Legislating to the Test

Recently, the Virginia Senate passed a bill that would eliminate the 3rd grade SOL (Standards of Learning) Tests in Science and Social Studies. That means less standardized testing! As a Virginia public school parent, I should be thrilled, right? Not necessarily.

See my post on this over at The Core Knowledge Blog.

Opportunity to Develop Literacy

On Monday, January 9th, Virginia Governor McDonnell announced his education agenda, entitled, "Opportunity to Learn." This has been covered by The Virginia Education Report, The Washington Post, as well as commented on by many throughout the state (For Chad Sansing's excellent commentary, read here. Or, for a partial listing of other reactions, see here.) I am going to offer my reactions in a series of posts starting with this one.

Before I comment on the agenda, I want to reiterate a point that Chad Sansing made in his piece:

McDonnell’s blueprint promises “a bold education proposal that will dramatically increase money for Virginia’s teachers and students by $480 million a year.” Meanwhile, his budget plans also include “hundreds of millions of dollars in cuts, including to child-care subsidies for low-income families and to health and parent-education programs for poor pregnant women.” Families who need social and support services to help their kids attend school and access curriculum won’t benefit from McDonnell’s cuts.

I will return to issues if budgeting and funding in later posts but for now I'll assert: We're not going to succeed in improving education for low-income children with one hand if we're squeezing their parents and communities with the other. As I explained here, single-issue advocacy is problematic and students don't lead single-issue lives. Furthermore, the more we deny help to those in need, the more needs our students will come to school with and the more resources our schools will need to adequately serve those students. And right now there is a growing number of people in need.

Now, on to the education agenda:

In the "Raise Standards - College Workforce and Readiness" section, the McDonnell administration proposes, among other things ("other things" being streamlining diploma requirements, positive youth development, and expanding dual enrollment programs--none of which I have any objections to, so far :), advancing literacy. McDonnell wants to make sure all third graders can read before they move on to fourth grade. That is a worthy goal, but I'm not sure that his way of achieving it is sound. McDonnell wants to pay kids who learn to read. Harvard Researcher Roland Fryer tried something similar to this, and it didn't really work. If kids aren't reading by third grade, it's not (good grief!) because we're not paying them. Nor do I think the strategy of waiting until third grade and then simply holding kids back will help much--it's too reactive.

If we want struggling readers to struggle less, we need to do two things:

1) Invest in reading intervention programs that work and reach out to struggling readers long before third grade. Many of the children who are likely to struggle with reading would probably benefit from the very preschool programs McDonnell is looking to cut, so if he wants to advance literacy he should reconsider cutting those programs. One program that my school district successfully uses and that helped my own son when he was struggling to learn to read was Reading Recovery. Such programs are expensive and require investment and commitment. (UPDATE: After I drafted this post, I read that McDonnell proposed adding $8.2 million to the budget for early reading programs. This is good news, though I'd want to know more about the efficacy of the specific programs being funded and the real estimated impact of the dollars allotted.)

2) We need to spend much less time teaching reading as a subject and teaching reading strategies beyond their utility and much more time teaching content or subject matters, such as literature, science, social studies, p.e., art music, foreign languages, technical education, etc. Yes, most kids need to be explicitly taught to decode and yes, to a point reading strategies are useful. Of course, content should be taught as reading and writing intensive. However, literacy is largely representative of someone's background and content knowledge, and knowledge of vocabulary and does not develop or improve without it. As the University of Virginia's own Dan Willingham says, teaching content is teaching reading. (It's also much, much more meaningful and interesting for kids.) My regular readers know that I talk about this ad nauseum. In case you're new to my writing on education, here are some posts that elaborate further: here, here, and here.

You know what I've found, as a parent and in my observations of my kids' teachers, is the best reward for kids who are working hard to learn to read or who are already reading? More books. Let's reward students for reading by giving them more books.

UPDATE: In a misguided effort to get Virginia third graders to do better on reading and math tests, State Senator John Miller (D-Newport News) wants teachers to spend even more time on reading and math and even less on science and social studies. And he wants to do so to get test scores up in fifth grade (not necessarily because it will mean better education). Ugh. Even supporters of NCLB say the bill is too limited in scope by just focusing on math and reading. Sorry, Senator Miller, but this bill will take us in the complete wrong direction!

cross-posted at The Virginia Education Report

It's the substance & the stress (not the salary), stupid.

As some of you know, I am starting to look for, ahem, a job, including positions that would put me back in the classroom. The position of "unpaid writer" isn't exactly putting food on the table and I'm starting to feel antsy writing so much about education without actually doing much about education. Reading over and updating my teaching resume, I am reminded of former students, colleagues, schools, and yes, curriculum. I am reminded of how much I enjoy teaching, for teaching itself but also for the content I got to ponder. I graduated at the top of my class in high school and went to an elite college. I'm "the type" many education reformers talk of attracting to teaching and, initially, attracted I was, but given what teaching has become in many cases, I am somewhat reluctant to go back.

The first reason is the working conditions. While I agree teachers are underpaid and I appreciate Secretary Duncan's strident acknowledgement of this, I would do the work at the current salaries if the working conditions made the job more manageable: if I knew classes would be reasonably and appropriately sized; if I were given adequate time for planning, development, collaboration, and frankly, bathroom breaks; and if I knew the school where I might work would be fully staffed with content teachers, a librarian, a nurse, a social worker, enough administrators, etc. If I knew I could do an adequate job in a 40-hour week (obviously, it would be more some weeks and a bit less during others and yes, the work would always be on my mind), I might never have taken the break I did in the first place. I can't work the punishing hours because I have my own children to raise. And I'm in favor to the idea of changing compensation systems to reflect the different roles and demands of different teaching jobs. If there are teachers out there who have the space in their life and desire to take on more work and responsibilities than I can, I think they should be paid more. I would be happy to take on a lesser teaching position for less money than a harder working colleague if it meant I could be in the classroom again and still be the parent I want to be. Unfortunately, it became clear to me that I had to choose.

Second of all, I was attracted to teaching because it's intellectual, interesting, stimulating, creative, and socially useful. Well, at least it should be. As Diana Senechal put it in this comment:

The McKinsey researchers examined teacher recruitment and retention in Singapore, Finland, and South Korea. They found many factors that make teaching an attractive profession in those countries: salary, job security, autonomy and trust, cultural respect, and more. Given their own findings, it’s odd that they or anyone would conclude that financial incentives should reign supreme. And there were things they should have investigated but didn’t–for instance, the intellectual and spiritual appeal of the profession.  

Look at the talented people in professions where the pay is decent but not stellar–the arts, humanities, teaching, scholarship, nonprofits, journalism, and more. What brings people to these professions? Not incompetence, but interest. The work has substance.  

But when the substance is driven out, when the work turns into busywork, people turn to professions that offer the combination of qualities that they seek.

Yes, the work has substance. Or it did. Or it should. Of course teaching is going to have some busy work--all jobs do. Sometimes I even look forward to the busy work as it gives me a break from the harder tasks of thinking, evaluating, planning. Of course, there are going to be some tasks I enjoy more than others. Reading up on the Bubonic Plague, planning how my students will learn about it for a world history class, and then assessing what the students have learned counts as enjoyable. Figuring out how to teach the standardized reading test to my world history students and doing a technocratic version of reading tea leaves, i.e., charting who got the "main idea" and "context clues" questions wrong on said standardized tests is not. And when the job starts to become mostly useless, fruitless busy work and mostly teaching vapid curriculum, that's when I'd rather work as a self-employed, unpaid writer and blogger or work at something less demanding that would still save time and energy for writing.

As Nancy Flanagan put it in her typically thoughtful way,

Good teaching is not about classroom rules, cute videos, raising test scores, cool field experiences or unions. It's about relationships, mastery, analysis, persistence, diagnosis and continuous reflection. It's complex, layered intellectual work. And it happens in hundreds of thousands of "regular" classrooms, every day.

Yes, it's complex, layered, challenging, and intellectual work with so many decisions to make at almost every turn. This is primarily why I want to do it. Okay, so the pay isn't great, but when you take away the substance of it, I no longer even enjoy the work and I don't want to do it. I'd rather do something mindless (wait tables, bar tend, or be someone's personal assistant) where I won't have to go against my principles.

As teacher James Boutin describes here (and again here), at some point in my teaching career, I began to feel like a bureaucrat:

During a visit I made to a private school in Denver last November, one of the teachers there confided in me that he moved out of public education because he didn't want to be a bureaucrat. The comment struck me. I'd never thought of myself as a bureaucrat before, but he's right - I am.

Yes, there's certainly more room for me to be more data-informed and consider the values of a technocratic approach. But if that's what I wanted to do, I'd go be a bureaucrat or a technocrat. If I wanted to teach test prep, I'd go work for Kaplan. That's not what I see as the primary role of a classroom teacher. As James further demonstrates in this must-read series, the data-driven dimension of teaching has gotten out of hand and has become a huge waste of time and resnurces for educators and students alike. Moreover, as I was engaged in it and was forced to make ill-advised curricular choices, I realized that such tasks weren't helping my students learn or improving my teaching, but were fueling political point-scoring and sustaining the education reform industry.

So thanks, Arne Duncan, for saying teachers should be paid more and thanks for your attempts at debunking flawed research that states otherwise. For a next step, consider advocating against acceptance of the "new normal" that translates to terrible working conditions for teachers and principals and terrible learning conditions for students. And then consider how you're going to attract more serious college and graduate school students to the profession if the work you're asking them to do lacks substance and insults their intelligence and, eventually, expertise. Finally, consider that if the most educated among us don't want to do to the work because it's bankrupt of creativity, intellectual exercise, meaning, and substance, then the education our students are going to be getting will hardly be rich, meaningful, and relevant. Think about how many of our best and brightest would rather get paid poverty wages working as adjunct professors and journalists than teach in the classrooms your and your predecessors' policies are molding.

Perhaps this isn't the best post to put out there as I apply for teaching jobs, but then again, I'm not going to lie or pretend. I'm going to do my best to be a team player and to be open to the advantages of a more quantitatively- or data-based approach to teaching. But I'm not going to give up my principles or knowingly engage in educational malpractice. Frankly, I'd rather scrub floors.

Will Flat NAEP Reading Scores Mean More Flat Reading Instruction?

At first I was annoyed with Matthew Di Carlo of the Shanker Blog for criticizing people for things they hadn't yet said. Speaking of the NAEP, he predicted, "People on all 'sides' will interpret the results favorably no matter how they turn out." But, he was right.


The results in my state of Virginia, were reported in The Richmond Times-Dispatch as follows: 

Virginia's fourth- and eighth-graders perform better in reading and mathematics than their peers nationwide, but less than two-fifths have a solid grasp of reading and less than half have a solid grasp of math. . . . In math, 40 percent of Virginia eighth-graders achieved proficient scores in 2011, up from 36 percent in 2009, according to the report. Forty-six percent of fourth-graders performed at the proficient level, compared to 43 percent in 2009.

According to VA DOE spokesman Charles Pyle, in short, Virginia students did relatively well nationally, but there's much room for improvement, especially in reading:

A lack of significant improvement in Virginia's eighth-grade NAEP reading scores over the last couple testing cycles as well as on state achievement tests has informed state efforts to pursue more rigorous standards in the subject, Department of Education spokesman Charles Pyle said. The new reading standards will take effect in 2012-13.

Oh dear. "More rigorous standards in reading"? Aren't they already "rigorous" enough? Let me enter the fray and tell you why I think reading scores are unimpressive in Virginia and flat nationally: Because in the (albeit, well-intentioned) mania to make American kids better readers, we're spending overwhelming amounts of time teaching reading as a subject, as a skill, at the expense of teaching knowledge of other subjects such as science, social studies, foreign language, art, music, PE, theater, etc.

Yes, my children spend more time on math than on other subjects, but that doesn't bother me nearly as much. Now, I don't know much about teaching math but from what I can tell from the elementary math curriculum used in the Virginia county where my kids attend school and from what I can tell from the work they bring home, yes, they are learning different strategies to solve math problems, but they are also learning math facts.

There is such a thing as math strategies. There is such a thing as mastering the mechanics of reading, which is essentially decoding and there is such a thing as reading strategies, but they aren't nearly as useful or applicable as math strategies and needn't be taught nearly to the extent that they are. There is such a thing as math facts. But there is no such thing as reading facts; there's just facts, background knowledge, and vocabulary, the more of which one knows, the better of a reader that one will be.

On a series of posts on Eduwonk between Eric Hanushek and Diane Ravitch about Hanushek's tiresome silver bullet solution of firing the bottom 5-10% of teachers based on standardized test scores (yes, teachers who don't do their jobs or who do them poorly should be removed, but I have no confidence that Hanushek's handwaving gimmickry will achieve that), superb edu-thinker Diana Senechal commented that:

We talk so much about achievement but do not adequately address the question “achievement of what?” This explains, in part, why “literacy” scores are much more stubborn and difficult to raise than math scores. There is no such subject as literacy, and we are spinning our wheels trying to teach it. There is literature, grammar, rhetoric, composition. Teach those things, and you will see some gains. (Math curricula are far from perfect in this country–but at least, in comparison with literacy curricula, they have some sort of substance and sequence.)

Exactly. Beyond teaching decoding and some limited reading strategies, if we want our children to be stronger readers, we need to teach them content (which yes, includes language arts as just outlined by Diana).

While Jeff Bryant did well to point out that NAEP shouldn't be looked at as a report card per se and "Nation At Risk" co-author James Harvey highlighted some short comings of NAEP as an assessment, I still fear the influence of these NAEP results over instruction and curriculum decisions. I worry that with NAEP reading scores being "flat," that educators and reformers will take an even more draconian and ill-informed approach, and call for beefing up reading standards and spending even more time on teaching reading and even less on everything else. For example, in a recent essay in Education Week unrelated to the NAEP release of NAEP results, Eric Witherspoon, superintendent of District 202 in Evanston, Illinois, called for just that:

Reading is the gateway to all learning. Literacy must be addressed in every classroom, every day—reading strategies must be an integral part of history class and math class and of physical and technical education. At ETHS, teachers receive training to help them implement literacy-learning strategies in everything from history and math to physical education.

Certainly, all public school teachers in America should be prepared to work with and help struggling readers, but do we really need kids in PE, math, and history to learn reading strategies? What will that serve other than teaching our kids to know less about PE, math, and history (and every other subject) than they already do. Yes, reading is a tool to learn content--indeed, it's a "gateway to learning"--but learning content is the gateway to becoming a stronger reader and more educated in general.

Matthew Di Carlo's prediction was right on. Let's hope for the education of our children that mine isn't.

A Lesson on Failing

This summer at the SOS March & National Call to Action, I was pleased to see some young and enthusiastic, but independent-minded and healthily skeptical teachers. Among them was DCPS elementary school teacher, Olivia Chapman (on twitter: @sedcteacher). Olivia dual-majored in special and general education at The College of Saint Rose in her native upstate New York  and then worked for a year as a substitute teacher in Albany, New York, before accepting her current position. I was so impressed with Olivia (plus I'm always looking to feature the voices of teachers and education professionals who are on the ground) that I solicited a guest post from her. If she is symbolic of the young, smart, dedicated, and energetic teachers that neo-liberal reformers so often talk of attracting and keeping in the teaching profession, from Olivia's account below, they're not doing a very good job. Who, especially with all those qualities, lasts long in a stifling and absurd environment such as Olivia describes? For our nation's sake, I pray that Olivia and so many of the discouraged newer teachers I've talked to in recent years stick it out. We need you! As one of my children's teachers told me as we talked about the limitations of standardization and high-stakes testing were doing, "The pendulum is always swinging; I'm just waiting for it to swing in the other direction." In too many schools and systems, teaching rich, meaningful, and varied content and leading our children to embrace the beauty of the life of the mind has become an act of defiance when it should be an ethos. Here is Olivia's piece:

A Lesson on Failing

We hear a great deal these days from the media and educationreformers about our “broken” public school system and about “failing” publicschools. While I certainly haven’t been to all public schools and seen them formyself, I see and read about success in public schools often enough to knowthat not all public schools are“failing.” Unfortunately, though, Ihappen to work at a school that is failing and I used to be part of the reasonfor that failure.

Just to be clear, I'm not referring to a label of “failure”often placed on schools due to their failure to meet No Child Left Behind's lofty and unattainable AYP (Adequate YearlyProgress) requirements. My school is failing because of what NCLB’s mandateshave done to the students, teachers, and to the community. My school is failingbecause morality, honesty, compassion, and values have been replaced by anobsession with data, accountability, standardized testing, and evaluations.

Authentic, creative, and innovational learning experienceshave been replaced by practice tests, overwhelming amounts of interimassessments, multiple choice drill and practice sheets, and an inundation ofmandated programs and paper work that have little impact on real studentlearning.  I have seen genuinely good,veteran teachers lose touch with their morals out of fear. I have seen childrenbow their heads in shame upon the revelation that their test scores labeledthem below basic in reading or math. I have had parents refer solely to theirchildren’s test scores to describe their abilities, telling me that theirchildren are good at math, but bad at reading and vice versa. I have witnessedcheating and lying to save careers. I have witnessed the stealing of materialsand resources because budget cuts have allowed for very little funding for whatour students really need. This is the harsh reality and this is failing. We arefailing ourselves and we are failing our students. We are neglecting to trulyeducate our students because teachers aren’t allowed to be innovative andcreative. Instead, we are overwhelmed by the task of producing robotictest-takers rather than thoughtful, lifelong learners.

When I was hired at DC Public Schools I was told that if Icouldn’t get the students' test scores up, I was dispensable. Teachers who havestudents with high test scores are put on pedestals and those without arestigmatized, humiliated, and downright disrespected by the administration. Thiswas the culture that I was thrown into as a first year teacher. At first, I wasdetermined to succeed at attaining this highly esteemed respect from mycolleagues and my principal.

I spent my first year teaching relentlessly chasing thisprize. I drilled, I practiced, I taught test-taking strategies. I made thestudents want to stay in for recess to practice testing by rewarding them withdollar store surprises and animal crackers. I begged and pleaded for parents toget their kids to school early and stay after for more standardized testreview. I thought that if my students had awesome test scores, I would earn theveneration I had yearned for. More importantly, I thought that this would provethat I was a good teacher. In reality, I lost sight of who I was and why I hadbecome a teacher. Oh, and my students test scores turned out to be pretty low,despite my sixty-hour work weeks and endless nights spent grading bubblesheets. In addition, at the end of the school year I was rated "minimallyeffective" due to my students’ low test scores.

I spent the summer after my first year reflecting on why I hadbecome a teacher and thought about quitting and traveling the world. But I soonrealized that it wasn't teaching that was the problem, it was the environment Iwas teaching in (not to mention I didn’t have enough money saved to even travellocally)--the high-stress intensity of the testing atmosphere, the"walking on eggshells" feeling that you get when you know somethingbad is going to happen despite any precautions you may have taken. I decided toscrap the entire test prep regimen that I thought, and was told, was crucial tostudent success. I figured I had one more year to improve my rating before beingterminated, so why not teach the way that I thought would be most effective,most compelling, and most beneficial to my students? Why not teach my studentsthe way that my best teachers had taught me?

Last year, for my students' sake as well as for my own, Itook the focus off of testing. I told my students that standardized testing wassomething that we had to do in order to prove to the city and to the nationthat they have good teachers and that they are learning at school, and myhead-strong group of fourth graders was determined to prove themselves. Ireassured them regularly that I would not refer to them by a label determinedby their test scores and that they were so smart and had so much knowledge thatthey did not need to worry about taking the silly old test. I treated the testas if it were just another thing on our fourth grade “to do” list. Thisconstant reassurance gave them confidence to take on the test, but it also tookthe emphasis off of the end-all-be-all aspect of high-stakes standardizedtesting.

With this weight off of our shoulders, I moved my students on tomore authentic learning. Genuine, meaningful learning cannot prosper when theburden of bubble sheets, arbitrary teacher firings and terms like “below basic”are clouding our brains. For the most part, I replaced weekly multiple-choiceassessments with projects that met the standards as well as met the students'interests. We read materials that sparked intellectual curiosity, debates, andcritical thinking.  I stopped using the“preferred” textbooks and found ways to fund class sets of books and magazinesthat were engaging and appropriate for my demographic. In the end, their testscores were fine. No, I didn’t produce any miraculous increase in proficiencylevels, but these kids now know how to think, they gained content knowledge,they know a few things about the world around them, and they genuinely careabout learning more.  

Critics of my anti-teaching-to-the-test approach often ask,“Well, how do you know that the students actually learned without looking atdata from their test scores?” I look at tons of data! I listen for conversation skills, I review projects, I read reports, I observe debates and discussions,and I use rubrics to assess skits and videos. Sure, I throw in somemultiple-choice style tests when appropriate and yes, I look at that data too.More importantly, I know that these students learned because they left my classwith authentic means to express and apply their knowledge. These students stillstop by my room to tell me what they are learning and doing in school. Theyvalue what I taught them because they see the importance of each lesson intheir everyday lives. Furthermore, they look to deepen their understanding oftopics of interest. They still ask me for help selecting books that will interestthem and help them expand their knowledge. Some of my former students stillcheck our class facebook page for extra learning activities to do at home. Theyask me questions like, “Ms. Chapman, do you have any friends who aredoctors/lawyers/engineers/authors that I could write to about how they gottheir careers?” Their fifth grade teacher informed me that during theearthquake, my previous students climbed under their desks because they hadlearned what to do during natural disasters by becoming “meteorologists” andwriting live weather reports in class last year. 

I read somewhere that teachers whose students do not excelon high-stakes standardized tests are probably the best teachers.  I don’t necessarily agree with that. However,I do believe that teaching to the test makes children dislike school and makesteachers loathe teaching. I have realized in my first three years of teaching that theaspects of public education that are “failing” are our current educationpolicies, reforms, and those who are pushing them, those who thinkthat spending large sums of money on testing and teacher evaluations will makechildren smarter. Then administrators continue the “failing” by pushing thesepolicies onto teachers, and in turn, so do the teachers who reluctantly chooseto go along with them.

My school did not make AYP again this year. We now have anew principal who never ceases to express his endless devotion to getting an80% pass rate on this year’s tests. I'm sure that my defiance of his test-prepregime, of his mandated ten multiple-choice question bi-weekly formativeassessments, and of his failure to see the students he is supposed to educate asanything more than test scores will cause great controversy. I have been warnedthat I walk on thin ice because of the test scores that are tied heavily to myevaluation. In spite of this, what I fear most is not a poor rating based on asingle test. What I fear most is failing my students and their community againby believing that my students' success and my own is based on teaching to that singletest.