Archives for category: Real Education
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Robo-Grading Student Essays is Garbage

By dianeravitch
July 15, 2018 //
52

NPR ran an interesting story about robo-grading student essays. It didn’t use the headline that appears here, but there is no better way to describe the insanity or stupidity of asking a machine to judge a student essay. First, it shows disrespect for the student. Second, it diminishes the importance and value of language. Third, the machine can be easily fooled, as Les Perelmann of MIT has demonstrated conclusively with his studies of how easy it is to fool the machine. Basically, the machine can’t evaluate facts. Perelman showed that a student could write an essay declaring that the War of 1812 took place in 1945, and the machine would not recognize it as an error.

To demonstrate, he calls up a practice question for the GRE exam that’s graded with the same algorithms that actual tests are. He then enters three words related to the essay prompt into his Babel Generator, which instantly spits back a 500-word wonder, replete with a plethora of obscure multisyllabic synonyms:

“History by mimic has not, and presumably never will be precipitously but blithely ensconced. Society will always encompass imaginativeness; many of scrutinizations but a few for an amanuensis. The perjured imaginativeness lies in the area of theory of knowledge but also the field of literature. Instead of enthralling the analysis, grounds constitutes both a disparaging quip and a diligent explanation.”

“It makes absolutely no sense,” he says, shaking his head. “There is no meaning. It’s not real writing.”

But Perelman promises that won’t matter to the robo-grader. And sure enough, when he submits it to the GRE automated scoring system, it gets a perfect score: 6 out of 6, which according to the GRE, means it “presents a cogent, well-articulated analysis of the issue and conveys meaning skillfully.”

“It’s so scary that it works,” Perelman sighs. “Machines are very brilliant for certain things and very stupid on other things. This is a case where the machines are very, very stupid.”

Because computers can only count, and cannot actually understand meaning, he says, facts are irrelevant to the algorithm. “So you can write that the War of 1812 began in 1945, and that wouldn’t count against you at all,” he says. “In fact it would count for you because [the computer would consider it to be] good detail.”

Perelman says his Babel Generator also proves how easy it is to game the system. While students are not going to walk into a standardized test with a Babel Generator in their back pocket, he says, they will quickly learn they can fool the algorithm by using lots of big words, complex sentences, and some key phrases—that make some English teachers cringe.

“For example, you will get a higher score just by [writing] “in conclusion,’” he says….

In places like Utah, where tests are graded by machines only, scampish students are giving the algorithm a run for its money.

“Students are geniuses, and they’re able to game the system,” notes Carter, the assessment official from Utah.

One year, she says, a student who wrote a whole page of the letter “b” ended up with a good score. Other students have figured out that they could do well writing one really good paragraph and just copying that four times to make a five-paragraph essay that scores well. Others have pulled one over on the computer by padding their essays with long quotes from the text they’re supposed to analyze, or from the question they’re supposed to answer.

But each time, Carter says, the computer code is tweaked to spot those tricks.

“We think we’re catching most things now,” Carter says, but students are “very creative” and the computer programs are continually being updated to flag different kinds of ruses.

As someone who devotes her life to writing and trying to communicate meaning, I reject the idea of robo-grading as insulting to the craft.

It demands garbage. It deserves to get what it asks for.

Anyone complicit in this betrayal of educational values should be ashamed.

Categories Education Industry, Real Education, Technology, Testing

Albert Shanker, Reflecting on Forty Years in Education

By dianeravitch
July 7, 2018 //
16

I recently was searching google for Albert Shanker’s connection to the Holweide School in Germany, which inspired some of his ideas about education reform, and I came across this fascinating personal essay about his life in education as a teacher, a labor organizer, and an advocate for authentic learning. Shanker died in 1996, having served for many years as President of the American Federation of Teachers, and before that as President of the United Federation of Teachers in New York City.

In this brief memoir, he reflects on what it means to be “a professional” and how that idea was used against teachers, to control them, and also against unions, to discourage them.

His thoughts about collective bargaining and unions are worth reviewing as unions are today in dire peril given the spread of “right to work” and the Supreme Court’s Janus decision.

His thoughts about the kind of learning that sticks with you through life is well exemplified in his memories of earning a merit badge from the Boy Scouts in birding.

His thoughts about the importance and necessity of public education in building American society are very relevant today.

This is an enjoyable read.

Categories Real Education, Teachers and Teaching, Unions

Edward F. Berger: As An Educator, I Have Held These Truths to be Self-Evident

By dianeravitch
March 28, 2018 //
32

This is the abbreviated format I will use to alert you to a good piece of writing and thinking, leaving me time to work on my book.

Ed Berger is a retired educator. He lives in Arizona and fights against privatization and what he calls “partial schools” (charter schools).

He wrote about what matters most in education. 

Do you agree?

Categories Real Education

How the Students at Marjory Stoneman Douglas Were Educated for This Moment

By dianeravitch
March 4, 2018 //
23

 

Dahlia Lithwick writes in Slate about the broad, comprehensive education that prepared students at Marjory Stoneman Douglas gave them the remarkable poise, knowledge, and rationality to meet the historic moment into which they have been thrust.

“The effectiveness of these poised, articulate, well-informed, and seemingly preternaturally mature student leaders of Stoneman Douglas has been vaguely attributed to very specific personalities and talents. Indeed, their words and actions have been so staggeringly powerful, they ended up fueling laughable claims about crisis actors, coaching, and fat checks from George Soros. But there is a more fundamental lesson to be learned in the events of this tragedy: These kids aren’t freaks of nature. Their eloquence and poise also represent the absolute vindication of the extracurricular education they receive at Marjory Stoneman Douglas.

“The students of Stoneman Douglas have been the beneficiaries of the kind of 1950s-style public education that has all but vanished in America. 

”Despite the gradual erosion of the arts and physical education in America’s public schools, the students of Stoneman Douglas have been the beneficiaries of the kind of 1950s-style public education that has all but vanished in America and that is being dismantled with great deliberation as funding for things like the arts, civics, and enrichment are zeroed out. In no small part because the school is more affluent than its counterparts across the country (fewer than 23 percent of its students received free or reduced-price lunches in 2015–16, compared to about 64 percent across Broward County Public Schools) these kids have managed to score the kind of extracurricular education we’ve been eviscerating for decades in the United States. These kids aren’t prodigiously gifted. They’ve just had the gift of the kind of education we no longer value.”

Categories Real Education

Jan Resseger: What Dewey Says to Us Today

By dianeravitch
January 4, 2018 //
7

 

When Jan Resseger read my post of John Dewey’s pedagogical creed, she thought about how his words apply to our situation today.

 

 

 

 

 

Categories Childhood, Real Education

John Dewey: My Pedagogic Creed

By dianeravitch
December 31, 2017 //
45

 

 

This seems to me like a good way to end a very difficult year.

Every so often, it is useful to remember the purposes of education.

It is not about test scores.

It is not about readiness for college and career.

It is not about readiness to be a global competitor.

It is the process of developing judgment, humanity, character, ethical and moral sensibility, one’s sense of self and sense of civic responsibility.

A journalist recently asked me what to read to learn about Dewey’s vision of education.

This was my recommendation.

Here is John Dewey’s creed.

What do you think?

Categories Character, Citizenship, Creativity, History, Real Education

Ann P. Cronin: How to Prepare Students for the Future

By dianeravitch
October 21, 2017 //
53

Many years back, I wrote an essay about the poor track record of those who purport to know the jobs of the future. I looked back at predictions made by great minds over the 20th century, and they were all wrong. We don’t seem to have a magic crystal ball.Just the other day, a neighbor asked me to advise his daughter, a high school student, about how to prepare for the future. We haven’t met yet, but when we do, I will urge her to get a solid liberal arts education, to immerse herself in literature, history, and delve deeply into her interests.

Ann Cronin, who has been a teacher, administrator, and all-round accomplished educator in Connecticut, uses this post to offer advice about how to prepare for an unknown future. She calls it “a toolkit for the future.”

The most important preparation is to develop as thinkers and learners.

Here are three practical ways that teachers can do that:

“Teach students to question.
“Teach students to write essays that explore questions of importance to them.
“Teach students to write essays about how they came to know what they know.”

She observes:

“The Common Core State Standards do not ask students to think in these ways. They are falsely marketed as being about critical thinking; those standards do not give students the learning and thinking skills needed for the future. Also, no standardized test in the United States assesses questioning, collaborating, creative thinking, or learning to learn skills. Every minute of class time given to preparing students for those tests takes students away from what they really need to learn.

“The future is almost upon us; it is just about here. It’s time to give students what they need. Invite them to question, to explore possibilities, to imagine solutions, to grow and change as thinkers, and to fall in love with learning. Then sit back and watch where they take us. It will be better than we now know.”

Categories Common Core, Real Education, Standardized Testing

Marion Brady: Test-Based Accountability is Dumbing Us Down

By dianeravitch
October 16, 2017 //
14

Marion Brady, veteran educator and author, sent the following:

Old joke, also known by research scientists as “The Streetlight Effect.”

A drunk is on hands and knees, under a streetlight, obviously searching.

Cop: Lose something?

Drunk: Yeash. My keys.

Cop joins hunt. No keys found.

Cop: You sure you lost them here?

Drunk: No, I think I lost them across the street.

Cop: Then why are you looking here?

Drunk: The light’s better.

As the current, corporately engineered “standards and accountability” education reform fiasco makes clear, non-educators assume schooling’s bottom-line purpose is to maximize learner understanding of the core curriculum.

So “core knowledge” gets taught and tested.

However, schooling’s bottom-line purpose isn’t to maximize learner understanding of the core curriculum, but to maximize learner ability to think—to abstract, adduce, analyze, anticipate, articulate, apply, categorize, compare, contrast, coordinate, correlate, describe, empathize, envision, extrapolate, imagine, infer, integrate, interpret, intuit—just to begin a much longer list.

So, why don’t standardized tests test learner ability to think?

Because they can’t. Of the dozens of identifiable thought processes, only two—recalling, and to a limited extent, applying—are simple enough to quantify and measure with sufficient precision to produce a meaningful number.

Inescapable conclusion: Today’s test-based reforms are dumbing kids and country down.

Solution: Give responsibility for evaluating learner performance back to classroom teachers, along with classes small enough for them to listen to what kids say and read what they write.

Categories Accountability, Real Education, Testing

William Doyle: Yes, There is a Finnish-Style Public Elementary School in New York

By dianeravitch
October 3, 2017 //
31

William Doyle was a Fulbright Scholar in Finland, and his child attended the local school. When Doyle returned to New Tork City, he went in search of a Finnish-style public school and found it. It is called The Earth School.

“My child now goes to PS 364, also known as the Earth School, a little-known gem of a public K-5 elementary in the East Village.

“The student population is some 50% black and Latino children. Half the students qualify for free and reduced priced lunch, and 23% of students receive special education services.

“If American teachers built a school, instead of politicians and bureaucrats, it would look a lot like this. Founded as an experimental program in 1992 by a group of New York City teachers who wanted, in the words of the school’s website, “to create a peaceful, nurturing place to stimulate learning in all realms of child development, intellectual, social, emotional and physical,” the Earth School is guided by the values of “hands-on exploration, an arts-rich curriculum, responsible stewardship of the Earth’s resources, harmonious resolution of conflict and parent-teacher partnership.”

“While “working rigorously in literacy and math” the students are encouraged “to explore, experiment, and even sometimes make a mess in the pursuit of learning.”

“The atmosphere of the school is one of warmth and safety. Teacher experience is prized here — the principal, Abbe Futterman, was one of the founding teachers of the school a quarter-century ago, and many other staff members have worked here for at least five or 10 years.

“Children at the school are assessed every day, not primarily by standardized tests — the majority of parents opt their kids out of state exams — but by certified, professional childhood educators who provide the ultimate in “personalized instruction”: the flesh-and-blood kind.

“Children at the school learn in part through play in the early years. They are encouraged to ask challenging questions and think for themselves. They are encouraged toto be creative and compassionate, and to make their own decisions. Children get unstructured, free-play outdoor recess in the big play yard most days.

“Like employees at Google who are given 20% of their time to devote to projects of their own choice, children are given a free afternoon every week to pursue their own self-chosen “passion projects.”

“In a striking innovation I especially appreciate, parents are actually invited into the school and directly into the classrooms for the morning drop-off, and given a room in the heart of the schoo, to relax, chat and plan much-needed school fundraisers.

“The school is not perfect, and it is not for everybody. If you’re looking for universal iPads, data walls, digital learning badges or boot-camp behavior modification in your child’s classroom, you won’t find them here.

“But somehow, this oasis of child-centered, evidence-based childhood education has managed to survive and flourish for a quarter-century in the heart of the New York City public school system.“

If it can happen in New York City, it can happen everywhere. If we ever get over our love affair with testing, anything is possible. Even a normal childhood.

Categories Childhood, New York City, Play, Real Education

Diane Pearl Gallagher: Do Not Give Up!

By dianeravitch
September 22, 2017 //
58

Diane Pearl Gallagher left the following comment. I have advice for her. Do not give up. It is always darkest just before the dawn. We will win. We are many. They are few. We put children first. They put money and power first. We fight for the next generation, not to control them but to free them to be their best selves.

Gallagher writes:

“There is no end in sight. No light. Tunnel is long and winding. Will the snakes (plethora of them, which is growing insanely and rapidly) consume themselves? I am a survivor of the NYCDOE, where I witnessed educators carried out on stretchers, nervous breakdowns, heart attacks, trauma, etc. It became such a hostile environment that it was like entering another country. It continues….Students who bring mammoth issues into the schools, especially our urban schools (poverty in this century is a new breed of poverty) witness their teachers’ stress (test scores, oppressive management by incompetent leaders etc) and there is little for them to “survive” on or be nourished and educated in a way that allows social mobility. I am a public school advocate but at this point, there only remains a skeleton of what once existed as a place of learning and safety in our urban areas. For profit schools are demonstrating that they too are failing our children. Soon it will be blatant in the public’s eye and too many sacrificial lambs will have already been placed on the pyre. Our “little” voices still need to be heard. Resistance still needs to occur.”

Categories Corporate Reform, Disruption, Joy, Justice, Real Education
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