Bethany Erickson wrote in D Magazine about the revolution in Dallas. The superintendent, Stephanie Elidzalde, declared that test prep is dead. She is determined to make school joyful. Imagine that! I have been waiting a long time for a superintendent with the brains and guts to do what she’s doing. The teacher shortage in Dallas has shrunk dramatically. Not surprising. What wonderful news.
Erickson writes:
School started at Dallas ISD today, and parents of students attending school at any of the 230 campuses may notice something different this year.
During her state of the district address last May, superintendent Stephanie Elizalde said the district would soon eschew the numerous tests designed to find out whether students were ready for the STAAR in favor of, as she put it, more “joy” in the classroom.
In last year’s address, she declared teaching to the test was “officially dead,” and added that some schools were testing as frequently as every few weeks in preparation for the STAAR test, and doing classwork in between those assessments that also practiced STAAR strategy.
“How about we put them all together and we have a huge bonfire?” she said.
That doesn’t mean that there won’t be occasional checks to make sure a student is understanding concepts learned in the classroom. But it does mean that Elizalde recognizes something many parents have been saying for years—the frequent testing only amps up anxiety about the test.
“Do kids need to know what the tests look like? Yes,” Elizalde said in May. “But do we need to be doing that once every six weeks, once every nine weeks? No we don’t. … Because we worry so much about the test, we have added pressure in a way that actually is hindering the success of how students do.”
And while there wasn’t an actual bonfire, Elizalde reiterated that stance last week in a note to students and parents.
“As I said in my State of the District speech, test scores will take care of themselves if joy – and on-grade-level materials – are in the classroom,” she said. “We do not need to drill and kill to prepare for the state assessment.”
Elizalde said the amount of testing and preparation for testing had “gotten completely out of control.” The district tallied up all the time teachers were spending preparing for tests and testing, which equated to roughly 18 school days.
The district is providing a full curriculum to teachers with lesson plans that will allow them more time to teach, Elizalde says. The aim at uniformity will also help a district where students often switch schools during the school year.
During her state of the district address, Elizalde said the goal was to provide a consistent framework, not to have teachers reciting lessons by rote.
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Anecdotally it appears that mileage varies on teacher experiences with the lesson plans. Some teachers have said they didn’t have all the materials their lesson plans required. But others said they felt they had a great deal of freedom to teach beyond the lesson plan, so long as they met their specific goals and taught the required skills.
The other lynchpin in Elizalde’s joy ride is making sure every student has a teacher in their classroom on the first day of school. Earlier this month, she told teachers at the Dallas ISD’s New Teacher Academy held at the Winspear Opera House that the district had fewer than 140 open positions out of its 10,000 total teaching jobs. (Last year, that number was 220.)
She also reiterated to those new hires that they would not be teaching to the test. “This whole movement is going to allow teachers to truly feel both the science and the art that is teaching,” she said.
It will be interesting to see which provides the district with a path to success. As a parent of a student, I’m rooting for the joy plan, especially if we can also figure out a way to pay teachers what they’re worth, and the state legislature can come out of the next special session robustly funding public education.
Good morning…not sure if you have been following what is going on in Arkansas with the Africian-American history class being cancelled at 4:02pm on the Friday before classes started on Monday. If you would like more information about the situation feel free to contact me. The Guardian also published a very comprehensive article yesterday about the situation. Thank you,Liz PiconeExec DirectorArkansas Ed Associati
Kudos to Ms Elizalde. Her philosophy should permeate every school districts in America. It is precisely the philosophy we adopted with our PE program and we brought kids back to school who were not coming and dramatically reduced fighting, suspensions and expulsions. Teaching AND learning are and should be joyful, exciting experiences. Rampant, standardized testing have been nothing more than a financial boondoggle for corporate theft and for socio/political influence. Teachers teach in their own individual fashion and motivate students to be curious and seek out more information, on their own. Public education is the bedrock, the foundation on which this Federal Republic stands.
Oh Happy Day!
I hope this policy shift is successful as they are on the right road. Students will respond to teachers that can build a sense of community in the classroom through relationships, but the district needs to provide materials and guidance for the new teachers. A mentoring program could be helpful to the newer teachers. The Dallas schools mention ‘personalized learning’ on their website. While computers are useful tools, too much time spent on-line is not beneficial to academic and social development. I wish them well, and I urge them to have patience. Administrators looking for miracles may be disappointed in the first year. Most significant changes in school climate and curriculum take time to yield results. Look for improvement in attendance and graduation rates instead of scores, and reach out to parents. Parents can be helpful allies that can help support students at home.
Someone slap me in the face…..because this must be a dream! Really….is this some joke or article from The Onion?
Nice to hear some GOOD news.
(The ongoing Trump depress-a-thon is grueling.)
I always thought when I was in a classroom full-time that if I’m bored, then the students must surely be bored. I mean, I enjoy history and if I find it dull, well…
Joy…fun matters. For example:
For many years we had “Cake of the Week” on Fridays. it was for the last 10 or 15 minutes of class My high school students could volunteer to bring in a social studies-themed cake (History, current events etc…) I supplied the plates and forks. Towards the end of my career we even set up a way to wash the supplies, rather than wasting so much plastic and paper.
I have photo albums filled with pictures of cakes. Serious, funny, you name it. They got us talking about social studies. And, we had some fun. The class would typically play some sort of game like Jeopardy and eat. And, the thing was, no student ever messed around with it.
Well, once and only once. A young woman did. She brought in a cake that was baked in a mold to look like a penis. (How old am I? I thought that cake was the space shuttle circa the 1980s until someone pointed out what it REALLY was. Of course, it was the one cake I needed to throw out.)
I had professional quality cakes and cakes that looked like someone was baking for the first time. (including me, ha, ha. I created a few.)
(If I’ve mentioned the cakes on here before, forgive me for repeating myself. But I find I need to focus on things that make me laugh.)
I was lucky to have administrators in my school who let this cake thing go on -for years. And, yeah, it wasn’t especially nutritious. But, how big were those slices, especially in a classroom of 30 kids? (Healthier cakes got extra, extra credit, btw.)
And, the kids knew, if one time there’s a mess, the cakes would be gone -forever.
No matter what the student was like, they were great about it. From kids who went on to Ivy League colleges to kids who tragically went to prison. Students respected “Cake of the Week.” I would have 140+ students eating cakes all day and when the buses pulled away at 2:30 you’d have a hard time finding a crumb on the classroom floor.
During the pandemic we even had a cake giveaway. We played Jeopardy online and the winners had cakes delivered to their homes. (I was suited up like a hazmat worker to make the delivery. I’ll never forget the look on one parent’s face when I showed up at his family’s house.)
Ah….the pandemic.
I’m taking a break right now from cleaning out junk including stuff I never got around to dealing with after COVID calmed down. (Masks, a spare webcam etc…. still within arm’s reach!)
Thanks for the chance to take a trip down amnesia lane.
And, all the best to the teachers and students in Dallas and beyond!
Awesome, John!
Thanks, Bob.
This is the important part:
“As I said in my State of the District speech, test scores will take care of themselves if joy – and on-grade-level materials – are in the classroom,” she said. “We do not need to drill and kill to prepare for the state assessment.”
Joy AND grade-level-materials are a must. Scaffolding lessons to make them accessible to all students is necessary, though certainly not easy. We must raise the level of the learner, not lower the level of the materials. Here’s how I wrote about it in “From Play-doh to Plato: All students need to grapple with grade-level text.”
https://fordhaminstitute.org/national/commentary/play-doh-plato-all-students-need-grapple-grade-level-text
And here’s what I wrote about joy in “Getting Reading Right: On Truths, Truce, and Trust”
https://pamelasnow.blogspot.com/2023/01/guest-post-getting-reading-right-on.html
“Picture this joyful scene: children beaming with pride as they crack the alphabetic code. It’s the delivery of the lesson that can and must be joyful–not the dilution, misdirection, or downright deceit conjured up through good intentions that have led to bad outcomes. Ignorance is not bliss; it hurts children.”
Yeah!!!! When I taught as a reading teacher, I didn’t waste time “teaching to the test”. I was reprimanded for not spending days in advance preparing my students for the test. But I continued having fun: dramatizing stories, responding to stories via writing, illustrating, making a video out of their illustrations and stories, partner reading… However, I first prepared them for the story relating the story to them and stimulating their imagination e.g. via graphic organizers such as the Venn Diagram. Sure I evaluated them but though observation and one-to-one evaluation. At testing time one class each scored a 99% on their state achievement test. Sure I taught decoding skills e.g., but I took words from the stories we read and analyzed. Phonics is more important for spelling and writing than it is for reading. I used text on their instructional level not grade level. Regardless if they were reading below or above their grade level. If a senior is reading on a third grade level, that is the level the student should instruct on. Then progress is accelerated.
If educators were allowed to develop the curriculum instead of business men, what a great
education the students would receive. This resurgence of phonics is a farce.
-Phonics only helps if the words are already in one’s hearing vocabulary.
-Every rule is broken at some time; e.g., I no sooner tell the children, “When there is only one vowel in the word and between two consonants the vowel is usually short.” The next word invariably will be kind, find, mind, wild, or mild.
-Phonics is a skill; readers occasionally use skills but constantly need to use strategies. For the emergent reader only the initial letter sound is needed.
-With so many varied speech patterns around the county, how can phonics be the primary approach to reading? There is a single spelling across dialects that pronounce words very differently. My son once stopped a Boston police officer for directions. He asked the officer to repeat it five times and finally gave up. My son couldn’t figure out what the officer was saying.
-“And when the rules being taught do not match the learner’s own dialect, it is that much more confusing and that much harder to learn. Yet another barrier for far too many children! “
-How about the children with an auditory discrimination problem? They can not learn via phonics. Extra help in phonic lessons is a waste of time.
-There is no carry over. My grandchildren reinforced the fact that there was no carry over from what they learned in the structured phonetic approach to their reading.
There is a rule that explains why the letters I and o say I and o when followed by two consonants.
That’s awesome! Classical Charter schools have never taught to the test.
Public schools did not teach to the tests before test and punish was implemented until schools were closed, teachers were fired, and students retained over results on bubble tests. The results of standardized tests were disseminated to parents and students only. We had something called privacy rights in those days. The tests were no big deal, and the results were not splashed all over the media. There were no comparative district report cards that made schools with poor students seem “inadequate, inferior and unacceptable.” Help to struggling students was provided, but it was a private, not public affair because billionaires and corporations hadn’t figured out how to monetize public education yet.
Yep!
She gave a speech in May and the teacher shortage has already shrunk dramatically?
Most districts require teachers to give notice in May whether they will leave the district or teach again next year. That also means that districts start hiring in May for the next school.
New teachers may take the first job offered and teachers with a family may limit their consideration to local schools, but many of us will not teach just anywhere. The quality and practices of the school are primary considerations, and I’m not talking about wealth, test scores, helicopter parents, and big-time semiprofessional athletic teams.
In Dallas County, Traitor Trump only got about 33% of the vote.
Has anyone starting a betting pool for who predicts when Abbott will fire Stephanie Elidzalde, have the state take over that school district, and appoint a MAGA head — who started their education with TFA, then was trained by the Broad Academy before voting for the traitor — to run Dallas Unified into the sewer in the game of supporting fascism.
I was wondering that too, but not as eloquently as you put it!
My first thought, too, Lloyd.
On the other hand, some Houston teachers may well find new positions in Dallas, where it seems their professionalism will be respected.
Dallas is where Mike Miles wreaked havoc before being sent to destroy Houston, so it seems the pendulum has swung. Of course, a whole lot of kids (and grownups) were hurt, but you know, whatever.
Miles’ vision and his plan to get there align with the emphasis that TEA Commissioner Mike Morath and some lawmakers have put on grading school districts in part based on scores from State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness tests. Morath himself served as a Dallas school board member when Miles was in charge of Dallas ISD and was one of the few board members with whom Miles had a good relationship.
Miles’ plan for Houston ISD is similar to a program he started in Dallas before he resigned with two years left on his contract. That program, which launched after Miles resigned, gave teachers huge pay bonuses if they boosted standardized test scores in some of the campuses with the biggest needs. Some low-rated campuses saw improvements as part of the program, but scores fell again once funding dried up and teachers left because they weren’t getting paid the same.
https://www.texastribune.org/2023/06/21/mike-miles-houston-isd-dallas-tea-takeover/
“[T]est scores will take care of themselves if joy – and on-grade-level materials – are in the classroom.”
That is the only attitude a true educator can have about wrongfully mandated testing.
Good luck! She used Austin ISD as a stepping stone and made terrible decisions across the board that we still haven’t recovered from. Must also be nice for her to be in a district that sends ~$600M dollars less to recapture. In AISD, she couldn’t even get our crumbling facilities fixed enough to guarantee every student and staff person has reliable access to air conditioning… Where is the joy in that?
Once again, we are reminded that there are always two sides to every story. Those of us working in public school districts understand these complexities.