Robert Shepherd, teacher, author, curriculum developer, assessment expert, etc., left the following comment on the blog about the deadening effects of the Common Core on teachers and students:
The biggest tragedy that has occurred in the last few decades in our schools is that they have been to an enormous extent turned into test prep organizations under the standards and testing regime. This is true in both public and charter schools. “Reformers” successfully rebranded the national standards by simply changing their name. So, for example, in Florida, the Common Core State Standards–unchanged–are now called the Mathematics Florida Standards and the Language Arts Florida Standards, but make no mistake about it, these are the CCSS.
The public largely believes that the standards and testing have been a good thing, and that’s because simple arguments can be made for them: who doesn’t want “high standards”? Who doesn’t want “accountability”? These phrases are easily promulgated sound bites. But go into K-12 classrooms, and what you find is that where in the past students were writing essays and reading novels and nonfiction books and short stories and plays, they are now doing exercise sets based on the questions on the standardized tests.
An English department chairperson recently told me that this is ALL she does until the kids take the test in April or May–test prep exercises, every day, for almost the entire school year. This teacher’s approach is now the norm.
Traditional materials for teaching English language arts have been largely replaced by ones that emphasize exercise sets in which each exercise is narrowly focused on practicing one skill described by one standard. What particular readings are involved has become largely irrelevant under this regime–any reading will do as long as it is accompanied by an exercise for practicing standard x or y. The content of these readings is often completely random–a piece about Harriet Tubman here, one about invasive plant species there–and so there is no sustained work in a particular context–that of a novel or a unit on some nonfiction topic–even though brains are connection machines, learning happens when it is connected to previous learning, and comprehension is largely contextual.
Where in the past, a teacher would announce that he or she was starting a unit on Robert Frost or the literature of the Civil War (Crane, Bierce, etc.), now it’s, “OK, class. We’re going to work on our recognizing the main idea skills.” But there’s a problem: There is no such thing as a generalized recognizing the main idea skill. Such a thing is entirely mythical, like the fairies that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle believed in. Meaning is contextual, and arriving at the main idea or main ideas (for often, there are several) depends upon particular knowledge of the text’s aims and context.
The CCSS for ELA give lip service to substantive reading and content knowledge, but the truth is that on the ground, where it matters, the national standards and testing regime has replaced traditional instruction in English with test prep exercises, and this has been a calamity of enormous proportions. It’s meant the end of the profession of English teaching as I knew it. I know many, many English teachers who have quit or changed fields because of this. They are sick of being pressured by administrators to do all test prep all the time. But the administrators are simply doing what they are incentivized to do. They are evaluated primarily on the test scores that they deliver, for who doesn’t want to be principal of an A school?
With this going on, worrying about other matters is like spending one’s time polishing the bright work on a sailboat when there is a hole in the hull.
Except in isolated classrooms where brave teachers are continuing to teach despite the standards and testing regime, the teaching of English in K-12 is dead.
RIP
When I retired about 13 years ago, education seemed to have the students needs a priority.
Sadly, that is not the situation today! Administrators, teachers, classified employees, parents and students should speak out and demand change.
So, I agree with this post, to an extent. I agree about too much focus on TEST prep, and I understand how some teachers (or schools/districts) interpret CCSS as restricting. I would counter with two points – 1) I think more of the issue with the standards is how they are implemented. At my daughters’ elementary school, sometimes some of the creative items are not included (as noted here) because teachers/administrators say it’s not connected to the standards…Instead, teachers should not look at such a strict interpretation of the standards, as I really believe they were written to be more open as opposed to restrictive.
Now, for my second point, you write, “who doesn’t want “high standards”? Who doesn’t want “accountability”?
I have written on the blog before of working with and seeing teachers who, without set standards, were able to teach whatever they wanted to…Sure, in some cases that leads to more freedom and really good things., But it also leads to things that aren’t so great. So what do we do? Some will argue administrators need to do their job better, etc. But as we have noted before, administrators are overworked, etc…
Without standards, we have kids graduating from HS (or from classes) without meeting minimum expectations, we have kids being passed in classes where they haven’t mastered the material in the class. So, what do we do about those. I also don’t believe that the stats that say 80% of teachers are proficient, etc. is really true – as there are other articles that note principals often feel pressure to not honestly assess the teachers who are struggling..
Teachers are always being assessed and evaluated by the principals and other administrators. This has been going on for a long time well before charter schools and Common Core. There have been standards long before CC, usually set by the state. There’s a lot of discussion and controversy regarding retaining kids. Usually, retention is recommended in the lower grades but retention can do more harm than any perceived good. Maybe it would be better to give extra support for the particular child than keeping him/her back grade after grade. It’s a moving debate.
The standards movement is 20 years old. What do we have to show for it? We still have children going to college without skills. Or do we? Who knows in truth? Are the college kids who do not produce there failing because they do not have the skills? Perhaps they are not people who love learning? Are they not ready because they figured the high school teachers were as bad as they heard in the popular press? Who can tell what is in the stew?
So, while the standards movt may be 20 years old, I would argue that in many cases it’s the implementation of the standards that has not worked. As for Common Core trying to create a national standard for all (without calling it national standards), I am not sure why that’s a bad thing. Why should a child in state A be able to graduate HS with say two years of math where child in State B has to take four years? CCSS is supposed to a floor, not a ceiling. I just looked at the CCSS for English here (http://www.corestandards.org/ELA-Literacy/RL/11-12/). IF you look at the standards discussing showing evidence in literature they are vague enough that they can be applied to classics or any text. Yes, I have read, and heard, that there is a push for students to better understand material that is more “every day” – I see some value in that as well. But I don’t agree with throwing out all of the classics as some have done. Again, the issue is that those districts/schools have misinterpreted what CCSS is asking of their teachers…
jlsteach: I am one of those teachers who taught algebra 2 and did not teach what I should have. The standards movement was responsible for my teaching children who we’re not ready to take algebra II. It put pressure on political leaders in various places in the chain of educational command to try to one up each other. Soon we were hearing that all students were capable of taking Algebra II. Manure.
When we had the decisions all to ourselves, we did what we could for the kids. I started a calculus program in our small rural high school. I persuaded some of the kids to come along. That did more for the amount of math the kids knew than any list of standards. Did we have a call program that was the equal of places where a culture of math was deeper? Of course not, but I was only interested in our kids learning more. Would you argue there is something wrong with that?
Having kids try classes they are not ready for does not help us to raise standards. Trusting testing to assure accountability requires a leap of logical faith that has been called into question. Is that really what we want, or does testing really fulfill a hidden agenda to sort people into piles? If accountability means sorti people into piles, count me out. I would rather take those kids not ready for alg II and move them as far as I can.
jlsteach,
“Without standards. . . ”
So much bs, so little desire to refute it again, and again and again, ad infinitum.
So let me ask this. What is your given name and what is your job in relation to education?
Don’t remember if I’ve asked this of you before, but I find it increasingly impossible for me to give any credence to those who hide behind pseudonyms no matter who they are.
The way to confront the fear of “being discovered/found out” is to come out and be honest about who one is and what one’s background is that has allowed one to “be where they are” (intellectually speaking). Without that intellectual honesty, well let’s just say the conversations/discussions/arguments are far less than adequate and serve only to obfuscate the topic at hand.
This post is not just to Duane but to others as well. First Duane – last I looked there are many others on this post that had pseudonyms – yet you seemed to only call me out (a person you disagree with). I have the right to use the pseudonym and will continue to do so.
Second I too have posted often about teachers that I personally worked with that seemed to not teach the right content (i.e. teaching lower level math in an Alg II class where kids were getting credit for Algebra II). It seems that some folks on this post have never worked with teachers that weren’t strong. LCT, whom I often agree with, notes, “And what about those teachers who wouldn’t know what or how to teach without the CCSS “guidance”? I haven’t met one of those, but if I ever do I’ll let you know. – I am guessing he or she has worked with teachers that were not effective or even good? Or maybe everyone here has worked with strong teachers.
I am more of a math person, but I will say this – I do think that there needs to be more common texts that all children read – both the classics as well as others. In HS I went through the International Baccalaurate program where you had a choice among different texts to chose – and yes, the teacher or dept helped make those choices. So if CCSS is limiting that, then well, I am against this.
Duane, and others who felt that I was advocating for the constant standardized testing, I am not. However, I am advocating for some type of accountability. Duane – you said you were observed yearly – well, in some schools that doesn’t happen. Or should it be just one observation that a teacher plans for (i.e. can do something special that day). but then he or she can do whatever else happens the entire time?
And since Duane touted in the ending of his book that it’s ok to not come up with perfect solutions to different problems, I am just going to end it here. I don’t have the ideal solution to solve the situation. But I do think it’s an injustice that kids in Alabama may not get the same type of education that kids in California get. OR making it even more local, that kids in SE DC get exposed to the same material as kids in NW DC.
Finally, I’ll end with the fact that I know that curriculum is NOT the only solution. My daughters’ school is in a different part of the county (not as wealthy) as other parts of the county – and an administrator once told me that since all children had the same access to the curriculum that all children had the same opportunity to pursue the gifted programs. We all know that is not true – that so much of what happens is directly in the classroom and is based on the interpretation of standards by the teacher.
I used to think that giving everyone the same curriculum would bring about equality. That was the idea behind the Common Core. I now think that adequate and equitable resources would do much more to advance equality that the same curriculum. No one wonders if Andover and Exeter have the same curriculum.
Dr Ravitch I would argue that you have to hVe both. I agree that having common standards alone is not enough. BUT without common standards and expectations how do you eliminate the previous scenarios i mentioned?
Common Core is proof that national standards don’t work and don’t matter. I advocated national standards for years. I was wrong.
I respectfully disagree. So you think of all schools had all the same resources and funding that everyone would do what was right and have the same expectations for all students? Maybe – but I’m not convinced
I do see what you’re saying – in private schools I taught at there were not standards – teachers had flexibility. But when parents are paying 30-40K a year they also have expectations of what is or isn’t taught
Identical standards in every school does not increase achievement because many schools are underresourced and many children are hungry, homeless, lack decent medical care, worry about things that standards don’t fix.
How about a radical experiment. Every school should have the resources of Success Academy charters. They should be connected to a medical clinic and have a nurse on staff. They should serve nutritious meals. They should have classes of no more than 15, and for high-needs children, no more than 12. They should have a chorus, dramatics, art, dancing, all the arts; they should have well-equipped science labs and robotics classes. How about that?
Dr Ravitch I do not disagree with any of this. And you are right probably in such instances standards wouldn’t be as necessary. But as I’ve noted before hear and in other places in public schools I’ve witnessed and seen teachers not teaching kids to the level of the material. In fact I’d argue that the standards mvmt in part came about because previously parents had no idea what was happening in their child’s classrooms. They were stunned when they learned their children weren’t getting the education they expected. And often this was happening in poor areas. Yes resources are a part of it. But I’ll share this – in my first year at a new school I didn’t have a book til Oct (yes I know others don’t have books at all)…still I had to teach Alg II. So I began with factoring. I then learned that my students who had been in Geometry and Alg I for two years were essentially passed without learning the basics. That infuriated me – how could a school or teacher just pass kids without having them learn the material? I immediately began to scaffold my work so that they would learn the required material. That is why I am passionate about accountability. Maybe standards aren’t the answer. And no I don’t think standardized tests are either. But to me some type of accountability needs to happen. Resources too need to happen – you are right very on that
LCT – see above as why I am somewhat passionate about some
type of accountability. You’re right I do not know the entire story. But I do not what thI outcome was for ny students
Even today we hear of teacher shortages… which means kids across this nation will have ill prepared teachers, leading to continuing the cycle. Yes, I know standards alone will not solve this – states need to value teachers, provide adequate salaries and.l not think “anyone can teach”…completely true. But I still think back to the group of 10th graders in Alg II who openly admitted they did no work for the grades they got. That story is not the only example of that in the US
I look back at the high school students I had in my self contained language arts and reading classes and I know that few of them had a chance of meeting what would be typical high school standards. What the heck do you do when you get students who have only third grade reading skills? I knew they had brains in their heads from the discussions we used to have and the progress they made, and I also knew that there were general ed students who were not much better off in mainstream classes. When a student is years behind, what do you do? My solution was to teach them as much as I could that would prove to them that they had minds and could think. Deep down under all the teenage swagger was a deep sense of inadequacy and frustration. I knew that many of those kids were woefully unprepared by typical standards. I tried to give them a belief in their own ability to keep growing beyond high school.
Speduktr – So I am guessing from your post (And your username) that you may be a special education teacher. I certainly believe that not ALL students should be held to the same standards, particularly those that have an IEP or a 504 plan. I do think that the attempts of NCLB (and then Race to the Top and then ESSA) to get all students up to a level or particular standards is unreasonable. This is where I do think that growth is important – if you were able to show that you had your students grow a certainy amount from where they started, that would be worthwhile.
That being said, I do think that sometimes we place lower expectations on folks just because. For example, I have worked with students that have dyscalcula – where they struggle with all numeric calculations, including and particularly equations like Algebra. My suggestion to one parent whose child I was working with was having the student solve a problem graphically – this way he/she can still solve the problem but just doing it a different way. Now if the standards said they have to solve it three ways, but their IEP has them do it one way, to me that’s acceptable.
What I don’t what happening (and I think the creators of NCLB – remember Ted Kennedy was one of them) is where kids of a particular color or economic background are denied access to certain classes or teachers have lower expectations for them simply because of where they live or there economic background. The reality is that happened in the 60/70s/80s, and probably in some cases still happens today.
So I get it – having national standards may not be the best solution – but in all of the responses here, no one has offered a counter argument to how we avoid such situations – where students are denied access to certain levels of education not because they cannot do it but because of their race or economic status.
“…if you were able to show that you had your students grow a certainy amount from where they started, that would be worthwhile.”
And how do we show growth these days? Tests! We try to standardize the ways we determine success. Tell me how that makes sense given the differences in children. We have spent years learning how to maximize differentiation in the way we teach children only to sit them down and expect them all to prove their growth using the same instrument. We bought into the false narrative of failing public schools and then let non-educators decide the way to improve them was to demand higher standards across the board and expect all children to show proficiency in their one easy to quantify method of accountability. The powers that be have chosen the easy, lucrative way out. Private businesses rake in millions of dollars selling us garbage while cutting social services and training programs. When did it become the responsibility of schools to prepare all children to fill the ranks of corporate clones? Businesses used to train employees and before the widespread destruction of unions, many more provided training to their members. You cannot keep crushing the little guy and then demand that his children excel at your little pre-programmed farce of an education model. It is amazing to me that we still manage to turn out so many students who are ready to tackle life after high school. Where we have concentrations of people who do not seem to be doing well, we don’t need their test scores to know why.
speduktr – I have said time and again that I do not believe that standardized tests are the way the only way that folks should be measured. I know many will say such tests should not be used at all – but I do believe that there should be a more objective way to measure – if we leave it to just the teachers to create the assessments, we have the potential for teachers to not create meaningful assessments. I would be fine if we used something like NAEP. I also think that if districts or states create common assessments that that would be ok as well…I also think that there may be other ways to show growth (that’s the main role of SLO, which many on this strand have panned as a bad idea – again, I think that points to implementation as well as the high stakes issue of the scores.
I believe that back when we had several discussions about SLOs, the consensus was that there was no research supporting the efficacy of the practice.
Dr Ravitch I agree with you on school inequality around resources but I wonder what in the 80s orIginally made you a proponent of national standards? I am guessing you saw some inequalities that you were. It happy with correct?
Because Diane has a WordPress Blog, she has access to the IP addresses of everyone that leaves comments here. The IP address won’t lead to the individual, but there is an 80-percent chance it will lead to within 20 miles of the location the comment was sent from.
http://whatismyipaddress.com/ip-lookup
There are other sites that look-up IP addresses and most of them are FREE. Don’t pay.
Jls,
First, Duane has asked me for my real name and I have emailed it to him. He kindly invited me to his home and to go fishing.
Second, when I was a newbie teacher I used to privately criticize other teachers. I learned I was wrong to think so, plain and simple. If someone’s been teaching for more than a small handful of years without having suffered a stroke from poor classroom management (not exaggerating) or been chased off by angry parents and administrators, she’s a good teacher.
Third, diversity is a strength, not a weakness.
Finally, when you figure out how to prevent the powerful testing conglomerates from using standardization to sell standardized tests to Congress, you let me know. Right now, with testing mandated, education is eroding because of Common Core “State” Standards,
and the children are suffering the consequences.
LCT,
Don’t worry about jlsteach. I know who he is, based on his IP address. He is an educator and he is earnestly trying to work through what he believes.
I think from the point of view of the legislators, they are spending public dollars and need to have some way to justify those expenditures (their own accountability to the public). “Trust the teacher in the classroom” doesn’t do it, especially in the view of high school graduation rates. Numbers do. But into that gap, wallpapered by a poor understanding of what education is and does, marches all of the evil in education that we are discussing on this site.
LCT – Glad Dr. Ravitch could ease fears about who I was…but in order to address some of your points here.
First, I am not against diversity at all – I don’t believe that teachers should be told exactly how to teach, but I worry when some students are provided fewer opportunities than others simply based upon where they live or go to school (and yes, Dr. Ravitch I do agree with you that we need to provide the same resources to all schools). I also worry when folks say that “these kids can’t do x or y, etc” That type of language worries me.
I will respectfully disagree with you on your description of a good teacher. I worked with teachers that thought the main goal was to be a student’s friend, to be the cool, popular teacher, but that it didn’t matter what they taught in terms of the content or the material. While certainly teachers should be more than just folks that share content (I am proud that some of my former students still reach out to me 10 years after graduation), I also know that my main goal was to make sure that students were prepared for the material. Otherwise, I am just a mentor, a friend, a supporter, but not a teacher.
Finally, on your point on the testing companies and the role of standardized tests – I don’t disagree with you I don’t know how to not have such companies involved, unless you get true changes in terms of school funding and support that Dr. Ravitch has mentioned. That being said, I do believe that there should be some type of accountability. That accountability goes in multiple directions – for students, for teachers, for parents, etc. All have to be held accountable.
Thank you, Diane. I thought so at first because of his username, but started to doubt my assumption. Teachers, especially in big cities, need to be anonymous or fear attack from reformy employers. I understand. I also understand why so many people, many teachers included, allowed Hope for President Obama to persuade them that the Common Core debacle was everyone’s fault but his and Arne Duncan’s. I was fooled too for a while.
LCT, and others…this is not the ideal statistic, but it is one that I happened to find off hand. IF you look at this link, it shows graduation requirements for states (this shows just one measure, but it will make my point): \
https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d96/d96t152.asp
If you look at this, in 1993, students in Alabama could graduate from HS with two math courses (nothing specific on what they were); many others required 3 units for math. Is it fair that a student in Alabama could graduate from HS and attend college with less math than someone from another state – more so would that student be at a disadvantage taking math classes in college – have to take more math/cost more to pursue opportunities).
And while I hate to take things from Wikipedia, I happened upon this line in relation to the standards based movement, ” It is a goal to achieve equity and success for all groups in society, as it is no longer acceptable to many in the education community that some have been historically excluded from the full range of opportunities that are open to those who have access…”
Those not having access relates to the expectations above for graduation, etc.
Let me be clear once again – I don’t have all of the solutions on how to do this work. I DO agree that corporations have tainted education. I DO agree that the cookie-cutter lessons that many corporations have created and districts/schools have adopted are NOT the way education needs to be for everyone. BUT, I also believe that there should be some type of accountability – that it cannot just be “trust the teacher”. I also DO believe that kids in Alabama deserve the same expectations around graduation OR material taught in an Algebra II course as kids in California. SO, if someone can tell me how we can do that without standards – I am certainly open to listening.
Jls,
Have you ever read the National Academies of Sciences report on “Incentives and Test-Based Accountability”? 2011
Dr. Ravitch – I had time this morning to download it, and jumped straight to the conclusions. A couple things stood out – 1. As you will probably note, things like end of school exams, or test-based accountability didn’t raise achievement. I get that – however I will note that there is a line that states “high school exit exam programs, as currently implemented” – I am focusing here on the implementation portion of the statement…A second line noted, “In addition to test-based incentives, investments to improve
standards, curriculum, instructional methods, and educator capacity are
all likely to be necessary for improving educational outcomes. Although
these other aspects of the system are likely to be complements to testbased
incentives in improving education, they are competitors for funding
and policy attention.” – so maybe that is one of the reasons that CCSS came about, as a means to improve standards and the curriculum?
Look, you are right in that I am seeking the correct answer. As a teacher I don’t like standardized tests and see that the heavy focus on them is hurting our instruction. I completely agree with that. If I had the faith that every teacher was doing his or her part in getting kids to where they need to be, then we wouldn’t need such accountability But I have shared stories of my own colleagues who derived students opportunities at learning by lowering the expectations.
So my question is – where is the balance. I do believe that there is a middle ground – I am just not sure what it looks like.
Go to Finland on your next vacation.
I did.
No standardized testing.
Very high performance.
Creativity.
The arts.
Medical care.
Meals.
Highly educated teachers.
I’d love to go there – but I am wondering about a few other things…
Diversity? – my guess is it is not as diverse as the US in terms of students in schools?
Taxes? – I believe that there is a higher tax rate (to help pay for many of the things you mentioned – no problem with that happening for the billionares here, but how are families without means impacted?
Smaller population means fewer teachers are needed?
I do hope to eventually go there to see the comparisons – I think that we can learn a lot. However, as you noted in an earlier post, even Psai Sahlberg noted that the teachers there were not the “best and the brightest”…
‘ “even Psai Sahlberg noted that the teachers there were not the “best and the brightest”…’
Exactly the point! They figured out that finding good teachers did not mean finding those with high test scores and stellar grades.
Jlsteach,
So you’re of the belief that teachers must be very strict. You believe teachers must be held accountable, apparently, by the federal government. And you believe that if you give a writing assignment and find a student struggling to use complete sentences, you should still stick to the standards and teach the student the definitions of participles and gerunds anyway, ignoring the gap between where the student is and where the standards are. I disagree on all counts. I believe a teacher can be encouraging and friendly without failing to teach. Provide more positive reinforcement and less punishment — you’ll be pleased with the results. I believe part of a teacher’s job is to identify what the students can and cannot do, and provide them with challenges that are appropriate instead of frustrating. And I believe a teacher should be held accountable by the locally, democratically elected school board, not by corporations lobbying the federal government.
LCT – Let me clear up a few things. No, there is a difference between strict and being fair. When I taught, my students knew I had high expectations for them, but that most of all I was fair. I had students who sadly suffered numerous tragedies in their lives or had numerous struggles, and certainly I was aware and worked with them on assignments, etc. That being said, I never lowered my expectations for what they could do.
As for giving an assignment and “sticking to the standards” – I do believe in scaffolding to offer students support. In fact, Scaffolding is not lowering standards, but rather offering support so that they can reach higher expectations than without supports.
I too believe that a teacher can be friendly without failing
As for the accountability from local school boards – how do we make that happen? I can tell you that in many areas the school boards are a mess…
And it seems to me the ones generalizing “these kids can’t do this or that” are the racist reformies claiming education is broken, not us educators who believe in public education and our students.
Catherine,
Spot on, as always. I just wish that instead of “trust the teacher in the classroom,” the push would be to trust communities to elect school boards that hire and support good administrators that hire and support good teachers. I wish billionaires would trust instead of trump democracy, pun intended.
LCT – so it seems that we do agree on one thing – that one cannot just “trust the teacher” – that is my point all along – if we have strong administrators and strong school boards, then yes, that is fantastic. but right now in many places that is not happening.
Yeah… heh heh. Believing in democracy is hard.
One more thing, a math problem I woke up with this morning. Two cars are both traveling up a hill from point A to point B at the same rate, at the same time. Which one is scaffolding with high expectations?
LCT – So here’s my response – first, why do they have to be going up the hill at the same time? And if so, maybe Car A has super unleaded gas that will offer better support for an older engine to move at the same time. Maybe Car A has better tires, etc. All of these are examples of scaffolding to support one car making it up the hill..
Depends upon what each driver is smoking!
My point was this: if you and I are both working at the students’ level instead of the tested standards’ level, and both of us are aiming at improving the students’ knowledge, etc. as best we can, aren’t we doing the same thing? Isn’t ‘scaffolding’ just another meaningless, reformy word unless you’re in construction and wearing a hard hat? And, as a side note, my car is like, way, way faster than yours, but wouldn’t it be nice if we could share the road instead of racing each other? (Way faster.) And shouldn’t governments make sure our lanes are paved equally and our cars are provided access to the good gas and the good tires? We are public transportation, after all. (I tried to include a line about smoking the same thing, but I just couldn’t figure out how to make it sound right.)
LCT, So I understand to an extent your point – I do get that sometimes teachers are asked to raise student achievement beyond capacity. That being said, I would disagree with you on a couple of things..
“as best we can” – that makes an assumption that all teachers are really doing this. While I would love to believe that is the case – and I don’t think that folks are not doing their best, I think that this can get nebulous – those in the 60s when we had segregated (and inferior schools for students of color) could claim that it was the best they could do.
scaffolding – I disagree with you on that being a reforming word. In fact, I look at it this way – students in special education would get extra support (whether written down in an IEP or otherwise seen). In fact, I think that part of the push for individualized plans/learning – note, I am not for computers replacing teachers here rather making an observation – stems from what happened with special ed – lessons/supports were catered to each student’s needs. That’s what scaffolding is supposed to be. Why does it have to be something that is “reformy” and bad?
I don’t view scaffolding as being a particularly reformy word either but rather a word that came out of special education in more recent years. I’m not sure who coined it, but it did describe what we were trying to do for students who needed someone to break down and perhaps add some hints to help students participate more fully in the learning experience. One idea I have never endorsed is an “IEP” for every student. When I think of the hours I spent writing IEPs, I shudder at the thought. What is more important from my way of thinking is teaching children to effectively advocate for themselves, which would look very different at different ages. IEPs for everyone seems to be another unnecessary attempt to micromanage the education process.
I dislike the “poor implementation” argument. Every education idea that fails was never a bad idea apparently. It’s the fault of those required to pit it in place. But some ideas are just bad ideas.
The fellow who headed up the CC math standard writing also blamed all problems on “implementation”.
The funny thing is that the people like Zimba who want accountability want it only for other people.
They blame everyone, but themselves.
Zimba made hundreds of thousands of dollars on the project but takes zero responsibility for it.
Along the way, the fact that CCSS were not written by content experts and included vey little input from classroom teachers seems to have been forgotten. As I remember there was a large contingent from companies that stood to make big bucks off both curriculum and testing materials. Poor implementation can be laid squarely at their doors. Poorly written standards, substandard curricula, and poor tests just might have had something to do with poor implementation. Ya think?
Many of those on the drafting committee of CCSS worked for the College Board and ACT.
The standards and testing were intended to be a seamless whole, integrated with textbooks, teacher education, teacher evaluation. Total standardization and capture.
jlsteach,
I hope that you make it out to the NPE conference in October (yes, that is a bad time for teachers, I understand). If you do, look me up and I’ll buy you a beer or whatever beverage (adult or not, no difference, except for Starbucks, don’t do that-ha ha). And we can discuss all issues educational.
And now we find out that the test date won’t ever be released. Nice work State of CA! How will we ever know who is a good student? How will we ever know who is a good teacher? How will we ever know if our children will succeed? (sarcasm) #whyIoptout #wasn’tgoingtolookanyway
http://www.latimes.com/local/education/la-essential-education-updates-southern-california-s-standardized-test-score-1503703716-htmlstory.html
“Data issue” is probably code for needing to determine the political fallout of a certain number of students failing and maybe needing to adjust the cut score to demonstrate the (small) improvement made by schools.
One of the effects of the Common Core is that in my school in the LAUSD last year, they adopted a new English text book devoid of literature. The old one had stories and poems by Mark Twain, Shakespeare, Emily Dickinson, Ray Bradbury, Poe. The new one was devoid of literary merit. I taught my 7th graders The Outsiders one more time, and retired.
My experience, as well, with the latest generation of “literature” texts
Robert Shepard,
Principals don’t merely want to be leaders of an “A rated School”. You’re oversimplifying and not accurately representing their situation. They are held responsible by the State usually and have employment consequences. The teachers are the first to go if not rated favorably for two to three years in a row (depending on which state), and then then after several years of state-defined “poor” performance, districts will and are legally required to consider terminating the principal under pressure from the state.
This is not just about prestige with an “A” rating; it’s about preserving one’s employment .
The rating and testing system nonetheless do not legitimize the consequences for principals and teachers; they only further destroy the virtues of their careers and therefore the true virtues of, as you imply, real teaching and learning.
The State would be fine if it was not dominated by big business and privatizers . . . .
I said, quoting here, “They are evaluated primarily on the test scores that they deliver”
So, I hope that addresses your concern. All the best.
You are absolutely 150%! Thank you for your excellent post.
I was pointing out that the evaluation is not only a grade for ability . . . It carries with it consequences for employability for building level administrators. I had further delved into what “evaluation” means.
“They are held responsible by the State usually and have employment consequences.”
YEP, can you say GAGA Good German adminimals in implementing malpractices that harm almost all the students.
I agree.
Hate to tell you, Norwegian, but many principals ARE in it to be the “leader” of an A-rated school. I’ve seen it many times.
Diane and jlsteach I almost didn’t respond to this thread because what I wanted to say doesn’t address specific issues but rather lays at the bottom of the whole educational project. But I think I’ll say it anyway under the FWIW label. Also, what I’m saying is not (much) about those who just want to redirect/reform/erase education for their own financial, political, or religious ideology. Rather the problem underlying the testing mania you speak of has many manifestations, but is rooted in a view of what education is about in the first place, and what children are like, and not like.
That is, in this view, children are like (or should be treated like) natural or physical data: non-conscious, non-developmental (at least not in the human way that they are), and non-historical. Ditto for teachers and administrators–these are like scientists; only these folks are supposed to be able to manipulate children in the way a scientist manipulates their data in a laboratory. It follows that education as a field should apply the same sorts of tests (as applied in a lab) and get the same kinds of results. Anything less is a failed experiment. Similarly, with statistics (which is an excellent field when used rightly) educators focus on the norms and throw-away the oddball numbers that don’t fit the scale (guess who these data-children are). (It’s the same thing in the sciences sometimes: They don’t want to allow for thinkers to make mistakes–but making mistakes is often the centerpiece of creative thought.)
Those here who have a little philosophical background will recognize scientific positivism in the above brief scenario. From that basis, we still find some teachers and administrators who do “think more of the issue with the standards is how they are implemented.” But they find they are going against the tide of the “unthinker’s, monetizer’s, quick-fix club.”
Also, the higher you get on the administrative scale, the more you get people who “numbers crunch” and who have to answer to politicians and funders who set policy, who listen to their under-informed or ill-motivated constituents, and then ALL who only listen to the “bad teachers-bad schools” arguments; and the more those with remote power want to tear-away the authority of teachers who ARE IN THE CLASSROOM (where the rubber meets the road but where they are up against all sorts of hindrances), and replace them with computers.
Fundamentally, the power-brokers are exasperated because (1) they forgot their own educational road; and (2) children are not computers (products of the physical sciences) but rather conscious, developing, historical human beings. Hey–science worked for them (I’m thinking the rich intrusive techno-crowd now).
I think jlsteach is right, however–that we do need some form of testing and accountability–who would want NO way to check, correct, and self-correct? But it cannot be on the (presently enforced) positivist model and its silly expectation of data-to-results–for children’s education, of all things! And my guess is that most administrators and teachers who do nothing but “administer tests” know better. (FWIW)
Catherine,
I was agreeing with you up until “I think jlsteach is right, however–that we do need some form of testing and accountability–who would want NO way to check, correct, and self-correct?” when you reverted back to suggesting to use that “scientific positivism” that you were just railing against.
Every year before the standards and testing insanities I was evaluated more than once, written evaluations done by an on-site administrator who knew the specifics of the school, the district, the class and the students in the class. And we would sit down and discuss that little snapshot of my total teaching ability, with me having the ability to countermand any notations by the administrator that I believed were not true/accurate.
Fortunately for me, I never had the total insanities that the standards and testing regime come down on me due to the nature of the subject I taught-high school Spanish. I would have refused any evaluation using some idiotic standardized test score and told them to shove the results where the sun doesn’t shine.
When I retired it was coming down to us having to build our own gallows (make specific SLOs), a test to supposedly “assess” what the students learned (SLOs) and then using that “data” to “improve” my teaching, in other words putting the noose around my neck and kicking the lever to release the drop door. Learning a second language, like almost all other high school subjects is far more complicated than some stupid SLOs. Ay ay ay. But it made the adminimal’s work seem a lot easier and, yes, “scientific and objective”. Horse manure. Sorry, I’m not that kind of fool. So I retired.
So, there’s my critique, now I need to come up with a solution right? From the afterword to my book:
“A tactic of administrators or any powers that be to silence those bold enough to critique their policies and practices, even after agreeing with one’s critique, is “Well, you’ve criticized what we are doing but “What is your solution?” usually said with such tone and emphasis as if they have now trapped the perpetrator in a debate dilemma. The administrator knows that it is impossible to come up with a feasible solution to your critiques in the minute or two they allot you to do so, solving his/her problem of the critical thinker in their employ. He/She walks away smug in his/her confidence that he/she won that verbal battle. And you’re left standing there thinking “What a smug ass bastard!”
Be that as it may here is my responses on another post:
Roy Turrentine
August 26, 2017 at 1:07 pm
Duane: your opposition to testing is widely understood to anyone who reads your posts. As far as I am concerned, it is logically sound, as has been demonstrated by the lack of logical response here. Let us assume you are correct and that we should not test students with standardized test at all. As you might have surmised from my responses, this has been my attitude all along.
Having come to that conclusion years ago, I have always struggled to look for ways to suggest positive self-examination practices in education. I feel we should be talking to each other and comparing notes in a cogent, logical fashion, to the end that we learn from each other. Short of testing, what would you suggest? How can we compare approaches? Is that even legitimate? Is the spectrum of human behavior in a nation of as many students with as we have too wide to provide comparative examination to any good end?
Duane E Swacker
August 26, 2017 at 5:10 pm
Question #1. Looking at inputs. Do we supply for all children that which the upper SES public districts and wealthy private schools provide, and then some for the most neediest SpEd students?
This looking at bogus outputs is insane. No business would be looking at false indicators of output to be THE indicators with which to assess a business. That would surely lead to going out of business quite quickly. (not that we should be assessing public schools in the same fashion as a business does although there are some areas that do indeed coincide.
Question #2-Why is there a need to compare approaches if we indeed do adequately fund all public schools adequately as described in #1? If each community provides the proper levels of the and functioning of the teaching and learning process (provided student rights are not being trampled, which can easily be gleaned from whether inputs are adequate or not) what difference does “comparing outputs” make-there would be no need.
Question #3 I think by my answers so far that I don’t consider those comparisons as legitimate if the conditions of proper inputs are met.
Question #4-Again, why or what is the need to “provide comparative examination”? And again, it is the input, proper funding, facilities, course offerings, qualified professional teachers, admixture of SES student groups with ELL and IEP students in the proper mix for the local conditions, etc. . . . Again the key is determining what the optimum input of resources is for each community that is the key to providing more than minimally adequate public schooling that may fulfill the fundamental purpose of public education of “. . . to promote the welfare of the individual so that each person may savor the right to life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, and the fruits of their own industry.”
Anything less is inadequate and unethical, even if legal.
tultican
August 26, 2017 at 4:28 pm
I subscribe to Wilson’s research but I believe NAEP testing does have some value. It is not a high stakes test and it is only given on a sampling basis. Since no one is teaching to this exam, it does not appear to do much harm. I do not think it is politically possible to eliminate all testing and since NAEP already exists, it might have the potential to placate those afflicted by testing mania. In other words, I see it as having little informative value but some political value.
Duane E Swacker
August 26, 2017 at 5:17 pm
tultican,
See my response to Roy Turrentine right above (below?).
And no, I don’t see the same “political value” that you see because false and error filled indicators of supposed learning through false and error filled, completely invalid standardized tests leads one to false and error filled conclusions. It can be no other way. To make such “political conclusions” is to play a very dangerous game that can serve to only harm children all the more.
Dangerous in the Trumpian way of making/believing/using, yes using “truths” that aren’t truths. That is not a recipe for honest political dialogue. And I reject it for lacking a “fidelity to truth” basis/attitude.
One final thought. I urge you Catherine and jlsteach to read my book “Infidelity to Truth: Education Malpractice in American Public Education”. It is now available through Amazon.
The new Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) prohibits USDE from mandating or implying that national standards take priority over standards produced by states.
At the same time, states must have “challenging standards,” and tests to determine how well students (and their teachers) have been met them.
In the decade ahead, it seems likely that the National Assessment of Educational Progress, will remain as the most enduring example of a process for setting national standards and creating assessments. Here is an indication of the proliferation of standards that I compiled in 2016 not counting high school.
PARTIAL INVENTORY of NATIONAL STANDARDS: PRE-K to GRADE 8 only.
References available on request. Left column has the number of standards.
Year Domain or Discipline and Grade Level Distribution
747 2010 Common Core ELA and Literacy K-8 (each grade)
285 2010 Common Core Mathematics. K-8 (each grade)
85 2011 Computer Science. K-8 (K-3, 3-6, then 7-8) revised 2016
99 2012 National Sexuality Standards. K-2, 3-5, 6-8
12 2012 Common Career Technical Core: Career Ready
Practices. “continuous, ungraded” for 16 Career Clusters & 79
Career Pathways. (same 12, every grade)
85 2013 Social and Emotional Learning (SEL). Early elementary, late
elementary, middle/junior high)
208 2013 Social Studies. K-3, 3-5, 6-8
144 2013 Next Generation Science Standards. K-8 (each grade, except
for 3 grade spans for engineering), Add 410 connections to
the Common Core.
453 2013 Physical Education Literacy. K-8 (each grade)
18 2014 School Social Workers. Grade level competencies—
early & late elementary, early & late high school.
1,038 2014 National Core Arts Standards. Pre-K-8 (each grade)
Dance=210, Media Arts=180, Music=272, Theater=226,
Visual arts=150
35 2014 School Counselors. I could not access the grade level
standards for the 35 key concepts.
240 2015 Personal Financial Literacy. K-8 (K, 1-3, 4-8)
98 2015 National Health Standards. PreK-2, 3-5, 6-8
11 2015 World-Readiness Standards for Learning Foreign
Languages. ungraded
72 2016 International Society for Technology in Education. Nine
topics: Communication and Collaboration; Creativity and
Innovation; Research and Information; Technology
Operations; Critical Thinking; and Digital Citizenship.
Revised at iste@iste.org See also Computer Science 2011.
224 2016 21st Century Skills. Eleven “core” subjects (English, reading
or language arts, world languages, arts, mathematics,
economics, science, geography, history, government and
civics). Plus five to seven Interdisciplinary literacy themes:
Global Awareness; Financial, Economic, Business and
Entrepreneurial Literacy; Civic Literacy; Health Literacy;
Environmental Literacy. Plus four to six Learning and
Innovation Skills: Creativity and Innovation; Critical Thinking
and Problem Solving; Communication; Collaboration.
Plus three to five Information, Media and Technology Skills:
such as: Information Literacy; Media Literacy; Information,
Communications and Technology Literacy.
Plus five to ten Life and Career Skills: Flexibility and
Adaptability, Initiative and Self-Direction, Social and Cross-
Cultural Skills, Productivity and Accountability, Leadership
and Responsibility (This conceptual mish-mash—word
salad– marketed by Ken Kay, lobbyist for the tech industry)
3,854 Total
Many of these standards are redundant, contradictory, based on wild
assumptions. Often, state standards are just as absurd. The list of 21st century skills “standards” could rise to a minimum of 472. The quantity and specificity of standards is always greater when standards are written for every grade rather than grade spans.
Nothing was learned from the Goals 2000 project when groups wrote down a total of 256 national standards with 4,100 grade level benchmarks, in fourteen subjects. Everyone wanted a bigger piece of the curriculum, believing wrongly, that standards-writing might guarantee that.
Laura H. Chapman Thanks for your informative post. If I may add this:
Correctly-understood standards would come with (a) a clear statement of a coverall-context view of what should occur in a classroom that is NOT about testing: that is, ALL other aspects of the educational experience for the student and the teacher. That’s what “curriculum” really means (“running,” current, or all things surrounding); and can commonly be found in a school’s well-written mission statement–and goals and objectives–which, when I left active teaching (of teachers), where my teachers brought in their schools’ mission statements for everyone to consider, never said “Teach to the Standards,” or “Be sure to test all day long.”
. . . and with (b) a working directive stating that standards and the testing associated with them will complement but not replace or intrude on any aspect of (a).
“can commonly be found in a school’s well-written mission statement”
Which is all well and good, but does that mission statement fulfill the ultimate goal of public education as discerned from the 25 state constitutions that give a rationale. After reviewing those rationales, I develop a common purpose of public education in Ch. 1 of my book-The Purpose of Public Education. Here is my summation of common purpose of public education:
“The purpose of public education is to promote the welfare of the individual so that each person may savor the right to life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, and the fruits of their own industry.”
Say this OUTLOUD: Standards and testing are a sham meant to keep some in perpetual poverty while the deformers get rich off kids, teachers, and parents/guardians backs. It’s totally DISGUSTING.
de acuerdo
I totally agree with you.
Robert hits the nail on the head. But I would say English was ailing even before Common Core. The earlier ELA standards had a similar deforming effect. I started my career as an English teacher in the late 90’s when standards were starting to take hold. I thought I’d be asked to teach grammar and literature, as that’s what I thought English was. Instead I was asked to “teach the standards”, which boiled down to all-purpose reading and writing skills. I had only a vague idea how to do this, but I assumed the experts knew and that I’d somehow acquire this information. Now I know that no one knows, because the task is impossible. Both reading and writing powers, it turns out, are the fruit of ALL that one has learned from parents, media, other subjects, etc. They’re not, as the standards imply, discrete skills that can be taught in a lecture and then practiced ’til mastery. Sure there are little tricks and fine-tuning that can be taught in mini-lessons and practiced. But the core capacity for reading and writing are gleaned outside reading and writing classes. An English teacher can teach grammar (the utility of this may be debatable) and can teach literature (very useful), but she cannot really teach the core capacity for reading and writing –only a little fine tuning. Yet this is what they’re expected to do. This incoherency is why I shifted over to teaching history. And it’s why schools are now resorting to raw test prep, because, while you cannot really impart reading and writing power in ELA class, you can teach tricks that will goose up test scores. Our school’s brand-new ELA curriculum consists essentially of practice Common Core tests.
Great post, as usual, Ponderosa.
Almost all the vocabulary that an educated adult knows was not learned from explicit instruction but, rather, incidentally, in an extended, personally significant semantic context. So, I take a class in painting at the Y and in the course of a few weeks pick up “gesso, filbert brush, stippling, chiaroscuro,” and other painting terms, not because someone is making me copy these down and take a test on them but because they were used around me in an extended, significant context. Well, teachers can provide such contexts for learning vocabulary incidentally by doing extended units dealing with particular engaging subject matter and concentrating not on the on the skills but on the substance, the content.
Teachers can also provide a lot of the significant contextual knowledge needed to make a given literary work or group of works accessible. One of the very few actual works of literature mentioned in the almost entirely content-free Common Core for ELA is the selection from Plato’s Republic commonly referred to as the Allegory of the Cave (mentioned in the notes to the CCSS). Now, almost any kid, encountering that text cold, will have no clue what it means because he or she doesn’t have the necessary context. And no amount of “applying inferencing skills” or other educratic claptrap is going to make that text accessible. To make sense of it, the student–an older student, preferably–will have to understand that Plato was influenced by mathematics–geometry, in particular–and impressed by the fact that we can conceive of perfect forms (a point, a line, a circle) that don’t exist in the real world but do exist in the mind. I can think of a perfect circle but won’t find one in the real world. Plato was really impressed by that fact. Add this to the fact that the Greeks used a single word–psyche–to refer to the mind and the soul, and one comes to his notion that by simply examining our own thinking–the contents of our psyches–carefully enough, we can discover perfect forms–the essences of this, that, and the other–of truth, beauty, virtue, justice, and so on. Understanding all that context is absolutely prerequisite to being able to approach the text at all. So, that’s one important function that a teacher can perform–supplying the necessary contextual knowledge. No teaching of mythical generalized finding the main idea skills or inferencing skills is going to make the text accessible. Only understanding its context and what Plato was concerned with is going to do that. And that sort of understanding is particular to the text and to related texts.
Another thing that English teachers can do, of course, is to clue kids in to particular conventions and tropes and to the concerns that particular authors returned to again and again.
But you are absolutely right in thinking that for the most part, one learns to read and write by reading and writing a lot, and certainly not by doing test prep exercises on inferencing skills and other claptrap.
I won’t go into grammar here. The authors of the CCSS clearly understood nothing about the acquisition of the grammar of a language, which is largely automatic. But that’s another story for another post at another time.
Another important role that the English teacher can play is as arbiter of what texts get attended to. Part of the role of a school is to transmit the culture–the best of what has been thought, said, felt, believed, and done throughout history–to slightly modify Arnold’s phrase. But under the new standards-and-testing regime, the canon is out the window. Any text will do as long as one is using it to practice one’s “skills.” Ludicrous.
To be fair, that’s not what the authors of the CCSS intended. The material AROUND the CCSS gives a lot of lip service to substantive texts. But the CCSS authors’ list of vague, abstract, and largely illusory, hypostatized “skills” is all that the test makers and curriculum developers attend to. The latest generation of “literature” texts is proof of that–filled with ephemeral junk and test prep practice sets.
My English department colleagues are all abuzz because our recently published test scores were up last year from the year before. Big whoop. My fellow teachers are all perplexed by me. They badly want me to care about the scores. They ask me how my students did. I don’t know. I didn’t look. ~~~ The principal has a Data-Driven series of in-service meetings every September. I usually have to endure a verbal thrashing in the principal’s office and some — during instruction — disruptive, angry class visits afterward because, during the meeting, I keep my eyes on the sunlit window instead of the number-lit screen. ~~~ Whenever I am evaluated under the new Data-Driven evaluation website (Thank heaven I know what I’m doing in a classroom during an evaluation.), as part of the process I have to look at the test scores to “analyze the data”. I almost have to have an out of body experience during the entire evaluation year to avoid self-identifying with the scores. I have to remember all I’ve read about the volatility and inaccuracy of the tests to keep from seeing my students as manipulated numbers instead of developing people, and falling into to the test prep trap like EVERYONE else I know. At least they’re not as bad as charter teachers.
Some would argue that the CCSS were and are meant to be guides instead of restrictions. As long as there are test scores to “analyze” and all around fuss over, however, the standards will always force teachers to do wrong, harming kids with isolated skill lessons instead of full, rich curriculums. And what about those teachers who wouldn’t know what or how to teach without the CCSS “guidance”? I haven’t met one of those, but if I ever do I’ll let you know. This September, I will be reading To Kill a Mockingbird — the whole masterpiece — with my classes instead of watching videos and answering multiple choice questions about the ‘central idea’ of a single, isolated chapter of To Kill a Mockingbird. And I will keep going, year after year, being attacked from all sides. As Bob Shepherd wrote, “Except in isolated classrooms where brave teachers are continuing to teach despite the standards and testing regime, the teaching of English in K-12 is dead.” Thank you, Bob, but I do not have to be brave; I have to be insane.
Wonderful.
Left Coast Teacher,
CCSS can absolutely be used as a guide.
But as long as CCSSS are tied to teacher evaluation in the form of standardized tests, they will NEVER serve as a mere guide. They will instead control and destroy teaching and learning, as they are doing now.
That’s it in a nutshell. Get rid of annual standardized testing and a world of good opens.
“Except in isolated classrooms where brave teachers are continuing to teach despite the standards and testing regime, the teaching of English in K-12 is dead.”
That’s called stealth teaching. I was doing it in the mid-1980s before I transferred back to the ghetto to teach at a high school in the same district.
I was teaching in a middle school in a middle-class community in the same school district and we got a new principal that clearly was an early corporate education reformer of public education. We were ordered to throw out all of our Warriner’s grammar books and only teach to the test. I don’t remember what the test was in the 1980s, but there was one.
When this dictator of a principal heard the entire English department had defied him and was teaching stealth grammar and literature for 15 minutes at the end of each period, he recruited students in our classes to be spies and report back to him.
Then he called us into meetings where he had a witness and then he attacked shouting at us and telling us we were liars and incompetent and should leave teaching. Half of the teachers at that middle school left at the end of that school year and I was one of them when I transferred across the district to the other side of the freeway and railroad to the ghetto where the teachers were much tougher and feared by the district administration.
To survive in schools with a child poverty rate higher than 7-percent and dealing with violent, multi generational street gangs taught the teachers that stayed how to be tough and that toughness extended to standing up to autocratic idiots in administration.
At that high school, it was the administration that had a revolving door. We seemed to get a new principal every two or three years and VPs kept leaving to escape the district administration.
Type – The poverty rate was not 7 percent. It was more than SEVENTY percent.
How nice. Mark and Sara are gourmet cooks. Have fun. See you tomorrow
Joan Baratz Snowden Education Study Center 2737 Devonshire Place NW Washington, DC 20008 202 412 6919 cell 202 537 3922
Please excuse typos–this message is being sent via iPhone
>
They may be “gourmet cooks” but are they truly chefs?
What’s the difference? I have a friend who describes himself as a gourmet cook, yet he has utter disdain for most chefs (he says they’re all fussy, demented divas of the kitchen). Frankly, he’s a bit of a demented diva himself in the kitchen, but since he doesn’t share said kitchen with anyone else, it’s not really a problem (which may possibly be the distinction between gourmet cook vs. chef). I would almost-but-not-quite-literally kill to eat anything he cooks, even things I don’t normally like.
I was just thinking, Senor Swacker, that our schools would be less destructive if they replaced all that test prep in English class with practice making homemade sourdough bread. At least something of lasting value would come of it.
Steve here’s my issue – too often people will say and idea/program/policy is bad and or didn’t work but never look at how it was implemented. To me it seems like many teachers/districts aren’t implementing CCsS properly. I really don’t think the intention of those that created them did so in hopes of getting rid of Twain, etc as books read in English
But we’ve had 20 years to implement “standards” properly, yet it’s pretty hard to find any such “proper” implementation. At what point do we decide that maybe, just maybe, the problem is with the “standards” themselves? Especially when the promoters of the standards are themselves admitting that they’re “building an airplane in mid-air’. Can we finally admit that perhaps there just isn’t a right way to do that?
I’d argue the reason you have issues with implementation is the “implementation gap” between federal (or state) policy that then goes to districts which then goes to school admin and then goes to teachers…not to mention thworry number of different districts across the country. As for standards for 20 years we’ve never had something like CCSS for that long (goals 2000 etc were ideals, not things that had to be or were implemented
As long as we have high-stakes tests of isolated, poorly defined, vague, abstract, hypostatized “skills” using random texts, we shall have English classes that have been turned into prep for taking tests of isolated, poorly defined, vague, abstract, hypostatized “skills” using random texts. That should be obvious enough. The “reformers” are fond of saying that “you get what you measure.” Well, yes, you do.
The English department has told me that it doesn’t matter if kids have background knowledge of what they are reading and writing about, because they don’t teach knowledge, they teach “skills.” I am a history teacher, and I was horrified.
People who say that sort of thing understand nothing whatsoever about what makes possible reading comprehension. Idiocy. How, exactly, are my students supposed to have any clue what Arthur Miller’s The Crucible is about if they know nothing of Puritans, Calvinism, the Salem Witch Trials, “spectral evidence,” the Protestant Reformation, McCarthyism and the Red Scare, Communism, Capitalism, the House Un-American Activities Committee, etc.? How are they going to have the slightest notion what Ambrose Bierce’s “Chickamauga” is about if they know nothing of the Battle of Chickamauga or, for that matter, of the Civil War? When they read Yeat’s lines, “Turning and turning in the widening gyre/The falcon cannot hear the falconer,” how are they to make any sense of those if they have never heard of falconry? What could Dylan Thomas’s line about the “twelve triangles of the cherub wind” possibly mean to them if they don’t know about old maps with cherubs on them, blowing the winds in triangular shapes across them? What could Robert Frost’s “Birches” mean to them if, like many of my students in Florida, they have no knowledge of or experience with ice storms?
Anyone who would say such a thing has no business teaching English. Texts exist in context, and knowledge of whatever it is that the author assumes that her readers already know is THE key to comprehension.
I do remember my junior year English teacher delighting in his ability to flaunt his knowledge of the symbolism running rampant through Moby Dick. I was lucky to have my older sister’s copy of the novel, annotated when she took his class. I also remember that we were never given any help in how to discover this information. He followed the “sage on the stage” model of teaching as did most of my teachers. It wasn’t until senior year that I even knew that people wrote entire critiques of an author’s work. I just felt clueless and impressed that anyone ever had an insightful comment.
Very sorry that you had this experience. Great that you have now learned about the existence of critical studies of lit. Enjoy your independent reading and thinking outside of school. Sounds like you are on your way in that regard.
I should have prefaced my comment by telling you my age, 67. I sure hope I am on my way! 🙂
“It is wrong to suppose that if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it — a costly myth.” Dr. W. E. Deming
Yes. Also true that if you do measure it and incentivize the outcome, you will get more of it. In this case, we are getting in our English classes precisely what is being “measured.” And that’s the tragedy. Students leave class after class having spent time practicing their inferencing skills or their citing evidence skills and know nothing whatsoever that they didn’t know going into class. And this is not to say that it isn’t important–extremely important–to make inferences or to cite evidence. The devil is in the details. There are many very different kinds of inferences, and the procedures for making them vary–there is no one generalized making inferences skill. And, at any rate, human brains make many kinds of inferences pretty much automatically without any training in making them. Most of what we understand of the world–almost all of our background understanding–is a result of automatic inference. The individual “standards” in the CCSS for ELA were never given individual scrutiny, and there are gaps in these standards big enough to drive whole curricula through. What matters, in the end, is what is actually happening as a result of tying a list of content-free, vague, ill-defined, often undefined or undefinable, hypostatized “skills” to high-stakes tests–our English classes have been replaced by test prep classes in which the curriculum has disappeared or, rather, in which the list of “skills” has become the curriculum. The creators of the Common Core didn’t do their job. They didn’t think carefully about any of this. They simply picked up junk from existing state standards that were themselves the product of the worst educratic groupthink and packaged them as a national product.
I just read a journal article on teaching close reading skills in different content areas. They reduced it to stupid acronyms meant to detail which skills to use in what order to decipher the text. I nearly blew a gasket trying to remember the various acronyms that had been developed that really meant nothing, one of which suggested that we think before, during ,and after reading (TWA)! Really? I never would have thought of that! Using SRSD to teach TWA was apparently very successful. Don’t ask me what SRSD is; I went back through the article to try to refresh my memory and gave up.
Forget all that nonsense. When you read literature, enter into the experience. Take the writer’s trip. Give yourself over to it wholly, the way you do when you are really engrossed in a great movie. If there’s some reference you don’t know and it seems important, look it up. But try, really, try, to be there, in the world of the work, fully. After the reading. Reflect. What was that experience all about? The more you read, the better you’ll get at it, especially now that you are a bit older and can choose your own reading–stuff you really want to read. But challenge yourself and read stuff that’s outside your immediate comfort zone. You will encounter many wonderful surprises.
I get it, Bob. I was really disgusted with the whole discussion, and it was in a journal on learning disabilities! I am an avid reader; I am never without at least one book in progress. I still do suffer a little bit, though, from the feeling that we shouldn’t enjoy really good literature. It is to be dissected rather than experienced. I enjoy popular authors with no pretensions to literary greatness, and some of them really can write! I know my feelings are partially a reaction to my long ago high school experiences, but right now I have the urge to go stretch out with a mystery I am engaged in.
LOL. Just saw your comment, speduktr. Should have gotten a hint from deciphering your blog name. I’m 62. Still getting on my way, here.
This argument might have some merit if it were just a handful of teachers, or even districts, who were missing the mark in regards to implementation. But, this supposed lack of understanding of what CCSS call for, or misinterpretation of how to properly implement the standards, is nationwide. At this point, I will shut up if someone out there can show me a district where the standards are implemented “correctly,” and where students are having a blast, and teacher moral is high. Please…show me.
“Misinterpretation”
I wrote it right
You read it wrong
Cuz day means night
And short means long
When a massive experiment fails, like Common Core, its supporters always say the problem was implementation. No. It was a bad idea, badly imposed, poorly conceived.
Wells said, SomeDAM.
Somehow very few teachers were convinced when we heard, “We know what works!”
Doing the wrong thing righter. . . . .
. . . . is what you are advocating, jlsteach.
But you can’t or refuse to admit it. Is there a 12 step process for your addiction to standards and testing?
“Doing the Wrong Thing Righter
The proliferation of educational assessments, evaluations and canned programs, standards belongs in the category of what systems theorist Russ Ackoff describes as “doing the wrong thing righter. The righter we do the wrong thing,” he explains, “the wronger we become. When we make a mistake doing the wrong thing and correct it, we become wronger. When we make a mistake doing the right thing and correct it, we become righter. Therefore, it is better to do the right thing wrong than the wrong thing right.”
Our current neglect of instructional issues are the result of assessment policies that waste resources to do the wrong things, e.g., canned curriculum/standards and standardized testing, right. Instructional central planning and student control doesn’t – can’t – work. But, that never stops people trying.
The result is that each effort to control the uncontrollable does further damage, provoking more efforts to get things in order. So the function of management/administration becomes control rather than creation of resources. When Peter Drucker lamented that so much of management consists in making it difficult for people to work, he meant it literally. Inherent in obsessive command and control is the assumption that human beings can’t be trusted on their own to do what’s needed. Hierarchy and tight supervision are required to tell them what to do. So, fear-driven, hierarchical organizations turn people into untrustworthy opportunists. Doing the right thing instructionally requires less centralized assessment, less emphasis on evaluation and less fussy interference, not more. The way to improve controls is to eliminate most and reduce all.” Anonymous internet commentary.
The people who really need standards are people like David Coleman and Jason Zimba who were in charge of Common Core.
But unfortunately, they have no standards.
Producing crap is all fine and dandy as long as they get paid for it.
“Producing crap so long as you get paid for it.” A sad description for untethered capitalism?
I would add a coda to this discussion. Over the last 20 years, I have seen the authority of the teacher being replaced by the authority of the test in the minds of the community and the students. Parents are more likely to suggest that there is something wrong with us based on the state report card or the comparative test scores than they were before these ersatz numbers began their trek through society.
When I started teaching, the buck stopped at my door. Students would complain at my requirements, and I would be obliged to respond that it was a thing of conscience. I had to go to bed at night with the idea that my students were being exposed to all the necessary understanding for me to justify credit. I was the voice of authority. Ten years into teaching, testing began to usurp teacher authority, and students began to ask if some idea or another would be on the test.
Before testing, we might get off on a tangential line of thought for a couple of days. After standards and testing became the order of the day, exposing students to a particularly perplexing problem became amotivational. As new teachers replaced experienced ones, I noticed that they were unaware this had ever taken place.
So I hold the standards movement as personally responsible for what I witnessed over its time of emphasis. The problem has become the implementation of standards, not the lack of implementation. Teachers forced to teach children ideas they are not ready for try to “teach the standards”. As a result, students who were not ready for the step required by the standards do not learn. Not only do they fail to learn the standards, but they also fail in their attempt to gain the next rung of their own personal ladder. A girl who needs fractions in order to pass the test to enter LPN school is required to take Algebra II by the state. She cannot learn fractions well enough because the teacher is trying to teach her Algebra II. She gets out of school and cannot pass the test to get into LPN school. In the days before standards ruled, the math teachers would have created a class to meet her where she was and move her along. She would have passed that test. We would have seen her at the fire department chili supper fundraiser with a big smile and a kid growing up in a more stable financial environment.
Thanks, standards movement.
And thanks to supporters like jlsteach!
Roy – two thoughts: I partially agree with on parents pointing the finger at parents. But I think part of that leads to accountability of students, not standards. In some ways standards leads to accountability and helped many parents actually know what was happening behind closed doors (in some cases it wasn’t pretty what was happening)
As for your post about not teaching Alg II I have a couple of follow ups – did the students get a grade for Alg II even if you weren’t teaching the material? If so then I do see you as part of the problem – as those students that passed the class then went to other math without the necessary skills associated with the grade and experience expectations of the curriculum. Now I am confident part of that is because you received students who as you say shouldn’t have been in Alg II – they too were passed on. A continuous cycle. And yes I get hat political pressures and district leaders catering to certain studies (such as those that pass Alg II succeed in college – doesn’t mean we should force them into Alg II).
What does concerns me is the latter part. Congrats on creating a calculus program and I applaud efforts to take kids who were ready and can go higher. But what about all kids? Shouldn’t they deserve the same chances?
In the school I taught at all seniors took precalculus (it is. STEM focused school). I had kids in the class who literally had a sub for the entire year of Alg 2. I could have said – these kids aren’t ready I need to teach them Alg 2 instead of precalc. But then what? Colleges see an A in precalc and they get accepted and then struggle in college level math because they had a sub in Alg 2 – is that fair? So I created an assessment of many of the main things to learn in Alg 2 (matrices, logs, etc). Students came in after school, before school, weekend tutoring. And guess what – they got caught up. Was my class a precalc that made a smooth transition to calculus? Probably not. But the same students came back and thanked me for pushing them – they said their college level math classes were easier to pass because I made them learn the right material
Standards alone will not solve the issues mentioned here. Roy, I get that political pressures are real. But don’t blame standards and thinking getting rid of them will solve all problems
JS: in our school rigorous math standards are forcing math teachers to teach way above the heads of many of their students. Kids tune out and misbehave. They gain nothing. Retaining kids en masse is not feasible. The best thing these teachers could do is ditch the standards and teach the kids at a level they comprehend. Thus standards harm kids’ education. Expecting underprivileged kids to meet the same standards as professionals’ kids sounds noble, but it’s often not possible.
Ponderosa – you mention that the rigorous standards are forcing students to teach math above the kids heads, and the kids get bored, etc. To me, the issue there isn’t the standards, but how the math is being taught. If someone is just standing at the board lecturing about factoring quadartics and making it boring, then yes, it will go over their heads. Why not see where students are at, and then go from there. There are ways to use manipulatives and hands on material to make connections to higher level mathematics.
“The best thing these teachers could do is ditch the standards and teach the kids at a level they comprehend’ – Again, the CC standards do not say what to teach or how to teach, but rather how to get students thinking about math, being able to explain their thinking. Yes, this takes time and it often not easy as most students have never been asked to explain their thinking before. If teachers begin trying it, get some resistance and then give up, well, that’s part of the issue. But if they are persistant it’s amazing what can be done to show students that thought they could never access math before how they can access it.
Jlsteach: Obviously, you have not had the experience of teaching children from a wide variety of educational backgrounds and experiences. In most community schools, there are children of all levels of development. In your school, and apparently, in your experience, all children are capable and willing to learn algebra at an advanced level, given that they all take a course called Pre-calculus. This is not the case for the general population of high school students. Human ability at a specific age falls into a wide variety. Human behavior conducive to learning also falls into a wide range. This is way more complex than my being willing or unwilling to give a student credit or not. Standards do not solve the complexity. This complexity is very real. I sense that you have not taught a very wide range of students.
I am very concerned that you hold me personally responsible for not beefing up the math program for all students. You must know how wrong his picture is. The only way to create a program that challenges the most proficient learners is to create steps along the way that lead in that direction. Creating a calc program meant promising kids it would be there for them when they got through the required prerequisite courses first. Not only was this necessary, but the program was obliged to help kids for whom calc was a goal farther down the road, and some who were still struggling to understand applications of basic math necessary to budget for a family.
I do not teach math now. At least locally, the math teacher shortage is eased a bit and I am teaching World History. I have a picture of what competency in that field would look like. To the extent that it correlates to the standards, I try to hit the mark, but it is far easier to sit far away from the students and pontificate than it is to teach. So I try.
Roy – You are partially right. I taught at a city wide school in Washington DC, one where students had to apply and get accepted. But I had students from all over the city, including many of them from Southeast DC. Second, one thing I was very proud about our school (at least at the outset) was that we didn’t just take “the best of the best” but rather students who wanted to be challenged. But stating that I don’t have experience with community schools is not quite 100% correct.
My fear is this – you say that in my experience all children are capable of learning advanced algebra. But you don’t think that is the case? Is it possible at all to get students caught up? As I noted in my stories on this post, I managed to get some students caught up so they could pursue Pre-calc. I worry whenever anyone says that some students cannot (and I am not talking about those that are in special education or similar tracks) accomplish certain goals or levels. Back in the 1960s, in general the word was that students of color were only to take certain classes )(remedial) and others took different classes (college prep, etc). I know that you are not advocating for this, but I worry that there are still some educators out there today that have such beliefs – that some certain students cannot do certain courses.
I am curious about your background – you say that you don’t teach math now but teach World History – this is not your fault, of course, but I am wondering if you had a math background (math major, etc). I only ask as I believe that this is a tragedy across the nation – particularly in math classes – where students that don’t have a math background are caught up quickly over the summer OR even in less time and then are asked to teach math they may not feel as comfortable with.
Also, I didn’t hold you responsible for not beefing up the math curriculum – I am sure that you did the best you did at the time, and certainly thought that you were doing the right thing. But over time, particularly in math, a cycle happens. Students will be in Alg I but not ready so the teacher teaches them 8th grade math but they get a grade for Alg 1, Then that student (or group of students) moves to Geometry, and when the teacher notices deficiencies in Alg spends the year focused on Alg (but they credit for Geometry), and so on and so on…eventually those students who are applying for or accepted to higher education often have to take remedial classes for pay but for no credit. Does this cycle make sense?
I have a MA in history and hold certifications in English and Math
You have certifications in English and Math? Would be intrigued to hear about the requirements in your state to earn a math certificate – or did you take numerous math courses as an UG? I know that in some states once you are certified in one area that you can simply take the Praxis Pedagogy to get certified in another area…
Jlsteach: why have you not answered my criticism concerning the girl whose needs were passed over because of the standards that the state required? You imply that she was the victim of incompetent teachers instead of unwise administration on a state and national level. This is absurd. She was the victim of a political desire to throw all students into Alg II.
The point is simple. All students can learn in a perfect world, but students do not live in a perfect world. Eventually, students have to choose between the various paths down which their lives go. Some have choices limited by their reality. Part of that reality is their own desire. Another part is the desire of the public to fund their schools. Another part… You get the picture. It is too complex to assume that all students will learn. Sure they can. But they generally do not, for a variety of reasons. We are responsible to assure that they get every chance they deserve. I claim standards and their implementation are in the way. They are not helping. They are hurting.
I had a conversation with an old friend and former principal. He related the tale of a boy that dropped out of school in 9th grade. He wanted to buy and sell cattle. He has made millions over the years. I am not impressed by his millions, but I see that he made a choice not to study advanced math. This is the real world. No one ever gets 100% at anything.
Roy = I did address it. In fact, I said that there have been similar cases where students were rushed into classes and/or passed over. That being said, what did you do as a teacher to try and get her up to speed (or did you see it as a completely lost cause that she couldn’t get caught up at all?). I had students that were not as prepared in the past, but I worked with them – tutoring before and after school, as well as Saturdays. Scaffolding ideas so that they could understand, etc.
Wait, you said, “We are responsible to assure that they get every chance they deserve” – yet in so many states and in so many schools kids were limited in their choices. I would counter that some of the point of the standards movement was to offer opportunities for students who in the past had their choices limited due to various reasons.
Sure, students have to choose – but shouldn’t they have the most options available when they chose. You cite a student who dropped out and made millions selling cattle. Yes, those stories exist. However, I am sure you are not advocating that all students drop out at grade 9 due because of this one example, right?
I am just stating that too often in our past students have been denied the opportunity to learn. What of a situation where someone was denied the access to higher level math because of their race, or other reasons? And who are we to judge as teachers to deny them possible opportunities?
As for addressing comments – I noticed that you addressed none of mine from the last post – I am open to hearing your story – I am particularly interested how you moved from teaching math to history…
“That being said, what did you do as a teacher to try and get her up to speed (or did you see it as a completely lost cause that she couldn’t get caught up at all?).”
Is that really how you see the possibilities? Is it really not possible that RT is capable of judging whether this student was in a position to “get up to speed”?
I would say yes – at the outset of the year I offered a pre-test/assessment based on what students should have learned from the previous course – it allowed me to see where they were at, what they were capable of, and then go from there…That’s the first step, the next steps would be to determine other situation/information about the student and determine what supports she needed, etc. She may not have able to get caught up completely (let’s say an extreme case – the child was in Alg II but could not add two digit numbers)…or she did NONE of this pre-assessment – then you go from there…
Pretty standard practice in a reasonably sized class. Not so easy to follow through in classes of 35+. I did notice that you said you managed to help SOME of your students, so at some point you make the decision that your efforts are not going to be entirely successful? I don’t know RT’s students or the class size but I do know that differentiating in a class of students that range in knowledge from those who are still struggling with fractions on up is extremely time consuming, not to mention difficult. Classes like that should not exist but, I suspect, are all too common in under-resourced, high poverty communities. You talk about tutoring students before and after school and on Saturdays. What do you do about the student who routinely misses school? How about those with child care responsibilities, either their own or their siblings? What about the jobs they hold to help support their families? I could go on. Your dedication is admirable but most of us did not realize that we needed to take vows of sacrificial servitude when we entered teaching. In my last job, 70 hour weeks were not uncommon, given the extra bureaucracy associated with special education, and 60 hours came close to the norm. I loved teaching and with my own kids grown could afford to devote more time to my profession, but keeping up that pace came close to destroying my life outside of teaching.
so I completely agree with you on many fronts – except for one – I think that in many cases folks sign up for teaching because they see it as a relatively easy job – it’s 9-3, no working during the summer, etc. I am not saying ALL folks do that, but I do think that some do that. When I entered teaching, I knew that it would be more than just the typical job – that it was WAY more than that. BUT, some of the things you pointed out – the tutoring days lessened when I got married and went down even more when my daughters’ were born. After that I took a year off to be a stay at home dad, and considered returning to the classroom. but guess what – from my vantage point, teaching is NOT so family friendly – you take work home, you stay late offering support, and if your own kid is sick, well you have to get a sub (which is often more work)…I left the profession for a little while – am considering returning to the classroom/public school now that my kids are older
As for some of the things you mentioned – you are right – I could not cure all of the things that my students faced. That being said, I tried as much as possible to set up supports so that they could succeed. I had kids miss school because they had to be the caretakers of their own kids/younger siblings – so I tried to always have assignments posted online that they could possibly access (not always, but it’s a start) Students who had jobs after school and who needed extra days on HW or other assignments, I tried to work with them – as long as I knew the situation in advance. Responsibility has to go both ways – it cannot be just last minute
And you are right on one other thing – often times the expectations do burn folks out rather quickly – OR the other thing that happens is that someone is good for a year, and he or she is promoted to dept chair or other leadership roles that then burn them out
I knew very few people who were “out the door at 3.” I know what you are talking about, but I question the necessity to micromanage everyone because there are those who would take advantage. I refuse to believe that a nation that has been so strong has a failing education system or a vast pool of incompetent teachers. Don’t try to tell me there were golden days in the past. I have seen the professionalism of teachers increase in spite of efforts to marginalize them. The bad eggs are easier to spot than the best because most teachers seem to be able to reach most of their students. My own four children had good teachers, some better than others and no truly bad ones. Some of them were less than the best match for one of my kids, but that’s life. I can’t say I have run into anyone in any profession who I would tag with a “best of the best” label but a lot who care about what they do. I find it hard to understand how truly incompetent teachers remain in the classroom; either they know someone high up the food chain or the administrators are not doing their job. I have to say that I have seen more incompetent administrators than teachers especially with the trend to emphasize business/managerial skills with little if any classroom experience. The outside pressures from reformy types have not been good for public education or those they entrust with the job of enforcing their demands. Those who worship at the church of capitalism do not belong in or around the classroom. I wonder if they micromanage their own families.
So this point to me is the key, ” I find it hard to understand how truly incompetent teachers remain in the classroom; either they know someone high up the food chain or the administrators are not doing their job. I have to say that I have seen more incompetent administrators than teachers especially with the trend to emphasize business/managerial skills with little if any classroom experience”
A lot of the reforms that have come about is due how hard it is to remove teachers from the classroom. There once was a chart posted how it took someone two years to be removed from the classroom in one large district (after appeals, etc). I know that I will get reamed for this – but in some cases this is why some are not fans of unions – they see them as protecting poor teachers…
Again, I think that there needs to be a balancing – the reform movement (in my opinion), in part attempted to standardized and use assessments as measurements in part because of frustration that poor teachers could not be easily removed. As Dr. Ravitch pointed out – a small group of poor teachers should not lead to such a huge reform. And I get that too. But I think it was done out of frustration…
Personally, I think we need change on all sides – we need to have some type of accountability, but certainly not standardized tests. We also need a better way to remove poor teachers from the classroom (yes, I know that unions help protect teachers that are pulled without cause, but what about protecting those or keeping those in the classroom beyond when they should be)…
Again, I don’t have solutions here…As for the CCSS – I really don’t think that those that created them did so solely for purpose of financial gain or to ruin education. Just in the same way I don’t think that those who support teachers rights from getting removed too easily don’t set up these barriers. As I have stated before, I see some value in having common standards – so that kids in Alabama get the same access to material as those in California. No, standards are not enough – we need resources, etc. But I do think that it is part of the conversation.
“I see some value in having common standards – so that kids in Alabama get the same access to material as those in California. ”
Education is a state responsibility. I would love to see the process of mandating the same material in every state. Not going to happen. Common standards are not and have not led to the same access to material. Have you noticed the disasters related to the push to get computers into schools so everyone could take tests on them? Never mind the expense to districts struggling to provide a basic curriculum. Math is a little easier to see in such a broad hierarchical framework. I don’t see that most subject content can be bent into a framework that could or should be applied across the country.
“A lot of the reforms that have come about is due how hard it is to remove teachers from the classroom.”
I question how hard the district worked to get rid of that teacher if it took two years, and I wonder what resources as well as facts the teacher had to rebut their allegations. Do you really think that districts across the country are burdened with incompetent teachers it would take them years to remove? In the high rent districts in which I taught, they had no trouble getting rid of anyone they chose to, whether justified or not. For the most part the same was true in the low rent community where I ended my career. On a few occasions, a teacher fought back, but either a strong union backing for cause or private attorneys were involved. Basically, if the district spent the time to carefully document, the teacher would be gone in short order. Take Chicago. There are far too many schools that are understaffed and under-resourced to believe in the almighty power of the union, however great they have been in the fight for decent public schools.
I don’t disagree with you that there are incompetent teachers just as there are doctors, lawyers, bankers… that shouldn’t be practicing their professions. In every walk of life, there will always be people who, for whatever reason, should probably find another occupation. I really don’t think that the teaching profession harbors any more people who are not suited to the job than other professions.
Yes, I know that education is a state decision – but if you think about it when the founders of the constitution made that decision – education was very different than it is now (in terms of who was educated, and how they were educated). Maybe it’s time for a change?
With your thoughts on getting rid of incompetent teachers, see this sample flow chart from Chicago (https://www.theatlantic.com/daily-dish/archive/2011/03/getting-rid-of-bad-teachers-ctd/174968/) – now, I am the first to say that it is possible its exaggerated, but still I’ve seen similar timelines in DC, NY, etc.
As for doctors, lawyers, etc – the different between them and teachers is that in most cases such professions are ones where folks chose you (I know that there are cases where that isn’t true – doctors working limited health care plans, lawyers who serve as public defenders. Yet in nearly all of those cases it truly is choice that can lead someone to not hire those professions. That doesn’t happen in teaching. Kids are stuck with the teacher they get – for better or for worse. And in some cases having a bad teacher for a year can set someone behind.
“… in most cases such professions are ones where folks chose you…”
Now you are talking about private business not public service. The comparison has to be drawn between those who are in public service to be close to comparable. You are comparing apples and oranges, not that they don’t share some of the same motivation. Private practice also means that they can choose their clientele. To keep it within the teaching profession without getting into the charter and voucher arguments…if I tutor students privately for a fee, I can choose to whom I offer my services and I can withdraw them as well.
I have no doubt there are some horrible situations (I know of one) where an incompetent teacher managed to keep a position despite district efforts to remove her. She retained a private attorney who probably had no trouble tearing holes in the district case. It should be hard to get rid of a teacher but not impossible, and unions have been known to be less than fully supportive of teachers they know are incompetent. I’m not sure why ISBE would be involved in the removal of a teacher. I don’t believe that is a standard practice across the state.
Do I want a national education system? Nope, at least not now. The DOE could be effective for overarching mission statement type stuff, but I as soon as they start trying to micromanage, forget it. They are much too far away from the classroom. Heck, even states use to realize they could only dictate so much. The further away they are from the children the more likely they are to make political decisions that play well in the press but that have little to do with effective education.
I did not catch your response. I have been in and out all day. I really do enjoy a good argument and appreciate your view. I do not agree that teachers should be expected to give up time with their family obligations just because a political leader comes up with a scheme that involves education. Nor will that ever happen. It is unrealistic. It is a way for political leaders to extort labor from employees.
My journey to teaching history goes back to a plan I had thirty years ago. Unable to get a job teaching history, I found my way into teaching math. I really liked it, especially geometry, which I found to be a lot like history in its use of logic. A couple of years ago, my principal approached me about teaching World History. I am now on year 2, a 61 year old rookie, doing my best. I must admit it is a daunting task, learning to teach younger kids a different subject after so many years of math.
When I argue against the standards movement, it is against the way we have done it over the past two decades. Top down reform is always doomed to failure, for the rank and file will not rush into the opposition fire.
If we want to teach the kids more and better, we start with a conversation with the teachers. Get them on board first. Work with them, using their understanding of children to guide the process, lest we try inappropriate technique or press for unreasonable levels of performance. Not everyone can play the piano at 5 the way Mozart did.
Thanks for spending so much time. Have a good night.
HI Roy – thank you for sharing your perspective. I feel that in education policy circles more listening needs to happen than just pointing fingers. I wanted to make one point on your first statement – I completely agree with you that teachers should not have to spend time after school, before school, on weekends to get their students up to speed. But if given a situation where students were left behind for one reason or another they may need to do so. I also think that it needs to be considered ok that students get remediation support – I have recently become more of a fan of year long school – mainly because of the summer slide that is real. My kids are in an upper middle class family and i know that I have the resources to provide them educational experiences and or support during the summer. But many families do not have such resources. The gov in the state where I live just announced this year that school should start after Labor Day so that more families could go visit the beach at a local town in the state – raise the economy of that town – of course forgetting the impact of summer slide OR the number of families that cannot afford camps, etc.
Each policy that is done has an impact – testing and CCSS were done in hopes of creating more equality. I get that they haven’t worked, but in my opinion, neither did “just close the door and let teachers do their thing”…so where’s the happy medium?
Start school after Labor Day so that more families can go to the beach?! Are you kidding? Vacations for many families mean no money coming in and taking time off may translate into no job when you get back. Imagine my surprise when one of my students said that he had never seen Lake Michigan from that lakefront community. He had neither the time nor resources for a trip to the beach. The rationale of your state legislators for a later start to school show an incredible ignorance to the realities of too many people.
You are preaching to the choir on that one! But it’s a Repbulican gov who saw economic progress as the key – in one or two towns. Ironically, Virginia had a Kings Dominion Law (that’s what it was called!) on the books to have its districts start after Labor day for the same reason. However, they were more flexible and allowed for waivers – now some of the districts closer to DC start before labor day -while we in MD went in the opposite direction
True to one of the more egregious, Midwestern stereotypes, it is my understanding that the start of school began edging into mid-August (here in Illinois) because the high school sports teams could only begin formal practice two weeks before the start of classes. Once one district changed their calendar to gain an advantage, districts fell like dominoes, and the elementary districts followed to stay in sync with the high schools. When I first moved here from NJ in the 60s as an 8th grader, school started after Labor Day, as it did in NJ. I do wonder if the trend has been exacerbated by the trend toward higher income people having to be two income families to maintain their standard of living. Those on the bottom rungs never had a whole lot of say in the matter, but, I suspect, those who are used to having some sense of rights are more likely to think that teachers have it easy and that school should never close. Childcare outside of relatives or in house nannies was rare when I was growing up. The options have improved 100% since then but are still problematical. I might have been treated like a poorly paid babysitter for part of my career, but there are and were few teachers sitting on their @$$3$ when school was not in session.
So you are right on much of that – school dates changes because of sports teams (I am sure that what you say is the case – no district wants to be as a disadvantage on the football field). In my area, elementary kids go to school the latest (9:30 start time) with HS kids going the earliest (7:30 start)…They pushed the HS times a little later, but that lead to causing lots of other issues related to busing, etc.
The fact is that when one decision is made, around busing, around school schedules, around year long schedule, it will impact other decisions, and then other decisions, etc. Too often those who are decision makers only look at a narrow slice of how things can impact them, but don’t look at the entire picture. Furthermore, I feel that often times there is a lack of creativity in creating schedules or that folks do things the same way because that’s the way it was done in the past. Here’s an example – teachers in my county get four grading days to catch up on grades – it’s no school for kids. As a former HS teacher, I certainly took advantage and used that day – where I had 120 or so students. But elementary school – does a K teacher really have the same amount of grading? I’d recommend that on those days that HS be closed and elementary days happen. Why can this happen? Well, on days for teacher conferences in elementary (two half days that we don’t have school), the HS have full days of class…
I’m sure we can all think of district decisions that do not seem like a lot of thought went into them. In the only unit district (K-12) that I worked in, the high school testing/grading schedule was not applied to the elementary schools and vice versa. The same was true of the K-8 districts. While they tried to match holidays and vacations, many scheduling decisions were unique. As to grading days, the elementary teachers in my districts used to write narrative reports twice a year that ran to pages. While the high school teachers may have essays to grade for finals, I know how hard those elementary teachers worked on those reports. Teaching at the different levels requires different skill sets. I loved middle school and high school. The younger kids exhausted me. (I also subbed for years, K-8.) I know that high school teaching is considered a higher status job and has been for as long as I can remember. Given what we now know about the importance of early education, whether formal or informal, perhaps we need to rethink that a bit. Most important, though, I think we should stop the blame game. There is plenty to go around even if teachers make handy scapegoats and even if we recognize the more nefarious reasons for pushing a failure narrative.
So I agree with nearly all that you said…but one thing to add – you noted at the end “I think we should stop the blame game” – to me that goes both ways – yes, we cannot blame just teachers but we also need to not also blame others who were trying to make changes. In my opinion both sides need to listen more to each other.
It didn’t take Diane this long to figure out the fallacies promoted by “reformers.” The system was never perfect, but the reformers insistence on continuing to promote failed policies isn’t making me feel particularly charitable. As the years go by, it gets harder and harder to believe in the good will/intentions of anyone who has profited off decisions that have obviously hurt those they claim to want to help. I am more than willing to work together with anyone who supports public education as a vital public good governed by democratic processes. I am more than willing to work with anyone who doesn’t see education as some sort of competition with winners and losers.
So I get your point of view and can somewhat understand it – that being said – look at how divided our country is on so many other issues. And as you (or someone else noted) the overall goal is (or should be) to improve educational opportunities for all children. Certainly some view improving education by raising test scores (I don’t see that as the main purpose either). I have not read Dr. Ravitch’s multiple books – but I am sure that something changed her mind about some of the policies, but at the same time something triggered those sentiments in the first place. At times I feel like education circles usually have people of same beliefs cheering each other on and attacking those who are against you. I’ve seen it happen often on social media and or in forums like this. Rather I think more people need to sit down with each other to listen. Me personally, I consider myself somewhere in the middle – I do believe some type of accountability is needed, but am not 100% sure what that should look like
Jlsteach, read my last two books.
As soon as I finish my dissertation work and have free time I plan to.
Good luck on your dissertation.
“Me personally, I consider myself somewhere in the middle – I do believe some type of accountability is needed, but am not 100% sure what that should look like.”
Some type of accountability is needed!
Really
I wanted to roar with laughter when I read that because some type of accountability is needed, but for Congress and the White House and not for public school teachers who had accountability in place before Reagan launched a war on the public schools with his flawed and fraudulent “A Nation at Risk Report.”
I taught for thirty years between 1975 – 2005 and teachers had accountability all of that time. Administrators would come in and watch teachers teach and write reports and then meet with the teachers to talk about strengths and weaknesses with suggestions to improve. Teachers were required to take workshops, classes and attend lectures to learn new methods that helped them improve their teaching. Teachers met in department meetings to work as a group and plan. Teachers met in school meetings to plan.
Teachers did not start the wars in Vietnam and Iraq, both wars that were based on lies and manipulation.
Teachers did not borrow and spend all of the Social Security taxes as it flowed into the general fund so Social Security has only IOU’s from Congress, a promise to pay out the benefits people paid a SS tax for. The average SS recipient worked for 45 years and paid into that SS tax.
Teachers did not spend about $40 trillion dollars on the nation’s military since World War II.
Teachers did not vote overwhelmingly for the Gramm-Leach-Billey Act that helped cause the 2007-08 global financial crises.
Teachers did not advertise $40 white-and-red USA hats while Houston was flooded.
“President Donald Trump wore a hat sold to raise money for his re-election campaign during his Tuesday visit to the areas of Texas affected by Hurricane Harvey, grabbing the attention of ethics watchdog groups.
“Trump was widely photographed wearing the “USA” cap when he arrived in Corpus Christi, Texas and during his subsequent briefing with Governor Greg Abbott about the natural disaster. The new images follow two official photos released by the White House showing Trump sitting in cabinet meetings about the storm while wearing the hats.
“The cap, which reads “USA,” is sold in red or white for $40 on the president’s re-election campaign website.”
http://www.thewrap.com/donald-trump-wears-re-election-campaign-fundraiser-hat-for-texas-visit/
You want accountability, then it should start at the top first.
Exactly, Lloyd. Accountability starts at the top!
Lloyd – I don’t disagree with anything you have said in terms of military spending, social security or the way that money is spent. And while yes, this does connect to education and funding I still believe that some accountability within schools is necessary (more on that later)..
yes, the US system is different than others – so one thing that I feel we have to do is stop trying to adopt cart blanche someone else’s program. Dr. Ravitch you mentioned Finland as a model. I happened to search and saw this information on Finland (http://ncee.org/what-we-do/center-on-international-education-benchmarking/top-performing-countries/finland-overview/finland-instructional-systems/). Note that the first words in curriculum is that Finland has a national model for curriculum. It also states, “While the curriculum guidelines are fairly sparse by the standards of many countries – just 10 pages are devoted to math – the national curriculum serves as a guide, rather than an explicit lesson plan. The curriculum outlines how teachers should focus on developing their students’ creativity, management and innovation skills; with teachers grasping these goals and selecting their own teaching materials and lesson plans”
now I know you and others will say that the CCSS are way more than 10 pages,. And you are right to point that out; Later on in the same document about assessment it notes that “The only external testing in comprehensive schools is for monitoring (rather than accountability) purposes and is done on a sample basis in grades 6 and 9. Finland also participates in international assessments like PISA. At the end of upper secondary school, all students take the National Matriculation Exam to determine whether they are eligible to graduate” = So it seems that there is some accountability at the end of Finish school to determine if a child is ready to move on.
To me, here is a system that has some accountability in place – and yes, the accountability is on the student as well as the school, I am guessing, although I may not be 100% correct here, that if a certain secondary school began to show low rates on passing this National Matriculation Exam that it would be looked at, etc.
Now back to accountability – Lloyd, you write that when you taught, “I taught for thirty years between 1975 – 2005 and teachers had accountability all of that time. Administrators would come in and watch teachers teach and write reports and then meet with the teachers to talk about strengths and weaknesses with suggestions to improve. Teachers were required to take workshops, classes and attend lectures to learn new methods that helped them improve their teaching. Teachers met in department meetings to work as a group and plan. Teachers met in school meetings to plan.”
All of this is great – but do you think that it happened in ALL schools?
I know some may argue, so what if it didn’t happen in all schools…in one local school district close to where I live, the Supt has been under fire from his own school board for teachers inflating to increase the graduation rate. In the article, the Supt said that it may have been isolated issues, but not a overall systematic issue. I think it’s a little bit of both. When a district/state or national bill puts unrealistic expectations (think NCLB all proficient by 2014), that pressure can lead to unscrupulous ways of making the data work (worst case – cheating on tests, best case allowing kids to pass without really knowing the material). So yes, I see the other side of how accountability gone wild can lead to some of these issues.
that being said – consider the testing that is done in a car on breaks, and the small percentage of break jobs that are allowed to fail during testing in order for a product to be considered safe. I am guessing somewhere between 2-5% (maybe less). brakes are important in cars, one would say, they save lives. Yet one teacher impacts a group of students (say 30) that can lead to impacting as many or more lives. So if we have one bad apple in a barrel, that apple can impact others. I have also documented her how long it can take in some districts to remove a poor teacher (say up to two years). That’s two years of pay for the teacher – who in some cases if on leave is paid to sit in a rubber room (or worse, in NY, is put on leave and then two years later forced to teach at a school that is not their choice)..
As for life before Regan, I also noted on this particular post that before then (and even today – due to states having full control over education) there were disparities in expectations on where one lived on what they had to complete for HS graduation, etc? How fair is that – that a child born in Alabama could graduate from HS with two years of math but a child in California may need three (or four). Who is more prepared. Now, one could argue – Alabama is a rural state, and if someone wants to be a farmer in Alabama, who needs four years of math? I get that – but what if they want to be a doctor? yet they graduate from HS with two years of math? or an engineer? Is the system set up so that students who live in one state have different expectations than those in other states? The same thing is seen in smaller areas – districts – kids in SE Washington DC have different expectations for them than those in NW DC. Why? In part because of their color and or economic level – the idea that those kids can’t do this or that. I get that CCSS as it stands now doesn’t address the issue, but I feel that something needs to address this inequality
Finally, I understand we are all shaped by our own experiences. I was fortunate to live in an upper middle class family – I went to good schools (public and private) while growing up. I was in the International Baccalaureate program in HS, went to a relative strong university (constantly ranked top 10 in the nation), etc. Yet it was while teaching in Washington DC that I began to see the differences in the expectations for students and teachers – where some expected less of their students in part of because who they were. YES, money and preparation are tied to this. I am not naive enough to NOT think that. However, when I would hear teachers in other schools say that those kids can’t do this or that, a fire would burn in my gut – who is a teacher to say what a student can or cannot do?
Sorry for this very long post, but I feel that is sums up where I am at in terms of the process and why I say that I am squarely in the middle on things. Dr. Ravitch, I will read your latest books and possibly I will change my mind. But honestly, I am not so sure, as my personal experiences are also ingrained in my thinking.
thanks for reading this long post (if you made it this far)
“All of this is great – but do you think that it happened in ALL schools?”
I can’t speak for all of the states. I can only speak about California because each state has its own ed-codes. In California, it was required in all the public schools.
Not only was there this accountability for all teachers by administrators, but the schools and the school districts were held accountable too and teams from other districts would show up to evaluate schools.
The evaluation went deep with one on one interviews with students, parents, teachers, administrators, a thorough examination of the curriculum, etc.
If one of these evaluations didn’t go well for a school or district, that school or district would be put on probation with another annual evaluations taking place a few years later to make sure the school or district had dealt with all the problems that had been found.
Schools that didn’t get off probation could lose their certification to operate and everyone at that school fired.
Getting certified as a teacher was one thing, but certification for a school and district was a complex and demanding process.
I can’t remember the acronym for that process, but the district stressed out every time those teams were scheduled to show up. The district would do its own audit of their schools a year or two earlier in an attempt to identify any areas that might fail and fix them before the outside teams roared in to cause even more stress.
“At times I feel like education circles usually have people of same beliefs cheering each other on and attacking those who are against you.”
It can get rather vicious. I try to avoid the urge to vomit rage, but I am not interested in a seat at the table until educators get seats “above the salt.” I am more than willing to let Bill Gates try all his ideas out on his own and his friends’ kids. I do not like the feeling that our children are in his petri dish for whatever reason.
I am not opposed to national standards. I am opposed to standards like the CC which were written in a closet in secret by people looking top make money off of them. Having said that, there also seems to be a failing of imagination here. Are teachers saying the only tool they know of to keep their jobs is “test prep drills”? If that is so, where is the creativity? Where is the imagination? Where is the chutzpah that I saw in my teachers when I was in school?
Lots of pressure on the principals, Steve, to deliver good test scores. Lots of pressure on the teachers to do test prep exercises. And then a full third of the school year is given over to the pretests, benchmark tests, practice tests, and the actual tests. In many schools, no one can use the “media centers” now because they are so often in use for those pretests, benchmark tests, practice tests, and actual tests–it’s pretty common for kids to take 20 or 30 of these every school year now. Crazy.
Instead of learning how to love and be inspired by literature, students are simply learning how to read literature. It’s almost like learning how to cook well while being prohibited from ever, EVER tasting the food.
It’s disgusting. We must and will continue to effectively fight back against reform.
But they are not even learning how to read literature. You can’t learn to read literature out of context (historical and literary), in snippets, and with no knowledge of its tropes and conventions (of genre, structure, etc). Again, the gaps in the Common Core for ELA are big enough to drive whole curricula through, and most of what’s important is left out. Texts exist and make sense in context. One of the long, long list of major problems with the CCSS for ELA is that they are content-free. They are quite literally a “know nothing” curriculum map (see the teacher’s comment, above, about the English Department that tells her that they don’t have to convey knowledge because they teach skills–a breathtakingly ignorant claim). But even on the skills side (the CCSS is a list of skills), there are enormous problems–major lacunae, absurd assumptions, hypostatising, vagueness so extreme that operationalizing them sufficiently to make them validly or reliably measurable is impossible, and many more, It’s a puerile list. And to compound matters, they created no mechanism for ongoing critique and development of the standards by subject-matter experts.
Steve:
There are many Stepford teachers who just follow orders unquestioningly; whose MO is to please the boss. I wish there were more with chutzpah.
Even teachers with chutzpah cannot defy an order without repercussions. This new wave of digital curricula, where every student operates on a laptop all period long, is full-service curricula –text, assignments, and assessments are all bundled together. It’s hard if not impossible to use it a la carte, and principals expect teachers to use it as designed.
Standards are not inherently good or bad. It’s the whole package surrounding Common Core that’s a failure: the massive shift toward test prep, the dropping of other valuable subjects like art and history, the misguided attempts to evaluate schools and teachers, and the demoralization if not destruction of what was once a professional teaching corps.
That last point is worth emphasizing. The underwriters of Common Core thought so little of teachers that way too much education has now become scripted. What follows is an example of the scripting. It’s what teachers are supposed to say when doing an “Achieve the Core” mini-assessment for 9th graders. In the name of Paul Black, Dylan Wiliam and Plain Old Common Sense, we have to wonder: when did formative assessment become mini-summative-assessment?
(As an aside, to understand how all the joy of reading can be sucked out of students, you should look at the questions which follow the two poems.)
from http://achievethecore.org/content/upload/The_Walrus_and_the_Carpenter_Pair%209MA.pdf
Today you will read two poems, “The Walrus and the Carpenter” by Lewis Carroll and “The Walrus and the Carpenter Head Back” by J.T. Holden. You will then answer several questions based on the texts.
I will be happy to answer questions about the directions, but I will not help you with the answers to any questions. You will notice as you answer the questions that some of the questions have two parts. You should answer Part A of the question before you answer Part B. Take as long as you need to read and answer the questions. If you do not finish when class ends, come see me to discuss when you may have additional time. Now read the poems and answer the questions. I encourage you to write notes in the margin as you read the poems.
Literature class as skill drill. All the time. Horrific.
“the demoralization if not destruction of what was once a professional teaching corps. The underwriters of Common Core thought so little of teachers that way too much education has now become scripted.”
Yes. Exactly what has happened. I can’t imagine why anyone would want to do this (teach English) anymore–not if THIS is what teaching English has become. Again, the reformers will get what they have called for–the ones who remain will be the ones who know nothing of their subjects themselves and are therefore quite happy to have their students follow scripts while they look out the window.
One of the major issue with this laser-focus on “skills” is that it loses sight of WHY writers write and readers read. Gone is the significant engagement with the ideas and emotional content of the text–this is replaced by “hunt for the answer.” We don’t read War and Peace to practice our recognizing tone skills. We read it to experience what Prince Andei experiences when he is blown all to hell on the battlefield and to learn from that. When we read a work of literature, we enter into the world of the work and have an experience there, and it is that experience that is then significant–meaningful. That’s one of the major ways in which a work of literature “means.” By approaching texts in the manner of that lesson (and the many even worse test prep lessons out there), one is teaching literature sans the experience of literature.
Insane.
cxs: One of the major ISSUES
Prince ANDREI
Bob –exactly. Advanced technical analysis of literature is rigorous, no doubt. But is it really the best way to approach literature? Reformers’ obsession with rigor is misguided. They should be obsessed with quality instead.
No. It’s not. See my note, below, in response to the insightful post by DL Paulson.
Bob Shepherd It’s not NO standards, nor is it ALL about standards, aka an obsession with testing where they drain education of quality educational experiences for the student and the in-class authoritative guidance of the classroom teacher. It’s rather the correct (intelligent and sane) use of standards.
But the thread about reading made me think of two things: First, of a foundational text on reading theory from a long time ago (a paragraph and citation from that text is copied below); and second, a recent essay about reading and understanding in the New York Review of Books, linked below.
TEXT on reading theory:
“It is impossible for readers to see meaning, and yet they take meaning to the word. Readers are perceiving something beyond what they see. They are using information that is not present to the senses. Their reactions to the printed word are determined by the experiences that they have had with those objects or events for which the symbol stands.” (1991, 88)
Duchant, E. Understand and Teaching Reading: An Interactive Model. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1991.
NYTReview of Books:
SNIP: “What is going on when a book simply makes no sense to you? Perhaps a classic that everyone praises. Or something new you’re being asked to review, something a publisher has warmly recommended.
“I don’t mean that you find the style tiresome, or the going slow; simply that the characters, their reflections, their priorities, the way they interact, do not really add up. You feel you’re missing them in the dark. And your inevitable reaction, especially if you are an experienced reader, is that this must be the author’s fault. He or she is not a good observer of life. . . . The most dramatic example of this in my reading career is, or was, Ulysses. . . .”
http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2017/08/15/the-books-we-dont-understand/?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=NYR%20Civil%20War%20fantasies%20Jefferson%20the%20brain&utm_content=NYR%20Civil%20War%20fantasies%20Jefferson%20the%20brain+CID_e6b1de6148a1bf590f71181cc0a2f1ed&utm_source=Newsletter&utm_term=The%20Books%20We%20Dont%20Understand
yes yes yes
Sorry, Ponderosa. A momentary confusion on my part. Thank you for your wise posts. You’ve clearly thought a lot about these matters. You mentioned that you moved from teaching English to teaching History. I know several people who have done that,. They couldn’t stand what’s happened to our beloved subject.
DL Paulson: I wish every supporter of Common Core would read that “Walrus and Carpenter” example you gave. Look at the dry, tedious, technical analysis it demands of 9th graders. Look at the tortured wording of those questions. Try Question #2. How long did that one take you?
Even if you understand these questions, picking the right answer is often very dicey as they often offer two or more that seem equally correct.
Several of the questions ask a student to identify the meaning of the word. They’re trying to tease out the kid’s skill at using context clues. But if the kid already knows the word, he just needs to draw on prior knowledge, not the text, thus invalidating the question.
Throughout I kept thinking, both poems are probably incomprehensible if you don’t know what an oyster is and that they’re edible. I’m sure many kids don’t know this (I had a middle class seventh grader who didn’t know what a squash was). So would their failure on this test imply lack of reading skills, or lack of background knowledge?
Reading comprehension is mostly a function of background knowledge, but these tests are premised on the idea that it’s mostly a function of all-purpose reading skills that can be improved with practice.
Practice tests like this are the new ELA curriculum across America. In our school, it’s all digital, with embedded assessments. Teachers don’t have a choice to opt out.
Well, since the English teachers have stopped teaching literature, Ponderosa, perhaps you history teachers can work in a little Bradford, Edwards, Mather, Ohíye S’a, Black Elk, Bierce, Crane, Whitman, Lewis, Orwell. . . .
I do read a little “Song of Roland” with the students, and teach Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 29” during the Renaissance unit. I give extra credit for memorizing it. Wish I had more time to do more literature. I do not follow this teaching with Common Core style questions. I do not ask them to identify literary devices. My main aim is for them to comprehend the text. That alone has value. I give a lot of help –I don’t go for the current vogue of making kids “wrestle” with tough texts as an end in itself.
This just appeared in the New York Times:
…ideas for the rehabilitation of the English teaching profession.
Thank you, DL, for providing this example of what I wrote about, above. But this, alas, is one of the best of a bad lot of CCSS ELA test prep junk that has flooded our schools like sewage overflowing.
Nobody told those who tried to standardize education, to basely reduce it to coding a machine, you can tune a piano, but you can’t tuna fish.
Yup. Because literary works are essentially EXPERIENCES, the teaching of literature is a profoundly human and humane undertaking. These technocrats and their puerile standards!!!!! Lord forgive them, for they know not what they do.
Bob Shepherd “Technocrats.” Did you read my note about scientific positivism? It’s a matter of limited and ideological framing, aka “silo-thinking.” The frame is what they learned about method-to-results expectations, about experimentation and what to expect–but that frame came from a natural-physical science, not human, context.
Behind the scenes of our thinking, an entire set of fields from the last century were “infected” with this silo view. With some fine exceptions, but as a general rule, that silo ruled and still rules, though to a bit lesser degree. From that view, however, we tried to put the human sciences, the arts, history, philosophy, etc., on that Procrustean Bed of data-to-results expectations of the natural-physical sciences. Of course, we came up short because “we” couldn’t develop an acceptable framework–one that took into account a completely different kind of “data,” subject matter, intention, and meaning: namely, human. For example, if literature (and its testing) didn’t “fit” that framework, then the fault is not the shape of the bed but the insignificance of the data, the fields and those who teach in it. Boooo.
It irony is that a different, data-relevant model would not be less critical. What is less critical is to try to adapt the methods and expectations of one kind of data (natural/physical) to a completely different set of data (human). Add to that the money-makers who only care about selling, and you have “today.”
Yes, I read your fine not. And this–superb. It’s funny how really bad ideas in philosophy–ones that are definitively refuted–like Logical Positivism–have this afterlife in the general culture.
Bob Shepherd The reality is righting itself, but slowly.
Also funny that the default Logical Positivists are typically folks who wouldn’t be able to name a Logical Positivist if asked to do so. Like the English teachers I’ve met recently who are coming out of education schools pleased as punch about standardized testing and the CCSS but can’t name a single poem by Shelley or tell you what a gerund is.
Bob Shepherd Right. From inside the silo, we think WE are the standard. Understanding that we might be in a limited and limiting silo of thought is the first step to getting beyond it.
A clear and cogent analysis of the educational malpractice embodied by the “Common Core” deforms.
Diane can add them to the ash heap of of history of other similar deforms she has insightfully chronicled. I have fond memories of reading books by authors such as Joyce and Flannery O’Connor, etc in high school English classes, and learning wisdom about life–never confused it with test prep. Sigh.
Diane can add them to the ash heap of of history of other similar deforms she has insightfully chronicled.
Diane’s Left Back: A Century of Failed School Reforms is the finest piece of education history I’ve ever read. Very highly recommended.
The imposition of a standard does not in itself create or ensure substantive, thoughtful learning and teaching. The greatest damage That has been done by Common Core in ELA is that students are losing the inclination and ability to interpret and express their own understanding of what they read We are constantly expecting them to hunt for quotes and evidence in text to prove their understanding. No wonder interest in reading and writing is declining.
You know, it occurs to me that the corporations responsible for creating curriculum materials are more to be blamed for “implementation” than anyone or anything else.
Is it possible that something with such dubious educational credibility could actually turn out to be a good thing? Not likely.The previous state standards were written by educators. They held us accountable for content. Common Core is about skills, written by people who didn’t know the difference and those who realized that skills were easier to test and would provide a need for their testing products. If I was a conspiracy theorist I might believe that beyond ignorance and personal greed, the motive was to keep the ‘public’ in public education less educated and more trained, so as to be docile and easy to manipulate.
My view is more cynical. Common Core was created to make public schools look bad. That makes it easier to replace them with charters and vouchers
Andrea Lancer I think you have captured the slippery-slope of a developed intelligence, its manifestations, and their applications, as those who work with the original ideas have a lesser and lesser (or lower and lower) horizon of understanding, and less comprehensive motivations (making money and boxing everything up in a small box that they can understand) than those who originated the idea. Listen to the sound of falling, from one horizon to the one below, to the one below . . . . It does speak to the need for “continuing education” for everyone and more concretely, for administrators to use truly qualified criteria for hiring.
I think that the folks who wanted to push computerized instruction–led by Mr. Gates– needed to have a single set of national standards to correlate their national products to, and so they hired people to hack them together based on a review of the existing state standards, which were themselves the product of lowest common denominator educratic groupthink. The folks who did that work did an incredibly sloppy job of it. They didn’t bother at all to think carefully about whether the ELA standards they were promulgating were actually operationalizable enough to be validly tested. But the folks who paid for these standards got what they needed–one set of national standards to key their computerized worksheets on a screen to, creating scale for their national products and thus dramatically lowering developments costs.