Schooltastic

Yesterday (as I write this), the governor and NYSUT (my union) agreed on terms for teacher evaluations.  Here’s a brief timeline:

July 2009 President Obama and Secretary of Ed. Duncan announce Race To The Top (RT3) program.  School districts compete for a share of $4.3 billion.  Criteria include more stringent teacher evaluations.

May 2010 State Ed. Department (SED) and NYSUT agree to a new teacher evaluation, and it becomes law. 

Aug 2010 New York wins $696 million in RT3 funds.

May 2011 Responding to schools that wanted to make state assessments an even greater percentage of teacher evaluations, Cuomo changes terms of the 2010 law.

Jun 2011 NYSUT successfully sues the governor.  Cuomo appeals.

Jan 2012 Cuomo announces that, if NYSUT doesn’t settle, he will unilaterally impose his own system.  He further threatens to withhold state aid from schools without a new evaluation system in place.

Feb 2012 NYSUT and Cuomo come to terms on a teacher evaluation system.

The plan that was agreed upon yesterday is nearly identical to the law passed in 2010.  So, what was that all about?  I have no idea.  Cuomo has been fighting the law for two years, but for what?  What core principle was at stake?

Also, would the governor really have been able to legally impose his own evaluation system?  Possibly.  He threatened to make it a part of the budget amendments that are his purview.  Doubtless, this would have resulted in yet another lawsuit. 

I’m not a big fan of the system outlined in the 2010 law, but, the fact is, there was an agreed upon plan.  Cuomo came onto the landscape and began tearing up sod, only to replace it pretty much as he found it. 

I find the whole thing to be emblematic of the current popular discontent with teachers and our unions.  NYSUT was included in the discussions when a new plan was needed to qualify for RT3 funds, and they agreed to a plan that was not completely favorable to teachers.  They gave a lot of ground, but the legislation was passed and NY won $696 million.

Cuomo then summarily dismissed the input from teachers.  He retroactively invalidated us as participants in legislation regulating our profession.  Even when a State Supreme Court judge determined that he was acting illegally, he still sought a backdoor channel to subvert the law NYSUT helped broker. 

And now, after all that, we’re back where we were in 2010.  I’d love for someone from Cuomo’s office to tell us why it was worth it.

Future posts will get more into the details of the new teacher evaluation plan.
 

How about this for a job offer? Sell our product while you’re at work! We don’t pay a salary, we don’t pay by commission; we don’t pay at all. If you do a good job, though, we’ll donate some of our inventory to your employer. You can make use of it while you’re at work.

This is the proposition offered to teachers from companies like Scholastic. This company is permitted to recruit teachers as unpaid sales reps in order to market directly to your kids at public schools. How many companies would like to have this advantage? Imagine having a sergeant promote your products to his platoon, or a pastor to her congregation. As a teacher, I wield influence over my students. Hopefully, I can use that influence to help them to be better writers, readers, and mathematicians. Not to hock products. 

Of course, we are talking about books. Books are good! Reading is good! Maybe the book orders help foster reading, and the books Scholastic will donate to my classroom could be useful. 

Except, it’s not just books. I’m not even sure it’s mostly books any more. Kids are also being sold posters, toys, DVDs, and video games at school. For many kids, seeing a video game juxtaposed with a book is like having a slice of chocolate cake on the same plate as their broccoli. 

As a parent, I make sure my son makes the right choice, even if he doesn’t like it. That’s my job. It’s a job I do at the mall, at a restaurant, and in the cereal aisle of the grocery store. I wish it wasn’t an issue at school.

Today, instead of looking at proposed policies of candidates, I’m looking at the major education reform policy of the sitting president in anticipation of it becoming a topic of debate following the Republican nomination.

Race to the Top (RT3) is a grant program, part of the 2009 stimulus, that allows the US Department of Ed to award federal funds to states implementing targeted education reforms. The objectives, laid out by the federal government, are fine, in and of themselves:

1) preparing students for college and work
2) high quality teachers and administrators
3) using data to improve teaching
4) turn around lowest-performing schools

Those are certainly things I’d like to see done.  However, how do you accomplish these things?

#1 is being addressed by a new set of state learning standards.  Revamping objectives is a fairly regular occurrence, regardless of federal initiatives.  This early on, I can’t comment on the efficacy of this particular iteration, but I find that the process of program review itself is usually positive.

#4 is being addressed by a secondary set of grants, awarded by the states, to schools identified as consistently low-performing. 

For #2 and #3, it’s testing.  Standards-based testing is, increasingly, the yardstick being used to measure quality of teachers, administrators, and schools.  No Child Left Behind (NCLB), the big education initiative of the previous administration, raised the stakes on state tests by threatening low-performing schools with decreased funding.  Now, RT3 raises those stakes even higher by offering a share of its $4.3 billion purse to schools that systematically link test scores to teacher and administrator evaluation.  A specific stipulation of RT3 is value-added modeling, which means that, as a group of students progresses through school, the efficacy of each of their successive teachers is judged by how much better they score on the state tests than the previous year. 

The goals of RT3 may be noble, but the means of attaining them don’t necessarily align with best educational practices.*  I’m definitely not sold on the “carrot and stick” approach to education reform.

*See previous post about standardized assessment.

Many kind people have mentioned to me that they read and enjoy Schooltastic, for which I am very grateful.  It’s fun to write!  If you’d like to comment, question, criticize, or otherwise converse about a post, there are two new ways to contact me:

Email: tedishammpn@gmail.com

Twitter: @Ted_Isham 

If you don’t want your message to become a part of the conversation on this blog, please let me know.

The Learning Loop:
1) State objective
2) Teach to achieve objective
3) Assess (did they meet the objective?)
4) Use assessment data to plan new objectives
5) Repeat

I take both of my kids shopping every week.  Like most siblings, they are either best friends or worst enemies.  It’s just as tough to focus on toothpaste coupons during a weepy blame-fest as it is during a friendly bout of screaming and giggling.  I hear myself saying things like, “Come on, guys!  Daddy’s trying to concentrate,” or just, “Hey!” delivered in my sternest tone (carefully modulated to avoid alerting other shoppers to my parenting difficulties). 

I’ve skipped ahead to step three. 

This is an assessment: Your behavior is not meeting objectives for riding in (or walking near) a grocery cart.  For objectives, I probably mentioned something like, “Let’s have a great shopping trip!” or, maybe, “I can’t wait to go shopping with my awesome kids!”  Those are terrible objectives.  What makes a shopping trip “great” or kids “awesome?”  I’m sure my kids and I would have drastically different criteria.  For step two, I guess I expect them to achieve the objective simply by hearing it.

So, my work-brain starts to break it down.  What, specifically, are my objectives? Chat, play, argue, or sing, but not too loud. How loud is too loud? I’ll let you know when I hear it. Ask me a maximum of two times to buy you something, unless I’ve clearly forgotten, in which case, why didn’t you tell me while we were there? Stay on or near the cart, unless you two are really aggravating each other, in which case, keep your distance. How much distance?  I’ll let you know when it’s too much.

Unable to fit shopping-trip behavior into my professional schema, I deliver a new objective and modify the process.

The Learning Loop at Wegmans:
1) State objective: "Help Daddy to be able to shop!"
2) ????
3) Assess: "Come on, guys!"
4) Students use assessment data to plan new behavior (same objective)
5) Repeat weekly

A great book might open with an uneventful 100 pages of exposition.  It might be a brief history of the town the novel is set in, the narrator’s tedious self-analysis, or a verbose description of a house.  Reading thoughtful books, especially at the outset, can seem less like leisure and more like work.

Well, it is work.  It can be an immersive and satisfying job, but accessing the real power of thought and emotion behind the text is definitely work.  Translating letters and words into sounds sentences is simply decoding.  To really read, students have to learn to seek meaning. 

“Why is that part funny?” seems like a simple question, but think of the many things a reader must do to be able to answer it.  Besides being able to keep track of salient plot points, the reader must judge character traits and gauge the tone of voice used in a passage.  These tasks and others must be performed in concert to detect hyperbole, or even irony, in order to recognize that a series of letters printed on paper is, in fact, funny.

It’s easy to see how this kind of analysis could suck the humor out of any passage, which means that, in order for it to actually be funny, all of these feats must be accomplished involuntarily.  Discerning any meaning contained in a book, besides just humor, demands a wide-ranging skill set.  More than that, if the meaning of a book is to achieve its intended impact, the reader must be so adept at this skill set that employing it becomes second nature. 

Please read the disclaimer in my last policy post before proceeding. 

A concept that appears in several platforms is decentralization.  This philosophy manifests as policy in varying forms, including decreasing regulations on charter schools, delegating policy decisions to state and local governments, and offering federal funding for homeschooling families.  The basic concept seems to be that the federal government doesn’t need to be in charge of everyone’s education, and that students would be better served by policy decisions made on a state, community, or even household level.  Having taught before and now during No Child Left Behind (NCLB) legislation, I can sympathize with the notion that sweeping regulatory measures are not best for all children in all communities.  Sometimes, federal or even state mandates are met with a sense of “lets make lemonade from these lemons,” or even, “grin and bear it.”  I don’t doubt that, in many cases, local administrators and teachers have a better idea of what would be best for students than federal legislators. 

Frequently following many candidates’ statements about decentralization is a call for increased accountability.  These two concepts, as policies, seem incompatible, even in the nebulous language of political candidates.  Accountability requires standards to which schools, students, and teachers can be held accountable.  And, in order to be held accountable, schools need to be measured against the standard.  To do this, we would need centralized regulation of education to define and administer the standards and to perform evaluations.  Accountability implies consequences as well.  What does it mean if a school performs well?  What are the ramifications of failure to meet standards?  What regulating body (bodies?) defines and administers these consequences?

NCLB currently provides answers to these questions (to varying degrees to satisfaction).  If candidates feel that the accountability measures in NCLB are insufficient, will they seek to expand this already massive federal regulation?

DISCLAIMER:

I don’t know whom I’m going to vote for in the 2012 presidential election.  I’m not going to write about politics, just policies.  I certainly don’t want to endorse or condemn any candidates here.  After reading the education plank in each candidate’s platform, from his or her own printed materials, I’m just going to explain how it all sounds to me as a teacher.  I’m organizing this by proposal, not by politician, since I’m more interested in policy than personalities. 

There’s a lot of ground to cover, so I’ll write one of these per week.  I realize that candidates will continue to drop out as the weeks go on, but their ideas are still worth commenting on, as they may represent legislative or popular trends.

Merit Pay

Many candidates in both large parties mention this one.  It’s always in the context of incentives, a strategy to lure bright young people to the profession or keep talented professionals working in struggling school districts.  Regarding the former, I don’t know anyone who got into teaching for the money.  As far as the latter goes, I do know many teachers who have switched districts to work in schools with nicer facilities, better community support, or other things that make our job more pleasant. 

If offering a cash bonus to great teachers helps keep them working in underachieving districts, I think it’s a great idea.  Most people can remember a certain teacher who really helped inspire and motivate them.  If we can increase the probability that a student in inner-city Detroit might have more teachers like that, then let’s do it. 

Of course, there is a punitive side of merit pay.  If you think that bad teachers should be paid less, how would you identify them?  Student performance on standardized assessments is becoming a bigger part of teacher evaluation.  However, while quality of teaching has an effect on test scores, so does student population, parent support, and other factors which are out of the control of teachers.  It seems unfair that I should get a bigger check than a colleague who happens to have more students with special needs than I do.

I don’t suppose quantifiably identifying great teachers would be any easier.  Great test scores don’t directly correspond with great teaching.  In fact, there’s a practice known as “teaching to the test” that is generally frowned on in pedagogical circles.  However, it would bother me a lot less if one of my colleagues got an undeserved bonus than it would if he or she got unfairly docked pay. 

Lurking behind merit pay policies is the notion that poor teaching is a big part of what’s wrong with American schools.  I have taught for 14 years between two separate schools, and I have never worked with a teacher who wasn’t seriously invested in the educational growth of his or her students, or who didn’t work hard to make every student a success.  Whatever factors are causing the US to compare unfavorably with student achievement in other countries, I seriously doubt it’s our teaching professionals. 

More policy next Friday!

When I was in third grade, accuracy wasn’t everything. It was the only thing. I’m sure that the manuals employed by my teachers included aspects devoted to a more comprehensive mathematical understanding, but on classwork, homework, and tests, the only thing that mattered was getting the right answer.

The new model prioritizes understanding. Even when students get the right answer, they are required to prove it’s right. Students need to be able to break a mathematical process down and explain it thoroughly using writing and diagrams. That’s a lot to ask of kids, but I think, ultimately, it will be worth it.

I enrolled in my first math class in college my junior year. It’s embarrassing, but I just couldn’t remember the steps. That’s because all I had ever learned was just that: steps.

Part of becoming a teacher meant learning how division actually works, and attaining that understanding was like learning it for the first time. Knowing what I was doing gave me leeway to devise my own strategy for calculating a solution. That division algorithm I leaned years ago, “Gozinta, multiply, subtract, drop down, repeat,” is really complete baloney and a huge waste of time. Unless that works better for you, in which case, enjoy.

Clearly, I’m a proponent of the “understanding first” movement in math instruction. However, lately I’ve been missing the virtues of the way I learned. Though it left me bereft of understanding, it equipped me to calculate answers efficiently, reliably, and precisely. Understanding is a beautiful thing, but it’s also demanding. A simple series of steps puts the right answer within reach of students who struggle with deeper meaning.

So, when your students comes home and complain that the way in which you’re trying to assist them with their math work doesn’t match the method taught in class (see title), please feel free to teach them the way you were taught. It just might relieve them of a little stress. A simple series of steps can be a comforting thing. Putting computation ahead of understanding won’t, in the long run, hurt them!

“Oh, you’ll be such great parents!  You’re both teachers!”

My wife and I heard this many times when we were expecting our first.  I told everyone I really didn’t think so, that parenting was its own thing, but I secretly hoped I would have an advantage.

In my classroom, on a good day, I’m a technician running a clinic.  I work with clearly defined objectives for academic progress and expectations for civil behavior.  I put carefully targeted work into getting students to achieve the standard.  When things don’t go right, I practice a kind of academic or social forensics, picking over the corpse of a lesson to determine the cause of death.

At home, forget it.  I’m not so much a technician as a rodeo clown, using tricks and gags to lure two toros into homework, chores, and tooth brushing.  When things don’t go well, I’m not an analyst.  I’m a marshmallow.

A student who approaches me with, “I can’t find my book!” will often hear, “I can’t find it either, sorry.”  It might sound cruel, but the expectation is that a third grader will problem-solve by performing his/her own search.  I’ll assist with strategy as far as that goes, but I won’t look for it myself.

At home, my daughter needs only to make a certain face, The Saddest Face Known to Mankind, and I’ll probably go look for her lost treasure.  I freely admit that I’m a pushover that way, and also that I’m a complete sucker for the expression of sheer joy she makes when I find the thing.

When I report to parents that their child is a model student in class, sometimes they respond with disbelief: “I wish I could get him to do that at home!”

I know how they feel.

I have tenure, which would make firing me quite an ordeal. If this means I have job security, I’ll take it. However, I’m not convinced that it makes me less accountable for the quality of my job performance.

I have an annual review, which is pretty typical for those working in the private sector, in which I’m accountable to administration. There is no small amount of pressure involved with these; when was the last time your boss sat for an hour with nothing else to do but watch you work and take notes?

I’m also accountable to the parents of my students at least twice a year during parent conferences.

From an accountability viewpoint, I don’t suppose it’s that different from a financial planner meeting with clients. Evidence is laid out and explained, and a course is charted or adjusted.

However, there is one aspect of the teaching profession that is especially fraught with accountability, which is crystalized in state test scores. Soon, my students’ scores will account for 20% of my professional evaluation.

At first blush, it makes sense. My job is to teach them the things they’ll be expected to know on the exam. However, I only have them for about four and a half hours of academic instruction, five days a week, 40 weeks a year. This pales in comparison with the amount of time they have with their parents. A lot of what will make a kid a good student comes from home.

My doctor helps me stay healthy. I count on him to give me good medical advice and treat my health issues with his specialized expertise. However, if I choose to subsist on a diet of cupcakes and bourbon whenever I’m not in his office, I can’t fault his medical practice for the consequences (unless it was his recommendation).

Continuing my math rant from the previous post, here are some more math terms that make no sense:

“Carry the one”

I can’t emphasize this enough: it’s not a one!  Using the sequential columnar algorithm that I was taught in third grade, let’s take a look at 19 + 19 = ____.  First, I would add the two nines, getting 18.  Then, I would put down the eight (what did eight ever do to deserve that?) and “carry the one.”  It’s not a one; it’s a ten!  All I’m doing is writing it in the ten’s place.  Since that’s all I’m doing, why does it have to go way the heck up on top?

“Gozinta”

If I have 20 cookies to pass out to five kids, a teacher from my childhood might ask me how many times five “gozinta” 20.  It doesn’t.  20 is not an empty vessel, it’s a quantity.  A better question would be, “How many fives would it take to build 20?”

"Borrow”

In the problem 22 – 14 = ____ , using the traditional algorithm, the first step would be “two minus four,” to which, the first response would be “You can’t do that.”  This is patently false; of course you can.  The solution to this contrived dilemma is to “borrow one” from the tens place.  It’s not “one,” it’s ten, and you’re not “borrowing” it.  What you’re doing is redistributing denominations.  You’re taking one of your ten-dollar bills and exchanging it for ten ones.

Already, the subtraction process has become so unnecessarily convoluted that it defies all meaning.  A student can only follow the steps as prescribed, devoid of understanding, and hopefully arrive at the correct answer.  By this same process, “carry the one” and “gozinta” rob math of its meaning.

Math isn’t the only part of our language in which we use anachronisms and euphemisms to cloud meaning; there are many times we don’t mean what we say or say what we mean.  I only want to make things as clear as possible for young children, to give them the best chance possible to develop a real understanding of math.

The word “twelve” makes no sense.  Sure, its etymology can be traced back to where it meant something like “two left over,” but, to a child learning math in America any time after 1200 AD, it’s just a nonsense word.  Kids will be happy to tell you that twelve is made “with a one and a two,” which is not true.  One and two make three.  Ten and two make twelve, and that’s what we ought to call it: “ten-and-two.”  Counting from nine would sound like, “nine, ten, ten-and-one, ten-and-two, ten-and-three…” etc.

That’s how it would go all the way up to the number following ten-and-nine, which ought to be “two tens.”  Yes, “twenty” is another nonsense word to modern ears.  If you have two hundreds, you call them “two hundred.”  Two thousands are “two thousand.”  For two tens, we substitute archaic vocabulary: “twenty.”

Of course, by a certain age, we understand that “twenty” means two groups of ten, and that “twelve” is two more than ten.  We can also learn to do math in French, but why would we add an extra step of translation to kids who are just learning how to think about numbers?

The language does make a difference.  A problem like “ninety minus forty” can intimidate younger students; the numbers seem large and unwieldy.  However, if Billy had nine apples and ate four of them, most kids five years and older could tell you he has five left.  If they can recognize it as simply, “Nine tens minus four tens,” then the word “tens” becomes just another thing you can have nine or four of, like apples.

It’s not just about making math easier to learn, though, that’s a good enough goal in and of itself.  It’s about understanding.  Using language that obfuscates meaning makes math into an arcane series of steps, rather than a language in which to converse.

I’ll cover more of the ways we use language to mangle mathematical understanding in my next post!

Testing is not evil, and neither are standards. Assessment of one kind or another is something I do constantly in my class. Teaching begins with an objective, followed by instruction designed to get students to meet that objective. A test is just a way to see if they got it or not, and that data is useful when planning the next lesson. Standards are, ostensibly, a common set of objectives for teachers statewide. We all teach with objectives, and we all assess student learning.

What is troubling about the tests, however, is how much depends on them. Schools can lose state aid if they score too low. School scores are also published, which could affect local home sales. Within the next two years, every teacher will receive a score out of 100, 20% of which is based on state test scores. This score isn’t linked to pay or disciplinary measures, at least not yet, but the practices like these have been in place in the South for years and are now migrating northward.

Imagine a doctor basing your care on only one test. It might be a particularly integral and informative test, but there is a lot more data he needs before arriving at a diagnosis, prognosis, and a plan for care.

Of course, we teachers have many more assessments than just the state tests to guide us in designing instruction. However, having so much riding on those state tests tends to focus the attention of teachers and administrators alike, risking the marginalization of all other data.

Overall quality of education and scores on standardized assessment are not mutually exclusive concepts. However, the more we make contingent on a single assessment, the more divergent those two become.

When my oldest came home from kindergarten, he would be drained and sullen. The rigor of attending a full day of school made it hard for him to be his fun-loving self late in the day, and that was tough for all of us. We spent some afternoons using his favorite games, toys, and books, trying to coax out the giggling little lunatic we knew.

Now, he is a third-grader, and he has much more stamina, of course. However, school still demands a lot of him. As a teacher, I understand. Our kids are required to fully concentrate on a variety of rapidly changing subjects for six hours, and they are expected to deliver a top effort in all of them.

Playing makes my son who he is again, lets him come back to life after a demanding day. Playing allows his mind to wander after having been regimented. After homework, dinner, shower, packing his backpack for tomorrow, and chores, I’m happiest if he can rejuvenate before bed by playing.

When is the last time your kids saw you play? When is the last time you and your kids shared a good belly laugh? Between work, maintaining a household, car trouble, bills, and the million other obligations that corral the hours of adult life, it’s tough to find time to build Legos or have a tea party with baby dolls. I try, though, because I believe that play is the most worthwhile thing my kids can do when they’re home. A good game of “Climb on Daddy” will do more to ensure a good day at school tomorrow than running through the spelling words again will.