Bill Honig, former State Superintendent of Instruction in California, suggests a replacement for the current approach to schooling. “Build and support,” he writes, is a far better strategy than “test and punish.” Unfortunately, NCLB and Race to the Top locks most schools into “test and punish.”
Honig writes:
“I wholeheartedly agree with the importance of Alice’s question. As more educators, parents, community, political, and opinion leaders become aware of the harm done and the lack of results from high-stakes accountability based on reading and math test scores ( “test and punish”) and privatization (“choice, charter, and competition”), they are increasingly open to alternative strategies. A viable replacement is staring us right in the face–not primarily from the limited number of excellent charter examples but mainly from our most successful schools, districts, and states which follow a more positive, engaging “build and support” agenda.
Massachusetts could offer a powerful model. It performs better than just about every country in the world. Similarly, our nation’s most successful districts and schools such as Long Beach, designated as one of the three best in the country and among the top twenty on the planet should inform this alternative to the top-down, harsh reform agenda. Many comments on this blog describe such schools. Several years ago, a broad coalition in the state of California rejected the major tenets of the “reform” movement, used Massachusetts and high-performing districts as a model, and is pursuing this more positive “build and support” agenda.
What are the hallmarks of the alternative “build and support” approach? First of all, it is patterned after what the best educational and management scholarship has advised, irrefutable evidence has supported, and the most successful schools and districts here and abroad have adopted.
These states, districts, and schools have placed improving instruction and teaching as the main driver of raising student performance. Their policies and practices center on implementing a rigorous and broad based liberal arts instructional program aimed at not just job preparation, but also citizenship, and helping students reach their potential. Curriculum, instruction, and materials embody a shift to a more active, collaborative classroom incorporating questions, discussions, and performances. Implementation efforts build on and improve current practice and endeavor to deepen learning for each child.
Crucially, successful states have provided local schools and districts the leeway and resources to accomplish these improvement goals. They have substantially increased school funding. They attend to class size, teacher pay, and investing in building capacity to continuously improve.
In addition, these “build and support” entities stress fostering the capability and motivation of educators to support improvement efforts by emphasizing improved working conditions, respect for teachers, the value of teacher engagement, and school-site team building. They also encourage the use of significant information about each student’s progress to better school and student performance. Policies have broadened the definition of accountability from primarily relying on test scores. They have also divorced accountability from high-stakes testing measures and instead employ it primarily for informing collaboration and continuous improvement efforts in mutual fruitful discussions.
These successful schools and districts have also focused on student and community support, adopted enlightened human resource policies, and concentrated on hiring and training principals who can build teams, encourage distributed teacher leadership, and support instructional improvement efforts. They also have instituted effective recruitment, induction, and avenues of eventual teacher leadership for new teachers. Most importantly, these states and districts have avoided the more damaging initiatives proposed by the “reformers” to rely on measures that actually work.
Of course there are some healthy differences of opinion about some of the components of the “build and support” approach such as whether Common Core envisions the type of active, engaging curriculum students need (in California we think it does), the importance of an organized curriculum, the role of published materials both proprietary and open sourced versus teacher designed efforts, and the relative roles of teacher, principal, district, and state. Positive discussions about these issues need to occur and many legitimate different ways to proceed are warranted. But those discussions should not detract from the viability of the overall build and support approach as one anti-reformers should support and promulgate.”
From my perspective on the ground in a California public school, it seems to me the Common Core tests are deforming education in California because they signal to our educators that education is mainly about teaching skills like supporting claims with evidence, not imbuing kids’ minds with subject-matter knowledge. In fact, because the tests don’t test knowledge (other than the knowledge of how to perform these nebulous skills), they implicitly assert that knowledge is not important. Thus the tests foster an educational climate in which the teaching of knowledge has no value, no status, no priority. Under Common Core, if kids learn anything about geography or civics, or chemistry or the sixth mass extinction, it’s merely an ACCIDENTAL by-product of learning the fetishized skills. If we take the implicit values of the Common Core test to their logical conclusion, kids would be absolutely fine if they emerged from school completely ignorant about the world –as long as they possessed the special skills. Because of its ballyhooed embrace of Common Core, California has made it the de facto official state education policy in the eyes of most teachers; thus the official policy of California seems to be acceptance of ignorance. There is no strong signal from on high that schools’ mission is to *dispel* ignorance. The only reason that kids do not emerge from California schools in *complete* ignorance is because a. parents teach them things; b. movies and TV teach them things (I bless the smart screenwriters in Hollywood –they are doing a better job at informing our youth than our elementary schools. Seriously); c. we still have old subject area standards that prescribe teaching content (though these are often disregarded and now imperiled by invidious revisions); and d. professional inertia keeps many of us teachers teaching actual content, despite the powerful influence of the tests’ implied proclamation that content doesn’t really matter. As that inertia runs out, California graduates will become even more ignorant than they currently are. It would be great if CA education leaders sent a stronger signal to schools that knowledge is actually important –that, in fact, it’s really the eternal essence of education –the sine qua non of the higher-order stuff we babble on about.
EXACTLY! Without a solid foundation of knowledge, the higher order “skills” are meaningless, and worse than meaningless they create confusion and frustration.
What this approach breeds is adults who believe that as long as you can argue your point by cherry picking sources and “facts”, that’s all that matters.
In other words, it breeds adults just like the ones who are now pushing reform — people who quote crackpots and other ignoramuses about the supposed value of Common Core, standardized testing, VAMs, charters and the rest.
These people are not concerned with actual reality as long as they can create their own and impose it on everyone else.
It’s the attitude of people like Karl Rove, who dismissed the “reality-based community,” [people who] “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality”
“when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors … and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”
Unfortunately, we (nearly all of us) are now left to “study” — and suffer the consequences of — years of disastrous “reality creating”.
very well put. he lost me with “In California we think Common Core…” in the immortal words of Tonto, “Who’s we, kemo sabe?”
Ponderosa, our ELA/ELD advisory frameworks explicating the California common core standards strongly support the build-up of content knowledge, being well-read, the value of independent reading, and being able to discuss and write about important ideas. Here is a just published summary http://www.scoe.net/castandards/multimedia/summary_ela-eld_framework.pdf and here is the link to the framework itself and supporting resources. http://www.cde.ca.gov/ci/rl/cf/elaeldfrmwrksbeadopted.asp
Specifically, look at the article at the bottom of the page co-authored by Carol Jago, ex-president of the National Council of Teachers of English, which demonstrates that content knowledge is high on our agenda. California’s Recently Adopted English Language Arts/English Language Development Framework: Translating the Common Core State Standards to a Coherent and Sequenced Curriculum for All Students (PDF)
Build and Support is a noble and edifying paradigm. It certainly puts a thumb right on the simple truth that it is more difficult to build and support in some communities.
I believe that standards based education is a terrible basis for curriculum. Public education curriculum should have a “common knowledge” component that builds the foundation of an informed citizenry.
This statement by Honig:
“Curriculum, instruction, and materials embody a shift to a more active, collaborative classroom incorporating questions, discussions, and performances. Implementation efforts build on and improve current practice and endeavor to deepen learning for each child.”
is a fine example of top down, tell them how to teach, eduspeak.
We could probably agree on a national “common knowledge” base. Then communities could add to that base as they see fit, and communities could decide how to build on a solid foundation of shared knowledge.
Bill, I know a very, very big school district in California that could use a superintendent who understands why its neighbor, Long Beach Unified, has been so vastly more successful. Broad and Deasy, and Apple and Pearson ransacked it, so it’s a fixer upper, but look at its potential. And the pay is grand.
Bill, now that I think about it, do you know anyone who does not support the use of standardized tests and does not support “new teacher leadership opportunities” (TFA dog whistle) and does not think Common Core breeds engaging curricula? We really need someone who fully understands. Sounded good at first, though.
Yes, and I question whether anyone who thinks it’s even possible to say that Massachusetts “performs better than just about every country in the world” has truly rejected the rephormster narrative. If tests can’t be used to compare teachers against each other then they also can’t be used to compare students against each other. You’re right about the “dog whistles” in this post. But then, any one who has been a superintendent in the rephorm years is automatically suspect – by definition they’ve imposed rephorm on their districts from the top down, even if they’ve tempered it with some “build and support” rhetoric.
Race to the top had $4.35 billion assigned. BY 2013 $4.1 billion was already spent. RTTP is no longer a part of as people here keep saying a “test and finish” concept. They no longer have money left to use for “test and punish.”
Right, Raj, because it was only up to 2013 that schools were closed and teachers fired based on VAM and other test score “accountability” measures. All that’s over with now and it’s all butterflies and unicorns.
Seriously, do you even believe yourself?
Raj, I don’t think you understand. When states applied for Race to the Top, they had to agree to adopt evaluation of teachers by student test scores, with the possibility of termination for low scores. When the money ran out, the states still had these systems. Are you evaluated by the test scores of your students?
They used RttT as a lever to get states to change policy and laws.
Duncan says it gave states “political cover” – that means state lawmakers adopted policies and drafted laws they wanted without state lawmakers accepting political accountability or any responsibility or those policies and laws.
It worked out great for state politicians. They can (now) campaign on the federal government “forcing” or “coercing” them to adopt these laws or policies.
Except that excuse never made any sense, because 1. RttT isn’t enough money to force state lawmakers to do anything, and 2. RttT funding didn’t even cover the cost of RttT policy and laws for states and school districts.
The phrase “respect for teachers” rang out in Bill’s strategy. I’ve often wondered how our students are supposed to learn to have respect for education when they see their own teachers being so DISrespected, really, humiliated day after day by the so-called “reform movement”. Why would anyone want to be teacher? Why should someone love learning when it’s all so….painful?
“Build and Support” are healthy concepts, so to speak. They call to mind the idea of wellness. They aim for compassion and enlightenment. “Test and punish”, on the other hand, imply some sort of illness, like a disease that must be cut out out of the body… or kicked out of the school! “Build and Support” looks to find the good that is exists in our society -and ourselves. Whereas, the “Test and Punishers” see plague and seem to relish a classic witch-hunt. Find that bad teacher and burn him or her at the stake.
It’s ironic that the so-called “reformers”, who like to think of themselves as being oh so high-tech, up-to-date and progressive, are really quite medieval in their thinking. And, it’s tragic that our children are being subjected to their backwards, destructive world view.
Build and support has not been just staring everyone in the face, it has been kicking and screaming.
Test and punish is more than just that, it is an utterly dehumanizing form of education based on market needs, business models, top-down approaches, endless data and documentation, rubrics for metrics, pressure, speed, superficiality, error, ignorance and competition.
Test, punish, fire, churn & privatize won’t make our children resilient. http://www.centerforresilientchildren.org/home/about-resilience/
http://www.dailykos.com/stories/2015/11/15/1450173/-Why-Did-Bernie-Mention-Grade-School-Kids-in-Regard-to-Free-College
“One seminal study looked closely at those resilient children who succeeded against all odds. Was it simply superior inborn character or were there other factors outside the child that made all the difference?
They had at least one positive role model who supported their development of trust, autonomy, and initiative.
The study discovered that these resilient children had at least one adult who cared about and connected with that child whether it was a coach, an aide, a cafeteria worker, or a teacher. In our under-resourced conveyor belt schools, staffing is poor and does not allow for this kind of mentoring. Middle school is a critical time and yet scant budgets force mega Middle Schools where the possibility of any child forming a supportive relationship is even more remote.”
http://www.dailykos.com/stories/2015/11/15/1450173/-Why-Did-Bernie-Mention-Grade-School-Kids-in-Regard-to-Free-College
Another protective factor that this study found which fostered resilience was this:
They had at least one skill that gave them a sense of pride and acceptance within their peer group
Big round of applause for Ohio newspapers, who are staying on ed reform “movement” activists in government despite a concerted effort by lawmakers ‘n lobbyists to get them to drop the whole discussion and “focus on the positive!” which means “shut up and sit down”:
http://www.cleveland.com/opinion/index.ssf/2015/11/wanted_an_independent_ohio_state_school_superintendent_editorial.html
I fear “test and punish” will continue to dominate the discussion as long as our schools and children are monetized.
SLOGANS don’t work! OY…
I agree. Simple ‘rebranding’ only advances the product, and the product isn’t very good.
Like an earlier commentator, I strung along until the statement about Massachusetts “doing better than most countries”. Better at what? How does their demographic compare? Later, of course, it was found that ‘better at testing’ was the criterion, and that the Common Core was a measuring instrument favored by the author.
Here’s a summer reading assignment: I don’t know how many of you are familiar with the works of the late Stephen Jay Gould. He wrote (mostly) about evolutionary biology and paleontology, so you might have missed him if you weren’t a science or geology teacher. However, he wrote a remarkable book about “intellegence testing” titled “The Mismearsure of Man”. It’s not a page-turner (and there are a few pages), but as you progress, you begin to realize that it is a critique of the entire testing culture, and a good history of it’s origin. I read the “revised and expanded” version now available as an e-book.
As one reviewer of the original version offered in 1986, “Should be required reading for anyone who’s ever taken a standardized test. And even more so for anyone who has ever administered, scored or helped write such a test, or used results from such a test to make judgements about people.” I totally agree.