Inside the Black Box of the Classroom Practice: Change without Reform in American Education

Readers who have been with me from August 2009 know that I have mentioned writing a book on the linkages between policy and practice in technology, curriculum, and accountability; I posted pieces of my research, for example, on laptops in a school fictitiously-named Las Montanas (see here, here, and here). And there have been other posts as I have drafted and revised different parts of the book.

In this post, I quote from the Preface and some thoughts I had about writing  Inside the Black Box of Classroom Practice.

From the Preface:

I have written a great deal over the past 30 years on teaching, curriculum, school organization, technology, and reform. The topics are all interconnected. After all, reform-driven policymakers have sought to alter classroom practices for at least two centuries in the U.S.  They have used structural reforms from the age-graded school to the non-graded school; from pushing new technologies into classrooms as the 19^th century slate blackboard to the 21^st century “smart” whiteboard.  The same holds for curricular reform;  late-19^th century reformers established one academic curriculum for all students and then dumped it a quarter-century later for a differentiated curriculum tailored to their estimates of  whether high school students would go directly into industrial and commercial jobs, take up white-collar occupations, or attend college. Then, yet again, 21^st century policymakers returned to the Common Core standards for all U.S. schools. All of these and many more structural reforms in school governance, curriculum, organization, and technology aimed to change teaching practices and teacher lessons so that students would learn more, faster, and better. Then those students would complete college, get jobs, and make the nation a better place.

Over many years, I have developed these themes independently in books, articles, op-ed pieces and now in my twice-weekly blog. What I do in this book is draw together these separate themes about structural reforms, societal changes, the role of public schools in a democracy, and teaching in what I call the black box of the classroom. In my career as a teacher, administrator, superintendent, and scholar I have seen up close these connections between policy and practice; top-decision makers making policy decisions  and first-grade teachers implementing those decisions; and societal conditions of poverty, inequality, and race  influencing school practices and classroom lessons again and again.

I lay out the tangled nature of these reforms, analyze successes and failures, and offer my thinking on why the black box of classroom instruction has been largely impervious to structural reforms aimed at moving teaching practices from teacher-centered to student-centered, students from absorbing subject-matter to critical thinking and problem solving. Classroom lessons, however, have been, paradoxically largely stable, seldom fulfilling reformers’ ambitions.

In this book, I synthesize and connect my thinking about reform-driven policy making and classroom instruction; at the same time, I try to break new ground in understanding the contradiction of enormous structural change in U.S. public schools amid stability in teaching practices.

From the Acknowledgements section of the book:

I have found that no matter how many books I have completed starting a new one still gives me the jitters. Writing is both satisfying and frustrating, filled with surprises and disappointments. None of my books has come easily to me.

As I have gotten older, however, I have discovered that revising and crafting words, sentences, and paragraphs has become as satisfying as creating the questions that drive the book, formulating the arguments, collecting and analyzing evidence, and drawing conclusions. Although I still get a kick out of ensuring an internal consistency between questions, arguments, evidence, and conclusions what has surprised me is how much pleasure I get from finding the right word, fashioning vivid phrases that capture accurately an image or idea I want to convey, and rewriting paragraphs a third and fourth time. All of these and more I have experienced in writing this book.

Some additional thoughts. When I was younger, spilling words on pages that capture ideas I had and my experiences in teaching and administration–the creative part of writing–were the highs of writing that I savored. Organizing the sentences and paragraphs were, of course, necessary but it was closer, at least in my mind then, to mopping a dirty floor and cleaning up an untidy room: important but lacking adrenalin-rush of ideas and experiences spilling over page after page. That has changed.

This affection for the craft of the writing has developed slowly over the years and while I need the creative rush, it is artistry of composing and ordering language that now gives me the most satisfaction. I do not know if this is a pattern among aging writers of nonfiction but this is what I have noticed in my writing books over the decades.

Online Courses: Cartoons

U.S. schools, K-12 through higher education, are in the midst of another reform wave. From states mandating online courses as a requirement for high school graduation to university-driven Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), hyperbole-filled Kool-Aid mixed with stark fear fuel reform rhetoric about the impending “revolution” in teaching and learning. I offer my monthly feature* of how some cartoonists poke and tear at the rhetoric and realities of online courses.  Enjoy!

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*For those who would like to see earlier posts of this monthly feature, see: “Digital Kids in School,” “Testing,” “Blaming Is So American,”  “Accountability in Action,” “Charter Schools,” and “Age-graded Schools,” Students and Teachers, Parent-Teacher Conferences, Digital Teachers, Addiction to Electronic Devices,  Testing, Testing, and Testing, Business and Schools, Common Core Standards, Problems and Dilemmas, and Digital Natives (2).

Third Anniversary of My Blog

Dear Readers,

This post marks my third anniversary as a blogger. I want to thank those readers who regularly read my twice-weekly posts, those who have dipped into them occasionally, those who have subscribed to the post, and finally those who have taken the time to write thoughtful comments. Nearly 325,000 readers from around the world (35 percent outside of the U.S.)  have clicked on to the blog since August 2009. Not exactly viral but, for me, most gratifying.

For the 364 posts I have written in the past three years, I have followed three rules:

1. Write less than 800 words.

2. Write clearly on school reform and classroom practice.

3. Take a position and back it up with evidence.

For anyone who blogs or writes often, I want to say that sticking to these rules has been no easy task. Occasionally, I have slipped and alert readers have helped me out.  Yet after three years, writing two posts a week–with help from guests (teachers, administrators, non-educators, family, and academics)–has been very satisfying. I remain highly motivated to write about what happens to policy as it gets translated into practice and those unrelenting efforts of reformers with varied ideas inside and outside the schools who have sought  improved schooling.

Four posts have caught the most clicks since beginning the blog:

“Chains or Spaghetti? Metaphors of Implementation (nearly 11,000)

“High-Tech Gadgets: Addiction, Dependency, or Hype?” (over 10,000)

“Data-Driven Instruction and the Practice of Teaching (over 9,000)

“The Difference between ‘Complicated’ and ‘Complex’ Matters (7200)

In September 2011, I began a once-monthly series of cartoons on selected topics of teaching, administering, policymaking, and school reform. For those who have not seen these cartoons, click on: “Digital Kids in School,” “Testing,” “Blaming Is So American,”  “Accountability in Action,” “Charter Schools,” and “Age-graded Schools,” Students and Teachers, Parent-Teacher Conferences, Digital Teachers, Addiction to Electronic Devices, and Testing, Testing, and Testing.

As I begin my fourth year, I am not sure where I fit into Roz Chast’s breakdown of bloggers, but poking fun at those who blog is, well, part of being a blogger. Thank you again, dear readers, for making the past three years a satisfying experience.

Note To Readers and Subscribers from Larry Cuban

I will not have access to the Internet between  July 5-15 so I will not be able to respond to any comments. I have already written and will run a three part series on teachers working with teachers as a strategy for school reform during the time I am offline. As always, thank you for reading my blog.

Cartoons: The Age-graded School

In my restless search for humor about school reforms as they affect students, teachers, parents, and the nation, I have posted cartoons on testing, technology and children, charters, accountability, and the inescapable blame that accompanies reform over the past five months. I have discovered the following:

*Humor is in the head of the beholder.

*Cartoonists’ portrayal of schools relies heavily upon traditional ideas of what schools and classrooms are like.

*Caricatures, for that is what cartoons are, both tickle and pinch viewers in their revealing truths of what happens in schools and the purposes that schools serve in a democracy. Such “truths” seldom get discussed in policy forums.

This batch of cartoons are about the age-graded school. I wrote about this hardy institution that was a mid-19th century reform in organizing schooling. Since then, it has spread like kudzu to be all-dominant in the early 21st century. Since every organization has plans for its inhabitants, the age-graded school has shaped notions of who is “normal” in going through the grades and what is “normal” in how children learn, what teachers teach, and how they teach. It is also the one experience that all children and youth have in common outside the family making it the grist for cartoonists to get us to chuckle and nod our heads at the revealed truths.

Then there is the self-contained classroom where one teacher works with groups of 25 or more children whose interests, abilities, and performance vary. What goes on in classrooms once that door closes has provided grist for cartoonists’ pens for years. Many of these cartoonists, of course, draw from their memories of being a student or nightmares when they were the teachers.

That’s All, Folks!

Blaming Is So American: Cartoons

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Republicans and Democrats blame one another for the impasse over reducing the deficit. Tea party rank-and-file blame President Obama for the decline of the U.S. “Occupy Wall Street” protests across the country blame inequality in wealth on the financial community’s greed. And the previous post dealt with policymakers and reformers, over the past century, blaming children, their families, teachers, and schools for doing poorly academically. Finger pointing is, well, so American.

It is now and has been for well over a century as this Thomas Nast cartoon about corrupt Tammany Hall run by Boss Tweed in late-19th century New York City points out (thanks to Ed Darrell).

In a culture where individualism is highly prized, where winners are glorified and losers are shunned, where if  problems go unsolved then it is someone’s fault–blame reigns. And so it is with a sampling from cartoons illustrating how common blaming is.

Blaming crosses political party lines:

And, of course, there is the historical tic described in the last post of blaming children, teachers, and schools for low performance and anything that goes awry in the U.S.

I wish I had a cartoon that shows folks blaming the turkey for the upcoming U.S. holiday of Thanksgiving, but I don’t. Here is the best that I can do.

For all of my U.S. readers, have a fine Thanksgiving. For my readers elsewhere in the world, I wish you good health and peace.

Related articles

• More Americans blame Bush than Obama for economy, but Obama blame is growing (americablog.com)
• GOP 2012 Hopefuls Blame Obama for S&P Rating Downgrade (usnews.com)
• Americans Blame The Government More Than Wall Street For The Economy (businessinsider.com)

Teaching in Turnaround Schools: Second Time Around

As I approach the second anniversary of my blog, I will be returning to particular posts in the past 24 months that hit themes I believe are important in reform and classroom practice. In presenting the post again, I will update facts in an introduction to the post and then make a few comments.

This post originally appeared August 11, 2009. Rafe Esquith continues to teach, Sarah Fine is no longer teaching. The questions I ask here are ones that I have mentioned numerous times over the past two years as crucial for anyone who makes, adopts, and implements policy–that means school boards, superintendents, legislators, principals, and teachers–to answer.

Lots of stories from principals, parents, and students reveal practices that range from marvelous to malign. Individual teachers give us a sense of what happens in their classrooms. Rafe Esquith in LA writes about his lessons and his kids’ experiences in an elementary school; Sarah Fine, an English teacher in a D.C. charter school, tells of her successes and failures. But beyond stories and first-hand accounts, helpful as they are in giving us a peek into different classrooms, we know very little about the kinds of daily lessons that unfold across the grades and in academic subjects. We know especially little about classroom teaching in those turnaround schools that get extra resources, new (and young) staff, and the charge to go from a chronically failing school to a high-flier.

So what? What’s wrong with being largely ignorant of how teachers teach in turnaround schools or even high-performing ones? Knowing how teachers teach is critical because school boards and superintendents assume that their decisions to turnaround schools (and adopting other policies targeting better student performance) will alter classroom teaching and lead to improved test scores.

In short, every single federal, state, and district policy decision aimed at improving student academic performance has a set of taken-for-granted assumptions that link the adopted policy to classroom lessons. From the feds putting money on the stump in “Race to the Top” to getting states to adopt charters and pay-for-performance schemes to a local school board and superintendent deciding to give laptops to each teacher and student, contain crucial assumptions–not facts–about outcomes that the new policy will bring to classrooms. And one of those crucial assumptions is that teachers will change how they teach for the better. Rarely are serious questions asked about these assumptions before or after hyped-up policies were adopted, money allocated, expectations raised, and materials (or machines) deployed to classrooms.

Consider a few simple questions that, too often, go unasked of policies heralded as a cure-all for the ills of urban schools, including turnaround schools.

1. Did policies aimed at improving student achievement (e.g., turning around failing schools, mayoral control, small high schools, pay-for performance plans, and parental choice) get fully implemented?

2. When implemented fully, did they change the content and practice of teaching?

3. Did changed classroom practices account for what students learned?

4. Did what students learn achieve the goals set by policy makers?

These straightforward questions about reform-driven policies inspect the chain of policy-to-practice assumptions that federal, state, and local decision-makers take for granted when adopting their pet policy. These questions distinguish policy talk (e.g. “Race to the Top”) and policy action (e.g., adopting and implementing policies) from classroom practice (e.g. how do teachers teach as a result of new policies),and student learning (e.g., what have students learned as a result of different lessons)….

Teaching in schools declared failing or teaching in turnaround schools is hard work both intellectually and emotionally. Martha Infante, an Los Angeles school district high school teacher described how hard it is in a post that she wrote in February 2011.

Medical and Educational Research: What To Believe?

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After all those clinical trials in medicine to conquer depression, Alzheimers, and cancer, we are told now that Prozac and other anti-depressants work no better than placebos and doing crossword puzzles, exercising, and taking fish oil does not prevent Alzheimer’s disease. Moreover, studies have found that mammograms, colonoscopies, and PSA tests are far less useful to detect cancer than we had been told.  The truth is that even with the toughest standards used by medical researchers to demonstrate one drug, one therapy, one test is better than other treatments it is very difficult to prove anything scientifically or even trust that those studies are accurate. Consider cancer.

President Richard Nixon declared war on cancer in 1971. Since then medical entrepreneurs have promised that surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy will cure the scourge. Molecular biologists and genome specialists have identified cell mechanisms and genes that trigger particular cancers. Yet after billions of dollars have been spent in cancer research, the disease with its remarkable heterogeneity remains at the top of the list of leading causes of death in the U.S. In short, politics, policy, and research have failed to cure cancer. But wait, there is even worse news.

One medical researcher and statistician, John Ioannidis, claims that 90 percent of published medical research that doctors rely on is flawed. Ioannidis and others raise serious issues about biases in research designs and the directions researchers pursue. The big unasked question remains: Can medical research studies be trusted?

Now, if doubts are raised about medical research where the highest statistical and ethical standards are used in studies on human subjects, what about educational research?

The sorry state of policy and practice research in education has been mentioned numerous times. Every important (and unimportant) issue in schooling children and youth has studies that say one thing and studies that say the opposite. Biases of researchers–as in medical investigations–often taint designs and methodologies. Efforts to make educational research more scientific and relevant to policy and practice have occupied scholars in both education and the social sciences for decades (see PDF EDUCATIONAL RESEARCHER-2002-Feuer-4-14).

To raise research standards, the federal government has launched a “What Works Clearinghouse” (WWC) to evaluate studies investigating educational policy and practice. Using tough standards of evidence, WWC determines the degree of effectiveness of  curriculum, software, and intervention programs across 11 areas (e.g., Adolescent Literacy,  Character Education, Elementary Math, English Language Learners). The stark results are eye-openers. Of nearly 75 Elementary Math programs, for example, six programs had mixed outcomes and only one had positive result for a single outcome (“Everyday Mathematics”). The other interventions, including software programs, had neither a report available nor had studies been done.

Stuck with results like this, educational policymakers, practitioners, and parents, ask: Can we trust research to point the right direction for practice?

As a high school teacher and district administrator for nearly 25 years and a researcher for another 25 years, part of me says yes and part of me says no.

In general, I value research. I have asked questions investigating the history of teaching, curriculum, and school reform (including technology). I have designed studies, and, using different methodologies, collected evidence and published my findings. I know that truth is elusive and that biases, including mine, can taint even the best designed study. Still, a careful, rigorous, and honest search for truth in different venues from preschool through the university is essential, I believe, for improved teaching and student learning.

Then the practitioner part of me kicks in and says that so much educational research fails to ask, much less answer, puzzling questions that teachers, principals, and superintendents face daily. Instead,to get answers to these questions, hardworking professionals have to rely on their experiences and the wisdom of peers, as I had done.

I have worked in both worlds and find it tempting to agree with those studies that support my biases while rejecting those that challenge those very same biases. And when research findings are mixed, I am tempted to ignore the findings. So I am torn by conflicting values. In truth, what I often end up doing–the compromise I have worked out–is to rely upon my experiences in classrooms and schools while keeping an eye peeled for rigorous, high-caliber studies.

In the face of growing disenchantment with medical research studies and the disarray of educational research, I have learned to trust my experiences. Though I am an avid consumer of educational research, I remain skeptical of much of what I read.

Related Articles

• You: Why Almost Everything You Hear About Medicine Is Wrong (newsweek.com)
• “Prominent scientist says almost all published medical research is flawed” and related posts (depthreporting.com)
• Human Farming & the Limits of Medical Research (thehealthcareblog.com)
• Lies, Damned Lies and Medical Science (kir.com)
• Right Diagnosis, Wrong Prescription: New Medical Research Center (innovationandgrowth.wordpress.com)

First Anniversary of Blog: Thank You

Dear Readers,

This post marks my first anniversary as a blogger. I want to thank those readers who regularly read my twice-weekly posts, those who have dipped into them occasionally, those who have subscribed to the post, and finally those who have taken the time to write thoughtful comments. Over 56,000 people from around the world have clicked on to the blog since August 2009. Not exactly viral but, for me, most gratifying.

For the 114 posts I have written this past year, I have followed three rules:

1. Write less than 800 words.

2. Write clearly on school reform and classroom practice.

3. Take a position and back it up with evidence.

For anyone who blogs or writes often, I want to say that sticking to these rules has been no easy task. Yet after a year, it has been very satisfying. I remain highly motivated to write about policymakers, administrators, teachers, and students–all who inhabit the policy-to-practice continuum–and all who in different ways, with varied ideas, seek to improve schooling.

To me, writing is a form of teaching and learning. The learning part comes from figuring out what I want to say on a topic, researching it, drafting a post, and then revising it more times than I would ever admit so that the post says what I want it to say. Learning also has come from the surprises I have found in the suggestions and comments readers post—”Did I really say that?” “Wow! that is an unexpected view on what I said,” or “I had never considered that point.”

The teaching part comes from putting my ideas out there in a clearly expressed logical argument, buttressed by evidence, for others who may agree or disagree about an issue I am deeply interested in. As in all teaching, planning enters the picture in how I frame the central question I want readers to consider and how I put the argument and evidence together in a clear, coherent, and crisp blog of less than 800 words.

Because of my background as a high school teacher, administrator, policymaker, and historian of education I often give a question or issue its context, both past and present. I do so, and here I put my teacher hat on, since I believe that current school reform and practice are deeply rooted in the past. Learning from earlier generations of reformers’ experiences in coping with the complexities of improving how teachers taught, and how they tried to change schools and districts, I believe, can inform current reformers about the tasks they face. Contemporary reformers, equally well-intentioned as their predecessors, in too many instances ignore what has occurred previously and end up bashing teachers and principals for not executing properly their reform-driven policies.

Expressing my sincere gratitude toward readers for the blogging I have done this first year is a preface to what I will begin writing during my second year of posts. Beginning this week and continuing periodically throughout the year will be posts drawing from a two-year study of a 1:1 laptop high school.

I have not written about Las Montanas high school (a pseudonym) since 1998 when I and two graduate students did a study of computer use in that and a nearby high school in the Bay area of northern California. That study became Chapter 3 in Oversold and Underused: Computers in the Classroom (2001). In 2008, I returned to Las Montanas because it had become a fully equipped 1:1 laptop school and I wanted to find out what had changed in teacher and student use over the past decade. Even though an application for research funds had been rejected, I was intensely curious about what had occurred so I decided to carry out the study by myself.* The next post describes the study.

*In 1998, I, Heather Kirkpatrick, and Craig Peck (both graduate students) completed the study of Las Montanas and Flatland high schools. In 2008, Craig, now an assistant professor at the University of North Carolina (Greensboro) asked me if I were interested in replicating the earlier study and returning to both schools. I was. He drafted a proposal (he would be Principal Investigator) to the foundation that had originally funded the earlier grant. The foundation turned us down. We revised the proposal and tried again. Rejected a second time. Because of my curiosity about what changes had occurred in one of the two schools that had become a 1:1 laptop school, I asked Craig if I could do the study. So without funding and some help from Craig who came out for a week to help with the 800-plus student surveys–at his own expense–I completed the study in June 2010.

Can Historians Help School Reformers?

Historians are divided over what can be learned from history. When policymakers (and public school students) ask about the usefulness of history they want guidance from the past to avoid making mistakes now; some even want predictions.

Historians who believe that the past can inform policy argue that even if “lessons” cannot be extracted from the past, policymakers can surely profit from looking backward. They say scholars can aid contemporary policymakers by pointing out similarities and differences between previous and current situations. Or, of even more help to policymakers, historians can redefine existing problems and solutions by observing how similar situations were viewed by a previous generation. Finally, without stooping to offer “lessons,” historians can alert policymakers to what did not work, what might be preferable and what to avoid under certain conditions.

Other historians reject the notion that history can, or even should, serve the present. These historians point to their obligations as professionals to be disinterested in contemporary policies. Scholars must bring to bear their knowledge of the past and their craft in handling documents without paying attention to the present moment. Not to do so can corrupt their professional impartiality. Moreover, these historians point to the uniqueness of a past event—say, the war in Vietnam–that is seldom identical or even sufficiently similar for policy makers to compare with a current explosive situation such as in Iraq or Afghanistan. More specifically, there are contemporary situations for which no historical analogy can be drawn: To what can the collapse of Soviet communism be compared? Or the cascade of oil spills since the late 1980s?

Historians bothered about reading the present into the past also argue that policy-driven colleagues ask questions that are too tightly tethered to contemporary issues and heavily influenced by the scholars’ values and experiences. Some policy-oriented historians, for example, ask: Why do public schools seemingly fail to improve student achievement? They then search the past for answers to a question that few educators, parents, or policymakers ever asked in 1880, 1920, or 1950. Historians uninterested in connecting the past to current policy issues call scholars who seek to influence reformers presentists, researchers who read the present into the past, and, in doing so, distort history to fit contemporary situations. Historians should write history for history’s sake.

At times, I have leaned toward those who claim that scholars must disengage from contemporary policy issues when investigating the past because history seldom teaches explicit lessons. Still, more often than not, I find myself in the camp of policy-relevant historians. As a teacher, superintendent, and policymaker for a quarter-century before becoming a professor, my values and experiences shaped the questions that I have asked over the last two decades–many of which connect policy to practice.

The path I have chosen, however, has been troublesome. The tug of reading the present into the past is strong and unyielding even when I scrutinize high school yearbooks from 1910 in the dank basement of a district office. Resisting the temptation to select only those historical records and incidents that fit the contemporary scene or bolster a bias is a constant struggle. I have to constantly remind myself to take the past on its own terms, to welcome the document that challenges my beliefs or to spend more time investigating an event that undermines thoroughly what I had found. Juggling professional duties to the craft and discipline with insistent impulses to shape stories that fit particular contemporary policies consistent with my values is–in a trite phrase–hard work.

None of this would surprise colleagues deeply committed to both scholarship and improving schools. It is unsurprising because the public school, a core institution in a market-driven democratic society, has had a checkered history of being drafted again and again to uplift the lives of individual students and improve a society blessed by prosperity and freedom yet wracked by social ills and inequities. Historians of education, perhaps more so than other historians, particularly if their formative experiences included working in schools, have had to contend with this dilemma of hewing to scholarly obligations while seeking improved schools.

The compromise I have worked out draws from historian David Tyack’s conclusion that contemporary decisionmakers already have a picture in their minds of what the past was like. Accurate or not, they will formulate policy based on those blurred images of the past. Like Tyack, I believe that more accurate renderings of the past than currently exist can inform the present not by prescribing particular policies but in helping educational decision makers, again in Tyack’s words: “not only to use a sense of the past (which they do willy-nilly) but also to make sense of it.” (“Historical Perspectives on the School as a Social Service Institution,” 1979, p. 56)