Teachers as Classroom Policymakers: The Case of the Kindergarten

Watching a policy travel from the White House, a state capitol, or a big city school board to a kindergarten teacher in her classroom has been compared (see my post September 9, 2009) to metal links in a chain, the children’s game of Telephone, and pushing spaghetti. Classroom teachers at the end of the iron-forged links in a chain convey military images of privates saluting captains and duties getting snappily discharged. The telephone game suggests miscommunications that ends up in hilarious misinterpretations of what was intended by the original policy. Pushing strands of wet spaghetti suggests futility in getting a policy ever to be put into practice in classrooms. Which metaphor, then, best describes going from adopting a policy to putting it into practice?

The truth is that for each metaphor actual examples of policies do fit the image. Yet other instances of teachers implementing policies fail to fit. There are other metaphors that better match the wide variation among teachers when they put policies into practice–and variation is a stubborn fact of organizational life. One is the street-level bureaucrat.

Street-level bureaucrats are police officers who decide whether or not to give a traffic citation, social workers who determine what kind of help a client needs and where to find that help, emergency room nurses who decide which sick and injured need immediate attention and which ones can wait. Include also teachers who determine whether to stick with the lesson plan or diverge when an unexpected event occurs. All of these professionals work within large rule-driven organizations but interact with the public daily as they make on-the-spot decisions. Each of these professionals are obligated to follow organizational rules yet have discretion to make decisions.  In effect, they reconcile the dilemma of  obligation and autonomy by  interpreting, amending, or ignoring decisions handed down by superiors.

Consider kindergarten teachers. Most primary teachers have been trained to see young children holistically as growing human beings needing work, play, and nurturing as necessary ingredients to develop into educated and healthy youth. Teaching the whole child has been a guiding principle central to early childhood programs for nearly a century. Since the early-1980s, however, the standards-based curriculum, increased testing, and accountability policies have flowed downward pressing early childhood educators to make kindergartens into boot camps for 1st grade and preschool programs into learning the alphabet and counting numbers.

In the policy-to-practice metaphor of the linked chain, one would expect that most kindergarten teachers, feeling strong obligations to school superiors, would have altered their child-centered pedagogy and embraced the new policy by relying on direct instruction while completely abandoning learning centers, comfy reading corners, and free choice time.

For the metaphor of the telephone game, one would expect most kindergarten teachers to have received instructions on implementing standards-based and testing policies from top officials, district supervisors, and school principals. Those instructions and guidance on their journey to kindergarten teachers would have gotten increasingly distorted. These distortions would result in huge variation among kindergarten teachers in implementing these policies ranging from major shifts in pedagogy to minimal alterations in daily lessons to outright mistakes.

The metaphor of pushing wet spaghetti raises different expectations. Because of the futility of the task, adopted policies meander in and out of schools occasionally entering classrooms. Here, kindergarten teachers are fully autonomous and once they close their doors, they do as they please.

None of these metaphors from complete military-like attention to rules to complete freedom to implement a policy capture most kindergarten teachers’ practice at a time when they must cope with dilemma-filled tensions arising from reconciling their obligations to implement state standards-based policies and their beliefs in child-centered practices. And here is where Lisa Goldstein’s study of streetlevel policy enters the discussion.

Goldstein’s research on four kindergarten teachers in two high performing urban schools within a Texas district details their different actions in coping with state curriculum standards stressing academic preparation for first grade, annual tests that specifies what kindergarteners were to have learned, and their professional and personal beliefs about what five year-olds should be doing and learning.

What did she find out after observing and interviewing the teachers for two years?

“From Ann’s refusal to use the language artsworkbooks to Liz’s holiday celebrations
unit and from Jenny’s either/or literacy block to Frieda’s commitment to her
students’ self-esteem, all of these teachers’ curricular and instructional decisions
were actively shaped by personal understandings of the state standards and DAP
((Developmentally Appropriate Practices derived from the National Association of Early Childhood Education), informed by strategic knowledge and careful thought, and considered in relation to the needs of the particular children in the class and other contextual
factors. Every policy decision was unique and deliberate and reflected attention
to obligations, desire for autonomy, and the use of professional discretion.”

These kindergarten teachers blended developmental practices they had done for years while attending to what their district and state standards required five year-olds to learn by the end of the year. They translated their beliefs in the whole child and many experiences with primary children into hybrid practices that mixed “developmentally appropriate” activities with direct instruction. In short, these four teachers in two schools made policy by creating mixes–they were street-level bureaucrats that hugged the middle.

Instead of Focusing on What Students Don’t Know, What Do They Know?

Another piece of evidence that students have not learned (or have forgotten) their science, math, and social studies made a recent splash in the media. This year it is civics. Two decades ago it was history. Diane Ravitch and Chester Finn published in 1988 What Do Our 17 year-olds Know in History and Literature. Their answer: not much.

This focus on how little each generation of students (and adults) know about academic subjects has become a popular ritual–dating back to 1943–that symbolizes–no surprise here–how inadequate U.S. schools are in transmitting to the next generation knowledge, skills, and values held to be essential in a democracy.

Perhaps a better question to ask is not what do students forget or haven’t learned in school but what do students know. Stanford University’s Sam Wineburg and University of Maryland’s Chauncey Monte-Santo, asked precisely that question when surveying students a few years ago. Here is the article that appeared in 2008.

Let’s begin with a brief exercise. Who are the most famous Americans in history, excluding presidents and first ladies? ….

A colleague and I recently put this question to 2,000 11th and 12th graders from all 50 states, curious to see whether they would name (as a great many educators had predicted) the likes of Paris Hilton, Britney Spears, Tupac Shakur, 50 Cent, Barry Bonds, Kanye West or any number of other hip-hop artists, celebrities or sports idols. To our surprise, the young people’s answers showed that whatever they were reading in their history classrooms, it wasn’t People magazine. Their top ten names were all bona fide historical figures.

To our even greater surprise, their answers pretty much matched those we gathered from 2,000 adults age 45 and over. From this modest exercise, we deduced that much of what we take for conventional wisdom about today’s youth might be conventional, but it is not wisdom. Maybe we’ve spent so much time ferreting out what kids don’t know that we’ve forgotten to ask what they do know.

Chauncey Monte-Sano of the University of Maryland and I designed our survey as an open-ended exercise. Rather than giving the students a list of names, we gave them a form with ten blank lines separated by a line in the middle. Part A came with these instructions: “Starting from Columbus to the present day, jot down the names of the most famous Americans in history.” There was only one ground rule—no presidents or first ladies. Part B prompted for “famous women in American history” (again, no first ladies). Thus the questionnaire was weighted toward women, though many kids erased women’s names from the first section before adding them to the second. But when we tallied our historical top ten, we counted the total number of times a name appeared, regardless of which section.

Of course a few kids clowned around, but most took the survey seriously. About an equal number of kids and adults listed Mom; from adolescent boys we learned that Jenna Jameson is the biggest star of the X-rated movie industry. But neither Mom nor Jenna was anywhere near the top. Only three people appeared on 40 percent of all questionnaires. All three were African-American.

For today’s teens, the most famous American in history is…the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., appearing on 67 percent of all lists. Rosa Parks was close behind, at 60 percent, and third was Harriet Tubman, at 44 percent. Rounding out the top ten were Susan B. Anthony (34 percent), Benjamin Franklin (29 percent), Amelia Earhart (23 percent), Oprah Winfrey (22 percent), Marilyn Monroe (19 percent), Thomas Edison (18 percent) and Albert Einstein (16 percent). For the record, our sample matched within a few percentage points the demographics of the 2000 U.S. Census: about 70 percent of our respondents were white, 13 percent African-American, 9 percent Hispanic, 7 percent Asian-American, 1 percent Native American.

What about the gap between our supposedly unmoored youth and their historically rooted elders? There was not much of one. Eight of the top ten names were identical. (Instead of Monroe and Einstein, adults listed Betsy Ross and Henry Ford.) Among both kids and adults, neither region nor gender made much difference. Indeed, the only consistent difference was between races, and even there it was only between African-Americans and whites. Whites’ lists comprised four African-Americans and six whites; African-Americans listed nine African-American figures and one white. (The African-American students put down Susan B. Anthony, the adults Benjamin Franklin.)

Trying to take the national pulse by counting names is fraught with problems. To start, we know little about our respondents beyond a few characteristics (gender, race/ethnicity and region, plus year and place of birth for adults). When we tested our questionnaire on kids, we found that replacing “important” with “famous” made little difference, but we used “famous” with adults for the sake of consistency. Prompting for women’s names obviously inflated their total, though we are at a loss to say by how many.

But still: such qualifications cannot mist the clarity of consensus we found among Americans of different ages, regions and races. Eighty-two years after Carter G. Woodson founded Negro History Week, Martin Luther King Jr. has emerged as the most famous American in history. This may come as no surprise—after all, King is the only American whose birthday is celebrated by name as a national holiday. But who would have predicted that Rosa Parks would be the second most named figure? Or that Harriet Tubman would be third for students and ninth for adults? Or that 45 years after the Civil Rights Act was passed, the three most common names appearing on surveys in an all-white classroom in, say, Columbia Falls, Montana, would belong to African-Americans? For many of those students’ grandparents, this moment would have been unimaginable.

In the space of a few decades, African-Americans have moved from blurry figures on the margins of the national narrative to actors on its center stage. Surely multicultural education has played a role. When textbooks of the 1940s and ’50s employed the disingenuous clause “leaving aside the Negro and Indian population” to sketch the national portrait, few cried foul. Not today. Textbooks went from “scarcely mentioning” minorities and women, as a 1995 Smith College study concluded, to “containing a substantial multicultural (and feminist) component” by the mid-1980s. Scanning the shelves of a school library—or even the youth biography section at your local mega-chain bookstore—it’s hard to miss this change. Schools, of course, influence others besides students. Adults learn new history from their children’s homework.

Yet, to claim that the curriculum alone has caused these shifts would be simplistic. It wasn’t librarians, but members of Congress who voted for Rosa Parks’ body to lie in honor in the Capitol Rotunda after she died in 2005, the first woman in American history to be so honored. And it wasn’t teachers, but officials at the United States Postal Service who in 1978 made Harriet Tubman the first African-American woman to be featured on a U.S. postage stamp (and who honored her with a second stamp in 1995). Kids learn about Martin Luther King not only in school assemblies, but also when they buy a Slurpee at 7-Eleven and find free copies of the “I Have a Dream” speech by the cash register.

Harriet Tubman’s prominence on the list was something we wouldn’t have predicted, particularly among adults. By any measure, Tubman was an extraordinary person, ferrying at least 70 slaves out of Maryland and indirectly helping up to 50 more. Still, the Underground Railroad moved 70,000 to 100,000 people out of slavery, and in terms of sheer impact, lesser-known individuals played larger roles—the freeman David Ruggles and his Vigilance Committee of New York, for example, aided a thousand fugitives during the 1830s. The alleged fact that a $40,000 bounty (the equivalent of $2 million today) was offered for her capture is sheer myth, but it has been printed over and over again in state-approved books and school biographies….

It’s much easier to document the accomplishments of the only living person to appear in the top ten list. Oprah Winfrey is not just one of the richest self-made women in America. She is also a magazine publisher, life coach, philanthropist, kingmaker (think Dr. Phil), advocate for survivors of sexual abuse, school benefactor, even spiritual counselor. In a 2005 Beliefnet poll, more than a third of the respondents said she had “a more profound impact” on their spirituality than their pastor.

Some people might point to the inclusion of a TV talk-show host on our list as an indication of decline and imminent fall. I’d say that gauging Winfrey’s influence by calling her a TV host makes as much sense as sizing up Ben Franklin’s by calling him a printer. Consider the parallels: both rose from modest means to become the most identifiable Americans of their time; both became famous for serving up hearty doses of folk wisdom and common sense; both were avid readers and powerful proponents of literacy and both earned countless friends and admirers with their personal charisma.

Recently, the chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, Bruce Cole, worried that today’s students don’t learn the kind of history that will give them a common bond. To remedy this, he commissioned laminated posters of 40 famous works of art to hang in every American classroom, including Grant Wood’s 1931 painting “The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere.” “Call them myths if you want,” Cole said, “but unless we have them, we don’t have anything.”

He can relax. Our kids seem to be doing just fine without an emergency transfusion of laminated artwork. Myths inhabit the national consciousness the way gas molecules fill a vacuum. In a country as diverse as ours, we instinctively search for symbols—in children’s biographies, coloring contests, Disney movies—that allow us to rally around common themes and common stories, whether true, embellished or made out of whole cloth.

Perhaps our most famous national hand-wringer was Arthur Schlesinger Jr., whose 1988 Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society predicted our national downfall. “Left unchecked,” he wrote, the “new ethnic gospel” is a recipe for “fragmentation, resegregation and tribalization of American life.”

If, like Schlesinger (who died last year), Monte-Sano and I had focused on statements by the most extreme multiculturalists, we may have come to a similar conclusion. But that’s not what we did. Instead, we gave ordinary kids in ordinary classrooms a simple survey and compared their responses with those from the ordinary adults we found eating lunch in a Seattle pedestrian mall, shopping for crafts at a street fair in Philadelphia or waiting for a bus in Oklahoma City. What we discovered was that Americans of different ages, regions, genders and races congregated with remarkable consistency around the same small set of names. To us, this sounds more like unity than fragmentation.

The common figures who draw together Americans today look somewhat different from those of former eras. While there are still a few inventors, entrepreneurs and entertainers, the others who capture our imagination are those who acted to expand rights, alleviate misery, rectify injustice and promote freedom. That Americans young and old, in locations as distant as Columbia Falls, Montana, and Tallahassee, Florida, listed the same figures seems deeply symbolic of the story we tell ourselves about who we think we are—and perhaps who we, as Americans, aspire to become.

The Train Has Left the Station: More on Teacher Pay-4-Performance

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Knowledge, someone said, is knowing a tomato is a fruit. Wisdom is not making a fruit salad out of it.

And that difference between knowledge and wisdom is how I feel about those state- and district-approved schemes that lean heavily upon “value-added” measures for a substantial portion of the judgment that a teacher is highly effective, marginally effective, or ineffective. Sure, I know that eager policymakers push value-added measures, flawed as they are, to evaluate and pay teachers; but it is unwise, even foolish, to make it the central measurement.  Tomatoes in a fruit salad? Better in a pasta sauce.

I say that even though that policy train filled with tomatoes has left the station. But down the track, the train might slow to a crawl as the engineers decide what to do with all that fruit, continue on the journey, or even return to the station. I offer three pieces of data that feel like a few tomatoes blown off the train.

Listen to a blogger for “Flypaper” who is a fellow at the Hoover Institution and a top official of the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation. Rather than devising new tests students take that will measure teacher effectiveness–the route that New York City is taking–he asks: why not trust principals to judge teachers? “If we can’t trust school leaders,” Mike Petrilli says, “to identify their best and worst teachers then the whole project of school reform is sunk. Not all the additional tests or teacher evaluations in the world can change that.”

The issue, of course, is not whether principals will evaluate teachers under any new evaluation process because their observations and their judgment do matter. The issue is how much weight among other factors should be given to principals’ informed opinions. As a gadfly, Petrilli advocates 100 percent, particularly  if principals have the authority “to link their evaluation decisions to … firing bad teachers, bumping salaries of their superstars–they will have reason to take the evaluation process more seriously.” Many of the comments to the post came from teachers who expressed outrage at principals having full sway over teachers’ future pay and status because of their biases, subjectivity, and–at the high school level–insufficient subject matter expertise. So “trust the principal” goes a mile too far but does underscore the importance of administrator observations. Just how much weight should be given to principals’ judgments?

That is guesswork since factors in the equation for evaluating and paying teachers get added and subtracted weekly. Public Agenda just published a poll of young teachers (“Generation Y”) that surprised me. I had expected that young teachers who resent being given pink slips on the basis of seniority–last in, first out–would welcome the use of “value added measures” to determine effectiveness.  According to this poll, I was wrong. Only 10 percent of the teachers said students’ test scores were “very effective” in judging their performance.

Then, I saw that a New York City organization of young teachers called “Educators for Excellence,” established in 2010 to lobby against seniority-based layoffs, had published its “ideal” evaluation system. Again, I had expected the plan to be heavily dependent upon student test scores because the state in its desperate search for federal dollars through Race to the Top funds had already stated that 20 percent of an evaluation would be based on test scores (subsequently changed by the Board of Regents to 40 percent). I was wrong again. Of the six factors in the proposed system, “value added measures” would be 25 percent of the score. But here is what surprised me. Administrator observations would be 30 percent–exceeding test scores and the highest percentage among factors in the “ideal” plan.

Finally, there is the evidence that teachers and their unions can work together with school administrators to hammer out agreements to evaluate teachers fairly even reaching decisions to terminate their peers. So many examples ranging from Toledo (OH) to Denver (CO) to Montgomery County (MD) demonstrate the simple fact that where trust has developed between teachers and district managers, fairness and decisiveness can govern evaluation and salary decisions.

That policy train that left the station carried tomatoes; the engineers driving that train need to distinguish between knowledge and wisdom; they must decide whether  to put them into fruit salads or make a rich pasta sauce. Perhaps, they will make the right decision.

Related articles

• Developing Better Teacher Evaluation Systems (usnews.com)

Data-Driven Instructional Practice in Action (Part 2)

Studying the daily practices of those teachers whose students register high standardized test scores in reading and math has begun to alter preparing, selecting, and evaluating teachers. Journalists (here and here) and researchers ( Allington) have reported (and shown on videos) what such teachers do to manage their classrooms as they teach content and skills from kindergarten through geometry and senior English. Data-driven instructional practice in action.

A short hop-ski-and-jump away are new policies to evaluate teachers on the basis of student test scores (often called “value-added measures”) and use of these data-driven practices in their classrooms. That is happening in Washington, D.C., Cincinnati, Houston, and other cities.

The road from data-driven instructional practice to evaluation and (don’t forget pay-4-performance bonuses), however, has potholes aplenty. Judging teacher performance on the basis of using data-driven practices and student test scores is highly contested. Dueling studies challenge the view that both approaches are scientific much like the controversy over global climate change or creationism. It ain’t pretty when researchers using gold-standard designs and methodologies hurl spitballs at one another’s studies. Ugliness aside, for now, bipartisan political support and dollars (both federal and philanthropic) support data-driven instructional practice and judging teacher effectiveness on the basis of student test scores.

When the current political climate favors top-down policies that have a weak scientific basis, what can teachers do?

Depend on their unions? Hardly. No collective bargaining contracts in southern states. Anti-union hostility at record high levels with abolition of collective bargaining for teachers in Wisconsin. Moreover, the AFT and NEA has affiliates that both support value-added measures (Denver, Cincinnati) and oppose it (Washington,D.C., New York City).

Depend on the formal data that comes from district and state tests? Not when recent reports point out that data-driven macro-reforms using penalties have yet to lift low-performing schools and districts to higher levels of achievement.  Not when some teachers see the test as measuring the wrong things. In a previous post (May 12, 2011), I pointed out that such information can be useful in constructing lessons if it is timely, easily accessible in understandable formats, and help is available to figure out how to use the numbers to improve lessons. Of equal importance–if not more–are the data teachers collect from observing students daily engaged in classroom activities, teacher-made tests, and other informal ways of assessing individuals.

The dilemma, then, that teachers face is, on the one hand, valuing retail data that they receive daily from observing and interacting with students in lessons and, on the other hand, finding useful for their schools and classrooms the wholesale data that they can access from data warehouses on state and district tests and other formal assessments, some of which they may distrust. Teachers feel the pinch between valuing both informal and formal data points because they have only so much time, attention, and expertise in figuring out beforehand what all the information means for the next lesson or unit. And when the lesson begins, teachers have to manage seamlessly hundreds of on-the-spot content (do I introduce concept now or later?), context (divide class into small groups and have them use their laptops toward end of lesson?) and individual student decisions (ask Tiffany the hard question?) as the minutes tick by.

The tensions that arise within individual teachers and collectively among teachers on using data to construct and teach lessons echo conflicts that practitioners have faced and reconciled through compromises for decades: how much weight do I give to what I know from my experience teaching and watching students and how much weight do I give to the test results and other formal data (e.g., research studies, demographics)? Such tensions and the questions that arise from conflict, of course, uncover again and again the conundrum that practitioners in helping professions struggle with–how much of the practice of teaching is art, how much is science? When I am uncertain about what I should do in a specific situation, what do I lean on most? What I have experienced? What the data say? Some combination of both?

For physicians who have a far richer data base of research studies and clinical practice guidelines to diagnose and treat a variety of illnesses with just a few clicks of keyboard keys than teachers have at their disposal, similar questions of privileging practical experience over research studies when faced with a specific patient arise. An earlier post (“Do Doctors Resist Reform?” May 6, 2011) discussed how data-driven evidence-based medical practice, while rhetorically the gold standard is far from pervasive among physicians after nearly a quarter-century, and this in a profession that prides itself on learning lessons from the science of double-blind, clinical tests (see post of January 27, 2011: “Medical and Educational Research: What To Believe?”) Again, the mix of art and science in teaching and medicine, of learning from daily practice and data-rich sources remains undetermined, tension-filled, and, yes, mysterious even in 2011.

Data-Driven Instruction and the Practice of Teaching

I like numbers. Numbers are facts: blood pressure reading is 145/90. Numbers are objective, free of emotion. The bike odometer tells me that I traveled 17 miles. Objective and factual as numbers may be,  still we inject meaning into them. The blood pressure reading, for example, crosses the threshold of high blood pressure and needs attention.  And that 17-mile bike ride meant a  chocolate-dipped vanilla cone at a Dairy Queen.

Which brings me to a school reform effort centered on numbers. Much has already been written on the U.S. obsession with standardized test scores. Ditto for the recent passion for value-added measures.  I turn now to policymakers who gather, digest, and use a vast array of numbers to reshape teaching practices.

Yes, I am talking about data-driven instruction–a way of making teaching less subjective, more objective, less experience-based, more scientific. Ultimately, a reform that will make teaching systematic and effective. Standardized test scores, dropout figures, percentages of non-native speakers proficient in English–are collected, disaggregated by  ethnicity and school grade, and analyzed. Then with access to data warehouses, staff can obtain electronic packets of student performance data that can be used to make instructional decisions to increase academic performance. Data-driven instruction, advocates say, is scientific and consistent with how successful businesses have used data for decades in making decisions that increased their productivity.

An earlier incarnation appeared four decades ago.  Responding to criticism of failing U.S. schools, policymakers established “competency tests” that students had to pass to graduate high school. These tests measured what students learned from the curriculum. Policymakers believed that when results were fed back to principals and teachers, they would realign lessons. Hence, ”measurement-driven” instruction..

Of course, teachers had always assessed learning informally before state- and district-designed tests. Teachers accumulated information (oops! data) from pop quizzes, class discussions, observing students in pairs and small groups, and individual conferences. Based on these data, teachers revised lessons. Teachers leaned heavily on their experience with students and the incremental learning they had accumulated from teaching 180 days, year after year.

Both subjective and objective, such micro- decisions were both practice- and data-driven. Teachers’ informal assessments of students gathered information directly and  would lead to altered lessons. Analysis of annual test results that showed patterns in student errors  helped teachers figure out better sequencing of content and different ways to teach particular topics.

In the 1990s and, especially after No Child Left Behind became law, the electronic gathering of data, disaggregating information by groups and individuals, and then applying lessons learned from the analysis to teaching became a top priority. Why? Because stigma and high-stakes consequences (e.g., state-inflicted penalties) occurred from public reporting of low test scores and inadequate school performance that could lead to a school’s closure.

Now, principals and teachers are awash in data.

How do teachers use the massive data available to them on student performance?  Studies of  teacher and administrator usage reveal wide variation and different strategies. In one study of 36 instances of data use in two districts, researchers found 15 where teachers used annual tests, for example, in basic ways to target weaknesses in professional development or to schedule double periods of language arts for English language learners. There were fewer instances of collective, sustained, and deeper inquiry by groups of teachers and administrators using multiple data sources (e.g., test scores, district surveys, and interviews) to, for example,  reallocate funds for reading specialists or start an overhaul of district high schools. Researchers pointed out how timeliness of data, its perceived worth by teachers, and district support limited or expanded the quality of analysis. These researchers admitted, however, that they could not connect student achievement to the 36 instances of basic to complex data-driven decisions  in these two districts.

Yet policymakers assume that micro- or macro-decisions driven by data will improve student achievement just like those productivity increases and profits major corporations accrue from using data to make decisions. Wait, it gets worse.

In 2009, the federal government published a report ( IES Expert Panel) that examined 490 studies where data was used by school staffs to make instructional decisions. Of these studies, the expert panel found 64 that used experimental or quasi-experimental designs and only six–yes, six–met the Institute of Education Sciences standard for making causal claims about data-driven decisions improving student achievement. When reviewing these six studies, however, the panel found “low evidence” (rather than “moderate” or “strong” evidence) to support data-driven instruction. In short, the assumption that data-driven instructional decisions improve student test scores is, well, still an assumption not a fact.

Numbers may be facts. Numbers may be objective. Numbers may smell scientific But we give meaning to these numbers. Data-driven instruction may be a worthwhile reform but as an evidence-based educational practice linked to student achievement, rhetoric notwithstanding, it is not there yet.

The Promise of Implementing Project-Based Learning (Steven Davis)

Steven Davis is in his tenth year teaching English to high school sophomores and seniors in a large northern California urban school district

I have reached a turning point where I can implement the day-to-day standards-based
curriculum for most of my students, preparing them for high-stakes testing, while providing highly individualized and sometimes project-based learning for some students in each of my classes. The catch is that this level of individualization does not scale easily, especially for sophomore English classes, because much responsibility for learning is on the student and some students may be uninterested in the projects you offer them. It’s one thing to differentiate instruction by scaffolding or accelerating the curriculum, it’s quite another thing to truly individualize the learning process with topics and activities that each student will find relevant.

In the past, I have had the latitude to plan for students to do their own learning but some students were confounded as to what to learn when left to their own devices. It seemed that they wanted me to do the learning for them. I am not blaming the students for being apathetic; I am condemning the system of schooling that has made them complacent consumers of education rather than active participants in the pursuit of knowledge.

Several of my sophomore English language learners have started coming in before
school, and at lunch. I provide them with a safe environment to eat and play chess,
checkers, and cards. I decided to direct more energy towards this group of students (it
was a goal of mine) and it has paid dividends. On occasion, I am able to
rally one or two of these students to complete projects that they never even dreamed of.
Two of my students from the breakfast/lunch club wired up a mechanical turtle kit I
bought for them. The turtle uses a battery powered electrical motor to propel itself across
the floor.

The students had to snap together parts, mesh gears, and do basic wiring.
It took them a few weeks because they constructed the turtle before school and during lunch. Then I had them write about it, do revisions, and then write about their writing. I managed to work the writing components into the class period. I believe that they learned more from the turtle project than from many months of class.

None of that experience was traditionally “planned” or linked to standards or assessed
with a rubric. However, many reading and writing standards were met in their work by frequent and student-initiated assessments. Project-based learning worked for those two students, but two others balked at the same opportunity. How does something so hit or miss make its way systematically into the regular period that rigidly adheres to a pacing calendar?

Now consider a field trip. I took 24 of my sophomore English students to the Martin Luther King Library in downtown San Jose. Again, there was no backwards mapping from assessments to standards, yet it was one of the most productive lessons of the year. The students were not left to their own devices. I chose the topic of study: racial profiling. And the day’s activities were structured around doing high-level academic research using MLA style for annotation.

Each student had to get a public library card to earn the privilege of attending. Students learned how to use the library’s electronic databases to access scholarly journal articles. Perhaps most importantly, the trip increased our levels of trust in each other. Sometimes students need to engage in activities that boost their self-efficacy, and such experiences are in short supply in today’s data-driven education climate.

I recently helped four students learn how to solder electronic components at lunch.
They’re making a “wheel of fate” for choosing students to speak in class. When you press the button, the lights go on and off in rapid succession until the capacitors lose their charges and the “spinning” ceases. The project has been less about teaching than it has been about
providing students with mentoring, tools, and the setting in which they can learn for
themselves. A lot of planning went into this, but none of it had anything to do with
standards. I bought a cordless soldering iron and tried building the wheel of fate myself.
It took me three tries, but I finally made one that works. Building the wheel of fate
allowed me to simplify the process for my students and to really know what I was doing
and talking about. Are they going to solder electrical components for a living? Probably not, but that wasn’t the point. It was learning for learning’s sake and you never know where that will lead, maybe to more learning.

The best California Exit Exam lesson that I did this year was sitting with eight students
analyzing two M.C. Escher drawings. No multiple guesses. No process of elimination.
We saw details and discussed our thoughts. Will it pay dividends in terms of exit
exam scores, i.e., was it “successful” teaching? Who knows, but it seemed like a “good”
lesson to me, and the students agreed.

How did I come up with the lesson? I used a publicly released test item about the experience of studying something in detail. I quickly abandoned the idea of having students work through the writing process because I thought they probably didn’t have a true, deep experience to pull from. So I decided to give them such an experience. You have to take risks with projects and you have to allow students to make their own mistakes.

All of these great learning experiences have meant a lot to my students, and me but they’re not given much value in today’s data driven climate. They are not easily quantifiable and can’t be reduced to neatly measured metrics. However, I guarantee that there are two young men out there that will remember building a mechanical turtle, and soldering their first circuit; a whole class will remember going downtown to the library and several other students will remember being introduced to M.C. Escher. Who knows where project-based learning experiences will lead?

Respect for Teaching: One Person’s Tale

Amid current disrespect for teaching I recall an incident that occurred to me 40 years ago when I worked in the Washington, D.C. schools. Sure, four decades ago is ancient history so readers will have to judge whether the attitudes displayed in the incident are contemporary or merely a curiosity. I wrote the following piece for a Washington paper in 1971.

*************************************************************************************

“I have taught off and on for nearly fifteen years. When not teaching, I have been an administrator…. I directed an experimental teaching project called the Cardozo Project in Urban Teaching 1963-1967. [Afterwards] I taught half-time while writing a book. The following year, in the hope of working with others who shared my interest in [reform], I returned to administration as the Director of Staff Development in the D.C. schools. That lasted two years since the budget and program [were] gutted … by the D.C. Council….  At that point [1970] I decided to return to the classroom rather than occupy a desk [downtown].

It was an uncommon decision I discovered. To understand why, you have to appreciate the nagging guilt that haunts administrators about leaving the classroom. Talk to most central office administrators … and you will inevitably hear how important it is ‘to stay in touch with kids. That’s where the action is. How I miss it.’  When I would ask why not return to the classroom, I would hear: ‘I would like to, but, you know, the money, and well, I like to make decisions, and well, I needed a change.’

Shortly after I was appointed director of staff development, I suggested at an [administrative] meeting that [their] perceptions … and sense of urgency might be considerably sharpened if [they] would teach one or two weeks and then return to [their] desks. The idea was beaten down. I began to see that administration was as much an escape from the … classroom as it was a search for status, authority, and dollars….

[Yet]  administrators deeply believe that the classroom is the backbone of education. Thus, when an administrator decides to teach, one would expect some encouragement from colleagues, perhaps a bit of support, and an easy transition. How naive I was. Disbelief, punishment, and shame dogged each step of my return to teaching….

When my colleagues found out [that I would be returning to the classroom], a wall of silence appeared. Except for some close associates, the response–when people chose to talk to me–was disbelief. They seemed to suggest by smile, smirk, or wink that I must be waiting for a good offer….For the most part, I was ignored.

In hallways when passing someone, eyes turned away…. Within two months, a series of actions, unmalicious in intent, initiated and executed in a most efficient bureaucratic manner occurred that created within me a sense of shame and failure.

The first shock came [over] salary. To teach meant taking a one-third wage cut… The Board of Examiners* informed me that my four years of administrative experience meant nothing in dollars and cents. Of my ten years of teaching, only seven met the standards set by D.C….

Next … I received a notice that said I was “demoted without prejudice.” The phrase is semantically correct. I am now on a lower rung of the school ladder and being there was my choice. [But} demoted sounded like grade school, like being pushed back to a lower group because you are dumb and misbehaving. The phrase is from the language of failure.

Then the Board of Examiners informed me a week before [I returned to the classroom] that I could not receive a regular … contract because I had never taken a college course in teaching at the secondary school level. With almost 15 years of classroom experience in three different cities, with five years experience in preparing teachers to work in [D.C.] schools, with a book and numerous articles on teacher education–I am told that unless I take a course on Teaching in the Secondary School within two years I will not be able to teach in D.C. After a pay cut, a demotion, and then a threat, I felt like I had committed a crime. What had I done wrong?

The unintentional but very destructive way a school system punishes administrators and teachers from moving freely back and forth between classroom and central office reveals [that] the stated value is: teaching is cherished; the real value is that teaching is [tough work] and unimportant; anyone with sense will get the hell out of it and the quicker, the better….”

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Pundits, know-nothings, and politicians on the make may praise and bash teachers in the same paragraph yet often overlooked is the disrespect for teaching that too often hides in organizational rules.

___________________________________

*The Board of Examiners no longer exists. Those functions have been assumed by the Office of Educator Licensure in the Office of the State Superintendent, District of Columbia

Parents as Tigers and Wimps: Cycles in Child Rearing and Schooling

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Amy Chua may be laughing all the way to the bank at the fuss she kicked up about her tough-love parenting of daughters–no sleepovers–in “Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother.”  Time magazine reports that her Wall Street Journal op-ed garnered over a million readers, 5000 comments, and an animation made in Taiwan.

For educated, financially comfortable non-Tiger Moms, however, the thought of giving up “Baby Mozarts,” chants of “well done” to build self- esteem, and, yes, even sleepovers–is too much.  In response to Tiger Moms, Ayelet Waldman says, developing empathy in children, nurturing them, and giving them room to decide things for themselves, while still achieving high grades and gathering awards, are traits that she and other non-Tiger Moms want to develop.

Competing ways of rearing children, of course is nothing new. Since the 17th century, ministers, mothers, and, later, physicians, and psychologists have written manuals to guide parents in raising children. Historians have analyzed these advice manuals. What they have found are basically two child rearing models that are similar to Tiger Moms and Guilty, Nurturing Moms.

I label them Strict Parent vs. Nurturing Parent. Of course, these models–see George Lakoff’s version–span a continuum and are not mutually exclusive. Many parents use hybrids of the two in their families.

Strict parent model teaches children right from wrong by setting clear rules for their behavior and enforcing them through punishments, typically mild to moderate but sufficiently painful to get attention. When rules are followed and children cooperate, parents show love and appreciation. Children are not coddled since a spoiled child seldom learns  proper behavior. Children become responsible, self-disciplined, and self-reliant by following the rules and listening to parents.

Nurturing parent model teaches children right from wrong through respect, empathy, and a positive relationship with parents. Children obey because they love their parents, not out of fear of punishment. Parents explain their decisions to children and encourage questioning and contributing ideas to family decisions. Children become responsible, self-disciplined, and self-reliant through being nurtured and caring for others.

No surprise that these competing models of child rearing have entered schools. Parents want their schools to be extensions of what is taught at home. Nor is it a surprise that the ideological and practical conflicts in schools today are anchored in these rival approaches to child-rearing.

In the early 19th century, for example, taxpayers, parents, and public officials saw public schools as proper places for the tenets of Protestant Christianity, steeped in Biblical views of parental authority, where teachers would teach that disobedience was a sin. Thus, raising children to respect authority, be self-disciplined, and know right from wrong–the Strict Parent model– was expected in one-room schoolhouses and, later, age-graded elementary schools. This dominant Strict Parent model of raising and schooling children was viewed as natural and, best for children and society before and after the Civil War.

In the late 19th century, another view  (history of progressivism schools PDF)  emerged challenging the religious-based popular model of child-rearing. The onslaught of industrialization, rapid urban growth, an emerging middle-class, and massive immigration spurred reformers to advocate a more “progressive” view of how best to raise and school children. Confined initially to manuals for middle-class parents, readers were urged to cultivate the innate goodness of children rather than dwell on their potential sinfulness. Parental love and example, not punishment, would produce respect for authority, self-discipline, and moral rigor in children.

For post-Civil War urban reformers who saw hard-working immigrant parents living in  slums, traditional schools were inadequate. They got schools to expand their usual duties and take on nurturing roles that families had once discharged. Schools offered medical care, meals, lessons to build moral character including respect for authority and job preparation. Teachers were expected to develop children’s intellectual, emotional, and social capacities to produce mature adults who acted responsibly. This rival ideology became the progressive model of schooling.

By World War I, then, these competing progressive and traditional ideologies constituted different faiths in the best way of raising and schooling children. These beliefs had become embedded in educators’ language and school programs thus creating a platform for subsequent struggles over what “good” schools were and should be. The “culture wars” since the 1960s over teaching reading, math, science, and other content in schools are variations of this century-long see-saw struggle of ideas over what ways are best to raise and school children.

Today’s media hullabaloo over Amy Chua’s Tiger Mom and angry rebuttals from many parents (and grandparents) are at the root of the traditional vs. progressive cyclical conflicts that have ebbed and flowed over what reforms work best in U.S. schools.

Related Articles

• What I Love about the Tiger Mom (psychologytoday.com)
• Why Threats Don’t Work: Parenting Effectively (psychologytoday.com)
• Daughter comes to ‘Tiger Mother’s’ defense | The Daily Caller … (dailycaller.com)
• Tiger Mother’s book makes case for ultra-strict Chinese parenting (guardian.co.uk)

“The Flight of a Butterfly” or “The Flight of a Bullet”: The Impossible Dream of Transforming Teaching into a Science

According to many policymakers and researchers, teaching should be more like the “flight of a bullet” rather than the “flight of a butterfly.”*  Using the latest social science findings, they are determined to re-engineer teaching to make it more efficient, less wasteful, and far more effective than ever before.  Behind the current passion among policymakers and politicians for using test scores to evaluate teacher performance (and pay higher salaries) is the current “science” of value-added measures (VAM) that leans heavily upon the work of William Sanders. But these smart officials have ignored the long march that researchers have slogged through in the past century.

Before William Sanders, there was Franklin Bobbitt in the 1920s, Ralph Tyler and Benjamin Bloom in the 1950s, Nathaniel Gage in the 1970s and 1980s, and many other researchers.  These scholars believed that teaching can be rational and predictable through scientifically engineering classrooms; they rejected the notion that teaching can be unpredictable and uncertain–”the flight of a butterfly.”

In How To Make a Curriculum (1924),Franklin Bobbitt listed 160 “educational objectives”  that teachers should pursue in teaching children such as “the ability to use language …required for proper and effective participation in community life.” Colleagues in math listed 300 for teachers in grades 1-6 and nearly 900 for social studies. This scientific movement to graft “educational objectives” onto daily classroom lessons collapsed of its own weight by the 1940s, and largely ignored by teachers. Elliot Eisner told that story well.

By the early 1960s, another generation of social scientists had advanced the idea that teachers should use “behavioral objectives” to guide lessons. Ralph Tyler, Benjamin Bloom and others  created taxonomies that provided teachers with “prescriptions for the formulation of educational objectives.” As Eisner pointed out, teachers generally ignored these scientific prescriptions in their daily lessons.

In the 1970s and 1980s, Nathaniel Gage and others sought to establish “a scientific basis for the art of teaching.” They focused on teacher behaviors (questions asked, how students are called upon,etc.)–the process of teaching–and the products of effective teaching, student scores on standardized tests. This line of research called “process-product” continued the behavioral tradition from an earlier generation committed to a science of teaching. Using experimental methods to identify teaching behaviors that were correlated to student gains in test scores on standardized tests, Gage and others came up with “teacher should” statements that were associated with improved student achievement.

The limitations of establishing a set of scientifically prescribed teaching behaviors soon became apparent as critics pointed out how many other factors (e.g., the content of the lesson, students themselves, the classroom environment, the school) come into play when teachers teach students. Again, teachers generally ignored the results from “process-product” studies.

And here in 2010, the re-engineering of teaching through science again seeks “the flight of the bullet.” Who among researchers and policymakers ever mentions the artistry of teaching? Evaluating and paying teachers on the basis of student test scores through value-added measures dominates reform talk.

Researchers and policy advocates now prescribe teaching behaviors that will yield gains in student achievement. Doug Lemov’s Teach Like a Champion lays out 49 “should” behaviors extracted from research in high teacher-turnover, largely minority and poor urban schools. The aura of “science” hovers over these  prescriptions. Ditto for VAM.

Even though many researchers challenge the use of VAM metrics and methodologies to evaluate teacher effectiveness,Washington, D.C., New York City, and Los Angeles–note how most top-performing suburban districts in the nation have taken an oath of silence on VAM–have embraced it. The “science” of measuring teacher effectiveness, in short, is sharply contested–and, yeah, that bullet zigs and zags.

The point of all this is to be clear that, yes, some parts of teaching can be improved through scientific studies. Empirical findings time and again have improved teaching from decoding skills in reading to classroom management. But what has been learned from science is not the lion’s share of what constitutes daily teaching. As Philip Jackson said in 1968:

“teaching is an opportunistic process [where] … neither the teacher or [her] students can predict with any certainty exactly what will happen next. Plans are forever going awry and unexpected opportunities …are constantly emerging. The seasoned teacher seizes upon these opportunities and uses them to … his student’s  advantage.”

Surprise and uncertainty greet teachers daily even for their best-planned lesson. Experienced teachers know this in their bones and in finessing the unpredictability of classroom life (or flopping) know that few researchers, especially among VAM-obsessed ones–care for such artistry because it cannot be connected to students’ test scores.

Those who still dream of engineering  classrooms into rational places where empirically-derived prescriptions help teachers become effective have failed to grasp that daily teaching is a mix of artistry, science and uncertainty.

*Philip Jackson, Life in Classrooms, 1968, pp. 166-167.

Applying Incremental and Fundamental Change to Actual Cases (Part 3)

In working with over a thousand teachers, principals, superintendents, and school board members in California, Minnesota, Washington, New York, and Virginia I have asked them to tell me where they stand on the kinds of change they seek in schools. I asked each person to pick a spot along the continuum of incremental to fundamental change. Almost two-thirds chose the fundamental side of the continuum (see Part 2, April 6, 2010).

But they challenged me that choosing a spot on the continuum was too crude. They knew that districts and schools were organizations that fitfully and slowly solved problems. They wanted to combine incremental and fundamental with different ways of achieving these changes. In short, they recognized that strategies also mattered.

To accommodate their wishes I combined types of change and different implementation strategies into one 2 X 2 matrix. I offered them a choice of strategies to implement the changes they desired: Make the changes in small steps or make the changes in one fell swoop or grand moves.

________________SMALL STEPS_____________________

i                                                                                                                                       f

n                                                                                                                                     u

c                                   A                                                  B                                           n

r                                                                                                                                      d

e__________________________________________________a

m                                                                                                                                    m

e                                                                                                                                      e

n                                   C                                                  D                                           n

t                                                                                                                                        t

a                                                                                                                                      a

l                                                                                                                                       l

____________________GRAND MOVES_____________________

To illustrate these choices, consider a kindergarten teacher—call her Janice–who put herself in the A quadrant (and where in the quadrant she would place her name—in the middle or close to B, C, or D indicated where her blend of inclinations rested) was an incrementalist. She defined a problem as her five year-olds lacking experiences with new technology. She introduced computers in her kindergarten by having one machine installed this year and another next year thereby having a computer center just like her centers for blocks, art, literacy, and science.

Barbara, a high school principal, placed herself in the C quadrant. In January, she had decided to introduce a block schedule of 3 daily 90-minute periods in September because she believed it would make teaching and learning more effective than the current 7 periods of 48-minutes. She concentrated only on schedule changes maintaining existing departments and avoided questioning teachers about what they would do in the 90-minute block. Within six weeks she had mobilized a faculty group to support the change, solved the logistical problems teachers identified, found the appropriate software to make the changes and got the parent school-site committee to endorse it. She found money for half of the staff to spend 2 weeks during the summer planning activities in each subject for the 90-minute block.

If A and C are incrementalist quadrants, B and D belong to those who seek fundamental changes in their classroom, school, or district but at different paces. Lillian, a veteran elementary school principal in a largely Latino barrio, confidently wrote her name in the B quadrant. She framed the problem as a rapidly growing majority of Latino students segregated from the rest of society. She wanted to create a dual immersion school (Spanish and English) where language skills and culture of her families and students could educate non-Latino children while Latino children could learn from others unlike themselves. She was passionate about this innovation but knew that it would take at least 3 years to get approved by the school board and enroll students. She laid out all of the steps that she would have to follow each year and listed the problems that she could anticipate.

Science teacher Sondra dashed her name into quadrant D with a flourish. She had found her customary way of teaching biology and chemistry inadequate for the culturally diverse students she faced each year. She believed in students discovering scientific concepts and working in teams on projects yet she was still tied to lecture, using the textbook with occasional lab periods. She wanted to make dramatic changes in her teaching. She located 10 laptops, a handful of biology software programs nicely integrated with key units that she would teach, and found a young biology teacher in another school who agreed to help her learn the new software. Over the summer, Sondra reorganized the traditional biology course. In September, with the help of a student whiz with machines and software, Sondra put half of the class to work on computers while she concentrated on the half-dozen students who needed extra help from her. In the past, these students fell behind quickly and eventually failed.

Which quadrant would you choose?

Wherever practitioners chose to put their names, it was clear that change, solving problems, and managing dilemmas were thoroughly entangled. Invariably, a planned change was a solution to a problem or a compromise to a dilemma. Also, the change itself, as it was implemented, would generate other problems and dilemmas. The deeply entangled process of identifying problems, figuring up practical solutions, managing dilemmas, and making changes is perpetual in schools and classrooms.