One Bad Apple: File Under Problems Not Addressed by NCLB

It may be a testament to public education that not until my daughters were in 8th grade that we encountered a teacher whose practices were so fundamentally unsound that I was forced to take action.


From kindergarten until now, my daughters have had a series of teachers whose professional abilities ranged from the solidly competent to the level of breathtaking mastery. (This includes the year we spent in Las Vegas--we lived in the suburbs, and our school was known for its academic rigor. Had we stayed, the girls would have attended a high school that is ranked by The Washington Post as one of the top 100 high schools in the country. You may be surprised to hear that.) Once in a rare while, I've had occasion to talk to a teacher about a tiny worry, but I've never felt my children were in other than able hands, educationally speaking. I trusted the teachers; I respected their methods; I often admired their patience and dedication; I appreciated their desire to bring out the best in my children (there is a lot of best to bring out in those two); and nearly always, I came to like my daughters' teachers a great deal.


I think of my daughters' kindergarten teacher, whose heart burned with her passion to teach tiny ones to read. That little lady was on fire! She demanded a lot from those tiny savages children--and she got a lot out of them. I think of one daughter's third and fourth grade teacher (she taught both grades), who instinctively understood my daughter's reserved and quiet temperament, and whose directions were unfailingly given in the most gentle manner possible. I think of all those talented, young, energetic, creative fifth grade teachers who worked so hard to prepare their students for the challenges of middle school. We had so many wonderful teachers. Looking back, I only wish I had said so more frequently to them and to their principals. (It's not too late. Some letters may be in order.)


As parent, there is no greater trust, is there? To give over the reins of authority over one's children to another adult? Yet we do it, every day, we send our children off to school where they are subject to the will (and, unfortunately, sometimes the whim) of others.


We trust that if we send our children to what is considered a good school--and what measure have we, other than test scores?--everything will be okay. But if one analyzed the longitudinal data from such a school, I doubt whether the scores would allow us to diagnose unsound teaching practices therein. Rather, we'd follow this cohort from K all the way to 12, the majority of whom are average to good students, the majority of whom are high SES, the majority of whom take music lessons and go to soccer or gymnastics or Irish dance or what have you, the majority of whom take for granted they will go on to college (and not just any college; you see them wearing the sweatshirts from their parents' alma maters and so you know this train is bound for glory) and I propose that their scores would remain relatively stable. We wouldn't see spikes for the best teachers; we wouldn't see dips for the worst. And so bad instruction may never be diagnosed, unless there be push back from parents. And yet, how many parents feel comfortable offering such push back? (Reasonable parents, you know, I'm not talking about the ones--and yes, I know such ones exist--that are like the leaky faucet in the constancy of the expression of their unhappiness about every little dang thing, every pebble in the path, every cloud on the horizon, every smudge on the window pane.)


I've seen grown men and women, giants in their fields, bright folks accustomed to wearing the mantle of authority in their chosen professions, shrink before the stern gaze of a classroom teacher or that of a principal.  The jargon of pedagogy intimidates them. Years of K-12 education haunt them. Nor does it increase one's sense of personal power to fold one's adult-sized body into those creaky little desk chairs. And experience unfortunately builds a false sense of confidence, so that a very bad teacher may teach very badly for 15 years and then use that 15 years of bad teaching to justify the continuation of bad practices.


For me, this is when the professional meets the personal. After six months of observation of very bad teaching, I decided to homeschool my two daughters. Just through the end of the year, and then they'll go on to high school. What an adventure, eh.


The unfortunate part is that this teacher will go on teaching, will rest in undeserved complacency, will feel comfortable that the unsound practices are good because the test scores (for which this teacher deserves no credit) remain high, and will be able to continue to ignore parents' complaints that what this teacher is doing is hurting the students.


UPDATE: What are my two star students doing today, you may ask? I am administering a pretest to obtain a measure of baseline performance. Then once we conclude our homeschooling adventure, I'll administer an equivalent parallel test form as a post-test in order to evaluate the effectiveness of my instruction. I'll probably write about it, both here and for a wider audience in another venue.


UPDATE: Correction to maintain consistency in verb tense in first paragraph. Ah, error-free publishing, that elusive goal.

File Under: All Roads Lead to Rome, Cross-Referenced to Mandatory Reading

The book every K-12 content developer--assessment and curriculum--should read is Tested: One American School Struggles to Make the Grade, which was recommended to me by a colleague and likeminded comrade in quality assessment content development, Carmen, a senior level genius expert at Anonymous Testing Company.


To say that the tests administered yearly at grades 3-8 (inclusive) are high stakes cannot possibly begin to convey what this means for students, teachers, and school administrators and how NCLB has transformed the educational landscape. The flames are licking at their feet every minute of every day.


And even when we who are informed are talking about this, and about how awful it is that teachers must teach to the tests and that the assessments are driving the curricula--it's one thing to talk about it, and it's another thing to experience it.  If you're not a student, teacher, principal, or parent, this book is the closest you can get to the fire.


Like the children in Tested, my daughters' skills and knowledge are assessed so frequently at school (and what is taught is often so narrowly focused--the algebra teacher actually labels each homework assignment with the assessable standard and tells parents that she does this so she will know whether students will answer those questions correctly on the state test) that I'm shocked by how little genuine instruction they actually receive and so I supplement their classroom instruction by offering my own reading, writing, social studies, and science lectures. Which may bore them nigh unto death, who knows, but I refuse to send them out into the world as little ignorami ignoramuses. (For math homework help, we turn to my friend and cohort and math content area genius expert Carrie Frech, who works at a major testing organization).


My daughters came home last week emitting little puffs of indignation over the latest district benchmark assessment. (They swiped it and brought it home to show me.) When I read it, I was horrified. It was a passage-dependent writing prompt. I didn't see a rubric, God knows what horrors hide behind that curtain, but I assume the responses were scored for reading and writing.


The story, a tedious adaptation of a folktale, was poorly written and at the fourth grade level (this, for an eighth grade gifted and talented program; my daughters are currently reading The Great Gatsby and Rebecca for their next book reports, and yet they're being assessed with text suitable for fourth grade?). What was there was was presented at an extremely literal level of understanding. Nothing in the story allowed for any genuine analysis of narrative elements nor interpretation of literary devices, and yet the writing prompt required the students to do just that. I don't know how they could. You can't make a pie out of one apple. The multiple-choice section (developed by a company relatively new to the game for whom I'd done some work a few years ago and by whose lack of understanding of test development at that time had shocked me) was no better. The girls told me that there was one question that was so nonsensical that, districtwide, the teachers' form of protest was simply to give all of their students the answer. Does anyone see any value whatsoever in the use of such an assessment tool?


When I did some work for this company a few years ago, I observed their inexperience with and lack of knowledge about assessment. Maybe things have changed since then, I don't know. What I do know is that this company--the same one that has little assessment background--doesn't perform any field testing of the test content and there is no data whatsoever to indicate that we can make any kind of accurate inferences about what students know and can do based on such poorly constructed assessments. But this company does a good job of selling, and the districts buy the dream fantasy idea that the products will 1) give teachers information about their students that will help them get students ready for the state test and 2) predict how students will perform on the state test. Neither claim is possible, particularly with assessments that violate the most basic quality standards.


All roads lead to Rome; it all comes back to the Quality Manifesto.


(And it must be said that certainly there is room for quality improvements in the classroom as well, and there was room even before NCLB. What passes for instruction in some classrooms horrifies me just as much as any quality train wreck I see in the assessment world. Two teachers at my daughters' school ROUTINELY play audio of the textbooks instead of teaching--this, in science, which I think we can all agree requires hands-on instruction; it's still bad in reading, but not quite so bad). One of these teachers also ROUTINELY spends twenty minutes or so of the fifty minute class period discussing her personal life to the captive audience of eighth-graders--they know all about her kids, her husband, her political views, her hobbies, her extended family, and her domestic habits. So do I. Unless someone is a friend, loved one, or crazy person celebrity, there's probably not much in her life you want to hear about for twenty minutes straight, and yet that is what this teacher subjects her students to instead of teaching them.)


UPDATE: Identified my book-readin' comrade by name. Thanks, Carmen!
UPDATE: Added a link.
UPDATE THE THIRD: Removed a link, anonymized an identity.

Big Wheel Keeps on Turning

This just in, from Frank Brockmann, Center Point empresario and fellow quality crusader:

President Barack Obama announced last week that 10 states will be exempt from the requirements of the highly-criticized No Child Left Behind legislation. In exchange, those states will have to agree to a series of reforms. But some experts say the law should be scrapped completely for models that don't rely on standardized tests.

Interesting, because last night I was reading about the rise and fall of the Roman Empire California Learning Assessment System. CLAS was not the first--and surely will not be the last--testing program to be felled by public controversy. Among the many objections to CLAS were to the reading passages (two of Alice Walker's stories were excised after complaints that "Am I Blue" promoted vegetarianism, and "Roselily"was anti-religion), to the writing prompts (which were considered invasive), and to the test questions themselves (too subjective and based in emotion, according to critics).

When I began my career in hand-scoring, CLAS was one of my first projects, so I did at one time have more than a passing familiarity with the tests and how students responded to them. In general, I liked the questions (what did I know? I hadn't any content development experience at that point), although scoring did present a problem.

In some parts of the test, students were encouraged to take notes--which were called "marginalia"-- and for some questions, were offered various options as to how to respond: they could draw a picture, for example. Anyone who's ever been presented with a drawing by a small child understands the obstacle in scoring there:

You: Oh, what a lovely dinosaur.
Child: It's not a dinosaur.
You: No?
Child: No.
[pause]
You: What is it, love?
Child: It's a manatee.
You: Oh, yes, of course it is.

I see what the developers and supporters of CLAS were attempting to accomplish, and the goal is a laudable one: to lure students into engaging with authentic literature and then to welcome their genuine, individual responses to what they read. However, in retrospect, these goals might be more readily achieved at the classroom level, through both instruction and formative assessment (and by "formative assessment," I really mean all those teacherly techniques for paying attention to one's students, not the administration of a series of badly-written multiple-choice quizzes), than through a standardized testing program.

The point is really to define clearly one's purpose, and then create the assessment that will best serve that purpose, as "the man without a purpose is like a ship without a rudder," in the immortal words of Thomas Carlyle.

Big wheel keeps on turning. We went from bubble-in to performance assessment, back to bubble-in, and now we're talking about performance assessment as if it were the hot new thing, never before attempted.

Not that we shouldn't move in that direction--I like that direction very much--but if we do, there should be a moment of planning and taking stock (For which of you, intending to build a tower, sitteth not down first and counteth the cost, whether he have sufficient to finish it?), a gathering of the elders for the harvest of wise counsel, before there is a marshaling of forces. What is our purpose? What will we gain, what will we lose, is the loss worth the gain? How do we prepare teachers for this role?

What do you think?

No News Yet

We're all waiting to see what Arne Duncan is going to do, and whether NCLB is going to be reauthorized, revamped, or kicked to the curb.

Looks like we'll be waiting for a little while yet.

Asked if he will push for passage of a new version of NCLB, Duncan says that he first wants to go on a cross-country listening tour and that he hopes that Congress will reauthorize a new version of the law late in the year. "Having lived with this, I have a good sense of what makes sense and what doesn't," he says. "But I want to be clear that I want to get out there and learn from people. And I think ultimately we should rebrand [the law]."

Asked what he would call a new version of the law, Duncan answered, "Don't know yet. I'm open to ideas."