Archives for category: Standardized Testing
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Jon Pelto: Connecticut Trachers Vote to Endorse Opt Out

By dianeravitch
May 22, 2015 //
4

Jon Pelto reports that the Connecticut Education Association voted to endorse parents’ right to opt out of state testing.

Pelto writes:

“As reported by the CEA Blog,

“Teacher leaders from across the state took decisive action today to strengthen the organization’s position on the right of parents to opt their children out of high-stakes standardized tests and re-elect CEA President Sheila Cohen and Vice President Jeff Leake overwhelmingly.

The motion on opting out was unanimously adopted by teachers who were delegates to the CEA Representative Assembly (CEA RA), the highest policymaking body of the Association.

[…]

CEA has long supported the right of parents to make critical decisions about their children’s education. Today’s vote goes a step further by putting the full weight the CEA RA behind that position and providing great detail about teachers’ objectives in ensuring less testing and more learning in Connecticut public schools.

[…]

“Essential components of the motion include:

“Call on state policymakers and local school districts to formulate and pass legislation and policies that allow school employees to discuss standardized tests with parents and inform them of their ability to exclude children from state and/or district standardized tests.

“Call on state lawmakers and school districts to formulate and pass legislation and policies that allow school employees to provide parents with their opinions on whether students would benefit from exclusion from a state/and or district standardized test and that no adverse action or discipline would be taken against employees who engage in such discussion.

“Provide that a school and its employees would not be negatively impacted due to a student not taking a state and/or district-level standardized test, such as by ensuring that students who are opted out of standardized tests by a parent or guardian are excluded from performance calculations for state and local accountability measures and from employee evaluations.

“Reexamine public school accountability systems throughout the state, and develop a system based on multiple forms of assessment that do not require extensive standardized testing, that more accurately reflects the broad range of student learning, and is used to support students and improve schools.”

Categories Connecticut, Opt Out, Standardized Testing

James Harvey: What Does “Proficiency” Mean?

By dianeravitch
May 22, 2015 //
9

The new Common Core tests funded by the federal government agreed to adopt the standard of “proficiency” used by the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). Students who are not “proficient” are deemed to have “failed” to meet the standards. They are described as “not proficient,” which is a very bad thing indeed.

But what does NAEP proficiency mean?

I served on the NAEP governing board for seven years. I understood that “proficient” was a very high standard. There are four NAEP achievement levels: Advanced (typically reached by 5-8% of students); Proficient (typically reached by about 35-40% of students); Basic (typically reached by about 75% of students); and Below Basic (very poor performance, about 20-25% of students). Thus, by aligning its “pass” mark with NAEP proficient, the PARCC and SBAC (the two testing groups) were choosing a level that most students will not reach. Only in Massachusetts have as many as 50% of students reached NAEP proficient. Nearly half have not.

As Catherine Gewertz wrote in Education Week, “The two common-assessment consortia are taking early steps to align the “college readiness” achievement levels on their tests with the rigorous proficiency standard of the National Assessment of Educational Progress, a move that is expected to set many states up for a steep drop in scores.
After all, fewer than four in 10 children reached the “proficient” level on the 2013 NAEP in reading and math.”

So, if these consortia intend to align with the very rigorous standards of NAEP, most students will fail the tests. They will fail them every year. Will the test results be used for promotion and/or graduation? If so, we can expect a majority of the current generation of students not to be promoted or graduate from high school. What will we do with them?

It is time to ask whether NAEP proficient is the right “cut score” (passing mark). I think it is not. To me, given my knowledge of NAEP achievement levels, proficient represents solid academic performance, a high level of achievement. I think of it as an A. Advanced, to me, is A+. Anyone who expects the majority of students to score an A on their state exams is being, I think, wildly unrealistic. Please remember that NAEP proficient represents a high level of achievement, not a grade level mark or a pass-fail mark. NAEP basic would be a proper benchmark as a passing grade, not NAEP proficient.

Furthermore, the NAEP achievements levels have been controversial ever since they were first promulgated in the early 1990s when Checker Finn was chairman of the NAEP governing board. Checker was subsequently president of the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation/Institute, and he has long believed that American students are slackers and need rigorous standards (as a member of his board for many years, I agreed with him then, not now). He believed that the NAEP scale scores (0-500) did not show the public how American students were doing, and he was a strong proponent of the achievement levels, which were set very high.

James Harvey, a former superintendent who runs the National Superintendents’ Roundtable, wrote an article in 2011 that explains just how controversial the NAEP achievement levels are.

He wrote then:

Since definition is crucial in any discussion of standards, let’s define the terms of the discussion. The No Child Left Behind Act, passed by Congress in 2001 as the latest reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, permitted states to develop their own assessments and set their own proficiency standards to measure student achievement. Most states, for their purposes, quite sensibly defined proficiency as performance at grade level.

What about NAEP? Oddly, NAEP’s proficient standard has little to do with grade-level performance or even proficiency as most people understand the term. NAEP officials like to think of the assessment standard as “aspirational.” In 2001, long before the current contretemps around state assessments, two experts associated with the National Assessment Governing Board—Mary Lynne Bourque, staff member to the governing board, and Susan Loomis, a member of the board—made it clear that “the proficient achievement level does not refer to ‘at grade’ performance. Nor is performance at the proficient level synonymous with ‘proficiency’ in the subject. That is, students who may be considered proficient in a subject, given the common usage of the term, might not satisfy the requirements for performance at the NAEP achievement level.”

It is hardly surprising, then, that most state assessments aimed at establishing proficiency as “at grade” produce results different from a NAEP standard in which proficiency does not refer to “at grade” performance or even describe students that most would think of as proficient. Far from supporting the NAEP proficient level as an appropriate benchmark for state assessments, many analysts endorse the NAEP basic level as the more appropriate standard because NAEP’s current standard sets an unreasonably high bar.

What is striking in reviewing the history of NAEP is how easily its governing board has shrugged off criticisms about the board’s standards-setting processes.

In 1993, the National Academy of Education argued that NAEP’s achievement-setting processes were “fundamentally flawed” and “indefensible.” That same year, the General Accounting Office concluded that “the standard-setting approach was procedurally flawed, and that the interpretations of the resulting NAEP scores were of doubtful validity.” The National Assessment Governing Board, or NAGB, which oversees NAEP, was so incensed by an unfavorable report it received from Western Michigan University in 1991 that it looked into firing the contractor before hiring other experts to take issue with the university researchers’ conclusions that counseled against releasing NAEP scores without warning about NAEP’s “conceptual and technical shortcomings.”

“Most state assessments aimed at establishing proficiency as ‘at grade’ produce results different from a NAEP standard.”
In addition, NAGB absorbed savage criticism from the National Academy of Sciences, which concluded in 1999 that “NAEP’s current achievement-level-setting procedures remain fundamentally flawed. The judgment tasks are difficult and confusing; raters’ judgments of different item types are internally inconsistent; appropriate validity evidence for the cut scores is lacking; and the process has produced unreasonable results. … The results are not believable.”

For the most part, such pointed criticism has rolled off the governing board like so much water off a duck’s back.
As recently as 2009, the U.S. Department of Education received a report on NAEP from the University of Nebraska’s Buros Institute. This latest document expressed worries about NAEP’s “validity framework” and asked for a “transparent, organized validity framework, beginning with a clear definition of the intended and unintended uses of the NAEP assessment scores. We recommend that NAGB continue to explore achievement-level methodologies.” In short, for the last 20 years, it has been hard to find any expert not on the Education Department’s payroll who will accept the NAEP benchmarks uncritically.

Those benchmarks might be more convincing if most students outside the United States could meet them. That’s a hard case to make, judging by a 2007 analysis from Gary Phillips, a former acting commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics. Phillips set out to map NAEP benchmarks onto international assessments in science and mathematics and found that only Taipei (or Taiwan) and Singapore have a significantly higher percentage of proficient students in 8th grade science than the United States does. In math, the average performance of 8th grade students in six jurisdictions could be classified as proficient: Singapore, South Korea, Taipei, Hong Kong, Japan, and Flemish Belgium. Judging by Phillips’ results, it seems that when average results, by jurisdiction, place typical students at the NAEP proficient level, the jurisdictions involved are typically wealthy—many with “tiger mothers” or histories of excluding low-income students or those with disabilities.

None of this is to say that the method of determining the NAEP achievement levels is entirely indefensible. Like other large-scale assessments—the International Mathematics and Science Study, the Progress on International Reading Literacy Survey, and the Program on International Student Assessment—NAEP is an extremely complex endeavor, depending on procedures in which experts make judgments about what students should know and construct assessment items to distinguish between student responses. Panels then make judgments about specific items, and trained scorers, in turn, bring judgment to bear on constructed-response items, which typically make up about 40 percent of the assessment.

That said, it is hard to avoid some obvious conclusions. First, NAEP’s achievement levels, far from being engraved on stone tablets, are administered, as Congress has insisted, on a “trial basis.” Second, NAEP achievement levels are based on judgment and educated guesses, not science. Third, the proficiency benchmark seems reachable by most students in only a handful of wealthy or Asian jurisdictions.

It is important to know this history when looking at the results of the Common Core tests (PARCC and SBAC). The fact that they have chosen NAEP proficient as their cut score guarantees that most students will “fail” and will continue to “fail.” Exactly what is the point? It is a good thing to have high standards, but they should be reasonable and attainable. NAEP proficient is not attainable by most students. Not because they are dumb, but because it is the wrong cut score for a state examination. It is “aspirational,” like running a four-minute mile. Some runners will be able to run a four-minute mile, but most cannot and never will. Virtually every major league pitcher aspires to pitch a no-hitter, but very few will do it. The rest will not, and they are not failures.

What parents and teachers need to know is that the testing consortia have chosen a passing mark that is inappropriate, that is not objective, and that is certain to fail most students. That’s not right, and that’s not fair.

Categories Common Core, NAEP, Standardized Testing

Here’s Something You Can Do to Stop the Testing Mania

By dianeravitch
May 22, 2015 //
20

As you probably know, No Child Left Behind saddled the schools with a heavy dose of annual testing from grades 3-8, and Race to the Top required states to use those test scores to evaluate teachers. Testing is out of control. The curriculum is narrowed, especially in schools that enroll low-income students, where the scores are lowest. Educators have cheated to save their jobs, and some lost their jobs, their reputations, and their freedom because they cheated.

No high-performing nation in the world has annual testing or evaluates teachers by test scores. The current revision of NCLB retains annual testing unfortunately. However, Senator Tester (ironic name) has written an amendment to change annual testing to grade span testing: once in elementary school, once in middle school, once in high school. My preference would be to have no federally-mandated testing at all, given how abusive this policy has proven to be. But grade-span testing is far preferable to annual testing.

Learn here how to support his sensible proposal. Write your Senator now. There is no time to waste.

Those who say that annual tests are needed to protect children of color, children with special needs, and English language learners have not looked at the racist history of standardized tests. These are the children most likely to be on the bottom half of the normal curve that governs standardized tests. They are the very children most likely to be labeled and stigmatized by the tests. What children need most are reduced class sizes, a rich curriculum, experienced teachers, fully resourced schools, and the opportunity to learn. This is what they need, not more testing. A test is a measure, not the goal or purpose of education. And it is a flawed measure.

Categories NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Race to the Top, Standardized Testing

Florida: Pearson Exams Hacked, Again

By dianeravitch
May 21, 2015 //
15

Uh-oh. Florida’s end-of-course exams suspended by hackers.

“Interruptions in Florida’s end-of-course biology, civics and U.S. history exams last week came courtesy of outside hackers, a Florida Department of Education spokeswoman told the Gradebook on Monday.

“It was an attempt by an outside party to somehow shut down the system,” spokeswoman Cheryl Etters said. “Pearson figured out what was going on and put a stop to it.”

“The state told schools to delay testing during the disruption, during which students could not log in to take their exams. The system was back up within about two hours.

“This event marked the second time this spring that Florida’s computerized testing fell victim to a denial of service attack. American Institutes for Research servers also were brought down in March, during the administration of Florida Standards Assessments.”

Last night, I watched a Nova program on PBS called “The Rise of the Hackers.” One of the most sophisticated hacks was the work of teenagers.

The only truly secure test is the one written and graded by the classroom teacher. Online testing is not secure, does not reflect what was taught, and generates profits that are extracted from instruction. They are so yesterday.

Categories Florida, Pearson, Standardized Testing

New York Times: Opt Out Becomes a Powerful Political Force

By dianeravitch
May 20, 2015 //
59

Elizabeth Harris and Ford Fessenden wrote an article that just went online in The Néw York Times about the stunning growth of the Opt Out movement in Néw York state. Its numbers have increased dramatically in only two years.

The movement is now a potent political force:

“As the vanguard of an anti-testing fervor that has spread across the country, New York’s opt-out movement already has become a political force. Just two months ago, lawmakers from both parties, at the behest of Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, a Democrat, increased the role of test scores in teacher evaluations and tenure decisions.

“Those same legislators are now tripping over one another to introduce bills that guarantee the right to refuse to take tests. The high numbers will also push state and federal officials to make an uncomfortable decision: whether to use their power to financially punish districts with low participation rates.”

The federal government requires a 95% participation rate on tests. Two years ago, almost every district complied. Not this year.

“Only 30 of the 440 districts where data was available met the 95-percent test participation rate called for by federal requirements, a far cry from just two years ago, when almost every district complied.”

Critics of opt out say that without the test scores, no one would know which students, teachers, and schools are “failing.” But if the tests are invalid and unreliable, as many believe the Common Core tests are, then the information they provide is worthless. Are superintendents, principals, and teachers so untrustworthy that no one knows what is happening in the schools? Are the test makers better judges than professional educators?

Where will the Opt Out Movement go from here? It terrifies the Establishment. It is a grassroots movement that can’t be bought out.

Now that parents have found their voice and a means of expressing their displeasure, there is nowhere to go but up. The organizing will continue, especially as the state raises the stakes on the trsts. Next year expect even bigger numbers.

Categories New York, Opt Out, Parent Groups, Parents, Standardized Testing

Long Island: Opt Out Candidates Sweep Elections!

By dianeravitch
May 20, 2015 //
6

Amazing news!

Long Island Opt Out, led by parent Jeanette Deutermann, endorsed candidates in yesterday’s school board elections across the two counties that comprise the Island. Fifty-seven of the 75 candidates endorsed by LIOO won their races. This includes seven of Deutermann’s liaisons for Opt Out.

Their message was: “We are taking back our schools.”

Long Island is the national hotbed for opt outs. It is a model for the nation. Parents are organized and active; they have the support of many principals and superintendents.

Jeanette Deutermann has spearheaded this effective resistance to high-stakes testing. She belongs on this blog’s honor roll as a champion of public education.

Categories Honor Roll, New York, Opt Out, Parent Groups, Standardized Testing

Julian Vasquez Heilig: Testing Does Not Promote Equity

By dianeravitch
May 20, 2015 //
5

Julian Vasquez Heilig recently delivered the Social Justice Keynote for The California Association of Latino Superintendents and Administrators (CALSA). He posted his remarks on his excellent blog, Cloaking Inequity.

Heilig reviews the racist history of standardized testing and its use to sort people by their socioeconomic status. He refers to court cases brought by civil rights groups in opposition to the use of standardized tests for high-stakes decisions.

Then he proposes an alternative means of assessing school quality, which he calls “local accountability” or “community-based reform,” using multiple measures and reflecting the ideas,, values, and priorities of local communities.

He writes (and says):

“We must press for community-based reforms in the public discourse instead of top-down, privately controlled reforms.

“We can utilize community-based, democratic approaches to student and teacher assessment.

“We must also support stakeholder collaboratives such as community-based charters instead of corporate based charters.

“We must do this because democratic control of public schools drives the health of our democracy!…..

“Community-based reform and policy changes the conversation from educators and local stakeholders as the “problem” by instead re-empowering them as the solution and strengthening the thread that links communities to vibrant, participatory neighborhood public schools.”

Categories Equity, Standardized Testing

BREAKING NEWS: Pearson Loses Most of Texas’ Testing Contract

By dianeravitch
May 18, 2015 //
52

Pearson just lost most of its Texas testing business.

For the first time in three decades, a new company is poised to develop and administer the state-required exams Texas students begin taking in the third grade.

The state is in negotiations with Educational Testing Service, or ETS, to take over the bulk of the four-year, $340 million student assessment contract, the Texas Education Agency announced Monday. Company Vice President John Oswald said ETS is “privileged and honored” to land the work. Final contracts are still being negotiated.

The London-based Pearson Education has held the state’s largest education-related contract — most recently, a five-year, $468 million deal to provide state exams through 2015 — since Texas began requiring state student assessments in the 1980s. Under the new agreement, the company would still develop the state’s assessments designed for special needs and foreign students. That portion of the contract is worth about $60 million.

Here is the puzzling question: Why did it cost $468 million for a five-year contract with Pearson when New York State pays Pearson “only” $32 million for a five-year contract? Does New York have smarter negotiators? Does Pearson have better lobbyists in Texas than in New York? Does New York get Texas’s used questions? True, Texas has more children than New York, but not 15 times more. Can anyone explain?

Categories Pearson, Standardized Testing, Texas

Ohio: A Stellar Example of Data Mania

By dianeravitch
May 18, 2015 //
27

A strange affliction has taken control of American public education. Or perhaps it is better to say a group of people with a mindset from some fantasyland are now making policy, all geared to produce standardized children and standardized minds.

Here is an exemplar.

As I read this article, my eyes began to blur, the words lost all meaning. Who are these people? Why do they think that all children can be rated,ranked, and labeled by their scores on a standardized test? How do they define “proficiency”? What does it mean? Who decided?

One voice of reason: Bob Schaeffer of Fairtest says that “standards” are not objective, they are subjective.

If you can jump higher than me, am I a failure? If you can solve a crossword puzzle faster than me, are you better than me in general or just better at solving crossword puzzles?

I know that the people who are immersed in data and who believe in data like a religion, think they are being scientific. So did the eugenicisys of the 1920s,who thought they could use test scores to sort and label people and to decide who was allowed to reproduce; they thought they were “scientifically” improving the human race, like plant genetics or animal genetics. By the 1930s, they were recognized as quacks, but on another continent, a mad dictator loved the eugenics philosophy and drove the world mad.

Will anyone hear if I put in a word for humanism? For valuing the different gifts of each person? For loving every child, regardless of their test scores? For abandoning the nutty quest to have standards so high that most children are designated failures by arbitrary measures?

Categories Common Core, Data and Data Mining, Ohio, Standardized Testing

Nancy Carlsson-Paige On What Matters Most

By dianeravitch
May 16, 2015 //
11

A reader contacted me and told me that Nancy Carlsson-Paige, professor emeritus at Lesley University and early childhood education expert, gave a wonderful graduation speech at Temple University. I reached out to Nancy and post it here with her permission.

She said:

TEMPLE GRADUATION SPEECH

Nancy Carlsson-Paige
May 8, 2015

Good Evening, Everyone!

I am truly honored to have this opportunity to speak to you today. This is a big day for you, graduates, and for your families. It’s a celebration of your accomplishments, all your hard work—I know it wasn’t always easy getting here. And this is a day also to appreciate those many people who have helped you, supported you, and loved you on your path to this graduation.

I’m so glad that education is the field you have chosen! It is a rewarding and meaningful profession. It is through education that our minds expand, we get wiser, and better able to improve the human condition. Nelson Mandela said, “Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.”

This moment in time that you have chosen to enter education is a rocky and uncertain one. In recent years, the meaning and purpose of education has narrowed. In the eyes of many today, education is seen as a delivery system to transmit units of knowledge and specific skills to our young people that are then tested to ensure they’ve been learned. It’s a one-dimensional, restrictive view of education that has led increasingly to the disappearance of engaging, holistic curriculum, the arts, recess, teacher innovation, teacher collaboration, and education for citizenship.

Classrooms for our young children have seen a dramatic disappearance of play. But we know play is the way young kids learn. And it is also how they build inner security and resilience. I learned this lesson when my own two sons, who are now grown, were very young.

It was a winter day, after my teaching and the boys’ day at school. The three of us were together in the living room of our rented apartment. An accidental fire started from the fireplace—accidental in the sense that I wasn’t trying to burn down the house, but tired after work, I’d made a sloppy fire. I do wonder as I look back now how overwhelmed I might have been as a young, single working mom. So the flames were leaping out of the fireplace, lapping the wooden mantle. I began trying to suffocate them with a heavy blanket. My older son Kyle was trying to help. But my younger son Matt, who was then five years old, ran out of the room.

I started having success suppressing the flames but then I was wondering: Where is Matt? And then after some moments, he ran into the room. He was dressed in his red corduroy bathrobe, his fire fighter’s hat, his black galoshes and a sea divers mask. He had a little piece of rubber tubing in his hand, it wasn’t connected to anything, but he was spraying it in the direction of the fireplace.

The outfit Matt had on was the one he wore for his rescue hero play.
–He had it on now because wearing it was what he could do to put out the fire.

A young child in a rescue hero outfit IS a hero in that moment—and he can fully believe that by wearing firefighter clothes and with his rubber tube, he can put out a fire.

When kids pretend to be Superheroes and other Rescue fantasy characters, it helps them feel safe and in control. Life presents so many challenges to young children, this kind of play helps them develop a sense of security and inner resilience.

Studies are now showing that play is rapidly disappearing from classrooms for young children, increasingly replaced by more teacher-directed instruction.

This test-driven education climate we have today, reinforced with accountability measures and high stakes, has made teachers fearful and discouraged. Currently 40 to 50 percent of teachers leave the profession within their first five years. I don’t want you to be included in that percentage of educators who become too demoralized to continue.

It is ironic that at this very moment in history when we need an expanded vision of education, the blinders come on. We are teaching as if we think that what our youth will need to know in the future is already known.

Our young people are going to have to exceed our limitations. They’ll need to develop wide-ranging competencies to be able to live well in the world they are inheriting. They’ll need to think in new ways, initiate, create, explore and solve problems, collaborate with others, make ethical decisions. They will have to grapple with all the problems we are handing them–climate change, income inequality, mass incarceration, nuclear weapons, war and terrorism.

These critical competencies that our young people will need are not quantifiable. How could you test for creativity on a computer-based exam? Or measure original thinking on a fill in the bubbles standardized test? (Let’s hope no one tries.) What passes for education today—all the facts and skills that can be defined, pinned down and tested– is a very small part of what education truly is and should be.

When I was a new teacher about forty years ago, I came across a letter that a principal had written to the teachers in his school. The words had a profound impact on me, and they have stayed with me all these years—as a reminder of the true purpose of education.

This is the letter:

Dear Teacher,

I am a survivor of a concentration camp. My eyes saw what no man should witness:

Gas chambers built by learned engineers.

Children poisoned by educated physicians.

Infants killed by trained nurses.

Women and babies shot and burned by high school and college graduates.

So I am suspicious of education.

My request is: Help your students become human.
————————————————————————-

This letter was written in 1971. And it is so relevant for us now.

It calls on us to understand education as a human and moral endeavor. In school we learn knowledge and skills and the moral and ethical awareness to choose how we use them. We educate whole people—their minds and hearts—so they will become citizens who can think for themselves and make choices for the good of others as well as themselves.

John Dewey believed that the aim of education was democracy and citizenship.

And that each generation had to learn citizenship anew– learn it by living it. Ideally from their first days in school.

I was in a kindergarten classroom one day early in the school year when the teacher was sitting with the children in a circle. She was asking them, “How do we want to be with each other in this class?” The children were raising their hands and saying things like: “We should share! No hitting! If you hurt someone, say you’re sorry.” The teacher was writing down the children’s words on chart paper. She told me that each morning she reads this list with the children. As the children have more experience with each other, they add more ideas to their list. Soon they start coming into the classroom and reading the list by themselves. The words are their words and the children want to learn how to read them.

In another kindergarten I visited more recently– during this era of high stakes testing—all of the children were sitting silently at tables. The teacher was testing one little boy at a computer. The other children were copying words from the chalk board. The words were: “No talking. Sit in your seat. Hands to Yourself.” These were the teacher’s rules.

Most of the children looked scared or disengaged, and one little boy was crying. For them, learning to write was something required; someone else’s words–disconnected from their ideas and passions.

This teacher was required to complete mandated testing of each child in her class—one by one at the computer– 3 times a year. She had no classroom aid. The program’s funding depended on the test scores. It would have been hard for any teacher in this situation to give children engaging, play-based curriculum, and community building experiences.

In the narrowed education climate of today, some people think of teachers as technicians. But good teaching can’t be pinned down to a recipe. Good teaching is a form of art.

Of course our work is grounded in science. But it isn’t enough to know only the science. In education, the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. Being a good teacher means knowing how to apply what we know, when and how to use it, and how to innovate upon it—and that takes talent.

There was an incident that happened in a high school in East Harlem, that taught me a lot about the art of good teaching. It was at a time when there’d been two incidents in NY City—within a couple of weeks, two teens had been shot and their coats stolen. In this school in East Harlem, there was a conflict resolution program, and the teacher had been talking with her students about these shooting incidents, and the kids were practicing ways to deescalate conflict.

Raymond went to this high school and he had recently bought a new coat.

On this day, Raymond arrived at school without his coat and profoundly upset. At the subway stop near school, he’d been surrounded by three guys who demanded he give up his new jacket.

The teacher called a class meeting immediately, with Raymond’s permission, so he could share his story and express his rage.

Teacher: Raymond I know you are very upset. Could you tell us what happened?

Raymond: I was getting off the subway stop right here in East Harlem and all of a sudden I was surrounded by three guys who told me that I better give them my coat. One of the guys had his hand in his pocket and I thought maybe he had a knife.

Teacher: Go on Raymond. We’re right here listening to you and all of us care a lot about you and what happened.

Raymond: Well, before I could even think, I started to unzip my coat, and I said to the guy who I thought had the knife, “This is incredible. I was just getting ready to give you my coat.” I said, “Who should I give it to?” One of the guys snatched the coat and all of them started to run off as fast as they could. Then, of course, I wanted to pick up some rocks and throw them at them, but I didn’t.

Maria said: I can’t believe you did that, Raymond. I think you saved your life. How come you didn’t try to say “no” or fight back? I think that’s what I would have done.

Raymond: I don’t know. It just came to me, but now I feel so angry and humiliated and I can’t believe I don’t have my coat. It’s 20 degrees out there today and I walked three blocks without a coat.

Teacher: Raymond, how do you think you were able to respond in this way and–I would agree with Maria–probably save your life? Remember just last week this same thing happened in Queens and the young man didn’t give up his coat and was shot to death.

Raymond: Well, I was actually thinking of what we were talking about last week of what makes violence even worse and that’s more violence. I also remember when we were talking about what happened to the kid in Queens, you said, “Remember, you are not your coat”. So I guess I decided to do something that would de-escalate the conflict and not give back more violence, and that’s what I did.

Manuel: Raymond, I think it was more courageous to not fight back and use your skills, but I don’t know if I would have been able to do that.

Teacher: So Raymond, it looks as though you really put your skills to use in a horrible situation. And when you asked who you should give the jacket to you were also de-escalating the conflict by staying neutral.

Anthony: How much was that jacket?

Raymond: Well, it was $119.00.

Tanya: There are 92 seniors in this school—that is a little over a dollar each.

Teacher: What are you thinking here, Tanya?

Tanya: I’m thinking that if I had help I would be willing to collect this money for Raymond to buy another jacket.

James: I would be willing to help. I can’t believe you were able to do what you did Raymond.

Teacher: Well, this sounds like a wonderful plan. Do we need to do anything else to make it happen? How do you feel about that Raymond?

Raymond: Wow. I can’t believe you would all do that. But I know my mother wouldn’t be able to buy another coat. Maybe don’t ask everybody or say, “Only if you can afford the dollar.” That would make me feel better.
———————————————————–

This high school teacher had the skill, compassion, and the artful ability to respond to her students in the moment and to build community from their experiences and ideas. And she had enough autonomy as a teacher to be able to create a teaching moment from what happened to Raymond.

Too many external requirements stifle a teacher’s ability to practice her craft.

Teaching is so much more than transmissin of information, test prep, and data collection. It’s why you can’t be replaced by a computer. Or by someone who had a 5-week summer program in how to teach.

But teaching like the teacher in East Harlem is a lot harder today. Many teachers say there isn’t room anymore for conflict resolution programs, community building, and student-centered projects when so many mandates fill the day. But teachers also know what good education looks like–and they hear its beating heart. They keep on finding creative ways to teach even in this climate.

The singer/songwriter Leonard Cohen wrote: “There is a crack, a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in.”

You are holding that light now. You, with all of your energy, your fresh ideas, your idealism (I hope you have it and hold onto it), your knowledge and talent. You’ll shine that light where you can—in whatever situations you find yourselves.

We have to keep our eyes on an expansive vision of education. So wherever we are, we find ways to move toward it. When I look around I see so many teachers, parents, administrators, and students—even a couple of politicians– taking steps toward a more holistic and human vision of education. And I feel sure that we—individually and together—are going to move that big needle.

Margaret Mead’s words, uttered decades ago, are timeless and history has proven them over and over to be true: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”

Categories Real Education, Standardized Testing, Students, Teachers and Teaching
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