AssortedStuff

The topic in today’s New York Times Room For Debate page is how do you assess the value of a teacher?

The section, which is hardly a debate, more a collection of short guest editorials on a particular issue, asks the writers to comment on the “value-add” system of evaluating teachers that is being tried in DC schools and was used by the LA Times in their recent series on the quality of teachers in the city schools.

According to the Times, “value add” is a system that “calculates the value teachers add to their students’ achievement, based on changes in test scores from year to year and how the students perform compared with others in their grade.”

As you might expect the editors managed to round up a “fair and balanced” group from a variety of think tanks and universities.

One of the writers, however, is actually a K12 educator, a math teacher at the middle school that feeds to the high school in which I taught, and someone whose teaching skills I saw in some of the kids in my classes.

He gives a qualified endorsement of the concept (“If value-added analysis is to be used, it should be fully validated and other data should also be included when evaluating and labeling a teacher.”), but it’s this observation that is more to the heart of the issue of assessing both students and teachers.

Some of my best teaching occurs (and my students learn the most) when I present material that will never appear on any summative assessment. For gifted students especially, it is imperative to present to them mathematics that is both challenging and interesting. At times this may include assigning complex problems that may take days instead of minutes to solve. Never will such problems appear on state or national tests that are used to determine a teacher’s added value.

I would take out the part about gifted students and say that all kids deserve to be presented with challenging and interesting material, not just in math but in all their learning experiences.

The skills gained by learning to solve those complex problems that take days to resolve (or maybe are never completely resolved?) will be far more valuable in their lives than anything we ask students to memorize (often temporarily) for the next standardized test.

evalutation, olsd, reform, standardized tests, teachers

On the Washington Post web site, Diane Ravitch recommends three books that offer “some dissenting views” on the administration’s current education reform plans.

I haven’t read the books and can’t verify their quality, but this observation by Ravitch in her introduction is right on target.

Now that the Obama administration has invited the states to compete for $5 billion in stimulus funds, the winners will not be those that come up with the best reform ideas, but those that agree to do what the administration wants: create privately managed charter schools, evaluate teachers by their students’ test scores, and close low-performing schools.

Money + power = do it our way.

diane ravitch, education, race to the top, reform

In today’s post on his Class Struggle blog, Jay Mathews disagrees with a recent column by Dana Milbank that spotlights many of the negatives to our all-testing-all-the-time educational system.

Hardly a surprise since Mathews never met a standardized test (or a charter school) he didn’t like.

So, why is Milbank wrong?

As near as I can figure Mathews’ side of the argument all boils down to politics since “…Milbank already knows that campaigning against standardized tests is a loser”.

And…

Since at least the late 1980s, the majority of Democratic and Republican legislators and executives have been reconciled to creating systems in which all children take tests and changes are made in schools that do not score well.

Still, liberals and conservatives in Congress appear to agree that test scores will remain important in any revision of the law.

So, the consensus among our politicians, most of whom have little understanding of K12 education beyond sitting in class for thirteen years, is that wrapping schools in a culture of test prep is the best policy to improve student learning and prepare them for a constantly changing world that never gives standardized tests.

Yeah, that sounds right.

jay mathews, reform, school, standardized tests

For all the talk about change during the 2008 presidential campaign, one policy area in which the Obama administration differs very little from that of his predecessor is education.

In this morning’s Post, Dana Milbank discusses the similarities between the two.

Unfortunately, his focus is almost entirely on the political consequences, which, as we all know, is far more important than any impact of the policy itself.

Easier to write too since most political analysis these days seems to be based on personal opinion, the louder the better.

Anyway, Milbank does manage to make a few relevant points.

But in education, the Bush-Obama comparison is spot on. If anything, Obama has taken the worst aspect of Bush’s No Child Left Behind education law — an obsession with testing — and amplified it.

Obama has expanded the importance of standardized testing to determine how much teachers will be paid, which educators will be fired and which schools will be closed — despite evidence that such practices are harmful. In the process, he’s offended just about all the liberals involved in or advocating for education without gaining much support from conservatives. (emphasis mine)

And…

There’s nothing wrong with testing*, but when you use tests to determine pay and job security, you inevitably induce teachers to turn children into test-taking automatons, not the creative thinkers that have been the most valuable product of American schools. Test obsession won’t help the bad schools, and it will wreck the good ones. (emphasis mine)

“The curriculum will be narrowed even more than under George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind,” New York University education professor Diane Ravitch, an education official in George H.W. Bush’s administration, wrote of Obama’s education policy in a piece for the Huffington Post. “There will be even less time available for the arts, science, history, civics, foreign language, even physical education. Teachers will teach to the test. There will be more cheating, more gaming the system.” The tests, she said, are “simply not adequate” to separate good teachers and schools from bad.

We can only hope that “Obama’s erstwhile allies” who Milbank claims are now pushing back on his Bush-like education policies are able to alter that all-consuming effort to graduate “test-taking automatons”.

*A more accurate statement would be there’s nothing wrong with assessment.

education, obama, politics, reform, testing

Something to look forward to in late September.  Media giant NBC Universal* is planning a one-week event, including segments to be featured in news programming on all their networks, called “Education Nation“

According to the press release that landed in my mailbox (and, I suspect, that of many other edubloggers), things will kick off with a two-day education summit that will be a “call to action, shining a spotlight on the most pressing national issue of our time: Education in America”.

Call to action? Who’s coming? Well, pretty much the usual suspects.

Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Delaware Governor Jack Markell, Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty, Harlem Children Zone’s CEO Geoffrey Canada, President of MIT Susan Hockfield, National Superintendent of the Year Elizabeth Morgan, Civil Rights Activist Al Sharpton, and President of University of Phoenix Bill Pepicello, Ph.D., join a host of top leaders in education to open a national dialogue and address the gap between how we perceive education and the actual results we are producing today.

And don’t forget Bill Gates, whose foundation is one of the sponsoring “partners”.

Interesting. All but one of those big names lives and works less than a days drive (in traffic) from New York City, the location of this summit. Just an observation.

Anyway, later on the NBC press people mention that the overall project will include input from “more than 300 big thinkers in government, politics, business and technology — as well as school administrators, teachers, parents and students from across the country”.

Again, notice that the people most directly affected by the education process – parents and students – are thrown in almost as an afterthought.

Later the same day, by coincidence (I think), I also received a promotion for a new book from Milton Chen, former executive director of the George Lucas Educational Foundation (of which I’m a member), carrying the same title: “Education Nation“.

A snippet from the introduction to that book, posted on the promotional site, certainly sounds like a good starting point.

Imagine an ‘Education Nation,’ a learning society where the education of children and adults is the highest national priority, on par with a strong economy, high employment, and national security. Where resources from public and private sources fund a ‘ladder of learning’ for learners of all ages, from pre-K through ‘gray.’ Where learners take courses through the formal institutions of high-quality schools and universities and also take advantage of informal experiences offered through museums, libraries, churches, youth groups, and parks as well as via the media.

Ok, I need to dial back the skepticism a little and reserve judgement on both variations on Education Nation until after I get the chance to evaluate the ideas presented.

However, it will be very interesting to see if the nations presented by NBC and Chen have anything in common, and especially if either has any connection to reality.

*No more GE microwave programming I guess. :-)

education, edutopia, nbc, reform

Were you aware that “public education is in the midst of a quiet revolution” in the US?

I wasn’t.  And after reading this morning’s Post, it’s clear the writer’s use of the term “revolution”, quiet or otherwise, is a major overstatement at best.

It seems this particular “revolution” is being funded by the big money foundation headed by Bill Gates and his wife.

However, actually reading past the headline we find that almost all of their cash is going into a variety of experiments focused on relatively minor variations on the status quo: national standards in language arts and math, pay-for-performance systems, and charter schools.

Of course, this is the same Gates Foundation that over the past ten years has already dumped $2 billion into their failed program to develop a small high school concept.

Which in most cases resulted in a shrunken version of the standard educational structure used in most high schools and little improvement student learning.

But that piece of history gets only a brief mention in this glowing assessment of Gates’ education current funding of reform efforts.

The other side of the issue gets only slightly more space.

Skeptics say the Microsoft founder is foisting a business-driven agenda on schools without understanding the challenges of public education. “I suspect that eight years from now, the Gates Foundation will say, ‘Whoops, we made another big boo-boo. What should we do now?’ ” education historian Diane Ravitch said.

And then there’s this little bit of information from the second half of the story, providing one likely reason for this puff piece to be published at all.

(Melinda Gates, wife of the Microsoft chairman, and investor Warren E. Buffett, a major donor to the foundation, are both on The Washington Post Co. board of directors.)

The price of having a major newspaper declare what you’re doing a “revolution”?

bill gates, education, foundation, reform, washington post

In parts one and two of a multipart post, Larry Cuban looks at why school districts buy new technologies when there is little or no evidence they do anything to improve student learning, especially when most are having major budget problems.

From part one, he notes that consumer spending on electronics in the US is up despite the continuing recession.

At the same time schools are purchasing more technology products while also laying off teachers, increasing class size, and cutting program.

Economists can probably tell you why families are devoting scarce resources to new and better technology devices but why are schools doing the same thing?

The reasons public officials most often give for these purchases, past and present, is that the electronic devices will transform classroom practices, student learning, and prepare students for jobs in a competitive global economy. So, school boards need to back up these reasons with solid evidence for spending public dollars on new (and replacement) technologies that promise significant changes in teaching, learning, and administrative practice.

Where is that “solid evidence”?

The evidence for these electronic devices doing what is expected both in the U.S. and abroad is—as I read the research–at best, spotty—at worst, weak. Few careful and impartial observers of U.S., Europe, and Asia where governments have committed themselves to infusing technology into schools can say with confidence that the use of new technologies has led to increases in student academic achievement (as measured on either U.S. or international tests), altered substantially how teachers teach, or prepared students for to compete in an ever-changing labor market.

In part two, Cuban offers two reasons for this blind devotion to tech “solutions” that solve nothing: political and psychological.

This political explanation helps to make sense of why policymakers effortlessly skip over the lack of evidence to support major high tech expenditures. They figure that media photos of students happily clicking away on laptops–visible symbols–will trump the few research studies or critics who question purchases.

Turning from a political to a psychological explanation, districts buy technology because they suffer from “inattentional blindness”: They are too focused on a specific problem and lose sight of the big picture.

Or they suffer from some kind of blindness caused by salespeople promising tech-based “solutions” to whatever problem their schools might be facing without seeing if it fits in that big picture.

Of course, if the stuff looks good when photographed next to the superintendent, mayor, governor, and/or congressional candidate, so much the better.

Cuban, as always, makes some excellent points about our educational obsession with gimmicks.  Take the time to read both posts.

edtech, education, larry cuban, reform, technology

In this morning’s Post, a first-year teacher, laid off due to the economic mess, discusses the growing number of proposals to link teacher pay directly with the test scores of their students.

She’s willing to give the idea a try, if certain conditions are met.

1. Teachers be assessed based on only those students with 90 percent or higher attendance.

2. Teachers be allowed to remove disruptive students from their classroom on a day-to-day basis.

3. Students who don’t achieve “basic” proficiency in a state test be prohibited from moving forward to the next class in the progression.

4. That teachers be assessed on student improvement, not an absolute standard — the so-called value-added assessment.

All honest, very reasonable ideas, recognizing the realities and complexities of being an educator in this country.

And none of it will ever happen.

Most of the politicians proposing “pay for performance” programs only want the simplest approach possible.

They don’t understand, or want to acknowledge, the many, many factors that affect student learning and the teaching process.

education, reform, teaching

In her Education Week blog this week, Diane Ravitch offers ten reasons why states should decline to participate in the DOEs big money game show, Race to the Top.

I can’t speak to the validity of all ten, but I suspect most her predictions of what will happen to American education as a result of this most recent attempt at “reform” are far too accurate.

Especially number five.

By raising the stakes for tests even higher, Race to the Top will predictably produce more teaching to bad tests, more narrowing of the curriculum, more cheating, and more gaming the system. If scores rise, it will be the illusion of progress, rather than better education. By ratcheting up the consequences of test scores, education will be corrupted and cheapened. There will be even less time for history, geography, civics, foreign languages, literature, and other important subjects.

All of that applied to No Child Left Behind, of course, except for the part about rising scores.

Supporters of NCLB simply made claims of major progress without even minimal statistical evidence.

diane ravitch, education, nclb, race to the top, reform

Recently I’ve been thinking a lot about the use of personal portable communications devices* in a classroom setting, only a small part of which is driven from carrying around an iPad for the last six weeks or so.

Based mainly on my experience, I think Apple’s tablet will be a very compelling device for learning, once they push out a few major upgrades. More about that in another post.

Anyway, here in the overly-large school district we are also running experiments with the instructional use of the iPod Touch, as well as seriously discussing how and why students might use their own personal computing devices in the classroom.

Frequently, however, I get an impression that many of the people involved don’t understand the nature of these tools and how they are designed to be used.

They want very much to map them onto our classic computer lab style of technology use.

In a computer lab, even one consisting of laptops stored in a big metal box that is rolled from room to room, all the units are the same. Or essentially identical when booted.

All have the same software, identical desktops, files all in the same places, mapped to the same servers, and sometimes are even connected to a master unit that can take control of the whole lab.

And all the kids using them are expected to be doing exactly the same activities on each computer.

On the other hand, the powerful devices coming to school in the pockets of students (and many adults) are designed to be personal, with everything customized by the user to make the unit function best for them.

The “lab” created when each student boots their personal “computer” would result in almost none of the workstations looking – or working – alike.

So, as one teacher recently asked me, how are we supposed to get anything done if every computer in the room is different?

It’s a valid question, and I think the answer lies in a fundamental mistake we’ve made over the decades in the way we’ve taught kids and adults to use computers.

We taught Microsoft Word Fundamentals instead of learning the writing process regardless of the tool being used.

Our training focused on the mechanics of PowerPoint instead of on understanding the best ways to communicate ideas.

While this approach is possible, and relatively easy to implement, when using a standardized lab, it falls apart completely in a BYOC setting.

So we “get something done” by separating learning to use the technology from using that technology as a tool for learning more useful skills – like writing and communicating ideas.

After setting minimum requirements for the “computers”, we put the responsibility on the students themselves for knowing how to use the different applications.

Then we give them meaningful assignments and evaluate their work based on factors other than how well they use fonts and the number of slides in their shows.

I know, I know… far too simplistic.

However, if a 1-1 ratio of kids to computers in our schools, at least high schools, is really what we want (and I hear many around here say it is), then we will need to make two major changes to our education process.

First, we must allow and encourage students to freely use their own computing devices in schools (and provide them for those families who can’t afford it).

And then completely revise both the curriculum and our approach to teaching to fit the new circumstances.

Not simple at all, but do we have any other options?

*I know that’s a very clunky name but “smart phones” doesn’t nearly cover the capabilities of these devices and “computer” ties them too much to a stereotype.

cell phones, education, ipad, portable computing, reform