tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-27473435727136743122024-03-21T01:50:01.915-07:00Dewey to DelpitMAX BEAN on education: pedagogy, curriculum, schooling, and education reform in America, from private to public to charter, from Romantic to Progressive to No-ExcusesMax Beanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09411037394257752336noreply@blogger.comBlogger56125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2747343572713674312.post-80446889688668132172013-04-05T11:27:00.000-07:002013-04-05T11:27:00.057-07:00In Educational Computer Games, It's Not the Learning That's Fun, It's the Computer Games<div class="MsoNormal">
A couple weeks ago, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/17/sunday-review/reading-writing-and-video-games.html?smid=pl-share">Pamela Paul wrote a column for the New York Times about the fad for educational computer games in classrooms and in the home</a>. Ms. Paul is justifiably skeptical of these developments, and her article is a good read. The article has a certain charming, almost refreshing crotchetiness:<br />
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The concepts of work and play have become farcically reversed: schoolwork is meant to be superfun; play, like homework, is meant to teach. There’s an underlying fear that if we don’t add interactive elements to lower school curriculums (sic), children won’t be able to handle fractions or develop scientific hypotheses — concepts children learned quite well in school before television. </blockquote>
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I want to stress that the point here isn't that kids shouldn't have fun in school. There's nothing wrong with making learning fun. A good
teacher gets us excited about <i>Catcher in
the Rye</i> or the elegance of Newtonian mechanics or the beauty of geometry.
The problem with computer game-based learning is that, in nearly every case,
it's not the subject-matter that's catching students’ interest; it's something
entirely incidental.</div>
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What game-based learning leads to, therefore, is not more
learning but more games. There is a race-to-the-bottom, from worksheets, to
computer math drills, to math-based games gussied up with cool features that
distract from the actual math, to games that have no discernible academic
content, like those found at the popular website coolmath-games.com. Like
addicts, students need more and more bells and whistles to hold their
attention, until they receive the drug in its pure form, undiluted by educative
content or mental effort.</div>
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If you want kids to learn, you have to get them engaged in
learning. No proxy will suffice.</div>
Max Beanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09411037394257752336noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2747343572713674312.post-62415606467821231482012-07-24T21:38:00.001-07:002012-12-13T08:49:00.092-08:00The Odyssey Initiative<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiwPIcpR5LibnDWnvUdwVGvsU-AmR3Z2VN6n_ca30EmphwWGG-C6HyruNJVJEuD1J1Qz076oQQFjDxAsQpDSEJbjQO-nYTi1FJ_lcm1mLZV-0I7_NFzBHXMqrrPWXTJchAIVQRwkEgLw9s/s1600/SIRENS+TOUR+2+140.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="214" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiwPIcpR5LibnDWnvUdwVGvsU-AmR3Z2VN6n_ca30EmphwWGG-C6HyruNJVJEuD1J1Qz076oQQFjDxAsQpDSEJbjQO-nYTi1FJ_lcm1mLZV-0I7_NFzBHXMqrrPWXTJchAIVQRwkEgLw9s/s320/SIRENS+TOUR+2+140.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
When I started writing this blog, I had the idea that someday it would lead to a large-scale school observation project: traveling the country in search of exceptional teaching practice and innovative school design. My experience in teaching had demonstrated to me what radically different sorts of institutions go by the name "school" in this country and what wildly divergent sorts of wisdom different educators have collected about how children learn and grow. I wanted to go out and see the range of teaching practices and schooling models at work in America.<br />
<br />
My own schemes have gone off in other directions, but my friend Todd Sutler is about to embark on a journey much like the one I imagined two years ago. Along with two colleagues, Todd will "tour the best schools and classrooms in the 50 states to observe and document what is already working in American schools." The three researchers intend to use their findings to inform a new charter elementary school, which they are designing and which is scheduled to open in Brooklyn next Fall. The project, dubbed <a href="http://odysseyinitiative.org/">the Odyssey Initiative</a>, is being funded on <a href="http://kck.st/N5FxCz">Kickstarter</a> and is garnering attention within the education world and <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/schoolbook/2012/04/18/in-gentrified-brooklyn-hopes-for-more-school-alternatives/">in the mainstream media as well</a>.<br />
<br />
The Odyssey Initiative and the interest it is garnering within education circles-- some of which is quite mainstream-- underscores a strange divide in the world of education research. In the academy and at the higher levels of policy analysis, quantitative methods are ascendant, and even those scholars who are doing qualitative work often rigidly control their observations, reducing teacher behaviors, for example, to a series of numerically coded gestures and expressions, in order to fit the aesthetics and aspirations of hard science. At the same time, educators and school administrators, even those in the heart of the No-Excuses movement, often make prolific use of open-ended observational methods of data collection. Schools that boast of their data-driven instruction still devote more time to classroom observations than to analysis of test-results. And the preeminent exposition of No-Excuses methodology, <a href="http://edcommentary.blogspot.com/p/glossary.html#lemov">Doug Lemov's <em>Teach Like a Champion</em></a>, is not a would-be scientific analysis of teacher behaviors and student outcomes but a work of close observation and psychological interpretation, carried out by a former teacher.<br />
<br />
Observational research is very different from more rigid methods of education research. It requires more art, depends more on the individual impressions and mindset of the researcher. It is harder to generalize from, but often more useful. It can tell us little about universal laws of behavior but can offer great insight into the practice, the techne, of education. It is a practitioner's research method-- and so, it is appropriate that three teachers planning to found a school should use it. I would like to see more education research being done by educators-- for the sake of both the schools and the research.Max Beanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09411037394257752336noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2747343572713674312.post-21918629288024423882012-06-26T17:08:00.001-07:002012-06-26T17:09:46.096-07:00<a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/max-bean/what-went-on-inside-the-o_b_1617250.html">New Huffington Post Article on Occupy</a>. This is the third in an ongoing series.Max Beanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09411037394257752336noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2747343572713674312.post-4250140808240859222012-04-09T11:16:00.000-07:002012-04-09T11:16:35.122-07:00Writing About Occupy on Huffington PostDear Readers,<br />
<br />
It's been a very long time since I've written in this blog. For most of the last six months, I've been completely submerged in Occupy Wall Street. I've finally emerged and recently begun writing about my experiences on Huffington Post. If you're looking for something to read, I hope you'll check these out:<br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/max-bean/occupy-movement_b_1394181.html">Why I Came to Occupy Wall Street and Why I Left: an Introduction</a><br />
<blockquote>This is the essential feature of political debate in America today: each side repeats its arguments in isolation, oblivious to what the other side is saying; and each is driven by a terror of the other. The result is a volatile and yet strangely monotonous political narrative, which swings wildly between two poles, yet never seems to get anywhere.</blockquote><br />
<a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/max-bean/you-cant-leave-occupy-wal_b_1411194.html">You Can't Leave Occupy Wall Street</a><br />
<blockquote>Before Occupy, the baby boomers used to call us (their children) apathetic. One thing that Occupy has demonstrated is that the problem wasn't apathy, it was despair. When we said, "Why bother," it wasn't because we didn't care; it was because we didn't think we had a shot. But maybe that's letting us off too easy. After all, hope isn't so much a probabilistic analysis as it is a relationship to action. When we have hope, we don't think our odds are any better than when we don't; it's more that we're in the mood to take a gamble. So, maybe hopeless is just another word for lazy, but I think it's more correct to put it the other way around: Lazy is another word for hopeless. That is, if we seemed lazy when it came to marching in the streets, it was because history and society had conspired to convince us that that sort of gamble wasn't worth taking.</blockquote>Max Beanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09411037394257752336noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2747343572713674312.post-7224961419748334032011-10-18T10:09:00.000-07:002011-10-27T13:04:53.155-07:00How Occupy Wall Street Is Like a Classroom<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhbZe7PvHOHFP0izhA8x24mCjpF-k1iIVKSLtQW-gkqUKC62sQ16dq31Cdj7zF2hbopud9dnR7phE6DZeQoa4AF0nfnul7Aqpfxd4kdAI3G0i8I9uluKjGwAf4_YG96ohRfF7u2jDC6USU/s1600/Washington_Square_General_Assembly.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhbZe7PvHOHFP0izhA8x24mCjpF-k1iIVKSLtQW-gkqUKC62sQ16dq31Cdj7zF2hbopud9dnR7phE6DZeQoa4AF0nfnul7Aqpfxd4kdAI3G0i8I9uluKjGwAf4_YG96ohRfF7u2jDC6USU/s320/Washington_Square_General_Assembly.jpg" width="239" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;" width="239">A speaker on the people's mic, arguing against occupation, at about 20 minutes to midnight</td></tr>
</tbody></table>On Saturday night, I watched a miracle of classroom management such as I would never have imagined possible; it didn’t happen in a classroom, and there was no teacher. <br />
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</div><div class="MsoNormal">Over the course of the evening, a crowd of three thousand or more had gathered in and around the dry fountain basin in Washington Square Park. Returning from the earlier march on Times Square, the attendees were agitated after a day of chanting and dancing, packed, often shoulder to shoulder, between police barricades. There were reports of scores of arrests and a couple of violent incidents. Word had spread of a possible illegal occupation of Washington Square that night. Meanwhile, a line of police officers stood at the entrances to the square, announcing to each arriving crowd that the park would close at midnight—i.e. “you’ve been warned.”</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">A little after 10 pm, a handful of facilitators from the Zuccotti park occupation stood up on the grate that covers the water jets at the center of the fountain basin and asked the mob to be seated. The general assembly had begun.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><a name='more'></a><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">If you’ve never been to an occupy event, you may be wondering how half a dozen people could tell a crowd of three thousand to sit down. PA systems are not allowed in public spaces without a permit, and naturally protestors rarely have such a permit. Most political protests—the immense anti-war protests in 2003, for example—are planned in advance via the internet and then simply run their course without any significant real-time organization; because Occupy Wall Street is long-term, however, and because it is deeply committed to being peaceful and well-organized, it needs to hold general assemblies on a regular basis. In Zuccotti Park, they have developed an ingenious system for addressing the assembled hundreds or thousands without a PA; they call it the People's Mic.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">It works like this: if you want to speak, you yell, “Mic check.” Anyone who can hear you yells back: “Mic check.” The message travels through the crowd. You do this until other noises have died down, and the call and response “Mic check! Mic check!” is crisp and carried by the whole crowd. You then speak in short phrases, no more than a few words, pausing after each phrase; those within earshot repeat your words in unison; those farther away repeat it again, and the message propagates to the edges of the group. If the mic is used properly and the speaker speaks loudly and clearly, thousands can hear a single person’s speech.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Thus, the general assembly was called to order. In order to carry the speeches over the lip of the fountain to the more rambunctious crowd around it, several people stood up on the pillars around the lip, to relay the message outward. There was only one real agenda item, of course: would the crowd attempt to occupy the park that night. The legal team made it clear, in case it wasn’t already obvious, that anyone remaining in the park after midnight had “a high probability of being arrestable.”</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">After some general announcements, the facilitators asked the assembled crowd to discuss the issue in small groups for fifteen minutes. By the time they called the meeting back together and began the collective discussion, it was 11 pm. With the deadline an hour away, tensions high, and many eager to argue their case for or against occupation, as well as dozens of peripherally related issues, the protocol of the meeting was at risk. As facilitators began the discussion, dissidents on the fountain’s rim began to shout for the mic. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">There are layers of protocol at work here, and the protocol of the people's mic is the most fundamental: when you hear “Mic check,” you answer “Mic check.” If this protocol does not operate, no one can be heard. Thus, a tall man with a loud voice on the rim of the fountain was able to take control of the mic, though his control was incomplete, his words carrying only partway through the crowd. He spoke for two or three minutes before one of the facilitators cut him off, shouting for the mic, while the man on the rim tried to continue his speech It was at this moment that I realized how tenuous was the order of the meeting: here we were, three thousand people with three thousand opinions, emotions high, short on time, ripe for chaos. It was incredible, really, that a meeting could even be begun, much less successfully concluded, under these conditions. I was seated near the center of the basin. Around me, people had begun to stand up; stray voices were heard from every direction. What would happen, I wondered, if this devolved into a shouting match, if the gathering turned from meeting to mob?</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">But the facilitator had successfully taken back the mic. She explained the protocol for the meeting, how a list would be taken of those who wished to speak and each would get their turn. She urged the speakers to be brief and to stay on topic. The crowd began to settle. The first name on the list was called. Someone stood and spoke. It was not on topic. Another name, and another speech, this one on topic. The meeting continued. There were no longer dissident voices; the people's mic rang out across an otherwise silent mass of people. You could hear it filling the basin, then echoing far off in the surrounding crowd.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">The first couple speakers argued for occupation, but after them came many arguments against it: there was not enough planning and organization; the strategy had not been thought out; this was not the time to take a stand—and these arguments seemed to get more positive reactions from the crowd. At 11:45, one of the facilitators took a “temperature check” for the idea of not occupying that night. Through the hand-signals that are standard usage at general assemblies in the “occupy” movement, the crowd indicated that it was largely in favor of the idea. A show of hands indicated that only fifty to a hundred people were still considering staying past midnight. The meeting was adjourned.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Somehow, under pressure, with little in the way of formal leadership, and without amplification or clearly established organization, 3,000 people had had a civilized debate; and despite a wide range of opinions at the beginning of the meeting, they had reached something very close to consensus. In the end, as you’ll know if you read the papers, 14 people stayed to get arrested in the fountain basin, a decision that was, of course, theirs to make. But, no matter who stayed or left, the cooperation was unlike anything I've ever seen in my life; thousands of strangers had spontaneously agreed to abide by a set of protocols, to respect one another’s right to speak, to assist each other in speaking, and to listen.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
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</div><div class="MsoNormal">In many ways, the protocols of the general assembly reminded me of the protocols of the classroom: an ingenious, efficient system for getting the group’s attention; <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6dtD8RnGaRQ">a set of hand signals and other procedures</a> to allow dissent and approval, confusion and parenthesis, to be efficiently communicated without diverting attention from the designated speaker or interrupting the flow of conversation; and a strong set of explicit values that underlies those procedures. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Just as <a href="http://edcommentary.blogspot.com/2010/11/on-september-27-th-i-posted-description.html#clap-in">the clap-in</a> or the raised-finger-for-silence propagates through a classroom, drawing in students who may miss it the first time around, the “mic check” propagates through the crowd, carried from person to person, without the speaker needing to out-shout the entire gathering. The “silent applause” with which the protestors indicate their approval of a speaker’s words is used in classrooms across America as a means for students to show agreement with another student’s answer or to indicate their excitement over something that has been said, without interrupting the class; the inverted applause by which the protestors show disapproval appears in many classrooms as a thumbs down that students use to show they think their classmate has answered a question incorrectly. Other hand-signs—the “point of information,” the “get on with it,”—are more specific to the needs of the movement; they have their parallels in classrooms, in the form of the “I need a tissue” and the “I dropped my pencil; I need to get out of my seat.” </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">The purpose of all these signs is to allow the crowd to express itself without interrupting the speaker, diffusing focus, and competing for attention. They arise, both in the classroom and in Zuccotti park, out of a recognition of the delicate and essential balance by which order and focus are maintained. Thirty children, if they are paying attention to the lesson, will not sit still and silent with hands raised, while their noses run, their classmates give wrong answers to questions to which they know the right one, and other classmates get called on to give the correct answer. We would not want them so silent in their knowledge and opinions; yet we know that if they call out, the order of the classroom will dissolve and the more timid will never be heard. Similarly a crowd of a thousand who sits still and silent while others make points they disagree with, cannot hear, or do not understand is an apathetic crowd that will never occupy a public park through a nippy October into a cold New York November. There must be means of group expression without interruption, a way for even the quiet to be heard.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">The values that underlie the procedures of Zuccotti Park are those of the democratic process: that every voice should be heard, that agreement should be reached through discussion, that no opinion is more important than any other. The values that underlie the procedures of the classroom vary from school to school, but they are rarely those of direct democracy. Still, both contexts represent the attempt to weave the needs and impulses of the individual into the welfare of the group; they are, in short, the essence of management—but management in its pure form, in which it is revealed as not a project of oversight and supervision, but one of facilitated cooperation. No classroom and no company and no organization really functions by coercion; even the most coercive methods are really attempts—rather blunt attempts—to generate a social contract. The fear of punishment and the desire for reward cannot keep kids in line in the long term; it is habit and classroom culture that keep them in line. Fear and desire are simply tools that we try to use to set that culture in motion.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">After the crowd had exited the park, it milled about the surrounding streets and sidewalks, chanting and playing drums until it was finally dispersed by the police. At the north end of the park, a line of mounted officers stood between the milling crowd and the arch, and the crowd directed a number of chants at the officers. “Who do you protect,” they chanted, and “Courtesy, Professionalism, Respect,” and “You deserve a raise.” They even got a smile from one of the cops, by chanting “Set the horses free.” At one point, a girl standing on the curb started chanting “NYPD, go to hell….” She managed to get just that far before she was booed into silence by the other protestors. <a href="http://edcommentary.blogspot.com/2011/04/autonomy-respect-and-obedience.html#skip-intro">Respect</a> is an essential ingredient of any social contract, and the protestors, energized and rebellious as they were, had not for a moment forgotten it.</div><div><br />
</div><div>4S2H9ESAP78S</div>Max Beanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09411037394257752336noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2747343572713674312.post-61635774936224976302011-10-06T12:22:00.000-07:002011-10-10T10:44:09.319-07:00Teaching Values Across Cultural Difference<div class="MsoNormal">There’s been a lot of discussion on this blog lately, both in the posts and in the comments, about the teaching of values. Most of these discussions have dealt with, if not necessarily middle-class values, at least values taught by middle-class educators—and taught, for the most part, to working-class and poor children, with the idea that these children are short on good values. Today, I want to talk about a different scenario.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">I recently happened upon <a href="http://teachermrw.com/2011/08/29/whose-morals/">this blog post</a> by “Teacher MRW,” an African-American first-generation-college-graduate teaching in a predominantly white, upper-middle class private school. Inspired by the discussion of moral education generated by <a href="http://edcommentary.blogspot.com/2011/08/my-series-on-fraught-status-of-teaching.html#main">my post on the London Riots</a>, MRW writes about the cultural dissonance between herself and her privileged, white students, particularly around conduct, manners, and responsibility. She opens with an anecdote about her attempts to make her students take their hats off when they enter the classroom—a wonderful bit of old-fashioned decorum that my Jesuit-educated 6<sup>th</sup>-grade history teacher enforced with an iron hand, to my baseball-cap-wearing classmates’ surprise and, at first, consternation, but ultimately half-frightened, half-amused respect. MRW’s demands that “gentlemen take their hats off in class,” as my history teacher used to put it, however, met with only bafflement and resistance, and she finally gave up on the hat battle.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">In a lot of ways MRW’s predicament seems to mirror that in which many privileged, white college-graduates (myself included) find themselves, when they take teaching jobs in inner-city public schools. For MRW, however, the gradient of cultural privilege runs in the opposite direction, a fact that drastically alters the terms of the cultural exchange in ways that are frustrating to MRW and far from beneficial to her students. The particulars of the exchange also highlight some of the difficulties facing middle-class education and harken to some of the themes discussed in <a href="http://edcommentary.blogspot.com/2011/09/teaching-character-strengths-and-values.html#main">my last full-length post</a>. (Yes, there are difficulties facing middle-class education; admitting that does not belittle the difficulties facing inner-city education.)</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
<a name='more'></a>Privileged white educators feel perfectly entitled to hold black and Hispanic inner-city students to privileged white cultural standards, not only in terms of conduct and decorum, but in terms of language, attire, and values. This is seen as being done in the students’ interests—and I’m not questioning that; I think it really is in their interests, for the most part. The ability to speak standard English and the habit of practicing good manners will open doors for these students. Likewise, teaching them to value education and intellectual development and (<a href="http://edcommentary.blogspot.com/2011/06/unrealistic-expectations-false-promise.html#main">with some important caveats</a>) to aspire to a college degree and a middle-class job is likely to create more opportunities in their future and increase their upward mobility. (<a name="appendix-insertion" href="http://edcommentary.blogspot.com/2011/10/teaching-values-across-cultural.html#appendix">More on this</a>.)</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Faced with the parallel dilemma—a dissonance between her own culture and that of her students—MRW feels no such entitlement. She writes,</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in;">I have also learned to temper my reactions when my students fall short in their responsibilities with homework. A soliloquy on the importance of preparing for the future gets lost on them. Having been a first-generation <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Student" title="Student">college student</a>, such a speech would have had a significant and heart-felt impact on me. However, given that many of the students I teach are but one of a long sequence of people in their families to have completed college, there really is no use in inflicting that degree of moral shame on them.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">The loss here is on both sides. MRW feels compelled to swallow her own values, to accept less from her students than she would demand of herself, and to conform her behavior to their dominant culture. The students, for their part, miss out on powerful character lessons that MRW could have taught them, had she been empowered to do so. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>The Anxiety of Influence</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Interestingly, MRW seems to recapitulate the values of privileged private-school culture, even in her determination of how to negotiate the interaction between those values and her own: she uses their values to weigh her values against their values. “Inflicting… moral shame” seems a harsh way to describe a teacher’s insistence that students hand in their homework and meet classroom obligations. It is as if MRW is saying that to hold middle-class students accountable in the same manner as one would hold poor, upwardly mobile students accountable is to risk psychologically mangling them. This is <a href="http://edcommentary.blogspot.com/2011/09/teaching-character-strengths-and-values.html#main">the same over-protective logic that guides middle-class parents and schools and leaves middle-class children without the resilience and grit in the face of adversity</a>.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">I don’t want to pretend that I can fully understand the difficulty and complexity of MRW’s position. The middle-class educator in an inner-city school is surrounded by middle-class colleagues who share her culture and support her interpretations. When she upholds that culture in the face of her students’ culture, it is as if the whole society stands behind her. MRW, by contrast, is surrounded on all sides by a culture that is not her own. Not only is her students’ culture prevalent within the school, but it is the culture of power within the society, the culture of the dominant class. No wonder, then, that she declines to hold her students to her values.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Some of my readers will no doubt argue that a teacher—no matter what her ethnic, cultural, and socioeconomic background—has no place enforcing her own cultural values on students who do not share her background. I want to argue that that position is born of <a href="http://edcommentary.blogspot.com/2011/09/teaching-character-strengths-and-values.html#main">that same protective and ultimately misguided philosophy that causes affluent parents and schools to shield children from failure and adversity in all its many forms</a>. It is a philosophy motivated by fear—in this case, the fear of impinging on students’ own values, of forcing them to conform to a set of oppressive, external, adult norms. Such a view is based on a false belief in the fragility of the child and it is counterproductive to its own aims.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">If we want children to develop into free-thinking individuals with a strong sense of their own personal values, the last thing we should do is limit their exposure to others’ values. It is precisely through exposure to a wide range of ideas about value, character, morality, and ethics that children obtain the raw materials and the breadth of experience with which to question, analyze, and critique such ideas and, in maturity, to develop their own, well-chosen personal code. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Just as some of the values learned in a ghettoized, blighted community may not best serve the children of that community, some middle-class values may not best serve middle-class kids. The Romantic, permissive child-rearing practices of affluent and middle-class Americans have many advantages, but they have drawbacks too; and a little training in the kind of decorum, discipline, and responsibility that was commonplace in middle-class parenting a hundred years ago will do them good.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>Long Live Hat Etiquette</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Last week, while I was working on this post, I went to visit a school in East New York, one of the most blighted, ghettoized neighborhoods in Brooklyn. A middle-school boy came into the building ahead of me, and as I entered, I heard the security guard telling him to take his hat off. When I came to her desk to show my ID and sign in, I asked her “Do you tell all the kids to take their hats off as they come in?”</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">“Yes,” she said. Frankly, she looked a little suspicious: why the heck was I asking? Did I disapprove?</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">“Cool,” I said. “Good for you.” Now, if only we could get a security guard like that in MRW’s school.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" id="appendix"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>Appendix: Teaching Middle Class Culture to Inner-City Youth</b> <br />
(<a href="http://edcommentary.blogspot.com/2011/10/teaching-values-across-cultural.html#appendix-insertion">Return to main text</a>)<br />
<br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">There are, it’s important to note, two very distinct valences to the argument for the re-enculturation of inner-city students. On the one hand, there is Delpit’s “culture of power” argument: there’s nothing wrong with the students’ home culture, but, in order to succeed in a white-dominated society, they need to learn the mores and subtle cues of white culture; these should not replace the home culture but rather should serve as a tool-set to be taken out and used when needed. On the other hand, there is the older “culture of poverty” argument: most inner-city students, this argument goes, come from unstable homes and crime-ridden neighborhoods; their home culture is consequently blighted, and it should, as much as possible, be replaced with a healthier culture got in school. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Delpit’s argument seems to me unassailable; even students who do choose to live and work within African American communities can benefit from the power and social mobility afforded them by the ability to “code switch.” The “culture of poverty” argument is a combination of right- and wrong-headed interpretations: yes, many inner-city children arrive at school with beliefs and attitudes that arise out of the frustration, fear, anger, and instability of their home and neighborhood; but, it is not always easy for a middle-class educator to distinguish those cultural traits which are the result of poverty and disaffection from those healthier—but, to the educator, still foreign—traits that are indigenous to the student’s ethnic background. The conscientious white, middle-class educator, working in an inner-city school, is thus engaged in a complicated balancing act, attempting to instill new habits and mores without devaluing the home culture, in such a way as to force the child to choose between parent and teacher, between home and school.</div>Max Beanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09411037394257752336noreply@blogger.com29tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2747343572713674312.post-9839622366925997972011-10-04T11:28:00.000-07:002011-10-05T07:25:45.654-07:00What makes a good principal? Don't ask Michael Winerip.Last week, The Times published <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/26/nyregion/the-secrets-of-a-good-principal.html">this ridiculous puff piece by Michael Winerip </a>about the principal of NYC's PS 126. The Times has published some excellent education journalism in recent years, especially the <a href="http://edcommentary.blogspot.com/2011/09/teaching-character-strengths-and-values.html#main">long and nuanced pieces that Paul Tough writes for the magazine supplement</a>, but Winerip's column is of a very different sort. Bad, partisan education reporting (and Winerip's article is subtly but definitely partisan) has very real negative consequences for the public debate. I wrote the Times the letter below, which, naturally, they declined to publish. I knew they would— its tone is far too strident— but I'm disappointed that they published <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/30/opinion/a-good-principal.html">this letter</a> instead, which not only praises Winerip's column, but treats it as serious education journalism.<br />
<br />
The "letter to the editor" is a fun form. The word-length constraint forces a nice directness and economy. Here's me on "The Secrets of a Good Principal," in 150 words:<br />
<br />
<blockquote><div class="MsoNormal">Dear Editor,</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">I don’t know whether Jacqui Getz is a good principal. She may or may not be, but Mr. Winerip’s column sheds no light on the matter. From the column we learn that Getz works hard; that she espouses union-friendly opinions about teacher evaluation (but not that she acts on them); that she talks to students; and that she wears high-heels. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">I’ve observed classes at PS 126 and happen to know that over the last few years, it ran a highly innovative literacy program that produced impressive results and inspired other schools. Is this program still in place? Is Ms. Getz supporting or revamping it? These are details that a responsible journalist might report on.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">But this column is not journalism, and it leaves the public none the wiser. This kind of negligent reporting is damaging to the entire public debate about education, and <i>The Times</i> ought not to publish it.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Sincerely,<br />
Max Bean</div></blockquote>Max Beanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09411037394257752336noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2747343572713674312.post-4652512165093067742011-09-22T12:22:00.000-07:002011-09-22T12:23:17.793-07:00Dana Goldstein on Obama, the Reformists, and the Teacher Quality DebateI’m kinda late on this, but <a href="http://www.danagoldstein.net/">Dana Goldstein</a> had <a href="http://www.danagoldstein.net/dana_goldstein/2011/09/where-does-obamas-job-plan-leave-the-teacher-quality-debate.html">a great post a couple weeks ago on Obama’s job-creation speech and what it signals about his education agenda</a>. In the speech, the president called for $30 billion in federal spending to prevent teacher layoffs. Goldstein thinks that’s deceptively remarkable: <br />
<blockquote><div class="MsoNormal">This may seem like an uncontroversial, conventional Democratic spending priority. Indeed, the 2009 stimulus and the Education Jobs Fund* also helped school districts avoid teacher layoffs. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">But it's important to realize that on education, Obama has rarely sounded like a conventional Democrat. During his years in the Senate, his presidential campaign, and after he entered the White House, Obama framed his school reform agenda around the issue of teacher quality, not teacher job security. He has resisted seeing schools primarily as places of employment, and has focused instead on measuring student achievement and using the data to evaluate teachers.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">…</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><b><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";">So last week's rhetorical emphasis on saving teachers' jobs --</span></b><i><b><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";">unaccompanied by talk of "teacher quality"-- </span></b></i><b><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";">is actually something notable from Obama. </span></b>It represents a messaging win for teachers' unions and for the more traditionally liberal wing of the Democratic coalition. Now the rhetoric is being echoed by Secretary of Education Arne Duncan on a <a href="http://www.ed.gov/blog/topic/bustour/" target="_blank">Midwest speaking tour</a>.</div></blockquote><div class="MsoNormal">Goldstein then takes a close look at the opposite wing of the reformist movement. Most reformers, she writes, are talking about who ought to be laid off, given that budget crunches are forcing layoffs, but</div><blockquote><div class="MsoNormal"><b><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";">What's less acknowledged is that there is a quieter conversation among reformers about reducing the size of the teaching force </span></b><i><b><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";">regardless of whether or not such a move is necessitated by budget crises</span></b></i><b><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";">. </span></b><b><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; font-weight: normal;"></span></b></div></blockquote><div class="MsoNormal"><b><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; font-weight: normal;">Goldstein quotes former NYC schools chancellor and News Corp. executive Joel Klein outlining his alarming vision for the future of American schooling: </span></b></div><blockquote><div class="MsoNormal">A very different system would be empowered by technology…a huge infusion of private capital aimed at creating an entirely new delivery system. <b><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";">Teachers would be much fewer</span></b>, but paid much more…it would be data-driven, it would be customized, it would engage kids, it would differentiate the approaches we take, and it would value human capital in a much different way</div></blockquote><div class="MsoNormal">I recommend <a href="http://www.danagoldstein.net/dana_goldstein/2011/09/where-does-obamas-job-plan-leave-the-teacher-quality-debate.html">reading Goldstein’s entire post</a>.</div>Max Beanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09411037394257752336noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2747343572713674312.post-37968006071788118002011-09-19T08:41:00.000-07:002013-02-20T10:15:05.547-08:00Let Them FailThe Deprivations of Growing Up Without Messing Up<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgSMTtHjWSUZfO86EuGu62ePvpmwvzLRfQGBJbVxxdcmtyjCMDUggz49rNbd9u6GhEgQnqXU9aILFxbppDnx_A52_lkRnP-t__c_C2TvpJSVBSB3d_rfyJZ_fi76q-TRfACFDtQvaOZX2w/s1600/grit.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgSMTtHjWSUZfO86EuGu62ePvpmwvzLRfQGBJbVxxdcmtyjCMDUggz49rNbd9u6GhEgQnqXU9aILFxbppDnx_A52_lkRnP-t__c_C2TvpJSVBSB3d_rfyJZ_fi76q-TRfACFDtQvaOZX2w/s320/grit.jpg" width="258" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td width="200" class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Tape installation by Stephen Doyle. Photograph by Stephen Willis for the New York Times.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>There’s <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/18/magazine/what-if-the-secret-to-success-is-failure.html">a fascinating article by Paul Tough in last week’s New York Times Magazine</a>. The article follows the parallel and cooperative, but very distinct, character education initiatives at KIPP’s NYC flagship school KIPP Infinity, and at its Infinity’s North Bronx neighbor, Riverdale Country School. The pairing is an excellent one, because these schools fall on either side of the philosophical divide in contemporary education: KIPP is a <a href="http://edcommentary.blogspot.com/p/no-excuses-charter-movement.html#main">No-Excuses charter school</a> serving low-income students of color in the south Bronx. Riverdale is a high-end private k-12, with the looser, more Romantic, and more Progressive educational outlook that is common among New York City’s elite private schools.<br />
<div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><a href="http://edcommentary.blogspot.com/2011/09/teaching-character-strengths-and-values.html#other-stuff">There’s a lot of interesting stuff in this article</a>, but perhaps the most interesting theme is the one that inspires article’s headline: “What if the secret to success is failure?” That phrase refers to a character strength that psychologists call grit. It’s the ability to overcome adversity, to bounce back from failure and frustration, to dust yourself off and keep going. It’s a quality on which both Riverdale and KIPP put a great deal of emphasis, because it appears to be a key ingredient of success in life. At the end of the article, Tough raises an interesting question: does the privilege of Riverdale’s students, and the reluctance of middle- and upper-class parents to allow their students to fall prevent them from developing grit?</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">It’s a great question, and it’s relevant far beyond the walls of Riverdale Country and KIPP Infinity. At play here are not only demographics, but an entire approach to child rearing favored by contemporary wealthy, educated parents, one in which children are not allowed to fail.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><a name='more'></a><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Thus, should a child hit any road-bumps in her academic career, private tutors, homework helpers, and organizational coaches are brought in to buoy her, before her weak understanding or lack of effort have any serious consequences. When these measures prove unsuccessful and children end the year with an inadequate grasp of course material, schools are usually highly creative in finding solutions that will stay off permanent records. My own college alma mater, an institution rife with misguided Romanticism, allowed students to drop a course as late as the final day of the semester, without leaving any mark on their official transcript. Some private grade schools simply do not put fails on transcripts, whether the student drops the class or not. I’ve observed incidents in which students who, through extreme negligence, had failed to receive credit for a course were able to avoid even the moderate consequence of having to repeat the course, by attending some private tutoring and taking an exam. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">There are a lot of factors that lead to this kind of coddling. Schools want to keep their college record high, so they’re motivated to help students maintain pristine transcripts. Parents are driven to the same ends by anxiety over their students’ future. Somewhere below these more immediate motivations, lies <a href="http://edcommentary.blogspot.com/p/glossary.html#romantic">the Romantic approach to pedagogy</a>, which views children as naturally good, creative, and brilliant and seeks to shield them from the bruising and corrupting influences of society. Thus, Romanticism is not merely in incidental conflict with the development of grit; it is explicitly opposed to that development.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">It’s not only slackers and underachievers who are over-coddled in privileged schools. Indeed, if a student is sufficiently irresponsible, his poor decisions will probably catch up with him eventually. Students with significant learning disabilities are similarly likely to encounter bruising hurdles in the long run. No, the category of kids most in danger of failing to develop grit are smart privileged kids who follow the rules. These kids can easily get all the way through college and well into the job market without encountering significant failure. I know about this because, well, I’m one of them.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Reading Tough’s article, I was reminded of a conversation I once had with a school administrator about the difficulty of hiring effective teachers. “[Something] I’ve realized about recruiting really smart people [is] they've never truly struggled with anything,” he told me. “They’re used to working hard, and getting fairly immediate results and teaching doesn’t work like that. So it’s breaking them down mentally.” (It was clear from the context that “really smart people” coming from underprivileged backgrounds did not come with the same drawbacks.)</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">The comment resonated with me, because I’d had precisely that experience, when I got my first job at a charter school. I was twenty-five at the time; I’d hitch-hiked halfway across America, traveled solo for a year in China, taught myself Chinese, and taught full-time for two years at a private school. Up until that point in my life, I’d never failed at anything I’d really worked hard at. I was, to say the least, ill-prepared to deal with the experience. I lacked the humility to turn things around quickly and lost a great deal of emotional energy on frustration that might have gone into improving the situation. When the year was over, I decided I wasn’t cut out for classroom teaching and did not go back to it for a year and a half, opting instead for tutoring and small-group jobs. I still have not taken a full-time job since that experience, nor have I tried to run a full-sized classroom in an inner-city school. It was not until close to two years after I finished my year at the charter school that I fully recovered from the sense of fear and incompetence that it had left me with.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">There are a lot of factors that contributed to my experience at the charter school: I am far from a natural classroom-manager; the students were inner-city eighth graders at a school that had failed to convince them to love learning; the expectations for teachers were extremely high and the school culture tended to brand weak teachers with a kind of social shame. Had I had more grit and more experience with failure, I would still have gotten knocked around hard at that school, but I would have learned more quickly from my mistakes and from those around me; I would have had more strength and less fear in the face of my failure; and I would have recovered more quickly.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">There’s a takeaway here for both teachers and parents: let your kids fail. Give them hard enough challenges that they won’t always succeed on the first or the second try. Make them struggle. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">I’m currently reading Rafe Esquith’s <i>Teach Like Your Hair’s on Fire</i>. If you’ve never heard of Esquith, I recommend looking into him; he’s a remarkable teacher, regarded by many as the best in the country—a true miracle worker. Esquith has a mini-chapter in the book—just a couple pages really—called “Failure is Good,” in which he relates an anecdote about a group of charter-school teachers who visited his classroom one day. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">“These instructors were terrific,” he writes, “energetic, bright, and caring. However, I noticed a key mistake in their approach to reading. Their desire to help kids feel good about themselves was so pronounced that they never allowed students to get the wrong answer or take a fall.” On the day the charter teachers visited, the students were assembling Viking model rockets. One group of students kept making errors in their calculations, and the visitors, noticing the problem, repeatedly came over to correct the mistakes. Finally, Rafe “had to politely but firmly ask the guests to leave the kids alone”:</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="MsoTableGrid" style="border-collapse: collapse; border: medium none;"><tbody>
<tr style="height: 14.3pt;"> <td style="height: 14.3pt; padding: 0in 5.4pt; width: 41.4pt;" valign="top" width="55"><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;">Guest:</div></td> <td style="height: 14.3pt; padding: 0in 5.4pt; width: 437.4pt;" valign="top" width="583"><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;">You don’t understand, Rafe, they’re doing it wrong.</div></td> </tr>
<tr style="height: 14.3pt;"> <td style="height: 14.3pt; padding: 0in 5.4pt; width: 41.4pt;" valign="top" width="55"><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;">Rafe:</div></td> <td style="height: 14.3pt; padding: 0in 5.4pt; width: 437.4pt;" valign="top" width="583"><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;">I understand</div></td> </tr>
<tr style="height: 14.3pt;"> <td style="height: 14.3pt; padding: 0in 5.4pt; width: 41.4pt;" valign="top" width="55"><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;">Guest:</div></td> <td style="height: 14.3pt; padding: 0in 5.4pt; width: 437.4pt;" valign="top" width="583"><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;">Their wings are crooked.</div></td> </tr>
<tr style="height: 14.3pt;"> <td style="height: 14.3pt; padding: 0in 5.4pt; width: 41.4pt;" valign="top" width="55"><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;">Rafe:</div></td> <td style="height: 14.3pt; padding: 0in 5.4pt; width: 437.4pt;" valign="top" width="583"><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;">Yes, they are.</div></td> </tr>
<tr style="height: 14.3pt;"> <td style="height: 14.3pt; padding: 0in 5.4pt; width: 41.4pt;" valign="top" width="55"><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;">Guest:</div></td> <td style="height: 14.3pt; padding: 0in 5.4pt; width: 437.4pt;" valign="top" width="583"><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;">The launch leg is glued too close to the nose.</div></td> </tr>
<tr style="height: 14.3pt;"> <td style="height: 14.3pt; padding: 0in 5.4pt; width: 41.4pt;" valign="top" width="55"><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;">Rafe:</div></td> <td style="height: 14.3pt; padding: 0in 5.4pt; width: 437.4pt;" valign="top" width="583"><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;">That’s true.</div></td> </tr>
<tr style="height: 14.3pt;"> <td style="height: 14.3pt; padding: 0in 5.4pt; width: 41.4pt;" valign="top" width="55"><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;">Guest:</div></td> <td style="height: 14.3pt; padding: 0in 5.4pt; width: 437.4pt;" valign="top" width="583"><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;">And you’re just going to sit there.</div></td> </tr>
<tr style="height: 14.3pt;"> <td style="height: 14.3pt; padding: 0in 5.4pt; width: 41.4pt;" valign="top" width="55"><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;">Rafe:</div></td> <td style="height: 14.3pt; padding: 0in 5.4pt; width: 437.4pt;" valign="top" width="583"><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;">Yes, I am.</div></td> </tr>
<tr style="height: 14.3pt;"> <td style="height: 14.3pt; padding: 0in 5.4pt; width: 41.4pt;" valign="top" width="55"><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;">Guest:</div></td> <td style="height: 14.3pt; padding: 0in 5.4pt; width: 437.4pt;" valign="top" width="583"><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;">But their rockets won’t fly.</div></td> </tr>
<tr style="height: 14.3pt;"> <td style="height: 14.3pt; padding: 0in 5.4pt; width: 41.4pt;" valign="top" width="55"><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;">Rafe:</div></td> <td style="height: 14.3pt; padding: 0in 5.4pt; width: 437.4pt;" valign="top" width="583"><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;">Not at first…</div></td> </tr>
<tr style="height: 14.3pt;"> <td style="height: 14.3pt; padding: 0in 5.4pt; width: 41.4pt;" valign="top" width="55"><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;">Guest:</div></td> <td style="height: 14.3pt; padding: 0in 5.4pt; width: 437.4pt;" valign="top" width="583"><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;">But.</div></td> </tr>
<tr> <td style="padding: 0in 5.4pt; width: 41.4pt;" valign="top" width="55"><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;">Rafe:</div></td> <td style="padding: 0in 5.4pt; width: 437.4pt;" valign="top" width="583"><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;">And then the group will have to figure out why their rocket won’t fly. They’ll have to come back to class and figure it out for themselves. It’s what scientists do all the time.</div></td> </tr>
</tbody></table><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">One is inclined to wonder whether dialogues like this one really occurred as written. The guest sounds a little like one of those ingénues who show up in Plato's dialogues to ask all the dumb questions and help Socrates make his points. But whatever the veracity of the dialogue, the point, I think, is well taken.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
<br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><hr /></div><div class="MsoNormal" id="other-stuff"><b>Other Interesting Items from the Article</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Measurement & Intangibles</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Riverdale and KIPP Infinity provide a lovely example of the <a href="http://edcommentary.blogspot.com/2011/05/attaining-intangible-states-personal.html#main">differing attitudes towards intangible qualities</a> that I have discussed in previous posts, and <a href="http://edcommentary.blogspot.com/2010/11/empathy-training-link-and-ruminations.html#values-education">the application of those attitudes towards values education</a>. In its character education program, Infinity relies on measurement (they now give each student a “Character Report Card”) and behavioral mod tactics that focus on outward behaviors rather than mental states (see pages 6, 7, and especially 8, in the article). Riverdale eschews such direct instruction and quantitative emphasis. “I have a philosophical issue with quantifying character,” says Riverdale’s headmaster (see page 4, paragraph 4). </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><br />
Performance Character vs. Moral Character<br />
<div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">The article points out an important distinction that I had never recognized, between values that are about helping others and values that are about achieving success for oneself (see pages 5 & 6). The former, which some researchers call values of <i>moral character</i>, include things like sharing, helping others, and showing respect; the latter, called values of <i>performance character</i>, include attributes like optimism, perseverance, curiosity, and zest—qualities which will not necessarily make you treat others better, but will make you more likely to be admired and to succeed in life.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">In previous posts, I have used the phrases “moral education,” “character education,” and “values education” more or less interchangeably, but this distinction reveals that the first term actually refers to a sub-set of the other two. The separation of moral from performance character strengths plays into debates about the relevance of character education to the purposes of schooling, which have been argued recently on this blog. Specifically, does the school have a responsibility to educate responsible, upstanding citizens or only successful, employable ones? Should inner city schooling provide stronger moral training or only upward mobility? And, if the purposes of schooling are purely utilitarian, what role, if any, should values education play in schools? Clearly, the distinction between performance and moral character adds a new angle to this debate, though, for me, it does not resolve it.<br />
<br />
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">Martin Seligman</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Tough gives a nice overview of psychologist Martin Seligman’s work on universal character strengths and learned happiness and the influence of that work on contemporary character education (see pages 1 & 2). Seligman has identified 24 human character strengths that he claims are universal across time and culture, from which Riverdale and Infinity have selected seven (including grit) that they deem most important.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Incidentally, KIPP’s adoption of Seligman’s ideas has given the anti-charter crazies some unexpected fodder, because Seligman got his start with a now famous experiment that involved administering electric shocks to dogs until they developed what’s called “learned helplessness,” work that <a href="http://www.shearonforschools.com/learned_optimism.htm">he has defended via ends-over-means arguments</a>; and because Seligman gave a lecture in 2002 at a gathering of US Navy personnel, organized in part by the CIA, that <a href="http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2008/07/22/torture">he reportedly didn’t realize would be used to refine torture and brainwashing techniques</a>. Such incidents, whatever they tell us about the man, seem to me to have little bearing on the validity of his work on character education. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Less colorful but more relevant to the project of education is the way in which Seligman’s conception of character strengths has filtered out through the rest of the No-Excuses community, where lists of school values are often taken from Seligman’s master list of universal strengths, and are frequently displayed prominently in classrooms and hallways and placed at the center of school culture.</div></div></div>Max Beanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09411037394257752336noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2747343572713674312.post-92166123856856903832011-09-09T15:31:00.000-07:002011-09-22T12:36:50.455-07:00The Scope of American Student Under-Achievement<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiA72meRZSB5XnhLPzDA7jg3jklTVFp-YLCgsCykGpj_bM34GHGyuwHUxS4LgNgbhRER3-2vNmtXL5fXUVPdbP7rI3zo2_w-wuYLmYNgc3HvR7EwAUmK4KgYJbA2C-3WXwFn2p3nDN2i94/s1600/flags.gif" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiA72meRZSB5XnhLPzDA7jg3jklTVFp-YLCgsCykGpj_bM34GHGyuwHUxS4LgNgbhRER3-2vNmtXL5fXUVPdbP7rI3zo2_w-wuYLmYNgc3HvR7EwAUmK4KgYJbA2C-3WXwFn2p3nDN2i94/s320/flags.gif" width="256" /></a></div><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">A couple of my readers have been suggesting that the problem with American student achievement is actually only a problem with our poorest and lowest-performing students, whose weak scores are dragging down the averages. I don't think that’s the case, and I want to present some data on this question, because it’s an important one.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">I’m looking at the 2009 international assessment scores (from the Programme for International Student Assessment, <a href="http://www.pisa.oecd.org/document/53/0,3746,en_32252351_46584327_46584821_1_1_1_1,00.html">which are available online</a>). Now, test-scores don’t tell you everything, of course, but when you need a blunt comparative instrument, they’re a good one. According to the data from these exams, high-performing US students are indeed more competitive with high-performing students from other countries than low-performing US students are with low-performing students from other countries, but there’s still plenty of room for concern.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><a name='more'></a><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">The table below compares percentiles of the US population to equivalent percentiles in other nations in the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). There are 34 nations in the OECD, and the data in each cell of the table shows how the US ranks among those 34 nations for a particular percentile in a particular subject. For example, if we compare the science scores of the 75<sup>th</sup> percentile in science, for every nation in the OECD, we find the US’s 75<sup>th</sup> percentile ranking 16<sup>th</sup>, or just above the middle.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><table border="1" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="MsoNormalTable" style="border-collapse: collapse; border: medium none; margin-left: 4.65pt; width: 387px;"><tbody>
<tr style="height: 15pt;"> <td nowrap="nowrap" style="border-color: -moz-use-text-color windowtext windowtext -moz-use-text-color; border-style: none solid solid none; border-width: medium 1pt 1pt medium; height: 15pt; padding: 0in 5.4pt; width: 50pt;" valign="bottom" width="67"><br />
</td> <td nowrap="nowrap" style="border-color: -moz-use-text-color windowtext windowtext -moz-use-text-color; border-style: none solid solid none; border-width: medium 1pt 1pt medium; height: 15pt; padding: 0in 5.4pt; width: 48pt;" valign="bottom" width="64"><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><b><span style="color: black; font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif";">10<sup>th</sup></span></b></div></td> <td nowrap="nowrap" style="border-color: -moz-use-text-color windowtext windowtext -moz-use-text-color; border-style: none solid solid none; border-width: medium 1pt 1pt medium; height: 15pt; padding: 0in 5.4pt; width: 48pt;" valign="bottom" width="64"><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><b><span style="color: black; font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif";">25<sup>th</sup></span></b></div></td> <td nowrap="nowrap" style="border-color: -moz-use-text-color windowtext windowtext -moz-use-text-color; border-style: none solid solid none; border-width: medium 1pt 1pt medium; height: 15pt; padding: 0in 5.4pt; width: 48pt;" valign="bottom" width="64"><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><b><span style="color: black; font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif";">75<sup>th</sup></span></b></div></td> <td nowrap="nowrap" style="border-color: -moz-use-text-color windowtext windowtext -moz-use-text-color; border-style: none solid solid none; border-width: medium 1pt 1pt medium; height: 15pt; padding: 0in 5.4pt; width: 48pt;" valign="bottom" width="64"><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><b><span style="color: black; font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif";">90<sup>th</sup></span></b></div></td> <td nowrap="nowrap" style="border-color: -moz-use-text-color windowtext windowtext -moz-use-text-color; border-style: none solid solid none; border-width: medium 1pt 1pt medium; height: 15pt; padding: 0in 5.4pt; width: 48pt;" valign="bottom" width="64"><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><b><span style="color: black; font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif";">95<sup>th</sup></span></b></div></td> </tr>
<tr style="height: 15pt;"> <td nowrap="nowrap" style="border-color: -moz-use-text-color windowtext windowtext -moz-use-text-color; border-style: none solid solid none; border-width: medium 1pt 1pt medium; height: 15pt; padding: 0in 5.4pt; width: 50pt;" valign="bottom" width="67"><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><b><span style="color: black; font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif";">Reading</span></b></div></td> <td nowrap="nowrap" style="border-color: -moz-use-text-color windowtext windowtext -moz-use-text-color; border-style: none solid solid none; border-width: medium 1pt 1pt medium; height: 15pt; padding: 0in 5.4pt; width: 48pt;" valign="bottom" width="64"><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif";">16<sup>th</sup></span></div></td> <td nowrap="nowrap" style="border-color: -moz-use-text-color windowtext windowtext -moz-use-text-color; border-style: none solid solid none; border-width: medium 1pt 1pt medium; height: 15pt; padding: 0in 5.4pt; width: 48pt;" valign="bottom" width="64"><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif";">19<sup>th</sup></span></div></td> <td nowrap="nowrap" style="border-color: -moz-use-text-color windowtext windowtext -moz-use-text-color; border-style: none solid solid none; border-width: medium 1pt 1pt medium; height: 15pt; padding: 0in 5.4pt; width: 48pt;" valign="bottom" width="64"><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif";">10<sup>th</sup></span></div></td> <td nowrap="nowrap" style="border-color: -moz-use-text-color windowtext windowtext -moz-use-text-color; border-style: none solid solid none; border-width: medium 1pt 1pt medium; height: 15pt; padding: 0in 5.4pt; width: 48pt;" valign="bottom" width="64"><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif";">8<sup>th</sup></span></div></td> <td nowrap="nowrap" style="border-color: -moz-use-text-color windowtext windowtext -moz-use-text-color; border-style: none solid solid none; border-width: medium 1pt 1pt medium; height: 15pt; padding: 0in 5.4pt; width: 48pt;" valign="bottom" width="64"><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif";">8<sup>th</sup></span></div></td> </tr>
<tr style="height: 15pt;"> <td nowrap="nowrap" style="border-color: -moz-use-text-color windowtext windowtext -moz-use-text-color; border-style: none solid solid none; border-width: medium 1pt 1pt medium; height: 15pt; padding: 0in 5.4pt; width: 50pt;" valign="bottom" width="67"><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><b><span style="color: black; font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif";">Science</span></b></div></td> <td nowrap="nowrap" style="border-color: -moz-use-text-color windowtext windowtext -moz-use-text-color; border-style: none solid solid none; border-width: medium 1pt 1pt medium; height: 15pt; padding: 0in 5.4pt; width: 48pt;" valign="bottom" width="64"><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif";">20<sup>th</sup></span></div></td> <td nowrap="nowrap" style="border-color: -moz-use-text-color windowtext windowtext -moz-use-text-color; border-style: none solid solid none; border-width: medium 1pt 1pt medium; height: 15pt; padding: 0in 5.4pt; width: 48pt;" valign="bottom" width="64"><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif";">24<sup>th</sup></span></div></td> <td nowrap="nowrap" style="border-color: -moz-use-text-color windowtext windowtext -moz-use-text-color; border-style: none solid solid none; border-width: medium 1pt 1pt medium; height: 15pt; padding: 0in 5.4pt; width: 48pt;" valign="bottom" width="64"><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif";">16<sup>th</sup></span></div></td> <td nowrap="nowrap" style="border-color: -moz-use-text-color windowtext windowtext -moz-use-text-color; border-style: none solid solid none; border-width: medium 1pt 1pt medium; height: 15pt; padding: 0in 5.4pt; width: 48pt;" valign="bottom" width="64"><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif";">13<sup>th</sup></span></div></td> <td nowrap="nowrap" style="border-color: -moz-use-text-color windowtext windowtext -moz-use-text-color; border-style: none solid solid none; border-width: medium 1pt 1pt medium; height: 15pt; padding: 0in 5.4pt; width: 48pt;" valign="bottom" width="64"><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif";">12<sup>th</sup></span></div></td> </tr>
<tr style="height: 15pt;"> <td nowrap="nowrap" style="border-color: -moz-use-text-color windowtext windowtext -moz-use-text-color; border-style: none solid solid none; border-width: medium 1pt 1pt medium; height: 15pt; padding: 0in 5.4pt; width: 50pt;" valign="bottom" width="67"><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><b><span style="color: black; font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif";">Math</span></b></div></td> <td nowrap="nowrap" style="border-color: -moz-use-text-color windowtext windowtext -moz-use-text-color; border-style: none solid solid none; border-width: medium 1pt 1pt medium; height: 15pt; padding: 0in 5.4pt; width: 48pt;" valign="bottom" width="64"><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif";">24<sup>th</sup></span></div></td> <td nowrap="nowrap" style="border-color: -moz-use-text-color windowtext windowtext -moz-use-text-color; border-style: none solid solid none; border-width: medium 1pt 1pt medium; height: 15pt; padding: 0in 5.4pt; width: 48pt;" valign="bottom" width="64"><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif";">25<sup>th</sup></span></div></td> <td nowrap="nowrap" style="border-color: -moz-use-text-color windowtext windowtext -moz-use-text-color; border-style: none solid solid none; border-width: medium 1pt 1pt medium; height: 15pt; padding: 0in 5.4pt; width: 48pt;" valign="bottom" width="64"><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif";">25<sup>th</sup></span></div></td> <td nowrap="nowrap" style="border-color: -moz-use-text-color windowtext windowtext -moz-use-text-color; border-style: none solid solid none; border-width: medium 1pt 1pt medium; height: 15pt; padding: 0in 5.4pt; width: 48pt;" valign="bottom" width="64"><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif";">24<sup>th</sup></span></div></td> <td nowrap="nowrap" style="border-color: -moz-use-text-color windowtext windowtext -moz-use-text-color; border-style: none solid solid none; border-width: medium 1pt 1pt medium; height: 15pt; padding: 0in 5.4pt; width: 48pt;" valign="bottom" width="64"><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif";">23<sup>rd</sup></span></div></td> </tr>
</tbody></table><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">As you can see from the table, our 25<sup>th</sup> percentile is actually somewhat worse than our 10<sup>th</sup>, but neither are very competitive. Our higher percentiles are doing pretty well in reading, fair to middling in science, and quite poorly in math. Now, I find all that troubling. Remember that all of those rankings are comparing these percentiles to equivalent percentiles in other countries, so this doesn’t just mean that our 25<sup>th</sup> percentile isn’t doing that well; it means that our 25<sup>th</sup> percentile is doing worse than the 25<sup>th</sup> percentile in most other economically developed nations. If we were doing a bad job of educating 5 or 10 percent of our population, I might call that an isolated problem, but if we’re talking about a quarter of our population—and the entire population in at least one subject—then I’d call that mediocre.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">But the situation may actually be worse than those numbers make it look. In PISA’s analysis of their data, they use regressions to identify national characteristics that are correlated with student achievement—GDP per capita, per-pupil educational expenditure, etc. In most of these variables, the US is at the upper end of the spectrum. In other words, based on how wealthy we are and how much we spend on education, our students ought to be scoring well above average. By these measures, the US is the 6<sup>th</sup> most advantaged nation in the OECD. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">To give a sense of what this means, PISA adjusts national reading scores to control for various relevant variables. When all national reading scores are adjusted to control for GDP per capita, the US drops from 13<sup>th</sup> place to 17<sup>th</sup>. When reading scores are adjusted to control for per-pupil educational expenditure (but not GDP per capita), the US drops to 20<sup>th</sup>. PISA’s 2009 analysis focuses on reading, so current data on the effect of these variables on math and science scores is not readily available, but I see no reason to assume the effects would not be similar.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Of course, America has unique educational challenges, stemming primarily from the tremendous cultural diversity of our population. We might excuse our schools if they don’t bring our kids up to the level of Finnish or Korean students. You can call this a demographic problem, but it’s not an isolated problem. It’s not a matter of some small ghettoized minority of our students underperforming.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">As usual, I’m not blaming the schools for this problem; I’m not even saying the schools alone can necessarily fix it. But looking at this data, I have to conclude that there’s a need for improvement, not just in the inner-city, but throughout our school system.</div>Max Beanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09411037394257752336noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2747343572713674312.post-21639115797106978502011-09-02T08:02:00.000-07:002011-09-02T08:23:56.770-07:00Education Reform and Teacher Professionalism(Psychoanalyzing the Politics of Teaching, part 4)<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <o:OfficeDocumentSettings> <o:AllowPNG/> </o:OfficeDocumentSettings> </xml><![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:WordDocument> <w:View>Normal</w:View> <w:Zoom>0</w:Zoom> <w:TrackMoves/> <w:TrackFormatting/> <w:PunctuationKerning/> <w:ValidateAgainstSchemas/> <w:SaveIfXMLInvalid>false</w:SaveIfXMLInvalid> <w:IgnoreMixedContent>false</w:IgnoreMixedContent> <w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText>false</w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText> <w:DoNotPromoteQF/> <w:LidThemeOther>EN-US</w:LidThemeOther> <w:LidThemeAsian>ZH-CN</w:LidThemeAsian> <w:LidThemeComplexScript>X-NONE</w:LidThemeComplexScript> <w:Compatibility> <w:BreakWrappedTables/> <w:SnapToGridInCell/> <w:WrapTextWithPunct/> <w:UseAsianBreakRules/> <w:DontGrowAutofit/> <w:SplitPgBreakAndParaMark/> <w:EnableOpenTypeKerning/> <w:DontFlipMirrorIndents/> <w:OverrideTableStyleHps/> <w:UseFELayout/> </w:Compatibility> <m:mathPr> <m:mathFont m:val="Cambria Math"/> <m:brkBin m:val="before"/> <m:brkBinSub m:val="--"/> <m:smallFrac m:val="off"/> <m:dispDef/> <m:lMargin m:val="0"/> <m:rMargin m:val="0"/> <m:defJc m:val="centerGroup"/> <m:wrapIndent m:val="1440"/> <m:intLim m:val="subSup"/> <m:naryLim m:val="undOvr"/> </m:mathPr></w:WordDocument> </xml><![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:LatentStyles DefLockedState="false" DefUnhideWhenUsed="true"
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<div class="MsoNormal">This is the fourth in a series of posts on the professional status of teachers. The series is non-contiguous—i.e., I’ve written other, unrelated posts in between installments of the series—so I figure only my most faithful readers are up to date on the whole thing. For everyone else, feel free to catch up here:</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 9pt;">Part 1 – <a href="http://edcommentary.blogspot.com/2011/07/teachers-unions.html">incentives: the wrong lens for understanding teacher motivation</a></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 9pt;">Part 2 – <a href="http://edcommentary.blogspot.com/2011/08/psychoanalyzing-politics-of-teaching.html">autonomy, not incentives: unpacking the conflicts between teachers unions and school authorities</a></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 9pt;">Part 3 – <a href="http://edcommentary.blogspot.com/2011/08/psychoanalyzing-politics-of-teaching_18.html">not quite a profession: why teachers struggle to attain professional status</a></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
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</div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>Expertise in Education</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">In part 3 of this series, I wrote about the difficulty of establishing a consistent, identifiable expertise among teachers. The key word here is <i>consistent</i>: expert teachers do exist, they’re just rare. Now great doctors are rare too—and the same probably goes for excellent plumbers and electricians—but everyone who gets a license to practice medicine—or to be a master plumber or electrician—has a high baseline level of expertise. Most doctors have had over 10,000 hours of experience practicing medicine by the time they finish their residency, not to mention thousands more hours of academic coursework.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">The baseline competency among teachers, on the other hand, is very low: first-year teachers generally have only a few hundred hours of classroom teaching experience and relevant coursework, often less; and as discussed previously, much of that coursework is of low rigor and uncertain value. That’s a big problem because teachers, like doctors, do a job that’s too important to screw up. (<a name="why-professions-ref" href="http://edcommentary.blogspot.com/2011/09/education-reform-professionalization-of.html#why-professions">Click here for a more detailed discussion</a>.) Without sufficient training and support, many of them burn out before ever attaining expertise, and many of those who remain learn slowly in the absence of guidance, mentorship, and any clear model of excellence.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">We all know what expert teachers are like, though, because we’ve all had one or two in our lives. They have a way with kids—not only a capacity to charm or quiet them, but an ability make difficult concepts approachable, strange ideas interesting, narratives and facts unforgettable—and anyone who sees them interact with children recognizes it. That ability, like the dog whisperer’s, appears almost magical; like the doctor’s, it comes with a decisive, authoritative sense of what should be done in a given situation—how a disease should be treated, how a wayward child should be handled—and the lay-person—the non-teacher, the exasperated father, the worried mother—defers naturally, automatically to that authority. Just as the sick person is relieved to cede authority over their health and body to a competent doctor, the parent is relieved to cede authority over their child to a competent teacher. Authority, power, and autonomy are not things we resent giving to trusted experts; they’re things we <i>want</i> to give them—after all, we pay them to take them from us.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><a name='more'></a><br />
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</div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>Leadership in Education and the Broader Role of Professions</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">In most professions, the ceding of authority to the professional occurs not only on the individual level, but also on the level of the society. We look to doctors to advance the practice of medicine, to find new cures and develop better methods of diagnosis. We look to lawyers and judges to advance the practice of law, to interpret our laws and define their scope. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">This does not mean we always agree with their methods or applaud their results. Maybe we think doctors focus too much on extending life and too little on making it pleasant; maybe we think our courts give corporations too many of the rights of people. As citizens of a democracy, thinking critically about key elements of our society—our laws, our medicine, our schools—is not only our right and our habit; it’s our duty. If we don’t like how our courts are doing their job, however, our solution isn’t to supplant them with lay people, who will “think outside the box.” If we don’t like our doctor’s attitude, we still wouldn’t ask a person with no experience in medicine telling her how to practice it. We recognize that law and medicine are extremely complex fields and no lay person is competent to practice them. Expertise trumps philosophical alignment.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Education is an extremely complex field as well, but because we don’t think teachers are experts (because many of them are not) we don’t treat it the same way. When a school system is underperforming, we bring in outsiders who often have little or no experience in education (Arne Duncan, Joel Klein, Cathy Black, etc.) to run the system; we develop exams to determine whether teachers are teaching well and what they should teach; in extreme cases, we develop scripted curricula to tell them exactly how to teach. The result is an endless cycle of ineffective and incoherent reforms. Read any writer on education who’s been in the field long enough, and you will read about these cycles: how a new reform comes in like a fad, glorified in the media, touted by politicians; how, after a few years, its amazing results prove illusory, ephemeral, or un-replicable, and it fades into oblivion, to be replaced by another new reform.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">That’s not to say that real discoveries have not been made, but we have rarely been successful at determining what about a successful school or school system makes it successful. We find a model that appears effective, school authorities replicate what seem the salient features of it, tout the project a success, make some political enemies, are replaced by new school authorities. Scholars of education analyze the results statistically and invariably disagree in their conclusions. New iterations are conceived by new school authorities in other districts with different conditions, implemented differently, analyzed by other scholars. The result is a chaotic, aimless evolution: random variation without natural selection.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">The problem is a lack of qualified leadership. The project of education reform, like the project of education in general, should be in the hands of experts, people with thorough knowledge of the history, structure, and practice of education, people who can maintain an ongoing, thoughtful, coherent dialogue about what schools and children need, and whose decisions will therefore not be haphazard and chaotic. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">I’m hardly original in suggesting that the haphazard course of school reform is the result of inexpert leadership. In her recent book on assessment and the new school reform, Diane Ravitch makes the case in no uncertain terms:</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in;">Our schools will not improve if elected officials intrude into pedagogical territory and make decisions that properly should be made by professional educators. Congress and state legislatures should not tell teachers how to teach, any more than they should tell surgeons how to perform operations. Nor should the curriculum of the schools be the subject of a political negotiation among people who are neither knowledgeable about teaching nor well educated. Pedagogy—that is, how we teach—is rightly the professional domain of individual teachers. Curriculum—that is, what to teach—should be determined by professional educators and scholars…. (<i>The Death and Life of the Great American School System</i>, p. 226)</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Addressing the AFT at a recent union conference, Randi Weingarten was even more direct: “Let’s refuse to be defined by people who are happy to lecture us about the state of public education — but wouldn’t last 10 minutes in a classroom.” (<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/12/us/12aft.html">Reported in the Times</a>)</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Ravitch and Weingarten want to put school reform in the hands of experts; their mistake, I believe, is to assume that teachers are those experts. (The transparency of that error may or may not explain why their arguments have had so little impact on the current education reform movement.) The mistake is understandable, though. As the professional practitioners of education, teachers <i>should</i> be the experts that schools are looking for. Because our training is insufficient, our expertise is inconsistent, and our field lacks a paradigm for rigorous production of knowledge, we are not those experts. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Of course, we also need other types of experts (education historians, experts in policy and financial management, etc.) working on the problem of education reform, but without professional educators at the center of the discussion, the conversation will inevitably be disconnected and inconclusive, because it is the expert teacher who understands how all the policies and curricula and incentives and philosophies will play out in actual classrooms. It’s as if a bunch of scientists and war historians and diplomats were to plan an invasion without consulting anyone who’d actually fought in a war.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">So, how do we get experts in education? As those who have been following this blog for a while know, I think the answer is to drastically change the training process. As I discussed in <a href="http://edcommentary.blogspot.com/2011/05/normal-0-false-false-false-en-us-zh-cn.html">my post on teacher training</a>, that can happen gradually, but in the long run, the change will need to be drastic. American educators have been talking for over a century about the professionalization of teaching. It’s long overdue.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
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</div><div class="MsoNormal"><hr /><strong>Additional Details</strong><br />
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</div><div class="MsoNormal" id="why-professions"><i>Teachers, like doctors, do a job that’s too important to screw up…</i><br />
(<a href="http://edcommentary.blogspot.com/2011/09/education-reform-professionalization-of.html#why-professions-ref">back to text</a>)</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Professions are able to maintain their exclusivity and thus their monopoly on their field of expert knowledge, because society needs this guarantee of expertise. You can hire a programmer, a graphic designer, or a marketing consultant based on reputation and portfolio. If they don’t work out, it’s a pain, but you can go hire another one. That’s not true when you’re hiring a doctor, a plumber, an electrician, or a lawyer. If they mess up, you will have serious problems; you could end up with sewage flooding your house, or in jail, or dead. What’s more, it’s difficult for a lay-person to assess their competence on his or her own: without licensing, it would be hard to tell who was a snake-oil salesman and who actually knew how to install a toilet, defend you in court, or diagnose strep throat.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Both of these conditions apply to teachers. If you hire a bad one, you not only have 100 to 120 kids who make minimal academic progress in a particular subject for one year, you also have a weak link in your school’s culture, an opening for disorder, frustration, and mutiny to seep into the school-day. When students come out of a poorly managed class, they tend to be harder to manage in their next class. When a particular homeroom has two or three mismanaged classes during the course of the day, the overall behavior and mood of the group begins to erode. I’ve seen this problem; indeed, I’ve been part of it.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">The assessment of teachers is a much more fraught issue, and I don’t want to delve into it too deeply at this juncture. I’m convinced that neither raw exam scores nor value-added assessments are reliable means of assessing teacher quality—at least not on their own. (<a name="quantitative-assessment-ref" href="http://edcommentary.blogspot.com/2011/09/education-reform-professionalization-of.html#quantitative-assessments">What’s wrong with quantitative teacher assessments?</a>) Classroom observations give better information, but obviously their worth depends on the competence of the observer. Schools with the luxury to select from a number of applicants often use sample lessons to assess a candidate’s abilities, since they can’t feasibly travel to all the schools that job applicants are coming from in order to observe them, but sample lessons are not nearly as telling as regular classroom observations. A teachers’ students usually have a very good gauge of how good (or bad) she is, but for obvious reasons, assessing teachers based on student reports creates problematic power-dynamics. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
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</div><div class="MsoNormal" id="quantitative-assessments"><i>What’s wrong with quantitative assessments?</i><br />
(<a href="http://edcommentary.blogspot.com/2011/09/education-reform-professionalization-of.html#quantitative-assessment-ref">back</a>)</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Raw exam scores are not considered a valid measure of teacher quality, because the main factor affecting exam score is family income, so looking at raw scores mostly just tells you who’s teaching higher-income kids. <u>Value-added measures</u> are currently in vogue, but they have several problems. They have been shown to be highly unstable over time—i.e. a teacher who scores high one year often scores low the next (I need to dig up the relevant study). They’re affected by a host of non-teacher factors, like test recalibrations, school culture, and class assignment. Even the demographic factors they’re designed to ignore may not actually be factored out, because behavioral and attitudinal differences among different populations can affect not only students’ knowledge coming into a class, but also their tendency to progress in the course of the year. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Value added measures are also subject to various critiques relating to the validity of the exams themselves. The exams may not—indeed, as currently designed, they surely do not—measure everything that we want students to learn, so assessments based on them can’t tell us everything we want to know about a teacher. For the same reason, value-added measures can be skewed by heavy emphasis on reductive test-preparation, which will produce a bump on this year’s exam but a dip on next year’s, because this kind of instruction leads to low rates of retention—not to mention jumbled and unusable knowledge. (Exam scores from the year after a teacher has a group of students can’t be factored into a value-added measure because it’s too heavily dependent on the teacher they have the following year.)</div>Max Beanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09411037394257752336noreply@blogger.com14tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2747343572713674312.post-73025842044233920892011-08-26T15:09:00.000-07:002011-08-28T14:29:54.508-07:00What Teachers Should Know Before they Start Teaching<div class="MsoNormal"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhOgBu9wbDLUChsp9PtoDskkQ_f_7mbtSY-RYiDxdHfgPlyz7f5047M6HX4Z1ifJkPrisHhUMFrXQOiht_exFiKAGErNXuxnBzCEcH2jSQ2lRqPVc6Mk8CFBPJanKwZOMEwaWJKUT5CNFs/s1600/grade+inflation+in+education+departments.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="330" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhOgBu9wbDLUChsp9PtoDskkQ_f_7mbtSY-RYiDxdHfgPlyz7f5047M6HX4Z1ifJkPrisHhUMFrXQOiht_exFiKAGErNXuxnBzCEcH2jSQ2lRqPVc6Mk8CFBPJanKwZOMEwaWJKUT5CNFs/s400/grade+inflation+in+education+departments.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><div class="MsoNormal">Mark J. Perry posted <a href="http://mjperry.blogspot.com/2011/08/nationwide-culture-of-low-standards-and.html">an essay on Carpe Diem two days ago about grade inflation in university education departments</a> (see the image to the right). Aside from offering me, as the holder of a BA in education history and policy, some personal embarrassment, the post gives strong evidence for <a href="http://edcommentary.blogspot.com/2011/08/psychoanalyzing-politics-of-teaching_18.html#training">the lack of rigor in teacher training that I discussed in my last post</a>. These soft standards have a double effect: they lower the public perception of teachers, and they leave teachers worse prepared to transmit knowledge.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">I want to argue, however—and this follows pretty directly from the discussion of expertise in my last post—that upping rigor is not a sufficient solution to the problem of weak teacher preparation; indeed, low-rigor is more symptomatic of our teacher-training problems than causal. The more important question is, what exactly are we trying to teach teachers? We want to up the rigor, yes, but the rigor of what?</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">There are, generally speaking, two types of material in a teacher training program: subject-area content and pedagogical technique. I talked briefly about <a href="http://edcommentary.blogspot.com/2011/08/psychoanalyzing-politics-of-teaching_18.html#training"><u>the issues surrounding pedagogical technique in my last post</u></a> and at considerable length in <a href="http://edcommentary.blogspot.com/2011/05/normal-0-false-false-false-en-us-zh-cn.html">my post on how to improve teacher training</a>. Upping the rigor on the psychology and pedagogical theory courses that dominate traditional training programs will not make teachers more effective in the classroom; what we need is a different kind of pedagogical training entirely, one that occurs in actual grade schools, under the mentorship of master teachers.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">What I want to talk about today are the issues surrounding subject-area knowledge. I touched a bit on this in my last post, but I want to go into more detail, because this is something I don’t hear anyone talking about. No matter how it’s done, more rigorous subject-area classes for secondary-school teachers are probably a good thing, but it’s worth thinking carefully about exactly what type of rigor we want. The word rigor gets tossed around a lot in education discussions, and I’m not the first to point out that it’s meaning has gotten a little vague: rigorous has become more or less synonymous with difficult. But there are a lot of ways to make classes harder. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><a name='more'></a><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">More difficult math courses, for example, will inevitably give future math teachers stronger knowledge of mathematics; but it seems doubtful that studying multivariable calculus, abstract algebra, or complex analysis (all of which are common required courses for undergraduate math majors) is an ideal use of a future middle-school math teacher’s time. It’s true that, when time can be spared from the state curriculum, some of the more obscure advanced topics in math can provide interesting enrichment material—I know private school teachers who do wonderful high-school level elective courses in non-Euclidean geometry, topology, and the like—but it doesn’t make sense for these topics to be required material for future sixth grade public-school math teachers. There is other mathematical content that is much more relevant to their work.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">As I argued in my last post, the kind of mathematical knowledge needed by a math teacher is significantly different from (but no less rigorous than) that needed by, say, an engineer. A couple examples will give a better idea of what I mean. To my mind, a well-prepared eighth grade math teacher ought to be able to solve problems like these:</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoListParagraph"><ol><li>Consider the second degree equation below:<br />
<div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">4x<sup>2</sup> – 6x = (x + 2)<sup>2</sup></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" id="problem1a"><b>Part A:</b> Come up with an application word problem that one might reasonably solve using this equation. Do not use the words “add,” “subtract,” “multiply,” “times,” “minus,” “plus,” “product,” “sum,” “difference,” or “variable.”</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">(<a href="http://edcommentary.blogspot.com/2011/08/rigorous-teacher-preparation-and.html#solution1a">See a sample solution</a>)</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoListParagraph" id="problem1b"><b>Part B:</b> Create a sequence of three simpler problems, based on your word problem from part A. The three new problems should gradually build in difficulty, so that the first is as simple as possible and the second and third build towards the difficulty of the problem from part A.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">(<a href="http://edcommentary.blogspot.com/2011/08/rigorous-teacher-preparation-and.html#solution1b">See a sample solution</a>)</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
<br />
</div></li>
<li>A house is twice as tall as a signpost which stands 12 feet in front of it. At 10am one day, the sun is directly opposite the house from the signpost, so that the shadow of the house falls directly towards the signpost. At this moment, the shadow of the house on the signpost falls 3 feet from the top of the post, and the shadow of the post on the ground extends 2 feet beyond the shadow of the house on the ground.<br />
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle"><br />
</div><div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpLast" id="problem2a"><b>Part A:</b> How tall is the house? Show all work and explain all steps.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">(<a href="http://edcommentary.blogspot.com/2011/08/rigorous-teacher-preparation-and.html#solution2a">See a sample solution</a>)</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoListParagraph"><b>Part B:</b> Derive a formula to solve problems like problem 2, regardless of the distances given and the ratio of the height of the house to the height of the signpost. Clearly specify all variable names.</div></li>
</ol></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">In terms of mathematical content knowledge, problem 1 requires nothing beyond basic algebra concepts and the most fundamental understanding of rectangle area. Problem 2 requires nothing beyond the ability to use similar triangles, to assign variables, and to solve ratios. There are no mathematical techniques required to solve these problems that are not part of the basic middle-school math curriculum, but these problems are much harder than what we currently expect most eighth graders, or most adults, or most teachers, to solve. You wouldn’t learn how to solve these in an upper-level undergraduate math course, either. It would require a special kind of class to learn this material, one that focused on the specific type of content knowledge that teachers need to know.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">I speak with less authority about other subject-areas, but I suspect that, in every subject, you could find content knowledge that’s highly relevant to teachers but not necessarily taught in university courses. A science teacher, for example, must know the various laws, forces, processes, and concepts through which we understand scientific phenomena, but she need not have memorized the massive arrays of facts that take up much of college-level chemistry and biology nor the difficult mathematical derivations that take up most of college-level physics courses. On the other hand, she ought to have far broader knowledge than, say, a doctor or an engineer, regarding the development and history of science, its connections to other subject areas, its applications in the world around us, and its relevance to daily and civic life. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">A history teacher need not have done the hundreds hours of primary-source research that characterize graduate-level study in history, nor need she have a strong grounding in the critical theories that modern historians use to problematize the reconceive their discipline. What she needs, instead, is a thorough and broad knowledge of historical phenomena: not only the major political events, but their connection to technological development, intellectual history, literature, and so on. She will also benefit greatly from a detailed knowledge of the many captivating narratives, dramatic moments, and vivifying details scattered throughout history: how Genghis Khan’s warriors, in order to travel quickly without stopping for supplies, would make yogurt from the milk of the mares they rode, mixed with blood from the same mare’s ankles; how J. Robert Oppenheimer, speaking in 1965 about his thoughts upon hearing that the bomb had dropped on Nagasaki, quoted what is thought to be his own translation of a passage from the Bhagavad Gita: “Now I am become death, destroyer of worlds,” <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f94j9WIWPQQ">and how sad he looked while he said it</a>.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">All of this applies with only slight modification to the training of primary-school teachers. Currently, content knowledge requirements for primary-school teachers are minimal: after all, everyone knows math, grammar, history, and science up through the fifth grade level—or if they don’t, they can pick it up quickly enough on the fly. The truth is, though, that primary school teachers lay the foundation for the study of each academic subject in the later years, and their content knowledge ought to go deeper than the curriculum they’re teaching. A fourth grade teacher with a weak understanding of math may know enough about long-multiplication to teach students how to perform it, but he is unlikely to instill in them any love of the subject; he will not know the many ways that multiplication can be understood in application problems or related to algebraic concepts, and he will not lay a strong foundation for the study of math in middle- and high-school.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Of course, primary school teachers typically have to teach math, history, reading, and writing, and often science as well, so they cannot be expected to study each subject as deeply as secondary-school teachers study their specialty, but they will be more effective teachers and better respected adults if they have a thorough working knowledge of each of the main academics. Currently, training for primary school teachers focuses heavily on developmental psychology and puts little emphasis on academic content, but it seems to me that primary-school teachers, because of the breadth of material that they teach, need just as much preparation in academic content as do secondary-school teachers.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
<br />
<br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" id="solution1a">Sample solution for problem 1:<br />
(<a href="http://edcommentary.blogspot.com/2011/08/rigorous-teacher-preparation-and.html#problem1a">back to text</a>)</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.25in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.25in;"><b>Part A:</b> </div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.25in;">John and Pete both have square gardens. The length of John’s garden is two feet more than half the length of Pete’s garden. One day, Pete cuts three feet off one side of his garden, in order to extend his house. Now John and Pete’s gardens have the same area. What is the area of each garden?</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.25in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" id="solution1b" style="margin-left: 0.25in;"><b>Part B:</b> </div><div class="MsoListParagraph" style="margin-left: 0.25in;"><ol><li>John has a rectangular garden and Pete has a square one, but both gardens have the same area. Pete’s garden is six feet on a side. John’s garden is nine feet long. How wide is John’s garden?<br />
<div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div></li>
<li>John and Pete both have square gardens. John’s garden is two feet wider than Pete’s garden. If the area of John’s garden is 40 square feet greater than that of Pete’s garden, what is the area of each garden.<br />
<div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div></li>
<li>John has a rectangular garden and Pete has a square one. Pete’s garden is one foot wider than John’s garden. John’s garden is ten feet long. One day, Pete cuts three feet off the side of his garden in order to extend his house. Now the two gardens have the same area. What are the dimensions of each garden? (Find all possible answers.)</li>
</ol></div><div class="MsoNormal">(<a href="http://edcommentary.blogspot.com/2011/08/rigorous-teacher-preparation-and.html#problem1b">back to text</a>)</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" id="solution2a">Sample solution for problem 2 (part A only):<br />
(<a href="http://edcommentary.blogspot.com/2011/08/rigorous-teacher-preparation-and.html#problem2a">back to text</a>)<br />
<div style="color: red;">*** thanks to one of my readers for pointing out a careless error in this solution. It is now corrected. ***</div></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.25in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.25in;"><div class="MsoNormal">We have three similar triangles in this problem, one formed by the wall of the house and its shadow, one formed by the signpost and its shadow, and one (which we can imagine) formed between the signpost, the shadow of the house on the ground, and the diagonal where the shadow of the house cuts through the signpost: </div></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.25in;"><br />
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal"><img height="192" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgjoJ-43AcFAm575D2BbHWm36JhhPKvhMtrhobSbHj5MPgAc-0yOgrOrmSM6GaHqj0g-a3acT_ADQNOEqWdIj0yWb7sgATwcojUU3iNlVBXfPJko4Ts_8LN0ZEGM1ffei57XPFGPzPxmFU/s1600/clip_image001.png" width="281" /></div><div class="MsoNormal">We know they’re all similar, because we assume that the rays of the sun are parallel (even though, in reality, they’re not quite parallel). Thus, we have</div><div align="center" class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 115%;"><img height="39" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEis3IrpETzBIOxwQjQpzbxPZbvhOvX1xH5MyCWELI-FO_d_qNnR86EYfMiNYBYoF6gP4W9bknQbsGistI1aact6rbNyCiK7sROTNlMsvgu3tM7VYvraUl4XiPO_tvqp_ierLiioWYKnOLE/s1600/clip_image003.png" width="123" /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
<br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">From the first pair, we get:</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh0RIES9assHJ53oSBROBwz8IuBOQ9xj5vrRTMz7Dj0sIeaf8FoCMXoWR4Ug1fBJSXy3MIkV5X7pmsCe5cu0sotyXdpxpUxipbu04VKT4MgIKC6Nrumvv03mDDVL26zsUH-AH9U25kIm4c/s1600/clip_image005.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh0RIES9assHJ53oSBROBwz8IuBOQ9xj5vrRTMz7Dj0sIeaf8FoCMXoWR4Ug1fBJSXy3MIkV5X7pmsCe5cu0sotyXdpxpUxipbu04VKT4MgIKC6Nrumvv03mDDVL26zsUH-AH9U25kIm4c/s1600/clip_image005.png" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi5KNliWWYQ50yHthlJ0jurLM1r6moB_QQcdBCdKzlxY3oXmuqMaMxV2JYTPuDgd-zkrgOohddRvocOvMzEJg8vJF4ZaLkNBF0o0Ls3RF4IzC7y78SfW889touSKoeHFrzejf1NNMoeycU/s1600/clip_image007.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi5KNliWWYQ50yHthlJ0jurLM1r6moB_QQcdBCdKzlxY3oXmuqMaMxV2JYTPuDgd-zkrgOohddRvocOvMzEJg8vJF4ZaLkNBF0o0Ls3RF4IzC7y78SfW889touSKoeHFrzejf1NNMoeycU/s1600/clip_image007.png" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhGyVdZ7svlseDyHxFJ9ZZb3vXRksGg8ilY3AcD6oCeRTFoomHT7umlfZ2Oz3eiNWutD5NbU1oLbjXrBOfrRdVSIyHh_cIGKCdHwfpvsyDUJtupyN5P3T06MARcIcaDwcP9a1mjVySiINs/s1600/clip_image009.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhGyVdZ7svlseDyHxFJ9ZZb3vXRksGg8ilY3AcD6oCeRTFoomHT7umlfZ2Oz3eiNWutD5NbU1oLbjXrBOfrRdVSIyHh_cIGKCdHwfpvsyDUJtupyN5P3T06MARcIcaDwcP9a1mjVySiINs/s1600/clip_image009.png" /></a></div><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">We plug this in for the y terms in the first and third ratios, and we get: </div><div class="separator" style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhaAmC5UB6kbqiI2i95jghXx6I2PZzBs0LlT-3VlW9Nk0t8McfNU-63LOhORry_cvu5VeCZo3wWfiTpeZevHvkXBT02-CIyf_n4-MYiV3yAyK2qw8KpwOndlpc6Yzf-aF2OgfN2Ld9FB40/s1600/clip_image002.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="50" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhaAmC5UB6kbqiI2i95jghXx6I2PZzBs0LlT-3VlW9Nk0t8McfNU-63LOhORry_cvu5VeCZo3wWfiTpeZevHvkXBT02-CIyf_n4-MYiV3yAyK2qw8KpwOndlpc6Yzf-aF2OgfN2Ld9FB40/s400/clip_image002.png" width="90" /></a></div><div class="MsoNormal">Simplifying, we get: </div><div class="separator" style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh3z3BtATgnWJx1fWCEPWEthjkPbyBuuEo4xQ3lUi2kNPu-dHxwpga6G8uiKuw8yM0dPmlThSgr4RsOzl7P3dp4YMWRD7XRFYhvGY_IntNRm76oAGdDRTZB_IJkaLvBN6P2iaFGKTvV9Fc/s1600/clip_image004.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="50" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh3z3BtATgnWJx1fWCEPWEthjkPbyBuuEo4xQ3lUi2kNPu-dHxwpga6G8uiKuw8yM0dPmlThSgr4RsOzl7P3dp4YMWRD7XRFYhvGY_IntNRm76oAGdDRTZB_IJkaLvBN6P2iaFGKTvV9Fc/s400/clip_image004.png" width="80" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgD9ibyTbtBi1Qisfvd4JDe8v8JNy0ksgBkAFBWdtE1JLUyCBakDIBPN-mxtU-0ijrB_MgQEUjjUayg0sCxLHewxZ8JdLDPTGBSwHKISjf2bwlECVKb6Ej6fVQoX4ZvBHk4aJ_PgebyqUU/s1600/clip_image006.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="20" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgD9ibyTbtBi1Qisfvd4JDe8v8JNy0ksgBkAFBWdtE1JLUyCBakDIBPN-mxtU-0ijrB_MgQEUjjUayg0sCxLHewxZ8JdLDPTGBSwHKISjf2bwlECVKb6Ej6fVQoX4ZvBHk4aJ_PgebyqUU/s400/clip_image006.png" width="86" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjTdgPcZdSib-uVSoS9Zn3-4jVMhXTn8xDWUAAZ2Mi-wGuty8oo1OrZy-zymp6csooYhQD7jZ-DnmR2qlCJERKDXwYe3aIrGlSBv_aTVfZbzk5-4zIEYFApOBvW49f1UYr0if7cL7Co-s0/s1600/clip_image008.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjTdgPcZdSib-uVSoS9Zn3-4jVMhXTn8xDWUAAZ2Mi-wGuty8oo1OrZy-zymp6csooYhQD7jZ-DnmR2qlCJERKDXwYe3aIrGlSBv_aTVfZbzk5-4zIEYFApOBvW49f1UYr0if7cL7Co-s0/s1600/clip_image008.png" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi4e4fJT7G0RAKQS7AWUUlOkUX2iCNs9DlpAeOcqgvO5E2vz6d80WAEOLiJLirsPpM_JcfIr6anvEaVC5ALme4bI5xdI_ni4JfthEBrwuL_UJdWPiKnED2OBeJtJ_h276-hYorzsHULuNQ/s400/clip_image010.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi4e4fJT7G0RAKQS7AWUUlOkUX2iCNs9DlpAeOcqgvO5E2vz6d80WAEOLiJLirsPpM_JcfIr6anvEaVC5ALme4bI5xdI_ni4JfthEBrwuL_UJdWPiKnED2OBeJtJ_h276-hYorzsHULuNQ/s400/clip_image010.png" /></a></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">The signpost is 18 feet tall. The wall is 36 feet tall.</div></div></div>Max Beanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09411037394257752336noreply@blogger.com11tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2747343572713674312.post-55054888678204182062011-08-18T13:16:00.000-07:002011-08-23T01:40:06.309-07:00Psychoanalyzing the Politics of Teaching (part 3): the Would-Be ProfessionThis is the third post in <a href="http://edcommentary.blogspot.com/2011/07/teachers-unions.html#main">a series about the professional status of teachers</a>. In <a href="http://edcommentary.blogspot.com/2011/08/psychoanalyzing-politics-of-teaching.html#main">my last post</a>, I viewed the struggles of the teachers’ unions in the light of teachers’ ongoing and often frustrated struggle for legitimacy as a profession. In this post, I will talk about why that legitimacy has proven so elusive.<br />
<div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Teaching has never been on solid footing as a profession. A professional is a recognized expert, an authority within a particular field. Any field that attains professional status needs at least these three ingredients: specialized knowledge and skills; specialized training; and a system of formal certification, marking mastery of the skill set, completion of the training, and membership in the profession. Without these three ingredients, the professional’s expertise would have no recognizable validity; she would be indistinguishable from a snake-oil salesman. (There are other characteristics of professions that grow naturally out of these three, but these are the essential ingredients.)</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Teaching has, for about a hundred years, possessed at least the semblance of all three elements—but only the semblance. There are tests required for teacher certification, but the tests are extremely easy; most well-educated non-teachers could pass them. There is training, but the curriculum and content vary wildly from one training program to another; so, though it may be specialized, it is not specialized in any particular way. The training is also brief, often undemanding, and of dubious practical value to teachers; and you don’t actually need to complete it to begin teaching. Teaching—or good teaching, at least—requires plenty of specialized skills and knowledge, but there’s not much agreement as to what those skills and knowledge are, and no one actually thinks that all or even most teachers possess them.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><a name='more'></a><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>The Training Problem</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">The problem goes in two directions. One begins with training: teachers have no common skill-set, because teacher training is minimal and, in most programs, focused on psychology and pedagogical theory, rather than on practical skills. Both psychology and pedagogical theory are subject to continuous revision, so training in them does not produce a consistent, reliable knowledge set. Also, because those fields don’t have direct, practical application, they lead to knowledge, but not to demonstrable expertise. Teachers who seem to be experts at teaching—that is, at interacting with and instructing children—get that way through instinct and job experience, not through formal training</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Teacher subject-area training is also weak. The history of graduate education departments—in particular their own parallel quest for legitimacy as academic departments—has lead towards profession-specific knowledge and therefore away from subject-area knowledge; but the lack of strong, consistent subject-area knowledge among teachers has done nothing to help either their public image or their ability to teach effectively. In fact, subject-area knowledge can and should be part of a teacher’s professional expertise; it forms the most explicit basis of her authority in the classroom, and it ought to accord her authority outside of the classroom as well. A good subject-area teacher is someone we can look to for answers to questions in her field, whether we’re adults or children. If my friends have a question about math, for example, they usually ask me, because I’m a math teacher. The fact that they do accords me authority; it makes my profession (or would-be-profession) a source of personal status and worth, as a profession ought to be.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">The ascendance of standardized testing has not helped the situation. With the narrowing of instruction to align with state standards, teachers (like their students) have become specialists in content-area knowledge that is jumbled, disconnected and sometimes lacking in relevance outside the peculiarities of their state curriculum. Any ninth grade math teacher in New York State can tell you how to simplify rational expressions, but few of them can tell you what the purpose of rational expressions is, what they describe, why we care about them, or how they relate to the rest of mathematics. A New York State writing teacher can list the five purposes of writing (explain, describe, narrate, persuade, or express feelings) and tell you how to identify each (if you couldn’t figure it out on your own) but does this knowledge have any external validity? Could Philip Roth or Toni Morrison list the five purposes of writing? Could E. B. White or Virginia Woolf have done so?</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Ideally, though, the teacher’s subject-area knowledge is not only broad, cohesive, and relevant, it’s also profession-specific. In my years as a math teacher, I’ve learned a lot about math that I didn’t know going in. Some of that was the kind of procedural and topical knowledge that an engineer, physicist, or mathematician might need to know. Much of it, however, was more peculiar to teaching: knowledge about how different mathematical procedures can be described, explained, and interpreted, how they can be illustrated visually, narratively, or through interaction with physical objects, and how they can be exercised through a wide variety of problems. That knowledge is detailed and rich, and it does not follow automatically from general knowledge of procedures and concepts.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>The Public Experience Problem</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">I said the problem goes in two directions, and the other direction begins with the project of education itself. If your doctor sets your broken limb or biopsies that weird spot on your back, you don’t come away thinking you know how to set a limb or biopsy a mole. If your electrician comes by to rewire a power outlet, you don’t decide now you know how to wire a power-outlet. The subject of all these procedures is not you—it’s your arm, or your mole, or your outlet, but it’s not you yourself—so having them done doesn’t teach you to do them. But the subject of education is the person himself, his mind, his character; and therefore being educated gives one strong opinions on how education should be done; and to make matters worse <i>everybody</i> goes to school. The result is that you’d be hard pressed to find an adult in America who doesn’t think he has some insight into how kids should be taught. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">And he does. Anyone who’s been to school has valid insight into how education works and how it might be done better. That knowledge is incomplete—it’s based on the experiences of a single individual, attending a handful of schools, and it’s filtered through the distorting lens of childhood memory—but it’s valid knowledge, and the would-be teaching profession will get nowhere if it seeks to establish its legitimacy by disparaging that knowledge. If the teacher is to be accepted as an expert, it will be by developing an understanding of her field coherent enough to incorporate the many conflicting educational philosophies held by the public, and by wielding that expertise with humility and respect for parents’ educational beliefs; unlikely as the former requirement sounds in the current polarized atmosphere, I do believe it’s possible.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">These two forces—the inadequacy of teacher training and the inherent validity of lay knowledge in the field of education—have left the teaching profession stranded in limbo, credited with good intentions, accused of incompetence, saddled with massive responsibility, and granted little or no authority over its field. The profession has often responded defensively—as seen, for example, in the efforts during the 1970s and '80s to invalidate all forms of parental instruction, especially in literacy, through a supposed, but unconvincing monopoly on pedagogical knowledge; as seen again in the rigid anti-reformist positions that the teachers’ unions took during the late 90s and early 2000s; as observed last post in <a href="http://edcommentary.blogspot.com/2011/08/psychoanalyzing-politics-of-teaching.html#main">Ms. Weingarten’s slightly paranoid comment on the effort to reduce homework loads</a>. All of these reactions have been misguided, of course, in that they have failed to address the fundamental issue: the lack of any consistent body of useful, established knowledge among teachers. They are attempts to gain the status of professionals without the actual expertise, and they have resulted, ironically, in a worsening of teachers’ public image and a more adamant denial of their professional authority.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">The lack of consistent expertise or acknowledged authority among teachers has effects far beyond the frustration it causes teachers themselves. In my next post, I will argue that the dubious professional status of teachers impedes the entire project of education reform in America.</div>Max Beanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09411037394257752336noreply@blogger.com12tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2747343572713674312.post-34506922109773220322011-08-12T21:53:00.000-07:002011-08-13T08:28:07.287-07:00The Morals We Want and the Morals We Have<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh-O6GljhJQHydiulS1aFmK_d4LkwmjIT9vh8LilMk4Q8n8egYr1FqwL-o9qkL_oTTwaS3jwlPe6_kQItJaUo7jKetM71-iHuBGUlJrfUG4AXCGZ9hxV-qgOYs3F5aYAG67PJZN7aDXTA4/s1600/virtues.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="244" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh-O6GljhJQHydiulS1aFmK_d4LkwmjIT9vh8LilMk4Q8n8egYr1FqwL-o9qkL_oTTwaS3jwlPe6_kQItJaUo7jKetM71-iHuBGUlJrfUG4AXCGZ9hxV-qgOYs3F5aYAG67PJZN7aDXTA4/s400/virtues.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The Cardinal Virtues: Temperance, Prudence, Fortitude, and Justice</td></tr>
</tbody></table><div class="MsoNormal">A comment on <a href="http://edcommentary.blogspot.com/2011/08/my-series-on-fraught-status-of-teaching.html#main">my last post</a> brought up some questions that I want to address publicly. Discussing the Archbishop of Canterbury’s comments to the House of Lords on the need for better moral education in British schools, one of my readers had this to say: <br />
<blockquote>The ‘civic excellence’ [the Archbishop] wants is a collective virtue, not just an individual one. To achieve it, the British would not only have to educate their poor in values, they would have to look seriously at the values of the society, including those that tolerate economic deprivation and isolation.</blockquote>I agree with that assessment, and I think it raises an interesting issue that <a href="http://edcommentary.blogspot.com/2011/07/college-for-all-dissected-part-2.html#comments">another commenter on this blog has been trying to raise in another thread</a> and which I have been a little slow to hear: namely, the dissonance between the morals we want to teach to kids and the morals reflected by the society as a whole. <br />
<div class="MsoNormal"><br />
<a name='more'></a>The problem is both pressing and troublesome. It’s troublesome because addressing it entails a broad critique of our society’s moral values, a project which falls well outside the scope of this blog and which is nearly impossible to pursue without descending into highly contentious terrain. It is pressing for a closely related reason: because the dwindling of shared mores has led many observers and educators—from the Archbishop of Canterbury, to <a href="http://edcommentary.blogspot.com/p/no-excuses-charter-movement.html">the leaders of the No-Excuses movement</a>, to Ted Sizer and his comrades in the neo-progressive Essential Schools movement—to advocate stronger moral education in the schools.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">To paint in broad, cursory strokes, then: we want to teach children the values of discipline, cooperation, respect, responsibility, etc. but the society does not seem to hold those values. We do not value or practice discipline: think of the quick fixes with which we try to improve our schools, the sudden, miraculous routes to wealth depicted in media and advertising—winning the lottery, gaming the stock-market, starting a multi-billion-dollar company in your basement. We discourage cooperation: self-interest and competition are the society’s watchwords. We do not practice respect: media and advertising are brash, rude, vulgar, and lurid; indeed, they frequently aim to offend, to lambast precisely what was once held sacred; one in twenty people will stand up to give an older person a seat on the subway; it is unclear what, if anything, we venerate. We are irresponsible: our government is in massive debt to other nations, as is our citizenry to its credit-card companies; we eat to excess, and obesity is rampant; we use resources with little concern for the limits of their supply. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">I’ve probably given people plenty to argue with in that last paragraph, but the specifics are not the point. I think anyone whose view of morality is not wholly relativistic will agree that the society has little in the way of a shared moral code. To teach morals in an amoral country is difficult, but we do it, presumably, because we dream of a more moral society—one, for example, in which disaffected mobs of teenagers don’t set fire to their own neighborhoods in our nations’ capitals. But we must keep in mind the danger of hypocrisy, the precariousness of the project: we’re trying to teach our children to be the upstanding citizens that we ourselves—on the aggregate, if not individually—are not. We’re asking them to be, not merely better than they are, but better than the world they see around them. It’s a lot to ask—especially when we ask it most loudly and most repeatedly of those who have been offered the fewest opportunities and suffered the greatest handicaps at the youngest ages.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Maybe that doesn’t change much: we will still teach moral values, we will still hope that children will imbibe them. We do what we can, of course. When we think about how to teach those values, however, an awareness of their absence in the society at large will aid us; it will allow us to present them in a way that is not, as the commenter quoted above puts it, condescending and to avoid the appearance of hypocrisy that might otherwise undermine our efforts.</div></div>Max Beanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09411037394257752336noreply@blogger.com10tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2747343572713674312.post-86695284239661350772011-08-11T13:45:00.000-07:002011-08-13T08:15:58.916-07:00Moral Education, the London Riots, and the Entanglement of Economics and Schooling<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg8MX0Dfe2oaiusntUbxuStpwnLYZxbKotPOD0JqnrVVcqiAW_CRwOzxw45YCi-ILbLXNNlIKsyEG4B2ftOJ_C-4fPT6LH2dkqg3x1OOISLztvCwEeX0J28T7TFnClFx5x69Gbff6bUkc4/s1600/london-burning.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="267" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg8MX0Dfe2oaiusntUbxuStpwnLYZxbKotPOD0JqnrVVcqiAW_CRwOzxw45YCi-ILbLXNNlIKsyEG4B2ftOJ_C-4fPT6LH2dkqg3x1OOISLztvCwEeX0J28T7TFnClFx5x69Gbff6bUkc4/s400/london-burning.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><div class="MsoNormal"> My series on the fraught status of the teaching profession is still unfinished, but I wanted to put up a quick post on another topic. <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/blog/2011/aug/11/uk-riots-day-five-commons-debate-live#block-21">The Guardian’s political blog reported yesterday, on comments by Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, on the role that schools should take in the long-term response to the riots</a> (and, inevitably in such discussions, the role that schools have taken in permitting the riots to occur).</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><blockquote><div class="MsoNormal">Williams, speaking in the House of Lords, said:</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.25in;">There is nothing to romanticise and there is nothing to condone in the behaviour that has spread across our streets. This is indeed criminality – criminality pure and simple."</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">For Williams, the cure for further outbreaks could only be found in the long-term and in the reorientation of schools towards teaching virtues rather than skills:</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.25in;">Over the last two decades, our educational philosophy at every level has been more and more dominated by an instrumentalist model; less and less concerned with a building of virtue, character and citizenship — 'civic excellence' as we might say. And a good educational system in a healthy society is one that builds character, that builds virtue.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.25in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.25in;">Character involves… a deepened sense of empathy with others, a deepened sense of our involvement together in a social project in which we all have to participate.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.25in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.25in;">Are we prepared to think not only about discipline in classrooms, but also about the content and ethos of our educational institutions — asking can we once again build a society which takes seriously the task of educating citizens, not consumers, not cogs in an economic system, but citizens.</div></blockquote><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">The nice thing about having a state church, I guess, is that there’s a voice for old fashioned ideas of morality and spiritual health in public debates. It says something about the state of a society, though, when the strongest public advocate for humanism is the church. I’m deeply sympathetic to Williams’s desire to view people in more than purely economic terms: citizenship is a far more worthy goal for education than consumerhood. Williams’s exclusive focus on character, however, ignores obvious economic factors that must play a major role in what’s going on in England right now. Viewed in the most cynical terms, his ideas of virtue and character appear to be tools for keeping the downtrodden from acting out: religion as the opiate of the masses.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
<a name='more'></a>I’m not inclined to view Williams’s arguments cynically. (I rarely view others’ arguments cynically. The accusation of insincerity is too often a means of ignoring viewpoints that differ from our own. It assumes that everyone believes what we believe, that those who espouse other views are simply lying. That’s a nice way to avoid engaging in real conversation.) Still, there’s a real narrowness to his perspective, and it’s a narrowness that’s politically convenient. People do not suddenly take to the streets, looting and burning, simply because they haven’t learned good manners or good moral character. Economic and social conditions must be a major factor in these riots, and looking to schools to fix the situation avoids addressing deep structural issues in the society. It assumes that oppression, in the broadest terms, either does not exist or should not matter.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">This discussion has a close parallel in American education. Many on the left (Barbara Ehrenreich is a prominent example) view the emphasis on <a href="http://edcommentary.blogspot.com/search/label/moral%20education">moral education and character-building</a> at KIPP and other <a href="http://edcommentary.blogspot.com/p/no-excuses-charter-movement.html#main">No-Excuses schools</a> as an attempt to brainwash the poor into not complaining about it. The rhetoric of hard work and discipline in the name of college attendance and upward mobility, they argue, provides a palliative of false hopes and an illusion that one’s successes and, more importantly, failures are one’s own doing. A reader of this blog <a href="http://edcommentary.blogspot.com/2011/07/college-for-all-dissected-part-2.html#comments">recently made a similar critique</a> of <a href="http://edcommentary.blogspot.com/2011/07/college-for-all-dissected-part-2.html#morality-and-citizenship">my own arguments in favor of moral and civic education</a> in <a href="http://edcommentary.blogspot.com/2011/06/unrealistic-expectations-false-promise.html#main">my series on “College for All.”</a> </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">I know lots of people in the No-Excuses movement—school founders, school directors, teachers, and students—and I’ve never met anyone who’s out to brainwash anyone into suffering injustice quietly. Indeed, I’ve watched school directors talk explicitly to students about the disadvantages they face as poor, minority, inner-city students. It’s true, however, that, hard as No-Excuses educators work to overcome the achievement gap, I’ve never seen one of them talk honestly to students about the magnitude of those disadvantages. The reason is obvious: it would simply be too discouraging. That reality underscores the complex nature of the problem and the difficult position in which the inner-city educator finds herself.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Educators are educators; they do what they can, within the context of the school and the classroom, to give kids the tools to live better lives. That’s what they ought to be doing. Those who feel inclined to call that project futile or to question the purity of their motivations should remember that it is a great deal easier to think about what should be done than to actually do something. It is important to keep in mind, however, that inner-city educators work within the context of a deeply troubled society, whose ills are neither the fault of the schools nor within their power to mend.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">We must keep the two conversations separate: we cannot risk reducing the problems of the society to the problems of the school, but neither can we risk reducing the problems of the school to the problems of society. The two are inextricably connected, but they are not the same, and if we conflate them, we will not think clearly about either.</div>Max Beanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09411037394257752336noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2747343572713674312.post-79054104713517220142011-08-03T14:36:00.000-07:002011-08-23T01:33:35.095-07:00Psychoanalyzing the Politics of Teaching (part 2): the Battle over Autonomy<div class="MsoNormal">[this is the second on a series of posts on the status of the teaching profession in American culture, the causes and implications of that status. <a href="http://edcommentary.blogspot.com/2011/07/teachers-unions.html#main">Read part 1 here</a>.]</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgKMG-oAFj7furH5JiU7w_RTjAmZNU0IJIe2BPgej7myG0Wc8d5SFfqIOZmJHNNqrQr8-E8ZrAXR0VYGYEJcPl2h3bhOwXl_IGRC4602nWUFATB0iX6odZqDUyuqatanGb9p2roBtw5ofM/s1600/weingarten.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="274" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgKMG-oAFj7furH5JiU7w_RTjAmZNU0IJIe2BPgej7myG0Wc8d5SFfqIOZmJHNNqrQr8-E8ZrAXR0VYGYEJcPl2h3bhOwXl_IGRC4602nWUFATB0iX6odZqDUyuqatanGb9p2roBtw5ofM/s320/weingarten.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Randi Weingarten, in 2010</i></td></tr>
</tbody></table>A couple months ago, I read <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/16/education/16homework.html#article">an article in The Times about a movement in a number of American schools and school districts to reduce homework loads</a>, through policies that limit the amount of homework per night or designate certain holidays as homework-free. The most interesting thing in the article was only incidentally connected to homework:</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in;">Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, views policies dictating how to do homework as “taking something that should be professional practice and making it into an assembly-line process.”</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">—i.e. don’t tell us how to do our job. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">One might fairly reply: are we to have no say over what happens in our schools? If parents feel that homework loads have spiraled out of control, shall they have no recourse? After all, if our electrician starts putting dimmer-switches on every fixture in the house, we are perfectly entitled to tell her we don’t want dimmer-switches; and if our lawyer wants us to plead the fifth, we’re entitled to insist on taking the stand. Professional status is not a talisman against meddling, it’s simply a mark of expertise—or it’s supposed to be.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><a name='more'></a><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">What struck me about Weingarten’s comment on the homework issue was how knee-jerk it sounded, how much it smacked of raw nerves. After all, we’ve heard this rhetoric from the union before: <br />
<br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhqWqIgPvqZQ8oOk91gD3FFHZxcvgIJKIEGJEnkid_NRX22AzcPcm8xj2_3gE5S3MkJIf5sHFyOreoDlgKCIyfMn6aa0toKE4XsNa87AnG89HjT535PpmAgFM75T_x-gXXbcHJhyspv9bY/s1600/albert_shanker_1968_city-hall.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="216" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhqWqIgPvqZQ8oOk91gD3FFHZxcvgIJKIEGJEnkid_NRX22AzcPcm8xj2_3gE5S3MkJIf5sHFyOreoDlgKCIyfMn6aa0toKE4XsNa87AnG89HjT535PpmAgFM75T_x-gXXbcHJhyspv9bY/s320/albert_shanker_1968_city-hall.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;" width="320"><i>Albert Shanker (center) and the United Federation of Teachers striking at City Hall in New York City in 1968, at one of the most politically divisive moments in the history of American teachers' unions</i></td></tr>
</tbody></table></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.25in;">“The biggest frustration for teachers in New York City is the Bloomberg administration's total disregard for their professional judgment and creativity. The mayor and chancellor must abandon their one-size-fits-all, top-down management style that treats teachers like assembly-line workers and children like widgets.”</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.25in;">-<a href="http://www.usatoday.com/news/opinion/editorials/2006-04-12-oppose-education_x.htm">Weingarten, in a USA Today Op-Ed, April, 2006</a> </div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.25in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.25in;">“Too often, testing has replaced instruction; data has replaced professional judgment;… and so-called leadership has replaced teacher professionalism.”</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.25in;">-<a href="http://www.edwize.org/the-teacher-voice-in-data-driven-accountability">Weingarten, writing for none other than eduwonk (the blog that inspired this whole sires), in August, 2007</a> </div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.25in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.25in;">"This (the current) system makes sense if you think of the student as an inanimate object going through an assembly line - if you view the schools as a factory in which teachers are the workers and the students are inanimate objects being worked on."</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.25in;">-<a href="http://www.chron.com/CDA/archives/archive.mpl/1988_554567/education-leader-decries-assembly-line-mentality.html">Albert Shanker, president of the AFT from 1974 to 1997, at the Union summit in August of 1988</a> </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Evidently, the union leadership feels that teacher autonomy is under attack and has felt that way for decades. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">This anxiety over autonomy is more central to the culture and politics of teaching than is usually recognized. Take high-stakes testing, for example. We’re so used to thinking in economic terms, that we assume that the unions’ opposition to tying salaries, bonuses, and teacher evaluations to test scores is about job security; but teachers’ unions were against high-stakes testing well before their own financial interests became involved. Tying their financial interests to the test results just adds injury to insult, but it’s the insult that smarts.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">When teachers talk about the issue, their arguments are usually about pedagogy: “The excessive emphasis on testing and test-prep has harmed efforts to provide students with a well-rounded education and help them develop critical-thinking skills…,” writes Weingarten, <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/randi-weingarten/are-we-testing-too-much_b_876107.html#blog_author_info">in a recent Huffington Post article</a>. She’s right, but it’s what comes after that ellipsis that really goes to the heart of the matter: “…and [that excessive emphasis] has in many ways de-professionalized teaching.”</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Why “de-professionalized”? There’s nothing hysterical about that concern. The high-stakes test takes from the teacher a responsibility that is traditionally central to her job: that of assessing her students, of assigning grades, of determining the criteria of success. The implications are vast. No longer is the teacher the repository of knowledge; she is now only the transmitter, and an imperfect one, for the accuracy and validity of her knowledge is subject to the judgment of the exam. Her authority is gone, her status reduced from that of expert to that of laborer. No wonder she needs a union.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Even the arguments over how and when teachers can be fired reveal interesting subtleties in the light of the struggle for autonomy. <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/06/education/06oneducation.html#article">Montgomery County, Maryland, has a teacher-evaluation program based entirely on observations by principals and other teachers</a>. In the eleven years since its inception, the program has led to the dismissal of 40 times the number of teachers fired under the old system in the ten years prior to the program’s inception. Yet, despite the obvious reduction in job security, teachers like the program. The key element, according to both the superintendent and the head of the local teachers’ union, is trust. Montgomery recently turned down $12 million in federal Race to the Top funding, because to get the money, they would have had to include test-scores in teacher evaluations. Apparently, the Montgomery County Public Schools deserve their teachers’ union’s trust; what they offer in exchange is something even more important: respect.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"></div><div class="MsoNormal">Actually, that respect is really just another kind of trust. The Montgomery teachers’ union trusts the board of ed. to uphold their end of a bargain; that’s trust in the moral sense: the assumption of honest dealings and good intentions. The board of ed offers the teachers that kind of trust as well, but that’s trivial—plenty of people believe in teachers’ good intentions; what they don’t believe in is teachers’ expertise. By insisting that evaluations be based on observation and peer review rather than the simplistic and unreliable dipstick of a state exam, the Montgomery system acknowledges the complexity and subtlety of the teacher’s job. The implication is that a teacher’s performance cannot be judged by anyone but other educators and that to measure it is a complex process, requiring rich, qualitative data. This is the nature of expertise, that it can be judged only by experts; and this is why expertise accords autonomy—because none but an expert can tell an expert how to do her job. The Montgomery board of ed has gone even further: they have demonstrated that the recognition of teacher expertise is worth more to them than twelve million dollars.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">The situation in Montgomery County reveals a lot about what teachers really want: not job security (they’re getting less of it) and not money (I’m not saying they don’t want money, but that $12 million could have gone straight into teacher bonuses, and it still wasn’t worth taking it) but recognition as experts in their field—in other words, professional status. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><a href="http://edcommentary.blogspot.com/2011/08/psychoanalyzing-politics-of-teaching_18.html">To be continued.</a></div>Max Beanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09411037394257752336noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2747343572713674312.post-40197581621715620912011-07-29T12:09:00.000-07:002011-08-03T17:05:13.460-07:00Psychoanalyzing the Politics of Teaching (part 1)<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjK9-UsOOjVOfVSAIPCXJqQaJ-fpna7oAmLUtizh73u0ERaE4sK-X3sOrVQMS-RTq095VGBnjAftPU1sci4eUQGlTjjV8BXkYKq9gAvqqx-WYVHM3CalyAS-NTAPuOSfj8XR9HqpfPxlDw/s1600/teacherdoctorplumber.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjK9-UsOOjVOfVSAIPCXJqQaJ-fpna7oAmLUtizh73u0ERaE4sK-X3sOrVQMS-RTq095VGBnjAftPU1sci4eUQGlTjjV8BXkYKq9gAvqqx-WYVHM3CalyAS-NTAPuOSfj8XR9HqpfPxlDw/s640/teacherdoctorplumber.jpg" width="360" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;" width="225">"Struggling for Legitimacy"<br />
Original artwork by <a href="http://www.tavetgillson.com/">Tavet Rubel</a>, created for <a href="http://edcommentary.blogspot.com/">Dewey to Delpit</a></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><br />
</td></tr>
</tbody></table><div class="MsoNormal">Two weeks ago, <a href="http://www.eduwonk.com/2011/07/why-not-here.html">Andrew Rotherham posted a piece about teachers’ unions on Eduwonk</a>. The inspiration for the piece was <a href="http://www.blogger.com/">a <i>Times</i> story about a collaboration between GM and the United Auto Workers union on the development of a new, domestically-produced sub-compact car</a>. Rotherham acknowledges that there are some examples of similar union-management collaboration in education, but he thinks that conditions in the public sector do not create the same incentives for collaboration:<br />
<blockquote>I don’t want to imply that teachers’ union leaders are not committed to the success of public education. But… the incentives around success are different because private firms can go out of business while public sector ones generally do not (especially public education, which is an essential service).</blockquote>He’s right, of course—it’s clear from the <i>Times</i> article that the UAW’s involvement in the collaboration was driven by concerns about the future of American domestic automobile manufacturing, concerns that have no parallel in education—but I think Rotherham is looking for the wrong kind of explanation.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Whichever side you’re listening to, and whomever you blame for the problem, it’s hard to deny that relations between teachers’ unions and the state and local governments with whom they are in contract are uncommonly ugly these days. It’s worth asking why that’s happening; and it’s hard to argue with a conclusion as reasonable and open-ended as Rotherham’s:<br />
<blockquote>...there are real differences between public sector and private sector unions and their various incentives and… we had better pay attention to them in our industry and think about how to navigate the various challenges public education faces with that in mind.</blockquote>But whatever the complexities of public-sector incentives, I don’t think incentives are the heart of the problem. Economic incentives have never been primary motivators for teachers, and despite all the talk about merit-based pay and strategic firings, I suspect they never will. (I’m not arguing that financial interests don’t play a role in union decision-making; I’m just arguing that it’s a secondary role.)</div><div class="MsoNormal"><a name='more'></a><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">I don’t think anyone out there—or hardly anyone—actually thinks teachers are in it for the money. So, why are we so quick to assume that their unions are in it for the money—or at least for the self-interest: the salary, the job security, the long vacations, etc.? Well, because that’s what labor unions do: they look out for the financial interests of their constituents; and teachers unions don’t seem to act any differently. At the same time, there’s something weird about it: why would a coalition of people most of whom are deeply committed to their students base its decisions on the self-interests of its members? More to the point, why does a professional group whose primary motivation is an intrinsic concern for the products of its labor even <i>need</i> a union?</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">What I want to suggest is that teachers’ unions’ primary purpose today is the same for which the unions were created a hundred years ago: to legitimize teaching as a profession. That goal has never been obtained, and despite many apparent improvements in the status and cultural image of teachers, we are, in the most important senses, no closer to being professionals today than we were a hundred years ago. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">A labor union is an odd way to try to legitimize a profession, of course. After all, labor is what you are if you’re not a professional. Indeed, the teachers’ unions are often faulted on the grounds that they bargain for policies that are more labor-like than professional, e.g. regulations limiting teachers’ working hours: labor leaves at the end of the day; professionals leave when the job is done.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">The contradiction in that position—protecting labor rights through collective bargaining while fighting for professional status—is indicative of the strange and uncomfortable position in which teachers find themselves: they’re professionals without a profession, experts without an identifiable expertise. Society does not put stock in teachers’ knowledge: it accords them no authority and does not seek their advice on matters relating to their field. When politicians want to improve schools, they hire outside consultants. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">It’s never worth faulting society; society is the amoral aggregate. There are compelling reasons why teachers’ expertise is not widely valued. In <a href="http://edcommentary.blogspot.com/2011/08/psychoanalyzing-politics-of-teaching.html#main">my next post two posts</a>, I will explore the nature and causes of teachers’ ambiguous professional status and argue that it is a powerful lens for understanding the state of education in America.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><a href="http://edcommentary.blogspot.com/2011/08/psychoanalyzing-politics-of-teaching.html#main">read the next post in this series</a>.<br />
</div>Max Beanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09411037394257752336noreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2747343572713674312.post-83031087734335081112011-07-21T09:01:00.000-07:002011-07-21T09:05:21.513-07:00Low Stakes Testing<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <o:OfficeDocumentSettings> <o:AllowPNG/> </o:OfficeDocumentSettings> </xml><![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:WordDocument> <w:View>Normal</w:View> <w:Zoom>0</w:Zoom> <w:TrackMoves/> <w:TrackFormatting/> <w:PunctuationKerning/> <w:ValidateAgainstSchemas/> <w:SaveIfXMLInvalid>false</w:SaveIfXMLInvalid> <w:IgnoreMixedContent>false</w:IgnoreMixedContent> <w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText>false</w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText> <w:DoNotPromoteQF/> <w:LidThemeOther>EN-US</w:LidThemeOther> <w:LidThemeAsian>ZH-CN</w:LidThemeAsian> <w:LidThemeComplexScript>X-NONE</w:LidThemeComplexScript> <w:Compatibility> <w:BreakWrappedTables/> <w:SnapToGridInCell/> <w:WrapTextWithPunct/> <w:UseAsianBreakRules/> <w:DontGrowAutofit/> <w:SplitPgBreakAndParaMark/> <w:EnableOpenTypeKerning/> <w:DontFlipMirrorIndents/> <w:OverrideTableStyleHps/> <w:UseFELayout/> </w:Compatibility> <m:mathPr> <m:mathFont m:val="Cambria Math"/> <m:brkBin m:val="before"/> <m:brkBinSub m:val="--"/> <m:smallFrac m:val="off"/> <m:dispDef/> <m:lMargin m:val="0"/> <m:rMargin m:val="0"/> <m:defJc m:val="centerGroup"/> <m:wrapIndent m:val="1440"/> <m:intLim m:val="subSup"/> <m:naryLim m:val="undOvr"/> </m:mathPr></w:WordDocument> </xml><![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:LatentStyles DefLockedState="false" DefUnhideWhenUsed="true"
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</style> <![endif]--> <div class="MsoNormal"><a href="http://www.danagoldstein.net/"><u>Dana Goldstein</u></a> had an interesting post a couple weeks ago (I move at a slower pace than the rest of the world) in The Nation’s group blog. (I recommend <a href="http://www.thenation.com/blog/161828/risks-and-potential-rewards-pre-k-testing#article-body">reading it</a>.) The post is about standardized testing for preschoolers:</div><blockquote><div class="MsoNormal">With new evidence of standardized test score-inflation and straightforward adult cheating on K-12 tests in <a href="http://www.ajc.com/news/atlanta/investigation-into-aps-cheating-1001375.html">Atlanta</a>, <a href="http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2011/03/29/michelle-rhees-cheating-scandal-school-test-score-irregularities.html">Washington, DC</a>, and <a href="http://www.usatoday.com/news/education/2011-03-06-school-testing_N.htm">across the country</a>, you’d think it would be exactly the wrong time for the Obama administration to <a href="http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/campaign-k-12/2011/07/_to_compete_states_must.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+CampaignK-12+%28Education+Week+Blog%3A+Politics+K-12%29">commit $500 million</a> to developing additional state tests for a totally new population of children: pre-schoolers.</div></blockquote><div class="MsoNormal">But Dana says she’s “cautiously enthusiastic” about the new focus on preschool testing, because </div><blockquote><div class="MsoNormal">...the model the administration has in mind for pre-school assessment is low-stakes for individual teachers and students and measures not only academic performance but also children’s social, emotional, physical and artistic readiness for kindergarten.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><a name='more'></a><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Maryland has perhaps the most advanced pre-K assessment tool in the country, and one the Department of Education is pointing to as an example. The state’s “<a href="http://www.msde.maryland.gov/NR/rdonlyres/BCFF0F0E-33E5-48DA-8F11-28CF333816C2/27833/GettingReady_ExSumm20102011.pdf">Model for School Readiness</a>” requires incoming kindergarteners to be assessed in seven “domains of learning”: language and literacy, mathematical thinking, scientific thinking, social studies, the arts, physical development and social and personal development. Teachers perform the assessment by looking at a child’s drawings and writing, watching the child attempt to identify letters and numbers, and observing the child playing and interacting with both peers and adults.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">The purpose of the system is to improve instruction for kids, not to reward or punish individual educators. “Kindergarten teachers use the findings to inform classroom instruction, provide appropriate support for individual students, and promote better communication with parents about children’s abilities,” Maryland <a href="http://www.msde.maryland.gov/NR/rdonlyres/BCFF0F0E-33E5-48DA-8F11-28CF333816C2/27833/GettingReady_ExSumm20102011.pdf">reports</a>. “Local school systems use the findings to guide professional development opportunities for teachers, inform strategic planning, target resources, and successfully help children make the transition from early childhood to school.”</div></blockquote><div class="MsoNormal">I’m reminded of last week’s <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/10/opinion/sunday/l10dialogue.html">debate in the “Sunday Dialogue” section of the Times</a>, between Diane Ravitch and several well-informed readers (most of them were education historians and the like), who weighed in via letters to the editor. Ravitch’s position, which she stated in <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/01/opinion/01ravitch.html"><u>the op-ed that started the whole debate</u></a>, and has stated previously in other venues, is that testing is good, but “high-stakes” testing (i.e. testing whose results are attached to teacher bonuses and firings) is bad. I’ve spoken to at least one reader who wondered what Ms. Ravitch wants us to do with the test data, if not hold teachers and principals accountable for the results. Well, here’s your answer, in action.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">The thing to notice about the Maryland system is that it’s oriented not towards competition but towards collaboration. The influence of economic logic and business-world strategies on education is strong right now, and these viewpoints bring with them a conception of motivation that is based almost exclusively on incentives and competition. I don’t think economic incentives and competition have ever been significant or effective motivators for teachers and principals—and, though they can work for students, they are not the only and probably not the most effective forms of student motivation. More on this line of inquiry in future posts.</div>Max Beanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09411037394257752336noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2747343572713674312.post-25864845607881719072011-07-13T15:36:00.000-07:002011-08-11T13:47:22.410-07:00"College for All" dissected (part 2)<div class="MsoNormal">This is the third in a series of posts critiquing the "college for all" rhetoric of the contemporary reform movement. If you're just tuning in, I recommend reading from <a href="http://edcommentary.blogspot.com/2011/06/unrealistic-expectations-false-promise.html">the first post in the trilogy</a>. If you're in a hurry, I encourage you at least to read <a href="http://edcommentary.blogspot.com/2011/07/college-for-all-dissected-part-1.html">last week's post</a>.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
<br />
</div><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiCb0855WiMIvge-9ak0RxVk1J_ytGa5WWCncg1-1sJ0VGiECuezsPkgUWah_rKLQx91Y8RVn__MMtt_NcVoXDiXRLGhkBSb6MA9AJM29r_3oe4aHS9MiGIMwpf9JnEwAotd2zfAWiBqJI/s1600/vocational-tracking.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear:right; float:right; margin-left:1em; margin-bottom:1em"><img border="0" height="400" width="305" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiCb0855WiMIvge-9ak0RxVk1J_ytGa5WWCncg1-1sJ0VGiECuezsPkgUWah_rKLQx91Y8RVn__MMtt_NcVoXDiXRLGhkBSb6MA9AJM29r_3oe4aHS9MiGIMwpf9JnEwAotd2zfAWiBqJI/s400/vocational-tracking.jpg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Original artwork by <a href="http://www.parismancini.net">Paris Mancini</a>,<br />
created for Dewey to Delpit</td></tr>
</tbody></table><div class="MsoNormal"><b>Uniform Expectations</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">The avoidance of the realities of student achievement constitutes a peculiar reworking of the concept of high expectations. Any real teacher who has genuinely high expectations for his students knows that what is exceptional and praise-worthy in one student is run of the mill for another; and what is exceptional and praise-worthy for the other will be unobtainable for the first. Thus, real teachers would never hold all students to identical standards. Yet, policymakers’ simultaneous adherence to the rhetoric of egalitarianism and that of high expectations has led to precisely these sorts of identical standards. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">“College for all” is the ultimate manifestation of this uniformity of expectations, but the effects trickle down into the lower grades, in the form of state—and soon, national—standards, for each grade and each subject. Let me be clear: there’s a strong argument to be made for a consistent national curriculum, but the requirement that all students, homeless and affluent alike, be proficient in precisely the same skills in each grade constitutes a dangerous obliviousness to individual variation; the result is that teachers in schools serving disadvantaged students are forced to race through large swaths of material, relying heavily on memorization and sacrificing both comprehension and retention (see my post on <a href="http://edcommentary.blogspot.com/2010/12/addendum-to-new-age-of-testing.html">rote instruction and memorization in impoverished neighborhoods</a>).</div><div class="MsoNormal"><a name='more'></a><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">For middle-class parents, one of the primary purposes of education is intellectual development—and the university is viewed as the final intellectual training-ground for young minds; but for many low-income children, real intellectual engagement is sacrificed in the pursuit of college. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>Doing and Thinking</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Different expectations for different students does not mean low expectations; in fact, it need not even imply unequal expectations. Students who struggle in purely academic classes may excel in other types of classes that are no less rigorous, stimulating, or useful. Alternative tracking raises questions of equity, however, when the majority of students from particular demographic groups arrive at school better prepared for some tracks than for others.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">In other words, vocational tracking in high school poses social justice problems only because we have failed to create equal opportunity at the primary school level. If academic achievement among American thirteen-year-olds were not so closely correlated with economic and ethnic background, then we could sort high-school students into vocational tracks and purely academic tracks, confident that these would be filled according to ability and interest, not according to class and race. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Considerations of equity and social justice, compelling as they are, are poor reasons to abandon vocational ed; to do so is to deprive students of valuable alternative routes to economic stability and intellectual stimulation—and, perhaps, to college as well. Many jobs that do not require a college degree (plumber, auto mechanic, welder, etc.) pay salaries that are sufficient to support a family. What’s more, many students who struggle with academics engage more readily with instruction that’s grounded in practical applications; as Dana Goldstein’s article reveals, practical training can be an in-road to rigorous academic study, and ultimately a route to college educatin.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">So why does vocational tracking have such an ugly stigma attached? In a recent blog post, <a href="http://mikerosebooks.blogspot.com/2011/06/untangling-postsecondary-debate.html">Mike Rose explains</a> the cultural bias at work here:</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in;">The comprehensive high school and curriculum tracking was an early twentieth century response to the rapid increase of working class and immigrant children in urban centers, and separate academic, general, and vocational courses of study seemed an efficient way to address their wide range of educational preparation and ability. But conceptions of ability were made amidst the emergence of I.Q. testing and a full-blown eugenics movement. So there was much talk about the limited mental capacity of various immigrant and working-class groups and the distinct ways their brains functioned. As opposed to college-bound students (overwhelmingly white and middle to upper class) who were “abstract minded”, working-class and immigrant students were “manually minded.” </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">It is not only this history of exclusionism and racism that stigmatizes vocational ed, but also a persistent middle-class bias against physical, technical, and practical work. A plumber is a far more indispensable member of society than, say, lawyer; his skill set is highly refined; his salary is high—why does he garner so much less respect? Plainly, it is because his expertise is of a less intellectual and theoretical nature.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Vocational education is associated with John Dewey, and for good reason: he was a great advocate of it. Dewey understood that practical training need not be merely a route to a particular profession; it can also serve as a means of building moral character and acquiring broader and more intimate knowledge of science, politics, and human society. To Dewey, purely theoretical knowledge was inferior to theoretical knowledge grounded in detailed experience of the concrete particulars to which the theory refers. (See <a href="http://edcommentary.blogspot.com/2011/02/on-vividness-of-experience-and-language.html">my posts on Dewey’s educational philosophy</a>.) This was Dewey’s vision of practical training, as not a reduction but an enhancement of academic study.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">The unacknowledged abandonment of Dewey’s vision in favor of the more convenient and reductive vocational ed dominant in the American comprehensive high school of the mid-20<sup>th</sup> century has thus impoverished not only vocational training but academic study as well. By rejecting the practical and concrete, we have divorced academics from the tangible particulars that originally inspired them and which might give them life. Lost in this divorce is not only a great many sources of rich cognitive engagement and intellectual stimulation, but also “the factors of discipline and character-building,” self-respect and satisfaction entailed in the acquisition and successful execution of practical skills.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-1"><a href="#cite_note-1">[1]</a></sup></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" id="morality-and-citizenship"><b>Morality and Citizenship</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">The issue of moral training, both in the personal sense and in the broader civic sense, is an important one in the discussion of the purposes of schooling and the role of college. Indeed, one of the original aims of public schooling was to give students the moral fiber and the intellectual tools to engage with their communities and their governments, to exercise their rights, and to resist oppression. After all, a democracy with an ill-informed, gullible, or disinterested citizenship is a recipe for the most insidious sort of tyranny. Ahem.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">College is not necessarily the only context in which the tools of civic engagement can be acquired, but it is clearly the case that a degree of academic training—in history, politics, rhetoric, textual analysis, and probably statistics, economics, and science as well—is necessary for well-informed participation in modern democracy. Any vocational tracking that ignores such subjects disserves both its students and the society at large.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">As Dewey recognized, however, responsible participation in democracy is not only a matter of intellectual capital but also of moral fiber and social adjustment. A well informed, but disaffected, selfish, or embittered citizen may serve his own political interests well enough, but we would hardly want a society full of such people. A well-functioning democracy is not simply a marketplace of votes, in which everyone serves his or her own self-interest; it is a nation of voters who seek the overall betterment of society. (How’s that for high expectations? In fact, though, that vision should hardly smack of idealism; the alternative is Social Darwinism.) If we teach the knowledge and skills of civic engagement yet neglect the moral character of students, we do our nation and its people no great service.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Having wandered so far from what was, at the start of this trilogy of posts, a simple and easily-defensible thesis (“college for all” is not as good as it sounds), into the realm of educational philosophy and lofty idealism, let me take one more inadvisable step, over the edge, into flat out philosophical musing: let me suggest that to teach pure, academic knowledge without grounding it in concrete experience of practical, physical, and social activity is to encourage a schism between the analytic mind and the empathic, emotional, interpersonal mind—and thereby to cultivate amorality and blind self-interest.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>Standardization and Education</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">The preceding investigation is ambitious and wide-ranging, but the critique with which it begins is a simple one: principles of good education (high expectations, for example) are not simple and fixed ideas; they are intricate, flexible tools that can be used effectively only by experienced educators. That’s an inconvenient reality in a country with an inexperienced teaching force (about half of all teachers leave the profession within the first five years<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-2"><a href="#cite_note-2">[2]</a></sup>), and policymakers try to standardize these tools in an effort to make them, if not impervious to individual human variation, at least functional across a large and heterogeneous teaching force. Many of these policymakers are themselves lay-people in the field of education<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-3"><a href="#cite_note-3">[3]</a></sup> and lack the expertise to properly wield the very tools they are trying to standardize. The result is blunt, dangerous instruments.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">This is a very widespread problem in education—the current rhetoric of “best practices” and the claims that “we know what works” tend in the same direction—but it’s not a stupid problem, by which I mean, it arises not purely out of arrogance and ignorance. Yes, arrogance and ignorance play a role, but standardization arises primarily as a response to a very real opposing problem: the deterioration of quality and equity that occurs in its absence. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">The pendulum has been swinging towards standardization for the past 30 years, and I suspect it’s nearing its apogee, but another swing back in the opposite direction will not help American schools. The top-down desegregation movement of the early ‘60s did little to right inequities in American public schooling, and the bottom-up community control movement of the late ‘60s and ‘70s did even less. After nearly 200 years of unceasing conflict in American public education between local control and variation on the one hand and national control and standardization on the other, we ought to recognize that the problem is more complicated than it looks and that the solution lies on neither side.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">How do you propagate good practices without codifying, ossifying, and desiccating them? That is one of the most fundamental questions facing American education, past and present.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
<br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><hr />[1] <a href="#cite_ref-1" id="cite_note-1">^</a> the quote is from Dewey, <i>The School and Society</i>, 1900. It’s a piece of a longer excerpt that I posted a discussion of</u> back in February. (http://edcommentary.blogspot.com/2011/02/little-dewey.html)</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">[2] <a href="#cite_ref-2" id="cite_note-2">^</a> 20 to 25% of those who leave return later, but that still implies that 40% of the teaching force, at any given time, has fewer than five years of experience. See <a href="http://www.nctaf.org/documents/no-dream-denied_full-report.pdf">http://www.nctaf.org/documents/no-dream-denied_full-report.pdf</a>, figure 4. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">[3] <a href="#cite_ref-3" id="cite_note-3">^</a> After playing professional basketball in Australia, Arne Duncan worked as an administrator in the field of education for a number of years before being appointed to run America’s public school system, but he never taught. Joel Klein was a lawyer in the department of Justice, who had no involvement with education before becoming the superintendent of the NYC schools. The first great champion of standardization in American education, Horace Mann, was a career politician with no connection and apparently no interest in education, until he was 43.</div><div class="MsoNormal"> As the first secretary of the Massachusetts board of ed, Mann went to great lengths to educate himself about the schools he was in charge of, visiting every school in Massachusetts, in the late 1830s. Duncan and Klein have surely done their homework in the way of background reading, and they’ve probably done their share of school observations as well, but there is no substitute for actual teaching experience.</div>Max Beanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09411037394257752336noreply@blogger.com21tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2747343572713674312.post-89519297949417977932011-07-07T13:55:00.000-07:002011-07-14T12:52:34.540-07:00"College for All" Dissected (part 1)<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEit5gRBB2oRuf73If_lbakoXeMdKx9lQ3j8dFe0bO7KFfbggGAhFjg-MPEO4DjmZSE4X_gaX-yhmzTrEjhmcrSDPE0ec2_B0zaWWJ7afxosWUl6YXqJGlwmC7HkIxz4RJzV8QfN-09ewOk/s1600/sneeches+on+the+beeches.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="296" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEit5gRBB2oRuf73If_lbakoXeMdKx9lQ3j8dFe0bO7KFfbggGAhFjg-MPEO4DjmZSE4X_gaX-yhmzTrEjhmcrSDPE0ec2_B0zaWWJ7afxosWUl6YXqJGlwmC7HkIxz4RJzV8QfN-09ewOk/s400/sneeches+on+the+beeches.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;" width="320">In Dr. Seuss's parable of social class exclusion, <i>The Sneeches on the Beaches</i>, a distant, furry relative of mine, Sylvester McMonkey McBean (they changed it at Ellis Island), arrives in town with a machine that magically affixes a high status indicator (a star on the belly) to low status sneeches. The long-term benefits of the procedure are questionable.</td></tr>
</tbody></table><div class="MsoNormal">This is a continuation of <a href="http://edcommentary.blogspot.com/2011/06/unrealistic-expectations-false-promise.html">a post I put up last week</a>, on the “college for all” movement. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Because this is such a delicate issue, and because there are so many angles from which it must be examined before it can be fully understood, I want to come out and state my overall position here and now: ideally, every student not suffering from severe biological handicaps should receive the kind of rigorous academic training that would provide an avenue to college; <i>but</i>, even in ideal circumstances, not all students should actually attend college; moreover, the rigid, uniform format in which college prep is currently being implemented in many inner-city schools is absurd and counterproductive.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>Distant Goals</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">The school described in my last post probably offers an extreme example of the disconnect between reality and student expectations that can be created by a hardline commitment to college for all. The narrow and insistent focus on college as the sole aim of grade-school education, however, inevitably creates a peculiar circumstance, in which all students are striving for a goal that, barring unprecedented pedagogical breakthroughs, many of them will not attain. High though our ideals may be, the realities of our schools and neighborhoods are not yet commensurate. To overcome the impact of poverty and segregation through sheer quality of schooling is a herculean undertaking, and we are naive if we expect it to be instantly accomplished, simply because we have willed it so. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">In a paper for the 2002 Spencer Foundation Conference, economist Richard Rothstein wrote about the pervasiveness of unrealistic college expectations:</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.25in;">…as late as their senior year in high school, black adolescents expect to graduate from college and obtain graduate degrees at higher rates than whites. Many then drop out of college and may take less rewarding jobs than those for which nonacademic training programs could have prepared them. <sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-1"><a href="#cite_note-1">[1]</a></sup></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">The <a href="http://edcommentary.blogspot.com/p/no-excuses-charter-movement.html">No-Excuses movement</a> is not as un-self-critical as its advocates in politics and the media make it appear, however. Among teachers and administrators in these schools, it is widely acknowledged that there is a significant gap between where most students are now and where they need to be to succeed in college, especially in terms of critical thinking and problem solving skills. Worried about irresponsible portrayals in the blogosphere and beyond, schools tend to stay off the record about these concerns, but they are a topic of widespread internal discussion. (Charter school leaders whom I spoke to about this post and who were sympathetic to some of my argument were reluctant to be quoted for fear of how critics might misrepresent their positions. As the public relations officer of one large charter network once told me, “We’re here to run schools, not to do public relations.”)</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Many No-Excuses schools and networks are beginning to experiment with more progressive, hands-on, comprehension-oriented instructional techniques, and many more are seeking to significantly expand instruction outside the core areas of math and English, providing improved education in the arts, science, social studies, debate, etc. As instructional styles become more varied and student comprehension deepens, college attendance will hopefully become a more reasonable goal for many students—but the problems with the “college for all” movement, in its current incarnation, go deeper than mere feasibility.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><a name='more'></a><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>High Expectations</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">It’s important to understand the history of this movement. The “college for all” rhetoric is a reaction against what reformist critics of the 1990s (E. D. Hirsch is the obvious example) viewed as the softness and low expectations (and unconscious racism) of the Romantic-progressive attitudes that dominated public schooling in the mid-20<sup>th</sup> century, when vocational tracks served as dumping grounds for low-income and non-white students. (See <a href="http://www.thenation.com/article/161463/should-all-kids-go-college?page=full">Dana Goldstein’s article for <i>The Nation</i></a> for more detail on this.) Indeed, the moniker “No Excuses” is part of the same reaction: neither poverty nor broken homes nor drug-addicted parents nor anything else will be an excuse for academic failure. We must have high expectations for all students.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Indeed we must, but we should think carefully about what exactly those expectations are. “High expectations” is not a single idea; it’s a broad principle that can mean different things in different contexts. When we boil it down to the simple, concrete goal of universal college attendance, we lose more than we retain. As always, in the field of education, the attempt to expand and replicate a good idea has produced a codification that retains the veneer of the organic original, but little of its genius.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">As some of the commenters on my last post pointed out, the question that’s really at stake here is, what are the purposes of schooling? High expectations will have a very different meaning depending on how we see those purposes: are they economic, social, intellectual, moral, democratic? College provides such a convenient token for high expectations, because it appears to serve all of these aims simultaneously. That very convenience should give us pause.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>The Star-Belly Sneech Machine</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">For many educators and pundits, “college for all” is about socioeconomic equality. After nearly half a century of widening income inequality, America is now among the most stratified nations in the industrialized world. In these circumstances, “college for all” offers a reincarnation of the American Dream: if everyone goes to college, then everyone will become middle-class.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">This doesn’t really make sense. If every kid in America attends college, there will still be only so many middle-class jobs; low-paying service jobs will still need to get done, and those who cannot obtain higher-paying jobs will still fill them, whether they go to college—and accumulate mountains of student debt—or not. In the same paper sited above, Rothstein provides vivid statistical data on the disconnect between college expectations and available jobs: “Some 90 percent of high school seniors now [in 2002] say they will go to college. Some 35 percent want to be engineers, architects, health professionals, and social or natural scientists. But only 8 percent of openings will be in those fields.”<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-2"><a href="#cite_note-2">[2]</a></sup></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">College attendance is a class-indicator precisely because it is exclusive. Universalize college, and it will cease to indicate or determine class. The result can already be seen in the increasingly stratified system of higher education, in which a degree from some schools is worth vastly more than a degree from others.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>The Crooked Playing Field</b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Socioeconomic equality depends on economic factors, not on public schools. What school is supposed to offer is not equality but meritocracy—not equal outcomes, but equal opportunity. We find ourselves in the current quagmire, precisely because our public schools have failed to do that: poor students in segregated neighborhoods arrive at kindergarten behind their middle-class counterparts, and the vast majority of them fall further and further behind, year after year.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">“College for all” represents an attempt to create an even playing field at age twenty-two; but that appears necessary only because we have failed to produce one at ages three through seventeen. Thus, the push for universal college attendance risks passing the dilemma of educating low-achieving students off onto community colleges and public universities that are no better equipped, financially or pedagogically, to overcome the academic deficits that these students arrive with. The result is overcrowding in bottom-tier colleges and high enrollment in remedial courses, which do not count towards a degree but do cost tuition dollars. If we have failed to teach a child to read by the time he reaches twelfth grade, sending him off to college probably will not help.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Facing up to that reality does not mean accepting it. The struggle for equity of quality and opportunity in education must continue, but real students should not be sacrificed to lofty ideals. Clifford Thomas, founder of <a href="http://invictusprep.org/">Invictus Prep</a>, a No-Excuses charter scheduled to open next fall, in East New York, Brooklyn, is deeply committed to “college for all,” but he retains a firm grasp on reality. “College for all is certainly the goal,” he says, “but we all know that we have to support the few students that won't be able to find that success, no matter how hard we educators try to get them there.”<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-3"><a href="#cite_note-3">[3]</a></sup> </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><a href="http://edcommentary.blogspot.com/2011/07/college-for-all-dissected-part-2.html">To be continued.</a></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
<br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><hr />[1] <a href="#cite_ref-1" id="cite_note-1">^</a> Richard Rothstein, Out of balance: Our understanding of how schools affect society and how society affects schools (Chicago: Spencer Foundation, 2002). Thanks to Jessica Wallenstein for bringing this paper to my attention.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">[2] <a href="#cite_ref-2" id="cite_note-2">^</a> Ibid.</div><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">[3] <a href="#cite_ref-3" id="cite_note-3">^</a> From an online conversation between Mr. Thomas and Dewey to Delpit, June 28<sup>th</sup>, 2011. The statement was on the record.</div>Max Beanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09411037394257752336noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2747343572713674312.post-35394896825623670702011-06-30T12:30:00.000-07:002011-07-15T11:35:08.563-07:00Unrealistic Expectations: the Uncertain Promise of College<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <o:OfficeDocumentSettings> <o:RelyOnVML/> <o:AllowPNG/> </o:OfficeDocumentSettings> </xml><![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:WordDocument> <w:View>Normal</w:View> <w:Zoom>0</w:Zoom> <w:TrackMoves/> <w:TrackFormatting/> <w:PunctuationKerning/> <w:ValidateAgainstSchemas/> <w:SaveIfXMLInvalid>false</w:SaveIfXMLInvalid> <w:IgnoreMixedContent>false</w:IgnoreMixedContent> <w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText>false</w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText> <w:DoNotPromoteQF/> <w:LidThemeOther>EN-US</w:LidThemeOther> <w:LidThemeAsian>ZH-CN</w:LidThemeAsian> <w:LidThemeComplexScript>X-NONE</w:LidThemeComplexScript> <w:Compatibility> <w:BreakWrappedTables/> <w:SnapToGridInCell/> <w:WrapTextWithPunct/> <w:UseAsianBreakRules/> <w:DontGrowAutofit/> <w:SplitPgBreakAndParaMark/> <w:EnableOpenTypeKerning/> <w:DontFlipMirrorIndents/> <w:OverrideTableStyleHps/> <w:UseFELayout/> </w:Compatibility> <m:mathPr> <m:mathFont m:val="Cambria Math"/> <m:brkBin m:val="before"/> <m:brkBinSub m:val="--"/> <m:smallFrac m:val="off"/> <m:dispDef/> <m:lMargin m:val="0"/> <m:rMargin m:val="0"/> <m:defJc m:val="centerGroup"/> <m:wrapIndent m:val="1440"/> <m:intLim m:val="subSup"/> <m:naryLim m:val="undOvr"/> </m:mathPr></w:WordDocument> </xml><![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:LatentStyles DefLockedState="false" DefUnhideWhenUsed="true"
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</style> <![endif]--> <div class="MsoNormal"><a href="http://www.danagoldstein.net">Dana Goldstein</a> has an excellent article on vocational education appearing in next week’s issue of <i>The Nation</i>. (You can <a href="http://www.thenation.com/article/161463/should-all-kids-go-college?page=full">read it online</a> currently, and I recommend it). Before delving into some interesting modern incarnations of vocational ed, Ms. Goldstein discusses a recent study by the Harvard Graduate School of Education, which found that only about 30% of new jobs in America, over the next seven years, would require a four-year college degree. The study serves as a jumping off point for a critical reexamining of the contemporary reformist rhetoric that every student in America can and should attend a four-year liberal arts college. Not surprisingly, challenging that rhetoric generated some vitriol in the online comments on <i>The Nation</i>’s website, but Ms. Goldstein is right to take on these questions; thorny though they may be, they are pressing ones.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj5SOpVgpFz5jy2wjCe85vD58PWZMoCIgTmBADlmIk9sp_OJoKrZsz4XO3CDq1mriQjeXPTLfzzAV_XjhmIi_uNdzIEex-Gg-Hfk8Px4OkXhWDzreJGW0GUOLCO8A8zhwKDBMeTOa0nEVI/s1600/sperm+competition+for+world+colored.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear:right; float:right; margin-left:1em; margin-bottom:1em"><img border="0" height="369" width="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj5SOpVgpFz5jy2wjCe85vD58PWZMoCIgTmBADlmIk9sp_OJoKrZsz4XO3CDq1mriQjeXPTLfzzAV_XjhmIi_uNdzIEex-Gg-Hfk8Px4OkXhWDzreJGW0GUOLCO8A8zhwKDBMeTOa0nEVI/s400/sperm+competition+for+world+colored.jpg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">"Long Odds"<br />
Original artwork created for Dewey to Delpit. <br />
Line Drawing: <a href="http://www.parismancini.net">Paris Mancini</a>. Color & Texture: <a href="http://www.tavetgillson.com">Tavet Rubel</a></td></tr>
</tbody></table></div><div class="MsoNormal">I’ve been concerned about the implications of “college for all” since my first experience working at an inner-city <a href="http://edcommentary.blogspot.com/p/no-excuses-charter-movement.html">No-Excuses</a> charter school. The school had a motto, which the students were made to memorize and chant often: “Work hard, go to college, change the world.” The first two items in that list formed the driving axiom of the school. What do you need to do? Work hard. Why? So you can go to college. College was presented as the ultimate motivation and reason behind everything we did at the school.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">The effort to inculcate in students the bourgeois value of college-attendance was everywhere visible. Each classroom was named after and decorated with the colors and emblems of a different college, and the students in a given homeroom were addressed collectively by the name of the corresponding college. “Wisconsin, I need your eyes on me,” a teacher might say to a class of eighth graders. Teachers went out of their way to refer to their own college experience whenever possible in classroom discussions, and hallway bulletin-boards were often decorated with photographs of faculty alma-maters and accompanying testimonials. Whenever possible, school trips included a visit to a college campus. Students were never referred to as students; they were called “scholars.”</div><div class="MsoNormal"><a name='more'></a><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">My experience was hardly unusual. The obsessive emphasis on college—and, in fact, most of the specific details described above—is common among No-Excuses schools, of which there are hundreds currently operating in America’s inner cities and dozens more opening every year.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-1"><a href="#cite_note-1">[1]</a></sup> As a symbol for faculty and students to rally around, the goal of 100% college attendance provides a strong foundation for school culture and represents an honest and valiant commitment to high expectations. At the school where I worked, the administration’s focus on that goal was genuine and well-intended, but as my first year there progressed, I became increasingly concerned about the long-term consequences of that focus.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">The school began in sixth grade. Most incoming students came out of underperforming local elementary schools, and arrived, on average, a year or two behind grade-level in mathematics and reading. By the end of seventh grade, over 90% of the students were scoring in the “proficient” range on the state math and lit exams, a fact of which the school was justly proud, but the gains were insufficient. In an average year, less than 10% of the students in any grade received a 4 (“mastery”) on either state exam; this was before the 2010 test recalibration and it was widely acknowledged, even within the school, that students scoring 3s were not on track to perform well on the high school Regents Exams. What’s more, the instruction, particularly in mathematics and writing, focused heavily on state-test content and memorized rules. Many students could simplify algebraic expressions and solve linear equations, but few of them could solve even a simple application problem or adapt their knowledge to an unfamiliar context. Several of the weakest ones could not tell you what number comes below a hundred (<a href="http://edcommentary.blogspot.com/2011/01/confusion-beneath-confusion-brief.html">see my post on this problem</a>). </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Under such conditions, the relentless focus on college created a divergence between the way we talked inside the school and the external reality. Material that was slightly more challenging than the norm—stuff that, at the private school where I had worked previously, would have been considered standard grade-level material—was referred to as “collegiate.” One day, I sat in on a lesson on basic logical operators used in database searches; <span> </span>at the end of the lesson, another teacher who had also been sitting in, told the students that the subject they were learning, formal logic, was one that she hadn’t studied until college. No doubt, that was technically true, but the level of rigor of the lesson was hardly collegiate; by the standards of an affluent private-school, it was remedial. The importance of making students feel proud of their achievements cannot be overstated, and these white lies (no pun intended!) are told with the best of intentions; but repeated too often, they fostered dangerously inaccurate self-perceptions.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">The impact of all this came home to me one afternoon that spring, as I watched the director of the school address an eighth grade homeroom after a day of bad behavior (in my own as well as other teachers’ classes). “What college do you want to go to?” she asked the students. Hands went up—some of the biggest instigators were the quickest to reply: “Harvard,” they said. “Brown,” “Yale,” “Princeton.”</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">If they wanted to go to good colleges, the director explained, they would need to nail the regents tests, master their course material, stop messing around, etc. The director was a veteran teacher, and she was great with kids; working within the paradigm of the school, she was doing her best to improve the class’s behavior, and, because they respected her, they listened and believed what she told them. But as I watched the scene, I could not help but think: we’ve told these kids lies. We’ve given them a skewed sense of reality and of their own position in it, and we’re setting them up for frustration and failure.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><a href="http://edcommentary.blogspot.com/2011/07/college-for-all-dissected-part-1.html">To be continued…</a></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
<hr /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in;">[1] <a href="#cite_ref-1" id="cite_note-1">^</a> No-Excuses is not an official designation, and there is no official association of these schools, so it is difficult to even estimate the exact number of schools that follow it. Three large charter networks (<a href="http://www.kipp.org">KIPP</a>, <a href="http://www.uncommonschools.org">Uncommon</a>, and <a href="http://www.achievementfirst.org">Achievement First</a>) follow this model, as well as several small networks (<a href="http://www.harlemsuccess.org">Harlem Success Academies</a>, <a href="http://www.democracyprep.org">Democracy Prep Public Schools</a>, etc.) and an undeterminable number of stand-alone charters. KIPP, the largest of the No-Excuses networks, operated 99 schools, serving 27,000 students, this past school year. Eleven new KIPPs will open this summer, and many of the existing ones are still adding a grade a year.</div>Max Beanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09411037394257752336noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2747343572713674312.post-45761301530828897512011-06-16T16:33:00.000-07:002011-06-20T08:53:42.431-07:00The Time-Traveling Fashion Reviewer Observations of an Unusual Sixth-Grade Writing Class<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiHLRpKfzr-4CGUwScyYy7Tim3eLGHPl7sPbojuPklFK5EgExIPkitMXmTUb9kAGQt3ynJMWI7cfatK-gMGAluTPuBSvKT79dCzcFeHyByIxBPC7a15wHU8kx4wTN2x-eXfZhjILgYA39A/s1600/listening+to+eachother.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="312" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiHLRpKfzr-4CGUwScyYy7Tim3eLGHPl7sPbojuPklFK5EgExIPkitMXmTUb9kAGQt3ynJMWI7cfatK-gMGAluTPuBSvKT79dCzcFeHyByIxBPC7a15wHU8kx4wTN2x-eXfZhjILgYA39A/s400/listening+to+eachother.JPG" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Listening to Each Other<br />
Original artwork created for Dewey to Delpit, by <a href="http://www.parismancini.net/">Paris Mancini</a></td></tr>
</tbody></table><div>This is the first in a series of posts that I intend to write on an innovative literacy program that I've been observing for the past six months at a public school in Chinatown. (<a href="http://edcommentary.blogspot.com/2010/09/day-1-at-no-excuses-kindergarten.html">Read previous observation-based posts on Dewey to Delpit</a>)</div><br />
<div>At 2:15pm on a Wednesday afternoon, the students in Amy Piller’s sixth grade humanities class gather on the rug at the front of the room. Some take seats on low, wooden benches, most kneel or sit cross-legged on the floor. A girl with wavy brown hair takes her station at the document camera—the digital version of an overhead projector—and begins to read from the hand-written manuscript projected on the pull-down screen in front of the board. “A Review of European Fashion in the 1600s, 1700s, and 1800s,” she announces. The writing is her own and the subject just what the title promises, but the approach is novel: the writer has placed herself in an imaginary 17th century English clothing boutique, in which the opulently-dressed proprietor comments on our narrator’s “poor looking, filthy” 20th century clothes, before stuffing her into an elaborate outfit so heavy she can barely walk. (“The women must have to have muscle to carry this elephant on them every day”). She departs the boutique happy with her new finery but worried about her wallet. It cost “a lot of euros,” she concludes. “I figured I didn’t have enough for dinner.”</div><br />
<div>Quirky and playful as the story may be, like all writing done in Ms. Piller’s class it’s based on detailed research. According to the writer, she used five sources on 17th century English apparel, and the background work is visible in her elaborate descriptions of dresses, wigs, veils, jewelry, and embroidery. </div><br />
<div>When she has finished reading, the class thanks her in unison for sharing, and it is then that, from a pedagogical standpoint, the really interesting part begins. A cup of popsicle sticks, each bearing the name of a student in the class, is handed to the writer, who moves from her position at the document camera to a seat amongst her peers. She picks a popsicle stick at random and calls out the name written on it. A blond girl in a white t-shirt has been selected, and she pipes up without hesitation: “I really like your piece,” she begins—but she thinks the writer needs to check the thesaurus for some synonyms for embroidery, because that word is overused. She also wants more description of setting—she doesn’t feel like she’s getting a sense of the context.</div><br />
<a name='more'></a>Another popsicle stick is drawn, and the critique continues. It is detailed, various, and always forthcoming: everyone, it seems, has an opinion. Having an opinion on its own isn’t remarkable, but what’s going on here is: every single student called on gives specific, constructive feedback; their ideas are well-articulated, and they build off each other’s comments, frequently referring to points made by other students, agreeing or disagreeing, building or counter-arguing—they’re really listening to each other.<br />
<br />
<div>Equally remarkable is the manner in which the writer is listening to them. The suggestions range from positively framed (mostly from girls) to one or two that come out sounding pretty harsh (from boys, naturally), but they’re all direct and substantive, which means the class talks a lot about what’s missing and what’s wrong with the piece. A lot of adults don’t do well with that kind of feedback, and I’ve rarely seen a workshop, even at the college level, that is this blunt; but the writer takes it all with unflagging good spirit. She seems genuinely interested in the feedback and excited to apply it to her story. In response to one particularly aggressive demand for more description of setting, from a blond boy in the middle of the rug—the second or third comment she’s gotten to the same effect—the writer gives a big thumbs up and a loud “Cool!” I can’t tell from where I’m sitting whether the gesture says “ok, I get it, enough already” or “great idea,” but either way, it’s so upbeat, so positive, so composed, I’m blown away.</div><br />
<div>A variety of viewpoints are expressed by the class, but certain common themes emerge. Several students want to hear more about setting. A number of comments address issues of plausibility that, as an adult hearing a child’s writing, didn’t bother me, but which, as sixth graders trying to hold themselves to adult standards, bothered them: the shop-keeper is dressed like a rich lady, so how come she’s working in a shop? How does this time-travel thing work? If this is 17th century England, she should be paying in pounds, not euros. Etc. </div><br />
<div>The most sophisticated discussion centers around the elaborate description of the clothing, and here again, I discover them to be a more demanding audience than I. I was impressed by the detail of the description, but the students are not satisfied with mere detail—the description must also be dynamic and engaging. Several say they found it, in their blunt words, “boring.” The writer, as good-spirited as ever, asks, in response to these kinds of comments, whether she should include more of her own opinions about what she’s seeing. Her peers think that’s a good idea, but they also want to hear things like, say, that she twirled the silver brocade between her fingers or that the shop keeper was playing with her beaded bracelets. These scattered examples gesture at a stylistic issue too sophisticated for these young critics to pin down to a category, and it is here that Ms. Piller, for the first and only time, speaks up: “Actions,” she says. “I think a lot of people have said more actions.”</div><br />
<div>The activity we’ve just witnessed is called a “Writing Share,” and it happens twice a day, every day, in Ms. Piller’s classes. With about 20 students in the class, that means each student presents his or her work once every two weeks, which must account for the sang-froid that our time-traveling fashion reviewer displayed during her critique—but the regularity of the activity alone cannot explain the seriousness and focus with which the students approach the critique, the specificity and concreteness of their feedback, the attentiveness with which they listen to one another; and it cannot explain their ability to carry out the activity almost entirely without their teacher’s input, either instructional or managerial. Those qualities are products of a confluence of excellent teaching and a very new and very innovative approach to literacy instruction that is in use throughout Ms. Piller’s school. </div><br />
<div>To be continued...</div>Max Beanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09411037394257752336noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2747343572713674312.post-3164746139843404952011-06-07T20:49:00.000-07:002011-08-20T14:14:36.027-07:00Integrated Education and No-Excuses Charter SchoolsDesegregation, the great education reform cause of the mid-20th century, never really happened, and not many people even talk about it nowadays, so I was pleasantly surprised last week when <a href="http://www.danagoldstein.net/">Dana Goldstein</a>, a blogger for the Washington Post cited <a href="http://edcommentary.blogspot.com/p/no-excuses-charter-movement.html">my page on No-Excuses education</a> in <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com//blogs/ezra-klein/post/integration-and-the-no-excuses-charter-school-movement/2011/06/02/AGmKLRHH_blog.html">an article</a> about race and class integration in charter schools. The writer’s concern was the increasing popularity of the No-Excuses model, whose lengthened school days and rigid behavioral codes she worried would prove distasteful to middle-class and affluent parents, leaving only poor, inner-city kids to populate these rapidly proliferating schools. That is the tip of a very craggy iceberg: dissimilarities in how we educate children from different backgrounds have widened over the past two decades, and unlike in previous eras, the dissimilarities are stated and intentional.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-1"><a href="#cite_note-1">[1]</a></sup></p><p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgax2CnXFYneIH9J83rUCYQ4SoTH-nXkMWVmqowpsD_ImUEQM9taNNkFLpuGWGrVhjLMzGUjhZNL4gpFL6QjEMskovpCKy7kWKjbG1cciO9ew9eIlT-bpoRJldsTYWD7gsdfsQsg7EjANA/s1600/bourgeois-modes-of-behavior.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgax2CnXFYneIH9J83rUCYQ4SoTH-nXkMWVmqowpsD_ImUEQM9taNNkFLpuGWGrVhjLMzGUjhZNL4gpFL6QjEMskovpCKy7kWKjbG1cciO9ew9eIlT-bpoRJldsTYWD7gsdfsQsg7EjANA/s320/bourgeois-modes-of-behavior.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Original artwork by <a href="http://www.tavetgillson.com/">Tavet Rubel</a>, created for <a href="http://edcommentary.blogspot.com/">Dewey to Delpit</a>.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>Matt Yglesias, writing for thinkprogress.org, <a href="http://thinkprogress.org/yglesias/2011/06/02/234962/charter-schools-and-low-ses-students-damned-if-they-do-and-damned-if-they-dont/">responded to Ms. Goldstein's article</a> with a version of the standard argument behind many of these dissimilarities: “…kids seem to benefit from picking up certain bourgeois modes of behavior.… Poor kids in a high-poverty school can… receive <i>explicit instruction</i> in bourgeois conduct. That’s the essence of the ‘No Excuses’ model, but it doesn’t make sense in a bourgeois context” (emphasis original.) That explanation resembles the one given by many No-Excuses schools for their strict behavioral codes: Middle-class students, the argument goes, learn school behaviors at home, and arrive in kindergarten already knowing how to sit still, listen to instructions, wait their turn, etc. Students from impoverished homes need to be explicitly taught these behaviors once they get to school.</p><p><a name='more'></a><br />
That explanation isn’t all wrong, but it’s only part of the picture. To begin with, the behaviors that No-Excuses schools work so hard to habituate in their students do not exactly resemble the behaviors of students in wealthy private schools, who are more likely to be lounging at their desks than sitting bolt upright with their hands folded. Questioning or debating a teacher’s decision, a major no-no of the No-Excuses model, is quite common in many affluent schools, nor is it discouraged: the right to argue with authority, in <a href="http://edcommentary.blogspot.com/p/glossary.html#romantic">Romantic education</a>, is inalienable. The peculiarly strict disciplinary style of the No-Excuses school does not teach bourgeois behaviors; it teaches a very different set of behaviors, and the reasons it does that are psychologically complex.</p><p>Over the past couple of decades sociological researchers have, in the grand tradition of the social sciences, rigorously documented what anyone who rides the subway figured out on his own ages ago: that affluent parents take a much looser approach to discipline and a much more flexible attitude towards rules than do poor and working-class parents. (<a href="http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9505E3D7153EF935A15752C1A9609C8B63&pagewanted=all">This New York Times Magazine article</a> gives a nice overview of the research, but you have to scroll about a third of the way down to find the relevant bit.) It can be no coincidence that the schools that have proved most effective at educating inner-city children take a more rigid approach to authority.</p><p>Anyone who has ever taught students from a background very different from his own knows that most children respond better to authority that resembles the authority of the home culture. An absolutely indomitable classroom manager who I used to work with once told me that, if a student turns really defiant, she will sometimes switch into the home language: French for West African kids, Spanish for Hispanic ones; she’ll even do black English for African-American kids, PC qualms notwithstanding. This tactic can be startlingly effective, she explained; a child who, a moment before, was hunkering down for a battle of wills, will turn suddenly compliant.</p><p>Those of us who grew up in schools that partook of their home culture can only guess at the discomfort felt by students who attend a school where most of the teachers neither look nor talk nor act like their moms and dads; where the rules of conduct and the subliminal messages by which those rules are communicated are foreign and unfamiliar. No wonder, then, that educators seeking to create safe, calm, focused learning environments for inner-city children have gravitated towards the No-Excuses model. That kind of forceful, explicit authority may actually be more comfortable and familiar to these students.</p><p>Sixteen years ago, African American educator and writer Lisa Delpit argued that the educational needs of children of color, in terms of both content and discipline, differed radically from those of white, middle-class children.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-2"><a href="#cite_note-2">[2]</a></sup> Delpit’s analysis encompassed both the considerations of parenting cultures just mentioned and the arguments about bourgeois values made by the blogger whom I quoted at the beginning of this post—though she deals with the latter issue in much deeper and less normative terms.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-3"><a href="5#cite_note-3">[3]</a></sup> Delpit is brilliant (that’s why I named this blog after her), and her arguments were compelling and influential, but what room do they leave for integrated schooling?</p><p>The issues at stake are too big for this blog; they touch on the most frightening peculiarities of American culture. I believe that children of different backgrounds can and should learn together in integrated schools; that it is our fear of the compromises and complexities of such an arrangement that have prevented it from coming into being for half a century; that a little discipline will not deaden our children’s souls and a little playful, collaborative learning will not squander precious, irretrievable time nor open the floodgates of chaos and mischief. I believe, too, that to give up on integrated schooling is to give up on America; it is to say that the many races and cultures living together in our cities cannot cohere into a single nation, sharing common beliefs, common knowledge, and common schools. We have failed, wildly and undeniably, to overcome the racial schisms that divide us—but we may yet succeed.</p><p>But this isn’t a blog about my beliefs, and I don’t want to end my post with a sermon. So many of the people that are building the most segregated new schools in this country are those most whole-heartedly dedicated to racial equality and social justice; and I, with my ten fingers and my big ideas, don’t presume to tell anyone how it ought to be done. I just want people to think hard on it.</p><p><hr />[1] <a href="#cite_ref-1" id="cite_note-1">^</a> See Jonathan Kozul's <i>Shame of the Nation</i></p><p><br />
[2] <a href="#cite_ref-2" id="cite_note-2">^</a> Delpit, Lisa, <i>Other People’s Children</i>, New York : New Press, 1995</p><p>[3] <a href="#cite_ref-3" id="cite_note-3">^</a> According to Delpit, the culture of the dominant class within the society—its modes of speech and dress, its body language, its cannon of shared knowledge—becomes a set of cues by which members of the dominant culture subconsciously signal their class status and read other people’s. She calls this the culture of power and, though she does not see it as intrinsically better or more valuable than any other culture, she believes that a mastery of its forms and behaviors—an ability to code switch—is an essential tool for navigating the society. Delpit argues that children of color ought to be trained to consciously code switch, when the situation calls for it. Indeed, many No-Excuses schools explain this principle to students, when introducing rules about how to speak and act in school: it’s not correct English, it’s standard English.</p>Max Beanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09411037394257752336noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2747343572713674312.post-87547367272753988932011-06-07T15:53:00.000-07:002011-06-07T21:44:14.800-07:00The Times Printed my LetterA little over a year ago, I started this blog in order to post a response to a New York Times article. (I'm not even linking to that post, because it's not very good; if you want to read some classic Dewey to Delpit, try <a href="http://edcommentary.blogspot.com/2010/09/day-1-at-no-excuses-kindergarten.html">this</a> or <a href="http://edcommentary.blogspot.com/2011/01/confusion-beneath-confusion-brief.html">this</a>.) That same day, I wrote a letter to the editor of the Times, on the same topic as my post, but they never published it<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 115%;">—</span>in retrospect, it probably wasn't worth publishing. A couple days ago, I wrote another letter and they did publish it. I'm one for two. You can <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/07/opinion/l07ravitch.html?_r=1&ref=letters">read it</a>, if you like. It's the third one down.Max Beanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09411037394257752336noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2747343572713674312.post-68051800156789838922011-05-28T20:32:00.000-07:002011-05-31T03:36:08.946-07:00A Better Way to Train Teachers<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgPBI14zOETUrnrpi9ciLLzcFRcxbYN2q34jB6MyWQnuvCDXthRXBK24QHoXYL7Dshf6Mmb-JEa_A0DBexFKdN7fLQ4P9c92636cy7zfs8X6MemG6NbqUEwe_B1gdBCkRKCmEDJzIvy-uo/s1600/apprenticeship.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="234" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgPBI14zOETUrnrpi9ciLLzcFRcxbYN2q34jB6MyWQnuvCDXthRXBK24QHoXYL7Dshf6Mmb-JEa_A0DBexFKdN7fLQ4P9c92636cy7zfs8X6MemG6NbqUEwe_B1gdBCkRKCmEDJzIvy-uo/s320/apprenticeship.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">I want to talk about teacher training. This is a big issue, and what with the sudden discovery that teachers are the single most important factor (besides the students themselves) determining a school’s effectiveness (shocking, really), there’s a good deal of hullabaloo about it—but compared the knotty problems I usually address in this blog, this one looks pretty straightforward to me.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Discussions of how to improve teacher training tend to center around <i>what</i> we teach teachers. The pedagogical theories on which we train our teachers, critics argue, are wrong headed. Structural problems within graduate departments of education are blamed for the production of invalid theories of learning and the promulgation of ineffective teaching practices. For once I’ll take a stand: I don’t think that’s true. The problem has more to do with <i>how</i> we teach teachers than with what we teach them.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><a name='more'></a><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Speaking in 2003, at the White House Conference on Preparing Tomorrow’s Teachers, <a href="http://www2.ed.gov/admins/tchrqual/learn/preparingteachersconference/ravitch.html">Diane Ravitch</a> located the causes of our weak teacher training in the history of the professionalization of teaching. At the beginning of the 19<sup>th</sup> century, she said, “Educational leaders wanted to be recognized as a profession,” on par with law and medicine. The problem, as Ravitch saw it, was that teaching lacked, and still lacks, the kind of fixed body of knowledge that forms the basis of law and medicine: there is no board, no bar, and no accepted standards for establishing best practices or determining the validity of pedagogical principles. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">The problem that Ravitch identified is of central import, but the solution she offered was surprisingly far off the mark: “education,” she said, “<span class="contenttext">cannot become a respected… profession until it establishes its practices on a solid foundation of valid research. We must insist on better evidence, more randomized trials, and replicable studies.” How, after fifty years of rapidly shifting terrain and endlessly unresolved disputes in every social science, from psychology to economics, can one expect “better evidence, more randomized trials, and predictable studies,” to establish any kind of fixed body of knowledge? Only a blind faith in the power of the academy could lead to such a conclusion. What’s more, I doubt that any person actually involved in teaching or running grade schools would suggest that what the profession needs more of is academic research. Randomized studies are fun-facts that teachers quote to each other; when it comes to how to run a classroom and how to get an idea across to children, they work from experience and from the experiences of their colleagues—as well they should. Academics disparage folk pedagogies as not only wrong-headed but dangerous, and that’s not an invalid critique, but theoretical pedagogies have hardly proved more useful or less dangerous.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">I happened upon the Ravitch speech because I’m reading this very important, very badly written book, by a guy named E. D. Hirsch—if you’re in the field, you’ve probably heard of him—called <i>The Schools We Need and Why We Don’t Have Them</i>. Writing in 1996, Hirsch challenges what he views as an “anti-knowledge” culture then dominant in education circles. Like Ravitch, he locates the source of the problem in the professionalization of teaching that occurred at the turn of the century, as seen in the development of graduate departments of education. Hirsch’s discussion is more detailed (and more long-winded) than Ravitch’s, and it contains many valuable historical insights, but his conclusion is marked by the same misplaced emphasis on academia: inter-departmental cooperation, he believes, would create “the intellectual ferment of cross-fertilization” and drive off the malaise of intellectual lassitude that he sees as the fundamental problem with education departments.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">I don’t want to be dismissive. Hirsch and Ravitch are right that the dominance of academically isolated and scientifically questionable theories of education in the formal training of teachers has been disastrous; both of them know far more than I about the history of education, and their analysis sheds valuable light on the question at hand, but they don’t see to the heart of the matter—and I suspect it’s because they’re both academics, not teachers.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-1"><a href="#cite_note-1">[1]</a></sup> It’s true that, as Hirsch argues, the input of academic experts can be useful in the development of grade-school curricula in their particular fields, but neither the input of academics nor a hardening of the scientific basis of education theories (a hopeless project) is liable to greatly improve teacher training. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">The problem isn’t the quality of academic theories of education—the problem is that academic theories of education have no place at the center of teacher-training. Good teaching requires mastery of a highly refined, practical skill-set, not an elaborate body of theoretical knowledge. Teachers need college classes in order to become masters of their subject area, not to improve their ability to run a classroom or transmit ideas. For that, they need experience and practice, under the guidance of capable mentors.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">The standard teacher-certification program, at either the undergraduate or masters level, includes only a semester of student teaching. Compare that to <a href="http://www.nyc.gov/html/dob/downloads/pdf/master_plumbers_license_exam.pdf">the requirements for becoming a licensed master plumber</a>, which, in NYC for example, include “at least seven years total experience… under the direct and continuing supervision of a licensed master plumber.” If you’re already a registered architect or professional engineer, you can get that down to three years of apprenticeship, but that’s the minimum. A license to practice medicine requires anywhere from six to twelve years of apprenticeship (i.e. rotations and residency), depending on specialization, on top of an undergraduate degree and two years of graduate-level courses, which include physical, hands-on work in the form of human dissections. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Note also the elaborate structuring and mentoring in the apprenticeship years in medicine. Responsibility is accorded gradually, as the doctor-in-training progresses from student to intern to resident to fellow. Trainees at the beginning of this progression work in teams with more experienced residents, under the oversight of doctors. That system is far from perfect—abuses of power and excessive demands on trainees are common—but the basic structure is an excellent one for training in a demanding and complex practical field. That is what teaching is, and the training ought to reflect it. Instead, we throw teachers with a semester—and in many cases less—of training, into the most difficult classrooms (due to assignment of teachers by seniority, new teachers typically teach in the roughest classrooms and the worst schools) with sporadic oversight and little or no formal mentoring.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">The issue is cut and dried: you want good teachers, you need to train them, not in pedagogical theory, but in <i>teaching</i>. This would require a massive restructuring of the profession, of course, but the good news is, it could be carried out on a school-by-school basis. It would look something like this.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">A teacher-training program, partnered with a grade-school that has an experienced faculty, could offer, say, a five-year training program. As the trainees progressed through the program, they would move from observers and assistants to co-teachers and deputies, and as their responsibility and competence increased, they would cease to pay tuition and begin to receive a small salary. Ideally, teachers in training would rotate among master teachers, especially in the early years of their training, working with a couple each semester, so as to experience a wide range of styles. As in any apprenticeship, the master teachers would be compensated for the time spent observing and instructing apprentices by the assistance with grading, tutoring, managing, and organizing provided by the trainees. Rigorous training in each teacher’s subject-area would also be necessary. (The word “rigorous,” above sounds like a meaningless buzz-word, so let me clarify: a high level of subject-area knowledge should be prerequisite to entering the program, and subject-area classes within the program should be taught at a level that assumes such advanced background knowledge.)</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">This would be an eminently practical arrangement—the only problem would be getting people to sign up. After all, if you can get a credential in a one-year master’s program, why go through a five-year apprenticeship—especially given that many people entering the profession nowadays see it as a short term gig before entering a higher-paying career. In the long term, we need to raise the upper limits on teaching salaries, so that they can justify longer training periods, but, in the short term, we could address the commitment problem by making the duration of the program variable: students wishing to depart after two years can leave with a regular masters in teaching. Those who choose to stay would receive a special certification from the program, based on the number of years they stay. I suspect that, if the program were well-constructed, some would choose to stay on after two years simply because they have come to appreciate how much they’re learning. For others, the appeal of the special certification would be significant, because it would be equivalent to years of actual teaching experience, which is by far the most important factor in teacher hiring—indeed, this very fact is one more argument for the utility of this kind of program.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">If you’re reading this post and want to donate, say $10,000,000, to help me get this program off the ground, you can get in touch by email: <a href="mailto:deweytodelpit@gmail.com">deweytodelpit@gmail.com</a>.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
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</div><div class="MsoNormal"><hr />[1] <a href="#cite_ref-1" id="cite_note-1">^</a> Hirsch started out as a professor of Romantic Poetry at Yale University. In his journey from literature to university-level writing-instruction, to education reformer, he never worked as a teacher or administrator in a primary or secondary school. Ravitch started out as an editorial assistant at a small political journal. She was at one time the assistant secretary of education of the United States, and she is one of the best-known writers on education in America, but she has never taught in a grade-school.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Both Hirsch and Ravitch have valuable insights into the history and structure of American public schooling, but they lack first-hand knowledge of grade-school teaching—college teaching at prestigious universities is not equivalent. That limits their knowledge of the skill-set required for good teaching and thus of how to train good teachers.</div>Max Beanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09411037394257752336noreply@blogger.com2