This week, an email and a news story caught my attention, and seemed illustrative of the problems that plaguing education right now.
The news story was that Florida has release rankings of its school districts, rating them from highest to lowest, based in large part on their district-wide performance on the state's standardized test, the FCAT. Ironically, the state's education commissioner said the idea was to "broaden the conversation" about education in Florida. Apparently he thinks "broadening" means the same thing as "narrowing"-- as in narrowing our view of successful education to meaning "high test scores." To no one's surprise, lower income, higher poverty counties scored near the bottom of the list. The commissioner indicated that we must stop making excuses for schools with high poverty populations.
Obviously, we want those students to do better, but on more than just tests. But a ranking like this one, where half the districts are going to rank "low" and some poor district is going to be in last place, is going to create winners and losers by its very nature. And that being the case, do we really think our high poverty districts are ever really going to pull themselves out of the basement on such a rating? Are we hoping for the day when our Title 1 schools outrank our wealthiest schools? Is this likely, or even, in the end, desirable?
I can't think of a single good result that could come out of such rankings, including a "broadened" discussion. The only thing such a ranking can do is make some districts that are already doing pretty well feel good about themselves and others to have a huge dip in morale. This is the whole problem with our obsession with data writ small.
The email I got this week informed me that all our school's computer labs are being commandeered from February to May this Spring. The computers will all be reconfigured so that they can only be used for FCAT testing, FAIR testing (a several times a year reading assessment), and State End of Course Exams.
So much for using technology for learning. So much for my students working on Wikispaces, researching online, typing and printing essays during class time, and working on their novellas this Spring. Assessment now trumps actual learning. This is our obsession with assessment to the detriment of teaching write small.
We are obsessed with rankings and data, winners and losers, and we are so busy checking to see if the pale if full, there's no time left to fill it.
Wednesday, January 25, 2012
Friday, January 13, 2012
Symptoms, Causes, Cures
This past weekend an older post of mine, my "Teacher's Letter to Obama: A Lesson in Irony" suddenly caught on. As of this evening, it has over 50 thousand hits, and dozens of mostly positive comments. A few of the "commenters" made the criticism that I didn't offer any solutions, and other commenters pointed out that finding solutions wasn't my goal in that piece--my goal was to express my frustration. Apparently, in venting my frustration, I expressed what a lot of other people were thinking as well.
But if solutions are what we want-- and I want them as much as anyone--I have one suggestion that is a step toward a solution. My suggestion is a change in mindset.
If you read a lot of the debate surrounding education, people are using data to do two very unscientific things: tell stories and create metaphors. One story goes like this: "Our test scores are low compared to other countries, so it must be the teacher's faults because it's too hard to fire bad teachers, so if we just busted the unions and made it easy to fire bad teachers, we'd be fine." Of course, bad teachers are defined as "teachers whose students aren't getting good test scores." That's one story-- and I'll address that in a later post. What concerns me more today is our metaphors.
The metaphor I particularly want to deal with is a medical one. I think many people view low test scores as a disease, high test scores as good health, and teachers as the doctors who are supposed to fix the problem. I won't even go into the oft repeated implications of this metaphor, that if you send a sick person to the doctor, and they don't take follow the doctor's instructions, then it isn't the doctor's fault when they don't get better. I think that's an extremely valid point.
What interests me about this metaphor is that when we view low test scores as the disease, all our efforts become focused on the test scores. If test scores are the disease, fixing them will fix the child, the school, the system. If test scores are the disease, we must find a systematic cure that will work in every case, and make every "doctor" use that systematic cure. That cure often amounts to attacking the disease repeatedly. With a bad infection, we give repeated doses of antibiotics. With bad test scores, we give repeated doses of skill-drills on the particular types of questions that are causing the disease. As we've discovered with antibiotics, though, overuse can actually make the disease worse.
We are seeing low test scores as the disease, and standardization of materials, assessments, and approaches as the cure, because we must fight disease in a scientific, systematic way. Here's the problem. Low test scores are not the disease. They are the symptoms.
Low test scores are the symptoms, plural, because low test scores are not just a symptom of one problem, but the symptoms of a host of other possible "diseases," and as long as we are merely treating the symptoms, we will never get to the root of the problem. But it's easier to treat this one, easy to identify, easy to track symptom, than to get into the messy, real life work of figuring out how what the real diseases are.
If low test scores are the symptom, what are the diseases? Well, there are lots of educational diseases out there.
If I look at my students who are "symptom free" because their test scores are good, there are certain traits they seem to have that my low-scoring students often don't.
For starters, high scoring students tend to be readers. Low scoring students tend to be non-readers. But even that is a symptom. The real disease is this-- our low-achieving students have boring-itis. They are simply not very interested or curious about the world around them. When I do an "enthusiasm map" at the start of the year, my high achieving students have dozens of interests in multiple areas of life: sports, movies, food, books, hobbies, video games, and classes. My low achieving students have trouble coming up with ten things they are interested in.
My high achieving students read a lot because they are interested in a lot of subjects. My low achieving students don't read because not that much interests them. They look at the world around them and say it's boring, when in fact, the boredom lies within themselves. What if we could somehow inspired our lowest students to be more interested in the world around them the way many of our top students are? It would cure the disease of boredom, and they might become happier, less bored, more engaged, and more likely to sit down and read a book. And test scores might come along for the ride-- the symptom alleviated because the disease was cured.
Some of our students are interested-- but only in a very narrow range of interests, or even in just one interest. But helping a student who is obsessed with drawing manga characters or fantasy football to see that their obsession has connections to literature, writing, math, science, social studies, music, business, art history, and a host of other subjects can make all the difference.
There are other diseases our students suffer from.
Home problems so enormous that school seems like a minor distraction. Poverty so crushing that school is a very low priority. Wealth, toys, and distractions so tempting, so addicting, that school seems like a chore. Depression. Lack of self confidence. Poor attitudes.
Sometimes what looks like an underlying disease may actually be a potential cure. Some students who act out in class because they are bored are actually gifted. Sometimes, as Sir Ken Robinson has pointed out, students' real interests are so stifled by the way we do school, that they act out, or tune out, in frustration. I was obsessed with drawing cartoons as a student. The teachers who did nothing but yell at me to put my drawings away, who made me feel that my drawing was childish, made me shut down. Fortunately, though, I had many, many excellent teachers who set clear guidelines about when drawing was okay and when it wasn't, and who encouraged me to use my drawing in school. Mr. Roach let me bring the comic strips magazines I made with my friends into class, and even to distribute them to my classmates. Mrs. Gottung let me create a packet of dittos to teach the other students how to draw cartoon characters. I think in pictures. That's not a disease. It has been, in school and beyond, the key to every successful thing I've ever done. That trait could have been seen as a liability to my test-score performance and discouraged very early on.
Recent research has indicated that imaginative free play is an important way for children to develop self regulation, imagination, creativity, and problem solving. Imaginative play does not, on the surface, seem to lead directly to higher test scores, and in fact looks like frivolous waste of time. So recess has been cut in favor of more "hard" academic work and more structured play designed to systematically battle obesity. By viewing low test scores as the disease, and good test scores as the highest good and the only worthy goal, we actually end up working against the test scores themselves.
I suspect many high test scores are seen as a sign of educational health, when in fact they are actually signs that bright children are being under-challenged and bored. We don't worry about high achieving kids much; we just pat them on the back for landing in the 99th percentile every year because we're too busy treating the symptoms of our low-achievers.
What if we stopped treating the symptom of low test scores, and looked at treating the real underlying causes of low performance, and, better yet, actually trying to figure out the underlying causes of success?
In health care we have tried to move away from curing disease to creating health. In psychology we have moved from treating psychological problems to studying and promoting happiness with the positive psychology movement. We need to do the same in education.
What kind of students are we trying to create? What kind of people do we want to help them be as adults?
If we want creative students who are interested in the world around them, who read, understand what they read, and make connections, who write with clarity, voice, and insight, who see the beauty and utility and, yes, fun of Mathematics, Science, and History, and who see the connections between all these disciplines and the arts and sports as well; if we want students who are life-long learners, constantly striving to improve themselves, and who can question, think, and bring fresh insights to the things they are studying-- if we want all of that for our students, then we must stop treating the symptoms-- low test scores-- and even go beyond dealing with the diseases of boredom, poverty, low motivation, and distraction.
We must look at the conditions that lead to educational health and make them available to everyone. This is not a call to warm and fuzzy feel-good education. It is a call to a level of rigor and thought that transcends any multiple choice test.
So that's my suggestion, my first one anyway. Change our mindset: treat low test scores as a symptom not a disease; but then move beyond even treating those underlying diseases to a model we are actively promoting good educational health.
Unless we have a vision for our children that is broader, deeper, higher, and more nuanced than "high test scores," we will never make real improvements-- not even those almighty scores.
But if solutions are what we want-- and I want them as much as anyone--I have one suggestion that is a step toward a solution. My suggestion is a change in mindset.
If you read a lot of the debate surrounding education, people are using data to do two very unscientific things: tell stories and create metaphors. One story goes like this: "Our test scores are low compared to other countries, so it must be the teacher's faults because it's too hard to fire bad teachers, so if we just busted the unions and made it easy to fire bad teachers, we'd be fine." Of course, bad teachers are defined as "teachers whose students aren't getting good test scores." That's one story-- and I'll address that in a later post. What concerns me more today is our metaphors.
The metaphor I particularly want to deal with is a medical one. I think many people view low test scores as a disease, high test scores as good health, and teachers as the doctors who are supposed to fix the problem. I won't even go into the oft repeated implications of this metaphor, that if you send a sick person to the doctor, and they don't take follow the doctor's instructions, then it isn't the doctor's fault when they don't get better. I think that's an extremely valid point.
What interests me about this metaphor is that when we view low test scores as the disease, all our efforts become focused on the test scores. If test scores are the disease, fixing them will fix the child, the school, the system. If test scores are the disease, we must find a systematic cure that will work in every case, and make every "doctor" use that systematic cure. That cure often amounts to attacking the disease repeatedly. With a bad infection, we give repeated doses of antibiotics. With bad test scores, we give repeated doses of skill-drills on the particular types of questions that are causing the disease. As we've discovered with antibiotics, though, overuse can actually make the disease worse.
We are seeing low test scores as the disease, and standardization of materials, assessments, and approaches as the cure, because we must fight disease in a scientific, systematic way. Here's the problem. Low test scores are not the disease. They are the symptoms.
Low test scores are the symptoms, plural, because low test scores are not just a symptom of one problem, but the symptoms of a host of other possible "diseases," and as long as we are merely treating the symptoms, we will never get to the root of the problem. But it's easier to treat this one, easy to identify, easy to track symptom, than to get into the messy, real life work of figuring out how what the real diseases are.
If low test scores are the symptom, what are the diseases? Well, there are lots of educational diseases out there.
If I look at my students who are "symptom free" because their test scores are good, there are certain traits they seem to have that my low-scoring students often don't.
For starters, high scoring students tend to be readers. Low scoring students tend to be non-readers. But even that is a symptom. The real disease is this-- our low-achieving students have boring-itis. They are simply not very interested or curious about the world around them. When I do an "enthusiasm map" at the start of the year, my high achieving students have dozens of interests in multiple areas of life: sports, movies, food, books, hobbies, video games, and classes. My low achieving students have trouble coming up with ten things they are interested in.
My high achieving students read a lot because they are interested in a lot of subjects. My low achieving students don't read because not that much interests them. They look at the world around them and say it's boring, when in fact, the boredom lies within themselves. What if we could somehow inspired our lowest students to be more interested in the world around them the way many of our top students are? It would cure the disease of boredom, and they might become happier, less bored, more engaged, and more likely to sit down and read a book. And test scores might come along for the ride-- the symptom alleviated because the disease was cured.
Some of our students are interested-- but only in a very narrow range of interests, or even in just one interest. But helping a student who is obsessed with drawing manga characters or fantasy football to see that their obsession has connections to literature, writing, math, science, social studies, music, business, art history, and a host of other subjects can make all the difference.
There are other diseases our students suffer from.
Home problems so enormous that school seems like a minor distraction. Poverty so crushing that school is a very low priority. Wealth, toys, and distractions so tempting, so addicting, that school seems like a chore. Depression. Lack of self confidence. Poor attitudes.
Sometimes what looks like an underlying disease may actually be a potential cure. Some students who act out in class because they are bored are actually gifted. Sometimes, as Sir Ken Robinson has pointed out, students' real interests are so stifled by the way we do school, that they act out, or tune out, in frustration. I was obsessed with drawing cartoons as a student. The teachers who did nothing but yell at me to put my drawings away, who made me feel that my drawing was childish, made me shut down. Fortunately, though, I had many, many excellent teachers who set clear guidelines about when drawing was okay and when it wasn't, and who encouraged me to use my drawing in school. Mr. Roach let me bring the comic strips magazines I made with my friends into class, and even to distribute them to my classmates. Mrs. Gottung let me create a packet of dittos to teach the other students how to draw cartoon characters. I think in pictures. That's not a disease. It has been, in school and beyond, the key to every successful thing I've ever done. That trait could have been seen as a liability to my test-score performance and discouraged very early on.
Recent research has indicated that imaginative free play is an important way for children to develop self regulation, imagination, creativity, and problem solving. Imaginative play does not, on the surface, seem to lead directly to higher test scores, and in fact looks like frivolous waste of time. So recess has been cut in favor of more "hard" academic work and more structured play designed to systematically battle obesity. By viewing low test scores as the disease, and good test scores as the highest good and the only worthy goal, we actually end up working against the test scores themselves.
I suspect many high test scores are seen as a sign of educational health, when in fact they are actually signs that bright children are being under-challenged and bored. We don't worry about high achieving kids much; we just pat them on the back for landing in the 99th percentile every year because we're too busy treating the symptoms of our low-achievers.
What if we stopped treating the symptom of low test scores, and looked at treating the real underlying causes of low performance, and, better yet, actually trying to figure out the underlying causes of success?
In health care we have tried to move away from curing disease to creating health. In psychology we have moved from treating psychological problems to studying and promoting happiness with the positive psychology movement. We need to do the same in education.
What kind of students are we trying to create? What kind of people do we want to help them be as adults?
If we want creative students who are interested in the world around them, who read, understand what they read, and make connections, who write with clarity, voice, and insight, who see the beauty and utility and, yes, fun of Mathematics, Science, and History, and who see the connections between all these disciplines and the arts and sports as well; if we want students who are life-long learners, constantly striving to improve themselves, and who can question, think, and bring fresh insights to the things they are studying-- if we want all of that for our students, then we must stop treating the symptoms-- low test scores-- and even go beyond dealing with the diseases of boredom, poverty, low motivation, and distraction.
We must look at the conditions that lead to educational health and make them available to everyone. This is not a call to warm and fuzzy feel-good education. It is a call to a level of rigor and thought that transcends any multiple choice test.
So that's my suggestion, my first one anyway. Change our mindset: treat low test scores as a symptom not a disease; but then move beyond even treating those underlying diseases to a model we are actively promoting good educational health.
Unless we have a vision for our children that is broader, deeper, higher, and more nuanced than "high test scores," we will never make real improvements-- not even those almighty scores.
Monday, January 2, 2012
For the New Year: A Reminder Why I Teach
As we begin a new calendar year, which never seems like as big an event as starting a new school year, I want to write a reminder to myself about why I teach. If it reminds you, too, then that's a bonus. Just before winter break, which ends to tomorrow, I had an experience I'd planned on writing about here, but I didn't make the time to sit and actually write about it before Christmas arrived.
The experience came in two parts.
Part 1: I had a rather hectic last with students the last day before break, one that included a student arguing with me about whether part of his essay was plagiarized, and lots of students being too rowdy and making a mess. It wasn't all bad-- it was just one of those days of teaching that left a bad taste in my mouth. If you've ever taught, you know about those days. You come home wondering why exactly it is why you teach. This can be especially discouraging right before a break-- especially Winter Break.
Part 2: To make things worse, I had set myself up to have a lot of grading to do that night. Friday was a planning day, and grades were due at the end of it. I wanted to clean up my classroom a bit, and do some planning, so it was important to me that I go into school the next day armed with all my essays graded. This meant a good two or three hour marathon of grading, which I wasn't particularly looking forward to.
The essays I had to grade were from both 7th and 8th grade. My seventh-graders had written expository "Enthusiasm Essays" about some activity they loved. My 8th graders had a few late "Education Essays" about an educational issue coming in, as well as their "This I Believe" essays of personal philosophy.
I sat in my big leather recliner, pulled out my pack of colored pens (I recommend the Uniball Signo click-top pens-- they are terrific), and opened the first folder. My seventh graders had written with harnessed enthusiasm, articulately conveying their enthusiasms with words. They wrote about creating music on various instruments, or with their own voices. They wrote about creating art, and about playing a favorite sport. They wrote about reading for the sheer pleasure of it, and wanting to find a job some day that would enable them to read. They wrote with such detail, such passion, that they made their enthusiasms tangible. I told them that I wanted to feel the heat of their enthusiasm radiating from the page-- and for the most part, they did just that. I was starting to warm up.
And then I moved on to my eight-graders This I Believe essays. They wrote about faith. They wrote about doubt. They wrote about their lives, for the most part with eloquence, insight, and thoughtfulness. I knew there were several essays I would want my students to submit to the This I Believe website. When I opened the last essays I had to read, the late-work Education Essays, I read and enjoyed them, but one of them stood out. Sara wrote about letting students bring themselves and their own personal interests into class, rather than trying to standardize everyone. She wrote with such maturity, command of language, and quirky voice that I realized she sounded just like a real columnist.
That's what my goal is all along-- to get my student writers to the point that they transcend rubrics, and writing scores, and hit that place where they no longer sound like student writers, or even excellent student writers, but like Writers. Period.
Of course, I realized that when I go back to school in January, I'd have to send her piece to one of the local newspapers.
I closed the folders, threw my Uniball pens in their bag, and got ready to input the grades on the computer. As I did so, I glanced up at the clock: nearly three hours had passed, but I had been so immersed, so completely swept away by my students' writing, that it seemed no time had passed at all.
And I realized that my kind-of-lousy last day before break had been redeemed. Those papers were the tangible evidence of why I teach: to see my students developing interests, enthusiasms, beliefs, and voices of their own. Not to fill a bucket, but to light a fire.
Happy New Year.
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