Dewey to Delpit

How Occupy Wall Street Is Like a Classroom

2011-10-18T10:09:00.000-07:00

A speaker on the people's mic, arguing against occupation, at about 20 minutes to midnight

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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 set of hand signals and other procedures 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.

Just as the clap-in 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.”

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.

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.

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. Respect is an essential ingredient of any social contract, and the protestors, energized and rebellious as they were, had not for a moment forgotten it.

4S2H9ESAP78S

Teaching Values Across Cultural Difference

2011-10-06T12:22:00.000-07:00

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.

I recently happened upon this blog post 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 my post on the London Riots, 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^th-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.

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 my last full-length post. (Yes, there are difficulties facing middle-class education; admitting that does not belittle the difficulties facing inner-city education.)

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 (with some important caveats) 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. (More on this.)

Faced with the parallel dilemma—a dissonance between her own culture and that of her students—MRW feels no such entitlement. She writes,

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 college student, 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.

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.

The Anxiety of Influence

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 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.

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.

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 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. 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.

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.

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.

Long Live Hat Etiquette

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?”

“Yes,” she said. Frankly, she looked a little suspicious: why the heck was I asking? Did I disapprove?

“Cool,” I said. “Good for you.” Now, if only we could get a security guard like that in MRW’s school.

Appendix: Teaching Middle Class Culture to Inner-City Youth
(Return to main text)

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.

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.

What makes a good principal? Don't ask Michael Winerip.

2011-10-04T11:28:00.000-07:00

Last week, The Times published this ridiculous puff piece by Michael Winerip about the principal of NYC's PS 126. The Times has published some excellent education journalism in recent years, especially the long and nuanced pieces that Paul Tough writes for the magazine supplement, 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 this letter instead, which not only praises Winerip's column, but treats it as serious education journalism.

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:

Dear Editor,

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.

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.

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 The Times ought not to publish it.

Sincerely,
Max Bean

Dana Goldstein on Obama, the Reformists, and the Teacher Quality Debate

2011-09-22T12:22:00.000-07:00

I’m kinda late on this, but Dana Goldstein had a great post a couple weeks ago on Obama’s job-creation speech and what it signals about his education agenda. In the speech, the president called for $30 billion in federal spending to prevent teacher layoffs. Goldstein thinks that’s deceptively remarkable:

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.

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.

…

So last week's rhetorical emphasis on saving teachers' jobs --unaccompanied by talk of "teacher quality"-- is actually something notable from Obama. 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 Midwest speaking tour.

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

What's less acknowledged is that there is a quieter conversation among reformers about reducing the size of the teaching force regardless of whether or not such a move is necessitated by budget crises.

Goldstein quotes former NYC schools chancellor and News Corp. executive Joel Klein outlining his alarming vision for the future of American schooling:

A very different system would be empowered by technology…a huge infusion of private capital aimed at creating an entirely new delivery system. Teachers would be much fewer, 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

I recommend reading Goldstein’s entire post.

Let Them FailThe Deprivations of Growing Up Without Messing Up

2011-09-19T08:41:00.000-07:00

Tape installation by Stephen Doyle. Photograph by Stephen Willis for the New York Times.

There’s a fascinating article by Paul Tough in last week’s New York Times Magazine. 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 No-Excuses charter school 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.

There’s a lot of interesting stuff in this article, 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?

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.

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.

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 the Romantic approach to pedagogy, 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.

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.

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.)

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 (besides getting a date, that is). 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.

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.

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.

I’m currently reading Rafe Esquith’s Teach Like Your Hair’s on Fire. 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.

“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”:

Guest:	You don’t understand, Rafe, they’re doing it wrong.
Rafe:	I understand
Guest:	Their wings are crooked.
Rafe:	Yes, they are.
Guest:	The launch leg is glued too close to the nose.
Rafe:	That’s true.
Guest:	And you’re just going to sit there.
Rafe:	Yes, I am.
Guest:	But their rockets won’t fly.
Rafe:	Not at first…
Guest:	But.
Rafe:	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.

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.

Other Interesting Items from the Article

Measurement & Intangibles

Riverdale and KIPP Infinity provide a lovely example of the differing attitudes towards intangible qualities that I have discussed in previous posts, and the application of those attitudes towards values education. 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).

Performance Character vs. Moral Character

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 moral character, include things like sharing, helping others, and showing respect; the latter, called values of performance character, 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.

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.

Martin Seligman

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.

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 he has defended via ends-over-means arguments; and because Seligman gave a lecture in 2002 at a gathering of US Navy personnel, organized in part by the CIA, that he reportedly didn’t realize would be used to refine torture and brainwashing techniques. 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.

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.

The Scope of American Student Under-Achievement

2011-09-09T15:31:00.000-07:00

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.

I’m looking at the 2009 international assessment scores (from the Programme for International Student Assessment, which are available online). 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.

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^th percentile in science, for every nation in the OECD, we find the US’s 75^th percentile ranking 16^th, or just above the middle.

	10^th	25^th	75^th	90^th	95^th
Reading	16^th	19^th	10^th	8^th	8^th
Science	20^th	24^th	16^th	13^th	12^th
Math	24^th	25^th	25^th	24^th	23^rd

As you can see from the table, our 25^th percentile is actually somewhat worse than our 10^th, 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^th percentile isn’t doing that well; it means that our 25^th percentile is doing worse than the 25^th 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.

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^th most advantaged nation in the OECD.

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^th place to 17^th. When reading scores are adjusted to control for per-pupil educational expenditure (but not GDP per capita), the US drops to 20^th. 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.

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.

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.

Education Reform and Teacher Professionalism(Psychoanalyzing the Politics of Teaching, part 4)

2011-09-02T08:02:00.000-07:00

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:

Part 1 – incentives: the wrong lens for understanding teacher motivation

Part 2 – autonomy, not incentives: unpacking the conflicts between teachers unions and school authorities

Part 3 – not quite a profession: why teachers struggle to attain professional status

Expertise in Education

In part 3 of this series, I wrote about the difficulty of establishing a consistent, identifiable expertise among teachers. The key word here is consistent: 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.

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. (Click here for a more detailed discussion.) 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.

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 want to give them—after all, we pay them to take them from us.

Leadership in Education and the Broader Role of Professions

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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:

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…. (The Death and Life of the Great American School System, p. 226)

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.” (Reported in the Times)

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 should 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.

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.

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 my post on teacher training, 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.

Additional Details

Teachers, like doctors, do a job that’s too important to screw up…
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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.

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.

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. (What’s wrong with quantitative teacher assessments?) 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.

What’s wrong with quantitative assessments?
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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. Value-added measures 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.

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.)

What Teachers Should Know Before they Start Teaching

2011-08-26T15:09:00.000-07:00

Mark J. Perry posted an essay on Carpe Diem two days ago about grade inflation in university education departments (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 the lack of rigor in teacher training that I discussed in my last post. These soft standards have a double effect: they lower the public perception of teachers, and they leave teachers worse prepared to transmit knowledge.

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?

There are, generally speaking, two types of material in a teacher training program: subject-area content and pedagogical technique. I talked briefly about the issues surrounding pedagogical technique in my last post and at considerable length in my post on how to improve teacher training. 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.

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.

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.

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:

Consider the second degree equation below:

4x² – 6x = (x + 2)²

Part A: 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.”

(See a sample solution)

Part 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.

(See a sample solution)
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.

Part A: How tall is the house? Show all work and explain all steps.

(See a sample solution)

Part 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.

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.

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.

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,” and how sad he looked while he said it.

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.

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.

Sample solution for problem 1:
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Part A:

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?

Part B:

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?
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.
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.)

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Sample solution for problem 2 (part A only):
(back to text)

*** thanks to one of my readers for pointing out a careless error in this solution. It is now corrected. ***

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:

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

From the first pair, we get:

We plug this in for the y terms in the first and third ratios, and we get:

Simplifying, we get:

The signpost is 18 feet tall. The wall is 36 feet tall.

Psychoanalyzing the Politics of Teaching (part 3): the Would-Be Profession

2011-08-18T13:16:00.000-07:00

This is the third post in a series about the professional status of teachers. In my last post, 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.

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.)

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.

The Training Problem

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

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.

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?

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.

The Public Experience Problem

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 everybody 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.

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.

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 Ms. Weingarten’s slightly paranoid comment on the effort to reduce homework loads. 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.

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.

The Morals We Want and the Morals We Have

2011-08-12T21:53:00.000-07:00

The Cardinal Virtues: Temperance, Prudence, Fortitude, and Justice

A comment on my last post 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:

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.

I agree with that assessment, and I think it raises an interesting issue that another commenter on this blog has been trying to raise in another thread 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.

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 the leaders of the No-Excuses movement, to Ted Sizer and his comrades in the neo-progressive Essential Schools movement—to advocate stronger moral education in the schools.

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.

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.

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.

Moral Education, the London Riots, and the Entanglement of Economics and Schooling

2011-08-11T13:45:00.000-07:00

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. 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 (and, inevitably in such discussions, the role that schools have taken in permitting the riots to occur).

Williams, speaking in the House of Lords, said:

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."

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:

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

This discussion has a close parallel in American education. Many on the left (Barbara Ehrenreich is a prominent example) view the emphasis on moral education and character-building at KIPP and other No-Excuses schools 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 recently made a similar critique of my own arguments in favor of moral and civic education in my series on “College for All.”

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.

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.

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.

Psychoanalyzing the Politics of Teaching (part 2): the Battle over Autonomy

2011-08-03T14:36:00.000-07:00

[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. Read part 1 here.]

Randi Weingarten, in 2010

A couple months ago, I read an article in The Times about a movement in a number of American schools and school districts to reduce homework loads, 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:

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.”

—i.e. don’t tell us how to do our job.

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.

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:

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

“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.”

-Weingarten, in a USA Today Op-Ed, April, 2006

“Too often, testing has replaced instruction; data has replaced professional judgment;… and so-called leadership has replaced teacher professionalism.”

-Weingarten, writing for none other than eduwonk (the blog that inspired this whole sires), in August, 2007

"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."

-Albert Shanker, president of the AFT from 1974 to 1997, at the Union summit in August of 1988

Evidently, the union leadership feels that teacher autonomy is under attack and has felt that way for decades.

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.

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, in a recent Huffington Post article. 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.”

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.

Even the arguments over how and when teachers can be fired reveal interesting subtleties in the light of the struggle for autonomy. Montgomery County, Maryland, has a teacher-evaluation program based entirely on observations by principals and other teachers. 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.

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.

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.

To be continued.

Psychoanalyzing the Politics of Teaching (part 1)

2011-07-29T12:09:00.000-07:00


"Struggling for Legitimacy" Original artwork by Tavet Rubel, created for Dewey to Delpit

Two weeks ago, Andrew Rotherham posted a piece about teachers’ unions on Eduwonk. The inspiration for the piece was a Times story about a collaboration between GM and the United Auto Workers union on the development of a new, domestically-produced sub-compact car. 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:

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).

He’s right, of course—it’s clear from the Times 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.

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:

...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.

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.)

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 need a union?

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.

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.

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.

It’s never worth faulting society; society is the amoral aggregate. There are compelling reasons why teachers’ expertise is not widely valued. In my next post two posts, 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.

read the next post in this series.

Low Stakes Testing

2011-07-21T09:01:00.000-07:00

Dana Goldstein 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 reading it.) The post is about standardized testing for preschoolers:

With new evidence of standardized test score-inflation and straightforward adult cheating on K-12 tests in Atlanta, Washington, DC, and across the country, you’d think it would be exactly the wrong time for the Obama administration to commit $500 million to developing additional state tests for a totally new population of children: pre-schoolers.

But Dana says she’s “cautiously enthusiastic” about the new focus on preschool testing, because

...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.

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 “Model for School Readiness” 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.

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 reports. “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.”

I’m reminded of last week’s debate in the “Sunday Dialogue” section of the Times, 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 the op-ed that started the whole debate, 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.

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.

"College for All" dissected (part 2)

2011-07-13T15:36:00.000-07:00

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 the first post in the trilogy. If you're in a hurry, I encourage you at least to read last week's post.

Original artwork by Paris Mancini,
created for Dewey to Delpit

Uniform Expectations

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.

“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 rote instruction and memorization in impoverished neighborhoods).

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.

Doing and Thinking

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.

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.

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.

So why does vocational tracking have such an ugly stigma attached? In a recent blog post, Mike Rose explains the cultural bias at work here:

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.”

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.

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 my posts on Dewey’s educational philosophy.) This was Dewey’s vision of practical training, as not a reduction but an enhancement of academic study.

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^th 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.^[1]

Morality and Citizenship

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.

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.

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.

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.

Standardization and Education

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^[2]), 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^[3] and lack the expertise to properly wield the very tools they are trying to standardize. The result is blunt, dangerous instruments.

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.

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.

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.

[1] ^ the quote is from Dewey, The School and Society, 1900. It’s a piece of a longer excerpt that I posted a discussion of back in February. (http://edcommentary.blogspot.com/2011/02/little-dewey.html)

[2] ^ 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 http://www.nctaf.org/documents/no-dream-denied_full-report.pdf, figure 4.

[3] ^ 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.

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.

"College for All" Dissected (part 1)

2011-07-07T13:55:00.000-07:00

In Dr. Seuss's parable of social class exclusion, The Sneeches on the Beaches, 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.

This is a continuation of a post I put up last week, on the “college for all” movement.

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; but, 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.

Distant Goals

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.

In a paper for the 2002 Spencer Foundation Conference, economist Richard Rothstein wrote about the pervasiveness of unrealistic college expectations:

…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. ^[1]

The No-Excuses movement 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.”)

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.

High Expectations

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^th century, when vocational tracks served as dumping grounds for low-income and non-white students. (See Dana Goldstein’s article for The Nation 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.

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.

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.

The Star-Belly Sneech Machine

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.

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.”^[2]

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.

The Crooked Playing Field

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.

“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.

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 Invictus Prep, 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.”^[3]

To be continued.

[1] ^ 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.

[2] ^ Ibid.

[3] ^ From an online conversation between Mr. Thomas and Dewey to Delpit, June 28^th, 2011. The statement was on the record.

Unrealistic Expectations: the Uncertain Promise of College

2011-06-30T12:30:00.000-07:00

Dana Goldstein has an excellent article on vocational education appearing in next week’s issue of The Nation. (You can read it online 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 The Nation’s website, but Ms. Goldstein is right to take on these questions; thorny though they may be, they are pressing ones.

"Long Odds"
Original artwork created for Dewey to Delpit.
Line Drawing: Paris Mancini. Color & Texture: Tavet Rubel

I’ve been concerned about the implications of “college for all” since my first experience working at an inner-city No-Excuses 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.

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.”

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.^[1] 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.

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 (see my post on this problem).

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; 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.

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.”

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.

To be continued…

[1] ^ 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 (KIPP, Uncommon, and Achievement First) follow this model, as well as several small networks (Harlem Success Academies, Democracy Prep Public Schools, 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.

The Time-Traveling Fashion Reviewer Observations of an Unusual Sixth-Grade Writing Class

2011-06-16T16:33:00.000-07:00

Listening to Each Other
Original artwork created for Dewey to Delpit, by Paris Mancini

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. (Read previous observation-based posts on Dewey to Delpit)

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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.

To be continued...

Integrated Education and No-Excuses Charter Schools

2011-06-07T20:49:00.000-07:00

Desegregation, 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 Dana Goldstein, a blogger for the Washington Post cited my page on No-Excuses education in an article 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.^[1]

Original artwork by Tavet Rubel, created for Dewey to Delpit.

Matt Yglesias, writing for thinkprogress.org, responded to Ms. Goldstein's article 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 explicit instruction 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.

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 Romantic education, 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.

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. (This New York Times Magazine article 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.

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.

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.

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.^[2] 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.^[3] 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?

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.

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.

[1] ^ See Jonathan Kozul's Shame of the Nation

[2] ^ Delpit, Lisa, Other People’s Children, New York : New Press, 1995

[3] ^ 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.

The Times Printed my Letter

2011-06-07T15:53:00.000-07:00

A 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 this or this.) 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—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 read it, if you like. It's the third one down.

A Better Way to Train Teachers

2011-05-28T20:32:00.000-07:00

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.

Discussions of how to improve teacher training tend to center around what 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 how we teach teachers than with what we teach them.

Speaking in 2003, at the White House Conference on Preparing Tomorrow’s Teachers, Diane Ravitch located the causes of our weak teacher training in the history of the professionalization of teaching. At the beginning of the 19^th 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.

The problem that Ravitch identified is of central import, but the solution she offered was surprisingly far off the mark: “education,” she said, “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.

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 The Schools We Need and Why We Don’t Have Them. 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.

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.^[1] 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.

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.

The standard teacher-certification program, at either the undergraduate or masters level, includes only a semester of student teaching. Compare that to the requirements for becoming a licensed master plumber, 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.

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.

The issue is cut and dried: you want good teachers, you need to train them, not in pedagogical theory, but in teaching. 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.

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.)

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.

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: deweytodelpit@gmail.com.

[1] ^ 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.

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.

New York State Math Exams Baffle Teachers and Students Facing the Tradeoff Between Breadth and Depth

2011-05-21T18:10:00.000-07:00

Ambushed by the Exam
original artwork by Tavet Rubel, created for Dewey to Delpit

Last week, New York City public school students sat for the state math exams. The scores won’t be announced until the summer, but there is reason to expect a dip. State exams are not typically available for public viewing until a month or two after the exam is administered, but the board of ed took special precautions this year to ensure that every copy of the test-booklets were returned to their offices and that no information about the exam leaked. What I hear from teachers who administered the exam, however, is that the 5^th and 8^th grade tests were completely unprecedented, both in their content and in their difficulty.

The transition to the national Common Core Standards is not slated to begin until 2014, so educators I’ve spoken to are struggling to understand why this year's 5^th grade exam abandoned topics like decimals and percents that have traditionally been the meat and potatoes of that exam, and focused instead on difficult pattern and area problems, some of which lie outside the stated 5^th grade curriculum altogether.

When teachers at an inner-city charter first told me about the changes in the test, I thought this might be what I’ve been waiting for—a move towards more rigorous exams. In a post that I wrote back in December, I predicted that more rigorous exams of the sort that education policymakers have been promising would bring to light very disturbing realities about the shallowness of student understanding in today’s inner-city schools. No one is less to blame for that situation than the teachers themselves—indeed, they are the only ones who really understand it and the only ones directly working to fix it. Nonetheless, it will fall to the teachers to teach differently, and under prevailing conditions, that will be impossible. I welcome more rigorous tests, not because they will force teachers to teach differently—I know plenty of teachers in the inner-city who already teach as rigorously as they possibly can—but because it will force the society to face the broader structural and curricular problems that, despite what you’ll hear from politicos and documentarians, stand in the way of serious academic achievement.

To put a slightly finer point on it, the schools that are passing the existing tests are, by and large, already committed to teaching for high rigor and deep understanding, as much as the strictures of the current system allow. (See my post on teaching to the test.) The schools in which rigor and depth are ignored are already failing the exams, so making the exams harder isn’t going to light any hotter a fire under their asses. The problem is not the incentives.

As far as math is concerned, one of the major impediments to depth and rigor is actually the breadth of the state curriculum: there are too many topics taught per year, so they all get treated cursorily. New York State uses what’s called a “spiraled math curriculum,” which means that each year contains over a hundred individual topics, organized into ten nebulous “strands;” these same topics—or ones very much like them—reappear, year after year, with slightly more depth and rigor. It’s a terrible way to organize a math curriculum.

The rhetoric of high expectations makes it hard to trim back curricula. The list of topics taught in a given year is the clearest and seemingly the most concrete measure of how challenging a curriculum is, so policymakers are reluctant to shorten it—unfortunately, a list of topics is a bad measure of a curriculum. Much more telling are the specific questions by which each topic is assessed on the exams; only when you look at the actual questions can you see what students really need to know, how comfortable they must be with the topics, how flexible they must be in adapting their knowledge to new situations—but, in order to glean this information, you have to know a lot more about math and spend a lot more time reading exams, and who bothers? Not voters, of course, and not politicians either. These are the guys who don’t even read the bills that they’re signing into law—you can bet they don’t read the exams that their boards of ed come up with.

The result is that changes in the exams tend to bring more, not fewer, topics. The current round looks to be headed in the same direction. I was talking to my friend Matt Kelly, who teaches 5^th grade math in inner-city Brooklyn, about this year’s exams and the Common Core Standards that will be phased in over the next few years. “If the problem with American math curricula is that it’s a mile wide and an inch deep,” he said, “they’ve just made it two miles wide, with the expectation that it’s going to be a mile deep—but it’s impossible. It’s not going to happen—especially when kids are coming in behind grade-level, not knowing how to multiply, how to divide.”

Matt is one of those teachers who works hard to teach math concepts. He is always searching for ways to build deeper understanding, but he worries that the new tests will make that kind of instruction impossible. “I’m not going to be able to do as much with fractions,” he says, “I’m not going to have time to use fraction tiles and shade in squares and all that stuff, if I have to teach operations with unlike denominators and fraction division and multiplication. I’m going to have to do it all procedurally.”

Of course, if the exams are hard enough, superficial procedural understanding won't be enough, and what'll happen then? Maybe they'll quietly reduce the rigor until students begin passing—but that'll be a lot harder on the nationally-normed assessments that are coming than it was on the old state-by-state exams. And if the rules of the Common Core Standards prevent them from dumbing down the test, well, then there might be a reckoning.

Attaining Intangible States A Personal Narrative and a Lesson in Applied Philosophy

2011-05-09T12:33:00.000-07:00

A Teacher Pursuing Intangible States
original artwork by Tavet Rubel, created for Dewey to Delpit

Last post, I wrote about a powerful, impersonal kind of certainty that, under the best circumstances, a teacher feels about the instructions she gives. The incident of the classroom interloper, which I chose to illustrate that certainty, is an especially clear example, but in the course of my two months teaching precalc, there have been countless subtler instances in which this sense of the inevitability of my injunctions has come to my aid. It is the first time in my teaching career (now in its fifth year) that I have felt this kind of sureness, and of course, it’s thrilling.

When I taught at an inner-city No-Excuses charter school two years ago, I had the opposite experience. I was deeply insecure and hesitating. I expected my instructions to meet resistance, and they almost always did; and when that resistance was forceful, as it often was, my very dignity and pride were threatened.

That school, unlike the one where I currently work, was deeply committed to professional development—to teaching teachers to teach and, in particular, how to manage. Much of their training was based on Doug Lemov’s taxonomy of effective teaching practices, an incisive text, widely studied within the charter movement, which I’ve written about previously. Lemov agrees with the private school administrator whom I quoted at the end of my last post that the essence of true authority is un-teachable; but, unlike the private school administrator, Lemov is therefore less concerned with the nature of that essence and more concerned with what can be taught. “Some teachers have ‘it,’” he writes in the introduction to his chapter on “Strong Voice.”

They enter a room and are instantly in command. Students who, moments before, seemed beyond the appeal of reason suddenly take their seats to await instructions. It’s hard to say exactly what “it” is and why some teachers have it. Much of it is surely intangible and non-transferable, a manifestation of the unique power of individuals and their ability to earn respect and credibility, build relationships, and exude confidence and poise. But even if I can’t tell you exactly how to bottle “it,” I can describe five concrete things that “it” teachers consistently use to signal their authority. These are five techniques that anyone, even the seemingly meekest and mildest of novices, can use…. Mastering these skills may not make you the “it” teacher, but having a Strong Voice will surely get you a lot closer.

Lemov’s approach to the problem of teaching authority is predicated on a particular attitude towards the intangible, an attitude that is pervasive within the No-Excuses movement. The intangible, for the No-Excuses educator—as for his philosophical opposite-number, the Romantic ^[1]—is the authentic thing; but, whereas the Romantic holds the authentic intangible sacred and seeks no substitute, Lemov abandons it to its intangibility and devotes his energies to constructing a tractable stand-in. The appearance of confidence that Lemov’s “meekest and mildest of novices” can attain by practicing his five techniques is repugnant to the Romantic—it is an unnatural, artificial authority, aimed at control and manipulation. To Lemov, it is the most expedient means of getting an inexperienced teacher in control of a chaotic classroom; it is one of the many rugged, pragmatic tools that the No-Excuses school uses to overcome the vast obstacles that it faces.

Clearly, context matters here: No-Excuses schools fight a dire battle against anarchy, truancy, and academic failure; Romantic-progressive schools, ^[2] serving primarily middle- and upper-class populations, have the luxury to pursue more esoteric goals. The philosophical questions a stake are much deeper, however, than this contrast of urgency and luxury implies—and their implications are pervasive: the argument over standardized testing and No Child Left Behind is, at heart, an argument about intangibles [read more]. The debate over phonics versus whole-language reading instruction, which breaks down cleanly along Romantic-Conservative lines, points to this same question of intangibles, as do differing approaches to moral education (see my post on moral education from last November). In all these issues, the complexities of the problem defy easy answers.

Lemov’s book is appropriately titled Teach like a Champion—the emphasis, I think, is on the “like.” But that “like” says something not about the modesty of the book’s aims but about its underlying ontology. If he thinks like most No-Excuses educators I’ve worked with, Lemov believes not only that tangible proxies are a worthwhile pursuit, but that they are actually stepping-stones to the intangible—i.e., if you habituate the outward behaviors of confident classroom-management, you will actually become a confident classroom manager. (Again, see my post on values education). The authentic, internal, intangible state (confidence, respect, maturity, understanding, etc.) is arrived at, piecemeal and gradually, through the practice of outward behaviors. Thus, teaching like a champion is the road to being a champion teacher—or, as my old boss at the charter used to tell us, “Fake it till you make it.”

The orthodox Romantic view is that such internal states can be got at only internally—that they exist inside oneself and “arriving” at them is really a matter of finding them within, in that divine, natural self that the Romantic posits. Indeed, I know Romantic educators who disparage teacher training in precisely these terms: all you have to do, they say, is be real with the kids; practicing a bunch of techniques makes your teaching artificial, and kids can sniff out that kind of BS in an instant. (If you ask me, kids are not quite the bullshit bloodhounds that Romantics portray them, but they do have a surprisingly acute sense of when they’re being patronized or talked-down to.)

In the light of these two opposing views, I want to return to the question of how I attained the genuine authority, however circumstantial it may be, that I now have—how I got from weakness, to a half-convincing approximation of confidence, to the actual internal state.

Straight out of college, I taught for two years at the same private school where I now teach my precalc class. I was confident and successful enough to think myself a good teacher at the time, but I see now how weak my authority was. True, many of my students seemed to like me, but I did not command respect; my rule, ultimately, was subject to their approval—and the truth is, I feared to displease them; or, to put a finer point upon it, I wanted their approval.

When I came to the charter school, I found myself in an environment where whatever charms sustained me in the private school were worse than useless. I was not only weird, nerdy, and white, I also had no capacity to rule by force. It took two or three months for the students to fully internalize my lack of authority and for me to fully comprehend the enormity of my problem. The rest of that long, long year was spent trying to dig myself out of the hole I was in, step by step, technique by technique, in the most prosaic, piecemeal way imaginable. All my life, I have been a global thinker, but I learned then that there are conditions under which global, integrated thinking is useless; I learned to live by the AA motto: one day at a time.

I didn’t dig myself all that far. Lemov’s techniques helped me to gain some modicum of control over my classroom, and slowly my students began to learn; but by the end of the year, I was still only a semi-competent teacher. It was, as I have hinted previously, a deeply frustrating experience, and in some ways a traumatic one. But I learned a lot: some of it tangible, some of it not.

When, after a year and a half of avoiding classroom teaching, I returned to the private school this past February to teach precalculus, I was returning to the Romantic style of education and to the privileged New York private-school milieu in which I myself was raised. It was a situation in which I was bound to be more at ease, and this was the first factor contributing to my current authority—what I think of as the Romantic factor: I had returned to my natural environment, to a community and culture where I was comfortable, and of course, that made me a better leader—more confident, more relaxed, more effective. The second factor was the what I had learned from Lemov. The various techniques that I had studied in those training session had given me a sizable bag of tricks for efficiently and invisibly molding a classroom to my will. Knowing I had those tricks made me more confident, and using them made me more effective, which in turn raised my confidence.

I think the most important factor, though, was neither context nor techniques—it was, dare I write it, personal growth. The gauntlet I’d gone through at the charter school had generated internal strength that I hadn’t had before. The nightmares I had used to have, during my first couple years of teaching, of classes turning against me had come true. I had lived out my fears and had gotten over being scared of them. I had gotten over needing kids to like my decisions. I had come to understand that sometimes what they do and do not want is irrelevant. I had come, in short, to embrace my own authority, to accept the primacy of my own will within the classroom. The alternative was anarchy.

(I see now, as I come to the close of this post, that this is a very deep matter, which I had not considered before. That one’s own decisions have validity over the stated desires and wills of 10 or 20 or 30 individuals, no matter how small, is a difficult and frightening thing to accept. It is a tremendous responsibility towards vast, intangible goals. It is a type of self-affirmation that must come very easily to some but which came slowly and painfully to me.)

One final thought. This third factor contributing to the growth of my confidence is one that someone of either a Romantic or a Classical turn of mind would probably accept as valid. The Romantic would embrace it because the strength is psychologically rich and internally generated, the classical because it is got through struggle and experience. It is a synthesis of the two approaches. The man who tried to create a synthesis of Romantic and Classical pedagogy is John Dewey, and internal growth towards an external goal through personal experience is a very Deweyan approach to learning.

[1] ^ See my glossary entry on Romantic Education.

[2] ^ Progressive education and Romantic education should not be synonymous, but the two have become so closely associated during the past 80 years that what people now think of as "Progressive" in schooling is actually Romantic. True Deweyan Progressive education was, to my knowledge, never implemented on any significant scale. This needs its own post.

Standardized Testing and Intangibles [back to text]

The values that the Romantic educator holds most dear—curiosity, love of learning, conceptual understanding—are not captured (at least not directly) by standardized exams. Most No-Excuses educators that I know (N = approximately 50) would agree that these less-testable values are central to the project of education; but they assume, and they’re not wrong, that the intangibles correlate with the skills tested on the exams: a student who loves learning and understands the concepts is far more likely to get a high score on an exam, even a very reductive exam, than one who doesn’t. Nonetheless, as I’ve discussed previously in this blog, the current high-stakes testing regime has caused a deep and troubling realignment of objectives in American public education.

The Brief Tale of the Classroom InterloperRuminations on Authority, Confidence, and Intangibility

2011-04-26T19:46:00.000-07:00

The Fates: the ultimate authority figures

(This is the second in a series of posts based on my experiences teaching a pre-calc class at a private school. See my last post for a more complete introduction.)

The other day, a girl who’s not in my class accompanied one of my students into the room at the start of the period. The two were sharing a fit of Thursday afternoon giggles and entered full of unexplained hilarity. Now, the culture of the school where I teach permits a certain amount of deviation from proscribed routines, and it’s not so unusual for a student to follow her friend into a classroom simply for the fun of it—and, I suspect, to see what it’s like in there. The purpose of such excursions is surely benign, but I find the loosening of structures to be a slippery slope, and I try to make sure classes start on time and start focused. In short, I wanted the interloper gone, and I knew she soon would be.

“Can I help you?” I said.

“No,” she said, giggling.

“Then you gotta go,” I said.

“Ok,” she said, still grinning but no longer giggling, and left.

The interaction was brief and apparently of no special import, but it might have gone very differently. Four years ago, the same playful incursion on my classroom would have lead to a protracted game of push and pull, of giggling students and gentle teacher, of how-long-can-we-keep-up-this-fun-before-we-have-to-do-math-or-get-lost. So what’s changed?

On one level, there were subtleties of body-language, tone, and word-choice that ensured the brevity of the interaction, that said “no nonsense” more definitively than any conscious declaration of seriousness ever could—but beneath those subliminal signs lay a change in my attitude. When the student first walked into the room, before I spoke to her, a thought had run through my head that went something like this: “this kid’s about to leave and she doesn’t even know it.” That sounds macho when I put it in words, and maybe there is a certain machismo in strong classroom management, but I didn’t think it in words, and the force of the thought was less about power than about certainty: I knew what needed to happen in my classroom and I knew it would happen. Her imminent, speedy departure was a fact of which I was as certain as I am that the next letter I type will be a “g”; all I had to do was make her aware of the situation.

That conception of the interaction is very different from one that asks “how do I make this kid leave?” or even “I’m going to make this kid leave!” Most significant, I think, is the elimination of my will from the equation. It’s not that I needed or wanted or willed her to leave—it was an immutable fact, divinely fated, that she was about to go. The psychological chicanery by which my needs and desires are replaced by a fatalistic certainty is not intentional or conscious, but it is, I think, essential to the ease that I have experienced in managing my classroom these past two months. I remember teachers from my own childhood who, though their personalities were vivid and engaging, wielded their authority in a way that felt impersonal and inhuman, as though it was not their will that compelled us to behave and attend, but some higher moral law. (See my last post, for more on the theme of moral authority).

Shortly after I began teaching my precalc class, I had a conversation was a veteran administrator at the school, a master at managing children and an old friend, in which I expressed it like this: “I know they’re going to do what I tell them, so they do it.”

“Exactly,” he said. “Once you know that, it’s easy. And there’s no way you can teach that to someone who doesn’t know it.” He’s right, of course, but the question is, where do we go from there? The answer depends on our attitude towards the intangible, a matter of such underlying significance in the field of education that it rarely gets discussed explicitly.

More on this next week.

Autonomy, Respect, and ObedienceObservations from my own Teaching Practice

2011-04-20T22:14:00.000-07:00

So, I was having a hell of a time finding an image for this post, when I ran into this weird little drawing in the google image results for "teacher." As my friend Erica points out, and as I don't know how I missed, it's clearly a drawing—or a schematic almost—of Jesus and the apostles. What interested me about it initially were the yellow lines over the "teacher" which seemed to indicate an authority that went beyond discipline and obedience towards something moral. The authority indicated, I now see, is a divine one, but, for a secular Jew & pantheist like myself, the distinction is minor. The vision is of teacher as purveyor not merely of knowledge but of wisdom and moral direction. Moral authority comes less from what one knows of morals than of how one's students view one.

Evidently, I am not efficient enough to simultaneously keep up with my new teaching schedule and post regularly to this blog, so instead of my usual essays, I’m going to start posting brief thoughts and observations arising out of my own teaching practice. These will come primarily from the pre-calculus class that I began teaching two months ago.

The class is held at a high-end private day-school, whose philosophy is Romantic—that is, permissive, individualist, and committed to teacher autonomy, student choice, and learning as the pursuit of truth and beauty. Sixteen students are enrolled in my class, which I think may be the perfect number for the instructional methods I’m using. The course content is loosely defined and oversight is minimal, so that within the (unfortunately brief) confines of my 45-minute block, I have a lot of freedom to teach what and how I like. Because my other weekly commitments are small, I have more time and energy than any full-time teacher could ever hope for to devote to planning and preparing my curriculum and to assessing student work. In short, I have the ideal conditions for rigorous, thoughtful pedagogical innovation, and the result is that I am teaching by far the best class I’ve ever taught.

If my reflections on the class appear at times big-headed, let me explain that I have been, in my estimation, the worst teacher in an entire school—incompetent, weak, and ineffectual—and if I am doing even a halfway decent job now, it is only because I have learned a little from my mistakes. I am still painfully aware of my shortcomings as a teacher, but the conditions of my pre-calc class—not only those factors listed above, but the cultural similarity between myself and my students, the maturity and intelligence of the students, etc.—show my teaching in the best possible light.

Increasingly, this is becoming a blog about pedagogy, and in that capacity I want it to be about good pedagogy. Plenty has been written about what is wrong with education, and I am greatly indebted in my knowledge of schooling and teaching to many fine writers on that subject, but that is not my project, and what I hope to present here are examples of excellence and innovation in education. Such examples are found in schools and classrooms all across this nation, and it is my great ambition to seek them out, to write about them, and to learn from them—but for now, I am busy with my own classroom, and so that’s what I’ll write about.

A couple weeks ago, I gave a quiz. Two students were absent on the day of the quiz, and the following day, I asked them to complete it for homework. One of them asked if they ought to take the quiz in the library—a common location for make-up quizzes. It was a question of routine procedure, but beneath that was one of trust. In the permissive context of the school in which I teach, I, with my residue of charter-school rigidity, my button shirts and leather shoes, come off as strict; so my student wanted to know if he should take his quiz in the library, so I’d know he wasn’t cheating.

One has to think quickly in these situations—hemming and hawing, no matter how minor the question at hand, undermines authority—and what I came out with was this: “The point of this quiz,” I said to him, “is for us to find out what you know, so that I can know how best to teach you and you can know what you still need to learn. If you choose to vitiate that information by using knowledge that is not your own, then we won’t know what you know.” You can tell, by signals too nuanced to record in words, when a message gets through to people, and this one got through. The point was one of both trust and esteem: you’re mature enough, I was telling them, to take responsibility for your own learning, to choose where to take a quiz and to hold yourself accountable for taking it honestly. The school where I teach the class has neither grades nor detentions; the whole point of such a school is that learning should occur for its own sake, and this was the lofty vision that I was asking these two students to live up to. They were pleased, you could tell. When I used the word “vitiate,” one of them laughed a little; I doubt he knew the word, but I had chosen it on purpose, to show, by the elevation of my language, the high estimation I have of their character, the adulthood that I bestow upon them.

What I came away thinking about was respect. It was respect that I accorded them in letting them choose where to take their quiz, but it was the respect that they had for me, for the class, and for their own learning that made it possible for me to place this trust in them. Because of their respect, the permission I gave did not undermine or dissolve my authority but rather extended it, raised it from the individual and impermanent authority of a single teacher to the broad, collective authority of knowledge, learning, and intellectual integrity.

At play here is the relationship between classroom authority and moral authority, between obedience and respect. If one can once got hold of the students’ respect, one can continuously ask for their best, and they will proudly and gladly give it; when one has got only their obedience, they show themselves lazy, unwilling, and immature, working listlessly and giving up quickly. Without their respect, I could never have offered those two students such autonomy; the appeal to maturity would have become only a permission to cheat and a lure to deception; the result would have been a further weakening of the teacher-student relationship and a further erosion of my authority.

It is hard to get from obedience to respect. When we teachers lack the latter, we experience the former as a brittle, pathetic kind of authority. The conclusion that some Romantic pedagogues draw is that the two are opposing forces, that obedience is the tool of those who cannot get respect. My experience has been the opposite: that firmness and quickness and sureness of command (as long as that command is understood as reasonable and benevolent) is a necessary precondition for the development of respect.

More reflections on teacher authority from my precalc class.

How to Make it Stick: The Psychology of Learning and Memory

2011-03-29T13:50:00.000-07:00

Apologies to my readers for the long delay. I recently started teaching a pre-calculus class at a private school in Brooklyn, through which I’m putting into practice many of the pedagogical theories and methods that I’ve observed and studied over the last few years; the process is exciting, but the extra planning required to implement so many new ideas takes up most of the time that I previously devoted to this blog. Further retarding my posting schedule, the post that I’ve been working on intermittently for the past few weeks defies my best efforts to tie it down to finitude and linearity. In the interim, I wanted to post a couple links & a “brief” discussion.*

The Research

My friend Sam Gershman, who studies the neuroscience of memory was thoughtful enough to pass on to me a bunch of cognitive-psych research (see links below) on the conditions that facilitate long-term learning retention. The broad principle around which this research coheres is a theory, strongly supported by experimental data, about the relationship between long- and short-term memory: learning conditions that facilitate short-term recall hamper long-term storage, and vice versa.

The relationship isn’t as counter-intuitive as it first sounds. The more you’re forced to struggle to recall a piece of information, the more likely you are to remember it weeks, months, or years later. To take a familiar example, studying a small set of facts for a long time at a stretch leads to good short-term recall but poor long-term retention—thus, cramming for tomorrow morning’s exam is an effective strategy for improving performance on the exam but a lousy one for mastering the course material. Intermittent studying, by contrast, is not as efficient at improving short-term recall, but it is much better for building retention. (The term “drilling” seems an unfortunate one, in light of this research—it implies, erroneously, that heavy drilling will drive facts deep in a student’s head, whereas the opposite appears to be the case.)

Researchers have identified several other so-called “desirable difficulties”—conditions that impede short-term recall but improve long-term retention: varying the context (location, time of day, etc.) and even formatting (as in page layout) of study sessions and materials; interleaving different topics and different types of study questions so that different pieces of knowledge are constantly interfering with one another; and having students attempt to perform procedure without first seeing them modeled by a teacher. All of these conditions force students to work harder to recall information or carry out procedures, thus improving retention. Perhaps the simplest result of this principle is the fact that practice tests are more effective than studying sessions.

Of course, the retrieval process must ultimately succeed. If conditions are made so difficult that the student is entirely unable to recall information from one study sessions to the next, then the benefit of these desirable difficulties diminishes or disappears entirely. The educator’s task, it seems, is to create a balance wherein students will struggle to recall facts, but ultimately succeed in recalling them.

One interesting side-point: according to some of the articles linked below, learning retention is actually a type of learning transfer. Learning transfer refers to the ability of students to take information and skills learned in one context and apply them to another. Obviously that’s a big issue in education, and one that’s of particular concern in inner-city schools, where kids often have trouble transferring knowledge. Long-term retention, according to these researchers, is not so much a matter of keeping memories from decaying (they won’t) as making the memories accessible at a later date—which is largely an issue of making the knowledge transferable to the new physical, psychological, and contextual conditions under which it will appear at that later date. Thus, instructional methods that improve long-term retention are precisely those that increase learning transfer.

Implications for Schools

These results may sound familiar to anyone who has acquired good study strategies, but they’re not obvious to everyone, and they run counter to many standard instructional practices—especially those used in a number of inner-city charters that I’ve observed. As discussed in the first link below, instructors are often seduced by strategies that reduce long-term retention precisely because they improve short-term performance: if the students recall the entire lesson by the end of the period, we think, then they are more likely to recall some of it tomorrow—but in fact, the opposite is the case. The more difficult the classroom conditions, the more tempting is this fallacy. In the inner city, where students struggle with the most basic facts, where retention is leaky, confidence weak, and mastery rare, teachers are inclined to do everything they can to get kids to answer questions correctly. The long-term detriments of such strategies may seem obvious to some external observers, but it’s difficult to maintain that perspective in a classroom full of eighth graders who are still counting on their fingers.

High pressure testing creates further incentives for instructional methods that favor recall over retention. In order to better prepare students for state exams, for example, many schools design classroom materials to mimic the formatting, phrasing, and problem types found on those exams. More generally, the knowledge that the measure of one’s teaching is the result of an exam, whether one approves of that measure or not, biases one towards strategies that seem to produce a maximum of correct answers, though precisely that preponderance of correct answers increases knowledge loss from day to day, week to week, and year to year.

The relevance of this research is not limited to inner-city education. Last week, after reading the articles below, I altered the materials I had created for my pre-calc class. Though my materials already contained many conditions that would challenge students’ recall and application of skills and strategies on more complex tasks, for facts that I wanted them simply to memorize (the sines and cosines of common angles, for example), I had created materials that were intentionally repetitious and uniform, in order, I thought, to accelerate memorization. Based on this research, I altered that approach.

It is this instantaneous movement from theory to practice that makes teaching this class so gratifying, and it is for this that I allow it to siphon time from my beloved Dewey to Delpit.

The Links

“Assessing Our Own Competence: Heuristics and Illusions,”
Robert A. Bjork
A literature review focused on learning conditions that impair people’s ability to judge their own level of competence and knowledge, this also contains a lot of information about conditions that improve recall at the expense of performance; there is naturally, a lot of overlap between the two types of conditions.

Spacing Effects in Learning: A Temporal Ridgeline of Optimal Retention
Nicholas J. Cepeda, Edward Vul, Doug Rohrer, John T. Wixted, and Harold Pashler
A study seeking to determine the optimal time interval between study sessions, as a function of the desired length of storage time—i.e. whether you want to retain information for a week, a month, a year, etc. helps to determine the optimal study schedule.

“The Critical Role of Retrieval Practice in Long-Term Retention”
Henry L. Roediger III and Andrew C. Butler
A study showing that, with regard to long-term retention, repeated testing is more effective than repeated studying—even if you don’t provide feedback on the test, surprisingly.

“Recent Research on Human Learning Challenges Conventional Instructional Strategies”
Doug Rohrer and Harold Pashler
A lit review geared specifically towards educators. I actually haven’t read through it, as it reiterates a lot of the conclusions of the other articles linked here, but if anyone wants further reading, have at it.

* ^ This is how I always describe these kinds of posts to myself before I actually write them.

On Vividness of Language and Experience

2011-02-24T21:49:00.000-08:00

The Carding of Wool

The Trying of Fat

A reader—alright, let’s be honest here: my dad—left a comment on this blog regarding Dewey’s language in the passage that I excerpted last week. His point seems to me so interesting and so consonant with Dewey’s own beliefs, that I want to address a brief post to the subject. The comment itself is excellently written, and I reproduce it here in full:

What strikes me first in the Dewey passage is the vividness and specificity of his language. The "carding" of wool, the "trying" of fat, a whole world of natural processes and self-sufficiency for which we no longer have even the words. The passage helps explain, among many other things, the richness of Shakespeare's imagery. He lived the life Dewey is describing in which human beings actually made the things they used and understood, therefore, in a way we cannot, the material world around them and the properties of the objects in it, the weight of the cloth, sharpness of the tool, the density of this wood and the flexibility of that one. They saw and knew (knew and saw) the world they lived in, and their language for describing it was abundant, particular and precise.

In the second chapter of the same book that I quoted from last week, The School and Society, Dewey makes nearly the same argument regarding the relationship between language and experience. Dewey refers not to his own language but to that of the students at the Chicago Lab School, of which he was then headmaster, and which served as a laboratory for his pedagogical ideas, and he provides excerpts from student writing to illustrate the point. (In addition to those points relevant to the discussion at hand, note Dewey's wonderful sensitivity to the details and style of the students' writing.)

The sentences that I am going to read seem to me poetic as well as "scientific." "A long time ago when the earth was new, when it was lava, there was no water on the earth, and there was steam all round the earth up in the air, as there were many gases in the air. One of them was carbon dioxide. The steam became clouds, because the earth began to cool off, and after awhile it began to rain, and the water came down and dissolved the carbon dioxide from the air." There is a good deal more science in that than probably would be apparent at the outset. It represents some three months of work on the part of the child. The children kept daily and weekly records, but this is part of the summing up of the quarter's work. I call this language poetic, because the child has a clear image and has a personal feeling for the realities imaged. I extract sentences from two other records to illustrate further the vivid use of language when there is a vivid experience back of it. "When the earth was cold enough to condense, the water, with the help of carbon dioxide, pulls the calcium out of the rocks into a large body of water where the little animals could get it." The other reads as follows: ``When the earth cooled, calcium was in the rocks. Then the carbon dioxide and water united and formed a solution, and, as it ran, it tore out the calcium and carried it on to the sea, where there were little animals who took it out of solution." The use of such words as "pulled " and "tore" in connection with the process of chemical combination evidences a personal realization which compels its own appropriate expression.

Dewey provides several examples of the kind of active, hands-on, and imaginatively rich activities that lead to such personal experience and vivid language. (Sadly, I don’t have a copy of the image referred to in the following passage.)

The children made a primitive loom in the shop; here the constructive instinct was appealed to. Then they wished to do something with this loom, to make something. It was the type of the Indian loom, and they were shown blankets woven by the Indians. Each child made a design kindred in idea to those of the Navajo blankets, and the one which seemed best adapted to the work in hand was selected. The technical resources were limited, but the coloring and form were worked out by the children. The example shown was made by the twelve-year-old children. Examination shows that it took patience, thoroughness, and perseverance to do the work. It involved not merely discipline and information of both a historical sort and the elements of technical design, but also something of the spirit of art in adequately conveying an idea.

In another passage, he describes how lessons in science and technology arose out of an imaginative exploration of the development of primitive society.

…the children had some idea of primitive weapons, of the stone arrowhead, etc. That provided occasion for the testing of materials as regards their friability, their shape, texture, etc., resulting in a lesson in mineralogy, as they examined the different stones to find which was best suited to the purpose. The discussion of the iron age supplied a demand for the construction of a smelting oven made out of clay, and of considerable size. As the children did not get their drafts right at first, the mouth of the furnace not being in proper relation to the vent, as to size and position, instruction in the principles of combustion, the nature of drafts and of fuel, was required. Yet the instruction was not given ready-made; it was first needed, and then arrived at experimentally.

This question of need—whether lessons arise naturally from a narrative that begins with human interest—is of great importance to Dewey. For him, that question is tied inextricably to the discussion of language that my dad raised in his comment. What matters is not what we see and touch but what we are led, by curiosity and practical necessity, to examine closely—not the richness of the materials before us but the vividness of our personal experience. Of the students at the Lab School, he writes:

As to discipline, they get more training of attention, more power of interpretation, of drawing inferences, of acute observation and continuous reflection, than if they were put to working out arbitrary problems simply for the sake of discipline.

Dewey sees motivation as a crucial element not only of observation but of writing. Vivid language and clear speech, he believes, arise from a desire to communicate. As he puts it, in a rare moment of linguistic agility, “There is all the difference in the world between having something to say and having to say something.” As a sometime teacher of expository writing, I can attest, that’s dead on.

These excerpts also show what an important role self-expression plays in Dewey's educational philosophy. He has a fine eye and ear for the ways in which artistic expression reveals how students are engaging with the objects of study. For him, social discourse is the heart of education, and the child's drawing and writing, when they arise naturally as focused efforts at communicating what she knows, understands, and values, constitute her most refined contribution to that discourse.

One more instance of the connection of the art side with the constructive side. The children had been studying primitive spinning and carding, when one of them, twelve years of age, made a picture of one of the older children spinning.… It is an illustration of two hands and the drawing out of the wool to get it ready for spinning. This was done by a child eleven years of age. But, upon the whole, with the younger children especially, the art impulse is connected mainly with the social instinct—the desire to tell, to represent. Now, keeping in mind these fourfold interests—the interest in conversation or communication; in inquiry, or finding out things; in making things, or construction; and in artistic expression—we may say they are the natural resources, the uninvested capital, upon the exercise of which depends the active growth of the child.

Dewey Speaks

2011-02-17T15:57:00.000-08:00

On closer inspection, my thoughts about math concepts proved too inchoate to form the basis of the taxonomy promised repeatedly in my last few posts. It is, I suppose, the nature of a serial journal of this kind that one cannot always deliver on one’s promises without sacrificing intellectual integrity. Thus, the “cliff-hanger” at the end of my last post proves nothing more than a tease, and the hungry reader, after a long delay, is served an entirely unexpected dish: a bit of Dewey, fresh from the freezer. What follows is an excerpt from The School and Society, 1900.

Those of us who are here today need go back only one, two, or at most three generations, to find a time when the household was practically the center in which were carried on or about which were clustered, all the typical forms of the industrial occupation. The clothing worn was for the most part not only made in the house, but the members of the household were usually familiar with the sheering of the sheep, the carding and spinning of the wool, and the plying of the loom. Instead of pressing a button and flooding the house with electric light, the whole process of getting illumination was followed in its toilsome length, from the killing of the animal and the trying of the fat, to the making of the wicks and dripping of candles. The supply of flower, of lumber, of foods, of building materials, of household furniture, even of metal ware, of nails, hinges, hammers, etc., was in the immediate neighborhood, in shops which were constantly open to inspection and often centers of neighborhood congregation. The entire industrial process stood revealed, from the production on the farm of the raw materials, till the finished article was actually put to use. Not only this, but practically every member of the household had his own share in the work. The children, as they gained in strength and capacity, were gradually initiated into the mysteries of the several processes. It was a matter of immediate and personal concern, even to the point of actual participation.

We cannot overlook the factors of discipline and of character-building involved in this: training in the habits of order and of industry, and in the idea of responsibility, of obligation to do something, to produce something, in the world. There was always something which really needed to be done and a real necessity that each member of the household should do his own part faithfully and in cooperation with others. Personalities which became effective in action were bred and tested in the medium of action. Again, we cannot overlook the importance for educational purposes of the close and intimate acquaintance got with nature at first hand, with real things and materials, with the actual processes of their manipulation, and the knowledge of their social necessities and uses. In all this there was continual training of observation, of ingenuity, constructive imagination, of logical thought, and of the sense of reality acquired through first-hand contact with actualities. The educative forces of the domestic spinning and weaving, of the saw-mill, the grist-mill, the cooper shop, and the blacksmith forge, were continuously operative.

No number of object-lessons, got up as object-lessons for the sake of giving information, can afford even the shadow of a substitute for acquaintance with the plants and animals of the farm and garden, acquired through actual living among them and caring for them. No training of sense-organs in school, introduced for the sake of training, can begin to compete with the alertness and fullness of sense-life that comes through daily intimacy and interest in familiar occupations. Verbal memory can be trained in committing tasks, a certain discipline of the reasoning powers can be acquired through lessons in science and mathematics; but, after all, this is somewhat remote and shadowy compared with the training of attention and of judgment that is acquired in having to do things with a real motive behind and a real outcome ahead. At present, concentration of industry and division of labor have practically eliminated household and neighborhood occupations—at least for educational purposes. But it is useless to bemoan the departure of the good old days of children's modesty, reverence, and implicit obedience, if we expect merely by bemoaning and by exhortation to bring them back. It is radical conditions which have changed, and only an equally radical change in education suffices. We must recognize our compensations—the increase in toleration, in breadth of social judgment, the larger acquaintance with human nature, the sharpened alertness in reading signs of character and interpreting social situations, greater accuracy of adaptation to differing personalities, contact with greater commercial activities. These considerations mean much to the city-bred child of today. Yet there is a real problem: how shall we retain these advantages, and yet introduce into the school something representing the other side of life—occupations which exact personal responsibilities and which train the child with relation to the physical realities of life?

Dewey’s prescription, like that of so many incisive thinkers, is not as elegant nor as briefly stated as his diagnosis—but it’s interesting. Dewey envisioned a school that would contain a fully-equipped textile shop, wood- and metal-working shops, kitchens, and physical, biological and chemical laboratories. He wanted students to study academics and the arts by following and physically reenacting the development of human industry, from the spinning of thread to the making of garments, from the boiling of water to the cooking of meals, from the microlithic to the metallurgic.

Note well the moral thread running through the above excerpt. Dewey’s idea was not merely that students have an immediate experience of history and science, but that they become bound into and conscious of their connection to the whole gestalt of human civilization—the triumphal, rising tide of human development. As he wrote three years earlier in My Pedagogy Creed, Dewey believed “that education is a regulation of the process of coming to share in the social consciousness; and that the adjustment of individual activity on the basis of this social consciousness is the only sure method of social reconstruction.” It is a truly progressive vision, expressive of a tremendous optimism regarding the future of mankind—an optimism that, after a century of world war, genocide, atom bobms, passive entertainment, and market forces, seems unrecoverable.

The Sweet Spot: Balancing Conceptual and Procedural Instruction in Grade-School Mathematics

2011-02-04T11:10:00.000-08:00


The purely procedural approach to long division. I stole these colorful illustrations from this website.

A few years ago, I was working in a charter school where the sixth-grade math teacher was having a hard time teaching long division. (I myself, let it be noted, was having a hard time teaching anything at all.) I sat in on some classes, and it was easy to spot the problem. The teacher had reduced the process of long division to a series of five steps: divide, multiply, subtract, bring down, repeat, with a mnemonic, which I forget, to help remember them. This must have seemed like an easy-to-follow script when they were planning the lesson, but it’s deceptively complicated: you have to know which numbers to divide, multiply, subtract, and bring down and what to do with all those quotients, products, and differences once you get them. (See Appendix A, for an idea of just how complex this gets.) The students didn’t understand why they were doing any of these steps, so they found all that information extremely difficult to keep track of. Long division, taught this way, became a dull and intricate labyrinth, riddled with small procedural booby-traps to derail the unsuspecting scholar. Yet, pure procedural methods like this one seem to be prevalent in contemporary instruction—try Googling “long division” and see what comes up.

More recently, my girlfriend asked me to teach her long division, a skill she’d never gotten her brain around back in elementary school. Eager to show her that mathematics is logical and comprehensible, not arbitrary and byzantine, I dove into a thorough explanation of the inner-workings of the long-division algorithm, complete with diagrams and concrete examples. After ten minutes, she was frustrated and I was worn out. My attempts to reveal the logic behind long division had made the process even more complicated than had my former colleague’s attempts to reduce it to a mechanistic sequence of discrete steps.

When I saw my error, I crossed out all those diagrams and did what, deep down, I knew I should’ve done from the start. I taught her short-division with remainders—an intuitive process that anyone who has ever had to share seven cupcakes with two friends has naturally engaged with. Then, when she’d mastered that, I gave her a very simple sequence of steps to memorize: start with the leftmost digit of the inside number; divide it by the outside number; put the answer on top and the remainder down below; then bring down the next digit and do it again. Within ten minutes, she was doing long division by herself.

In the teaching of mathematics, I believe that there’s a sweet-spot: a proper mix of conceptual understanding and procedural memorization that leads most quickly and naturally to mastery of the material. When we stray to either side of this sweet-spot, math becomes difficult to teach.

If we overemphasize procedural memorization, math appears arbitrary, byzantine, and dull—and in the long run, students progress more slowly than they would with a balanced method. Purely procedural methods, like the one used by my former colleague in Harlem to teach long division, are difficult to master, because children lack the intuitive understanding that would glue the different steps together in their minds. We invent rhymes and acronyms and other mnemonics, but they are never elaborate enough to capture the details of the procedure, and a great deal of minutia must be drilled into place. This website full of long-division mnemonics gives a nice sense of the pains proceduralist math teachers go to in trying to turn a complex procedure into a sequence of robotic steps; Appendix A gives a list of the dozens of steps and special cases that actually go into doing long division correctly. Even after all the memorizing and drilling, these kinds of procedures rarely stick in kids’ heads for more than a month or two, so teachers are usually forced to re-teach them, year after year. Even if quick mastery of state-test material were one's only goal, this hardly seems the best way to go about it.

The opposite scenario is more complicated. Progressive (or “constructivist”) math teachers are guided by two related principles: first, that students should never be doing work that they cannot understand; and second, that students will learn best and understand their work most clearly if they are led to discover mathematical principles on their own rather than having those principles handed down to them by the teacher. I want to clarify that this is not passive education: the progressive math teacher must guide the students with carefully chosen problems and puzzles that will lead them to the next discovery; in many ways, her task is subtler and more complex than that of the proceduralist—but are the results better?

In a real-world context, at least, constructivism has obvious drawbacks. Truly discovery-based instruction must move at the students’ pace. That makes it incompatible with any set grade-level expectations; for all kinds of reasons, it’s practically unfeasible to get away from such expectations in an urban school system (see my August 3^rd post). Furthermore, since different students move at very different paces, this requires tremendous individualization of instruction, which is possible only with a student-teacher ratio far below that of regular public schools.

There are, however, deeper reasons to question the wisdom of orthodox constructivism. First of all, it tends to compound differences in student ability. There’s much more natural variation in ability in math than in other academic disciplines; when every student must discover and invent for herself, those who cannot see the patterns as quickly fall behind. There are kids who like to figure stuff out on their own and kids who like to have things explained to them: we should not assume that the latter are just being lazy; that may be how they learn best. The mathematically minded student will always want to discover the answer—no wonder, then, that the most mathematically minded teachers tend to favor progressive methods: they’re teaching the way they themselves like to be taught; but that’s not necessarily how most students should be taught.

This points to an even deeper issue—one which constitutes the heart of my misgivings about pure constructivism. The idea that students should understand a procedure before they use it arises, I think, from one of the great hobgoblins of pedagogy: the desire for our students’ understanding to mirror our own. For those of us with a strong grasp of the subject, the procedures and rules of math are deeply logical and interconnected; to use them without an understanding of this logic and interconnection seems to us barbaric—but this is a pedagogical fallacy.

In fact, it is the natural course of learning that understanding should be at first partial and functional, and only later broad and theoretical. Only when the student has become familiar with the practice of a discipline is she ready to see the patterns that lead to the theory. This is all the more true with young children, who—as theories of child-development tells us and as experience confirms—reside in a concrete world and do not think in purely abstract terms.

The strange interconnectedness of mathematics muddies this essential pedagogical truth. Math is a castle built of math: math is the tool, math the substance, and math the product. The theory and the practice are therefore one, since the theory created the practice and the practice the theory. It therefore seems reductive, even barbaric, to separate the two, to teach the practice as if it were mere practice and not a gleaming mechanism of interlocking theory—but only the most talented students can see the patterns and interconnections from the outset. Most, I think, benefit from exploring mathematics first in a muted form, through a narrower lens. As Ms. Dickinson put it, “The truth must dazzle gradually.”

But it has to dazzle. We have to provide the necessary foundation of conceptual understanding to allow deeper inquiry in later years. How do we find that necessary balance of procedures and concepts, that sweet spot? I think that the best math teachers are always searching for that proper balance, and no doubt the experienced ones know where it lies far better than I. I hope, however, that the taxonomy of math knowledge that I mentioned in my last post will provide some added insight. I said I was going to discuss that taxonomy this week, but here we are, Friday Afternoon, 1,400 words in (not to mention three discarded drafts and an appendix), and I haven’t begun to write about it. So, once again, it will have to wait for next week. By now I know better than to make any promises, though. You’ll just have to read and see. It’s like a cliff-hanger, only much, much dryer.

Appendix A ^ ^

The step-by-step procedure for long division presented in the sixth grade math class described at the beginning of this post leaves out a lot of important details and is much simpler than the actual process of long division. Below is a more complete script, one which provides all the details that a robot-child would need to do long division. I provide this to illustrate how absurd it is to try to memorize the long division procedure without understanding the short-division procedure of which it is composed.

Step 1: Find how many times the divisor goes into the leftmost digit of the dividend.

· If it goes in zero times, try again with the two leftmost digits of the dividend; if the result is still zero, then try it with three, and so on.

· Otherwise, go to step 2.

Step 2: Put the result above the digit of the dividend you just used. (If you just used more than one digit of the dividend, put the result above the rightmost of the digits you just used.)

Step 3: Multiply the number you just wrote down by the divisor.

Step 4: Subtract the result from the leftmost digit of the divisor.

Step 5: Bring down the next digit of the dividend so it is next to the result of step 4, to form a two-digit number. (If the result of step 4 was zero, this will only be a one-digit number.)

Step 6: Find how many times the divisor goes into the number formed in step 5.

Step 7: Repeat steps 2-6 until you have reached a step 5 but have no more digits in the dividend to bring down.

· If the result of the last time you did step 4 was zero, then you’re done, and the answer is the number written above the dividend.

· Otherwise got to step 8.

Step 8: Form a fraction by placing the result of the last time you did step 4 above the divisor. (Don’t forget to reduce!) The answer is the number written above the dividend plus this fraction.

Obviously, this would have to be more complicated if you wanted to get a decimal result rather than a fractional one.

Concepts vs. Procedures – the Great Math Debate

2011-01-26T21:26:00.001-08:00

In last week's post—read it before you read this one—I presented evidence of deep math concept deficits in four 5^th graders in inner-city Brooklyn. Math is America's weakest subject, according to the results of international exams,^[1] and it's traditionally the most feared and hated among students. There's a lot of debate as to why that is, and as with so many other issues, that debate tends to polarize around two camps. For years, I have found myself torn between those camps, but I believe the evidence that I presented last week offers a glimpse of an elusive middle-ground and a more nuanced approach to math education.

Procedures-Based Math

I was surprised when Samantha David, the principal of the school that my four students attend, asked me to teach math concepts. In New York's inner-city, remedial instruction usually focuses on drilling and chanting to memorize basic facts and procedures. So why were these four getting the luxury of slow-paced concept-building? The answer was simple: they started the year so far behind grade-level that they will not make it to sixth grade next year anyway.^[2]

For most inner-city students, though, concept-oriented math instruction just doesn't seem to be worth the time. As Ms. David puts it, "there isn't an alternative universe that these kids will get to go to if they learn the conceptual stuff, and they won't learn the material as fast if we teach it that way." Ms. David recognizes the intellectual value of conceptual understanding, but expedience is more important: if you take too long getting kids up to grade level, you risk losing them altogether. (For a detailed discussion of how the circumstances of inner-city schools and the pressures of high-stakes testing force educators to teach procedures over concepts and critical thinking, see my December 23^rd post.)

I find that pragmatic logic compelling, yet I believe that the neglect of conceptual understanding does damage that is difficult to measure. It's rare for even the weakest math students to get the kind of conceptual remediation that I give those four 5^th graders—I'm not tooting my own horn or anything; it's just that what I'm doing with them is only possible with a tiny student-teacher ratio, and I only get that ratio because I'm working on a volunteer basis. Few schools, presumably, have access to experienced teachers willing to work without pay—or, to put a finer point upon it, few schools would deem it cost-effective to pay a qualified teacher for the slow work of rooting out elementary conceptual deficits. I have evidence, though, that such deficits don't disappear of their own accord: last year, I asked two ninth-graders at a No-Excuses charter in Central Harlem what number comes before 100. Both were stumped.

This is more than just a remedial math issue, though. I believe that the deficits displayed by my four students—and by those two ninth-graders in Central Harlem—are merely the starkest form of a type of deficit that is prevalent in the majority of grade-school students. True, the No-Excuses movement has made great strides towards closing the black-white achievement gap in math relying heavily on procedural instruction;^[3] but, though their success is laudable, it is not enough: if our education leaders up the conceptual rigor of our state exams, as they have promised to do (see my December 12^th post), students who have memorized procedures to the exclusion of concepts will see their scores drop. Then too, closing the black-white achievement gap is one thing; closing the achievement gap between the US and the rest of the industrialized world is another.

Most importantly, though, I think that conceptual instruction, done right, could expedite procedural learning, rather than slow it down. See below.

Concept-Based Math

Opposed to procedures-based math instruction is the open-ended, student-driven, constructivist approach favored by progressive educators and Scandinavian child psychologists. This method focuses on allowing students to explore mathematical problems and discover mathematical procedures on their own, rather than having them dished out ready-made. Its efficacy is supported by a large body of experimental data, but it usually requires low student-teacher ratios, which are difficult to achieve in public school classrooms, and as Ms. David points out, it produces slower results.

My own experience is that constructivist methods work best with strong, self-motivated math students. Weaker students and those who are more teacher-dependent seem to get lost in conceptual lessons and are rarely able to connect the logic and patterns that I show them back to the procedures that that logic is meant to explain. Frustrated by such failures, I have increasingly embraced more procedures-based methods—but always with a sense that I was deadening the subject and short-changing my pupils. It seems obvious that memorizing procedures in the absence of comprehension cannot be the quickest route to high math scores—but in a subject as abstract and endlessly interconnected as mathematics, how do you teach concepts without getting your students lost in them?

Middle Ground

What initially struck me about the conceptual deficits I encountered in these four students was how elementary they were. Constructivist math seeks to teach kids the logic behind mathematical procedures—to show them not merely how to do long multiplication but why that procedure works—but what my students lack is a basic understanding of what numbers are: their order, their size, and how they're written. Those two categories of knowledge differ not only in complexity, but in kind: one deals with the inner workings of a mathematical tool (long multiplication), the other with the nature of the objects (numbers) that mathematical tools (procedures) operate upon. In this distinction, I have begun to see a new way of thinking about math concepts.

To put it in the broadest terms, I believe that we progressive math teachers (a category I am at least halfway in) have failed to distinguish between different types of math concepts. In our quest to purify math education, to make it truly mathematical and to shuffle off the dross of memorized procedures, we have tried to teach concepts that are not only too difficult for most students but which are irrelevant to effective problem solving. In a perfect world—one without time constraints or resource constraints, standardized exams or college admissions; in short, one without any set expectations—a purified math curriculum might enrich the mind of every student. By insisting on such purity, however, we have marginalized conceptual math and thus impoverished mainstream math education.

I want to propose a new way of categorizing math knowledge, one which will do away with the simplistic divide between "conceptual" and "procedural" knowledge. This more nuanced taxonomy will, I hope, make it easier to distinguish those categories of knowledge that are necessary to a cogent practical understanding of mathematical methods from those that are not. It being Wednesday night, and my having not yet posted anything this week, I will present this new categorization neeeeext week!

[1] ^ We tied two other nations for 25^th out of the 34 nations in the OECD. That lousy performance appears to be persistent across various demographic subgroups of the population.

[2] ^ No-Excuses schools take a lot of heat for their high rates of grade retention. Critics argue that grade retention increases a child's chance of dropping out and inflates the school's test-scores by allowing extra years to prepare the weakest kids for a given round of exams. The first argument is specious, because there's no way to make causal claims about grade-retention and drop-out rates; yes, the two are highly correlated, but that's got a lot to do with the fact that kids who get retained are weak students are thus already at risk of dropping out before they get retained. Even if there is a causal relationship, it probably only effects unsupportive schools that make retained students feel like failures. The second argument is undeniable, but when a student arrives three or four years behind grade-level, taking an extra year to catch them up makes a hell of a lot of sense. Otherwise, such students will spend the rest of their academic lives playing catch-up, cramming for exams that they lack the fundamentals to really understand.

[3] ^ I don't have all this data in front of me. Some of it, indeed, has not yet been released by the schools, making it difficult to analyze. Others can be found on school websites. The Democracy Prep Public Schools website, for example, boasts that, in 2009, their 7^th grade class "outscore[d] their counterparts in Scarsdale and all of Westchester County by almost 10%." Cherry-picked data is always a little suspect, but this is impressive nonetheless.

The Confusion Beneath Confusion: Brief Glimpses of Number and Quantity

2011-01-18T09:33:00.000-08:00

For the past few months, I’ve been spending a couple hours each week teaching remedial math to four fifth-graders in inner-city Brooklyn. My assignment: help my students to develop a conceptual grasp of numbers and elementary mathematics.

Over the course of my first week or two with my charges, I gauged my students’ knowledge and understanding—or so I thought. In fact, I had discerned only the superficial: their addition tables were shaky, but they could perform two-digit column-addition; they could carry but were prone to mistakes; three of them could borrow, but again with errors; they could name the place values of two- and in some cases three-digit numbers; they could quickly add multiples of ten in their heads.

It took me several weeks to realize what should have been obvious: that that was a procedural assessment, not a conceptual one. Beneath those weak basic skills were fundamental gaps in my students’ understanding of number and quantity.

Exhibit A: Counting Down in the Double-Digits

Several weeks in, I asked one of my students to subtract 11 from 58. She didn’t know the answer, so I suggested she count down. From 58 to 50 she did fine, but she didn’t know what number came below 50. Over the course of a minute or two of leading questions, she never even guessed in the 40s.

A couple weeks later, I asked the strongest of my four students to build the numbers from 1 to 19 out of the colored wooden blocks that I use to make numbers concrete and tangible. She built the whole set, using blue 10-blocks and differently-colored 1-blocks—not without a bit of effort. Afterwards, I asked her to count down through the numbers she had made, beginning with 19. I pointed to each row of blocks as we went, and she counted it off:

SHE: 19, 18, 17, 16… [pause. She counts the little 1-blocks above the ten.]... 15, 14, 13, 12.. [pause. There is just one little cube sitting above the ten, but she’s not sure what it means]… 14?

I: [shaking my head] Uh-uh. [pause] How many ones are there?

SHE: [pause] Eleven.

I: Right.

SHE: Eleven, ten… [she stops, uncertain; counts all the blocks in the next row.]… nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one.

Exhibit B: Counting in the Hundreds

Inspired by these incidents, I had my students make “number scrolls,” an activity I remembered loving back in preschool. I taped together strips of loose-leaf to form the scroll, and told my students to write the numbers in order, starting with one at the beginning of the scroll and adding more strips of loose-leaf as they went.

They had no problem up through 100, but after 100, two of the three (the one who struggles the most was absent) got confused. One tried to go right on to 200, 300, 400, etc.; with a little prompting, she realized that 101 ought to come after 100, but wasn’t sure how to write it; when she got to 199, she didn’t know what came next; her first guess was 1100. After 200, though, she got the pattern and continued on with great enthusiasm until about 370, when we ran out of time.

The second did ok until 109, but after that she went straight to 200, 201, 202, up to 209, and then on to 300, and so on. With the help of some guiding questions (“What’s the number after nine?”) she realized that 110 ought to follow 109 but wasn’t sure how to write it. After 110, she put 120, then 130,and so on. She made no further mistakes, but remained hesitant about both the order of numbers and how to write them, up through the mid 120s, after which she too continued without stumbling for the remainder of the period. (The third student, incidentally, had no such confusion; he explained that they had had a number-writing race in his 4^th grade math class, which he’d won.)

The conceptual gaps unearthed by this exercise seem to me even more fundamental than those which had inspired it. The inability to count down shows a weakness but not an absence of understanding, but the inability to count up from 100 indicates that these students literally did not have any conception of the order and size of numbers beyond 100. Numbers such as 200 and 300 were literally meaningless and arbitrary symbols to them.

Exhibit C: Comparing Quantities

Staircase made of blocks 1 through 10

The strangest deficit of all I actually noticed early on, but I didn’t appreciate its importance until later. The wooden blocks mentioned above include differently-colored blocks for each number below ten—the 1-block is a little cube; the 2-block consists of two cubes joined together, with a groove between them; the 3-block three cubes, and so on. Now, several of the exercises I do with the kids begin with putting these blocks in order, from 1 to 10, to create a staircase of even, equilateral steps. When I first started working with them, the kids had an odd way of finding the next block: they would pick up a block that looked about the right length and count the little cubes of which it was composed; if there were the right number of cubes, they knew they had the right block, and would place it next to the preceding one; if not, they’d pick up another and count that one. At first, I tried to point out that there’s a quicker way to do it, but they seemed determined to count, and I wanted to let them explore the blocks at their own pace.

Over dozens of experiences putting the blocks in order, they kept on counting. Then, a couple weeks ago, something wonderful happened. I had started a student on one such exercise, by putting the ten in its correct spot. I watched him pick up the nine, clearly unsure whether he had the right block; he placed it alongside the ten and, seeing that it was just one cube shorter, said to himself, “yeah,” and started looking for the eight. Dear readers, I was elated.

Teaser

The four students whose math knowledge is on display in these three exhibits are at the far end of the spectrum, but I believe that the lessons they teach us about how and why math failure occurs are widely applicable, not only within grade-schools, but across the entire population. There is a lot to be said about this, and I’m trying to keep these posts short, so tune in next week for a close look at what can be learned from the above evidence.