approach? Why not ensure that schools are safe places to be? If the Success Academies and schools like it didn’t exist, many of those hard-working, high-achieving students would be in chaotic, low-performing public schools. Why don’t their needs count?

Our public schools are intended to help all students achieve their potential. By all means, we need to find ways to better serve disruptive students, who are often dealing with horrendous situations at home. (Often, specialized alternative schools are the best option.) Trying to boost the performance of the lowest-achieving kids is also the right thing to do; kids who grow up to be illiterate or innumerate have little hope for success in our knowledge economy.

But the bulk of the attention can’t go just to the toughest cases. Poor children who are ready to learn, follow the rules, and work hard deserve resources and opportunities to flourish. If the public school system is unwilling or unable to provide them, then charter schools should be allowed and encouraged to do so, even if that means cracking down on the students who ruin it for the rest.

___________________________________________

To the Editor:

Michael Petrilli is wrong about so many things in his commentary that it would take me a full page in the Oregonian to name and counter all his errors. Over many years as an educator at all levels—including college– and as an elementary and middle school principal, I worked with students of different ages, backgrounds, and abilities and never had to use “tough love” to teach or manage their behavior.

To put my views as briefly as possible, students of all ages and backgrounds have feelings, desires, and views of themselves. As parents or educators it is our job to support the good things we see in them and to help them to overcome their weaknesses, fears and self-destructive behavior. There is no benefit for individuals or our society as a whole in having our schools separate kids into two groups: the winners and the losers, and then solidify those classifications for life through academic separation and harsh discipline.

Sincerely yours,

Joanne Yatvin

Yesterday I read commentary posted online by Education Week that focused on the fact that current federal and state policies were turning our schools into robot factories.  Unfortunately, I found it disappointing because it gave no examples of what was actually happening or suggestions of what could be done to turn things around.  However, it drove me back to an essay I wrote five years ago that was posted on Valerie Strauss’ blog, “The Answer Sheet.”  Given my vanity, I couldn’t resist showing my readers that I did a better job of explaining and illustrating one of the most serious problems in education today. Oh, and I must make it clear that I wrote that piece in early September, so that’s why it refers to the beginning of the school year.

As a regular reader of the newspaper comics, I am always impressed by how well their writers understand human feelings and behavior. Right about now I am struck by the number of comic strips that deal with the beginning of the school year and how uniform their messages are: children aren’t happy about going back to school. This is not good-natured humor. It reflects pretty accurately the feelings I hear expressed by my grandchildren and many other children I talk to.

Although the excitement of new clothes and school supplies seems to soften the blow, the thought of being confined all day to over-crowded classrooms and hard seats and allowed to speak or move only after raising one’s hand is not a pretty prospect. Unfortunately, this picture gets uglier every year as demands for more and harder schoolwork increase, and the old respites of recess, art, music, and physical education disappear. By law, adults get breaks during their workday, but not children.

As an educational researcher I have been visiting elementary classrooms regularly over the past several years and finding much fine teaching and learning that I could write about.  But recently, for the most part, I don’t like what I see. Many of the once excellent teachers I know have been reduced to automatons reciting scripted lessons, focusing on mechanical skills, and rehearsing students for standardized tests. The school curriculum has become something teachers “deliver” like a pizza and students “swallow” whole, whether or not they like mushrooms.

Kindergartens that used to be places for children to learn social behavior, songs, dances, and poetry; how to build cities with blocks, play store, and express their feelings with crayons and paint, are now cheerless cells for memorizing letter sounds and numbers. In one kindergarten I visited last year, children recited in chorus all the words on the pages of the little books they had been given without ever appearing to recognize that those words were part of a story.

In a first-grade classroom I watched children march in circles at mid-morning, waving their arms because there was no longer a recess to refresh their bodies and spirits. Still, there was time enough for them to shout out the sounds of letters in chorus and to memorize the words “onomatopoeia” and “metaphor.”

In upper elementary grade classrooms I saw both English and math taught by formulas. Students were given a list of the parts of a standard essay, told to use them in order and to begin with a question or a surprising statement. They were also taught the formula for dividing by fractions (as if anyone ever does such a thing) and the Pythagorean theorem (useful if ever you want to know the length of the hypotenuse of a right triangle).

I’ve also learned that many school districts have adopted summer homework policies, usually requiring students to read a prescribed list of books. This past summer my grand-nephew, who is entering 9th grade, had to write a legal brief defending or condemning Martin Luther King, although he had not been taught anything about that writing form or that famous man in 8th grade.

With the advent of the Common Core Standards, created by “experts” who will never be tested on them, school life will grow even more onerous. In keeping with the Standards many school districts have moved algebra down to the 8th grade, and geometry, before a tenth grade elective, is now required of all ninth graders. Wordsworth’s “Preface to the Lyrical Ballads,” which I read as a graduate student, is on the 9th grade recommended reading list. Although, the knowledge, skills, and books in the standards are, on the whole, academically valuable, they are scheduled to be taught to students two to four years too young to understand or appreciate them and not linked in any way to the interests of students.

All this has happened because the politicians who now control America’s schools have adopted the worst aspects of European and Asian education, which were designed to maintain social class boundaries in those societies.

Out of a misguided belief that students’ test scores represent a country’s economic health and, perhaps, out of wounded pride our leaders appear determined to convert our once strong public schools into robot factories and to extinguish the youthful imagination and ambition that have fueled our country’s greatness for more than 200 years.