How To Teach History

Here is how a journalist described a class she watched a few months ago in a Northern California high school.

In the 1986 comedy Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Ben Stein famously plays a high school teacher who drones on about the 1930 Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act while his students slump at their desks in a collective stupor. For many kids, that’s history: an endless catalog of disconnected dates and names, passed down like scripture from the state textbook, seldom questioned and quickly forgotten.

Now take a seat inside Will Colglazier’s classroom at Aragon High School in San Mateo. The student population here is fairly typical for the Bay Area: about 30 percent Latino, 30 percent Asian and 40 percent white. The subject matter is standard 11th grade stuff: What caused the Great American Dust Bowl?

Tapping on his laptop, Colglazier shows the class striking black-and-white images of the choking storms that consumed the Plains states in the 1930s. Then he does something unusual. Instead of following a lesson plan out of the textbook, he passes out copies of a 1935 letter, written by one Caroline Henderson to the then-U.S. secretary of agriculture, poignantly describing the plight of her neighbors in the Oklahoma panhandle. He follows that with another compelling document: a confidential high-level government report, addressed to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, decrying the region’s misguided homesteading policies.

Colglazier clearly is a gifted and well-trained educator, a history/economics major and 2006 graduate of the Stanford Teacher Education Program. But what sets this class apart from Ferris Bueller’s is more than the man; it’s his method—an approach developed at Stanford’s Graduate School of Education that’s rapidly gaining adherents across the country. At a time when national student surveys show abysmal rates of proficiency in history, trial studies of the Stanford program demonstrated that when high school students engage regularly with challenging primary source documents, they not only make significant gains learning and retaining historical material, they also markedly improve their reading comprehension and critical thinking…..

Colglazier builds his thought-provoking classes using an online tool called Reading Like a Historian. Designed by the Stanford History Education Group under Professor Sam Wineburg, the website offers 87 flexible lesson plans featuring documents from the Library of Congress. Teachers can download the lessons and adapt them for their own purposes, free of charge. Students learn how to examine documents critically, just as historians would, in order to answer intriguing questions: Did Pocahontas really rescue John Smith? Was Abraham Lincoln a racist? Who blinked first in the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Russians or the Americans?

Most history teachers do not teach like Will Colglazier or the cartoon figure teacher in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.  Colglazier is an exception, albeit according to the journalist, one who joins many others in using  historical thinking to gain deep understanding of the past rather than a heritage approach, that is, using facts from the past to recreate a present that tells Americans who they are, who they were, and the nation they are part of.

As I and many others who have been in classrooms have pointed out, most history teachers tilt toward the heritage end of the spectrum of history teaching but many do incorporate historical approaches in their lessons (See here and here).

Why?

One answer looks at how external testing, state academic standards, federal accountability regulations, teacher certification, and the unofficial national curriculum of Advanced Placement influence what teachers present. These omnipresent structures in the policy terrain set the boundaries within which teachers teach. To answer the above question on why teachers tilt toward “traditional” teaching, then, I also want to identify other factors that often go unmentioned by those eager to improve the teaching of history in K-12 schools.

Consider that cultural beliefs about the function of public schools to socialize children and youth into the dominant civic and social values (e.g., honesty, respect for others’ values, cooperating) are anchored in age-graded school structures. They become a powerful organizational mechanism for carrying out societal expectations (i.e., kindergarten prepares children for the first grade, a high school diploma is essential to going to college or getting a decent job). Teachers operating separately in their classrooms move 25 to 30-plus students through a 700-page history text, and give frequent tests to see whether students have learned the required knowledge and skills.

Moreover, age-graded secondary schools have history teachers teaching five classes a day (with at least one planning or “free” period and lunch) usually involving up to three different preparations (e.g., world history, U.S. history, and economics) with a student load of anywhere between 125 to 165 a day. The sheer whirl of traversing these classes between 7:45 AM-3 PM is exhausting for 22-year-olds. Imagine what it is like for 62- year-olds. When grading homework, reading essays, and checking quizzes are factored into the workload of most history teachers—don’t forget most teachers see individual students before school, during planning periods and lunch, and then after school–the daily decisions and fast pace of the day, much less the unpredictable emotional ups-and-downs that accompany working with teenagers, exhilarate and exhaust teachers. These social beliefs and school structures added to the public expectation that every student passes a test to graduate and then goes to college merge to create intense workplace conditions that influence how teachers teach.

Yet history teachers are hardly passive agents that societal expectations and school structures pour into a mold. Teachers bring their life experiences, formal and informal knowledge, and personal beliefs about children, learning, and serving the community that also influence what and how they teach history. And this is where blends of heritage and historical thinking pedagogy enter the picture.

Both constrained and autonomous, teachers accommodate to external demands and organizational structures while carving out a niche for themselves in which they can make independent decisions about how they organize their classrooms, group students, and teach.  Most history teachers end up picking and choosing different practices to put a tattoo on their teaching yet fall somewhere in the middle part of a continuum of teaching practices.

While most teachers use a version of the heritage approach, a small minority like Will Colglazier work within the constraints of the age-graded school and make other teaching choices based on their beliefs about learning, children, and knowledge of history.

Consider New York teacher Linda Strait (a pseudonym). A researcher who observed her teach a hybrid of both traditions of teaching. She teaches U.S. history through lectures, guides discussions, and controls what content is taught and how.

Yet in her Civil Rights unit, she offered a series of lessons beginning with a videotape “The Shadow of Hate” after which students divided into small groups to discuss and list their reactions on wall charts; an ungraded quiz on a reading Strait had assigned; a roundtable discussion of four questions she posed to the class; a two-day simulation of a local skating rink that refused to admit minorities with the teacher role-playing the owner and students making pitches to her to keep or drop the policy. Then two days of reviewing notes, writing in-class practice essays for the 11^th grade Regents tests that would draw from the Civil Rights unit.

Strait tells the researcher, “I try to throw in as many activities and projects, but I still feel that I am too heavily the center of it.” She has invented a hybrid of the two teaching traditions out of the choices she made within the constraints of state and school district policies, the structures of the age-graded high schools, her knowledge of the subject, personal experiences, and beliefs about how her students learn U.S. history (pp. 16-28).

Will Colglazier is part of a minority of teachers using historical thinking pedagogy. Most teachers of history blend both pieces of it and the heritage approach; they hug the middle.

Advanced Placement Courses Need More Than a Makeover (Jack Schneider)

Jack Schneider is an assistant professor of education at the College of the Holy Cross, in Worcester, Mass., and the author of Excellence for All: How a New Breed of Reformers Is Transforming America’s Public Schools (Vanderbilt University Press, 2011).

To the many in the world of education reform, the latest AP Report to the Nation—released recently by the College Board—is cause for celebration on two fronts. The first achievement has to do with equity.  During the program’s early history in the 1960s, Advanced Placement courses were generally populated by white students.  Even as recently as the mid-1990s, 80 percent of AP exams were taken by whites or Asians.  Today, however, roughly a third of students participating in the program are non-Asian students of color.  And that number is growing every year.

The second achievement has to do with teaching and learning.  By the twenty-first century, AP was being assailed by its critics for failing to evolve.  While college professors increasingly guided students through closer examinations of subjects with an orientation toward critical thinking and hands-on work, the AP Program continued to emphasize survey-style coverage and content memorization.  This latest report, however, details a course and exam redesign that brings AP back in line with “current practices in college instruction.”  And according to the College Board, changes in all subject areas will be substantial.

Both of these developments are the result of hard work, financial commitment (the Department of Education alone has spent a quarter of a billion dollars on its AP Incentive Program), and concerted efforts by all parties involved to promote the twin aims of equity and excellence.

The problem, however, is that AP can do very little to actually realize those aims.

Policy leaders, of course, are aware of the limited success of their labors, both through the AP Program and through other technically-oriented school improvement efforts.  Still, they continue to favor centrally-designed reforms that can be implemented in a top-down manner because they sidestep the unpredictable and time-consuming work of engaging stakeholders, building school capacity, and developing a politically courageous agenda.  Consequently, their efforts, while well-intended, never address the underlying problems that affect school quality and educational equity (a topic I address in my book, Excellence For All).  To use a metaphor of Larry Cuban’s, they create storm-tossed waves on the ocean’s surface without disturbing the deep waters below.

Consider the effort to promote equity through AP.  For decades, reformers tried to use the program as a lever for giving underserved students a college admissions edge.  After all, in the last decades of the twentieth century, colleges and universities looked favorably on students with AP courses on their transcripts.  But most AP courses were taught at private and suburban schools.  Consequently, reformers sought to extend the AP Program, believing they could level the playing field by providing equal access to an elite brand.  Yet, as I have written elsewhere, the expansion of the AP Program failed to promote real parity between the educational haves and have-nots.  Because once the AP Program reached a critical mass, it lost its functionality as a mark of distinction.  Soon, scores of colleges and universities (Dartmouth being the latest) revised their policies around awarding credit for AP coursework or favoring it in admissions reviews.  And ultimately, elite suburban and private schools began to drop the program, calling it outdated, overly-restrictive, and too oriented toward multiple choice tests.  Thus, while students at Garfield High in East Los Angeles were for a short time doing the same work as students at Andover, the aim of equity proved a noble and elusive dream.

Consider now the recent move by the College Board to restore curricular relevance and rigor to the AP brand.  Taking seriously the charge that AP was no longer in line with teaching practices in higher education, the College Board has overhauled the program.  The new curriculum will encourage more work in science labs and less parroting back of formulas, more work on historical thinking and less memorization of historical minutiae.  That all sounds pretty good.  But it will do little to improve teaching and learning, especially at schools with low-levels of instructional and administrative capacity.  Merely asking teachers to spend less time drilling and more time promoting inquiry, in other words, does not make them able to do so, nor does it prepare their students to succeed in such classes.

To be clear: these are good developments, and programs like AP should continue to be refined and revised.  But they will not resolve the deeper issues that affect educational quality and opportunity in the United States.

That is not to say that they must do so; there is, after all, a place for tinkering.  But contemporary reform rhetoric fosters the belief that all of our school problems have relatively straightforward technical solutions that policy leaders could implement if only the unions would get out of the way.

Evidence to the contrary, however, is all around us.  Look, for instance, at Mississippi, which has the lowest average household income in the U.S. and the highest percentage of African-American residents.  Given the way that educational resources are distributed, it should come as no surprise that nearly half of students taking AP exams in the state scored a 1 out of 5.  Only four percent of students scored a 5.  These are not the kinds of problems that the AP Program can solve.

Without a doubt, programs like AP have their place.  And in many schools AP remains a valuable addition to the curriculum.  But when we pretend that all our schools need is the right reform, we erode our collective will to do the harder work required of us.  We distract ourselves from our greater purposes.

Students and Teachers Again: Cartoons

For millennia, teachers and students have loved and hated one another. The excitement of kindergartners eager to tell their teacher what happened at home last night and the teenager with head down on desk waiting to hear the buzzer end 54-minutes of  listening to the teacher–all are part of the relationship between students and teachers. The classroom was (and is) a place where students watched the second-hand of the clock move ever so slowly, a room where adults and children eagerly learned from each other, and, yes, a site for humor. Here is another collection of cartoons showing the funny side of teachers and students interacting.

For readers interested in looking at the monthly posts of cartoons in this blog, 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, Digital Natives (2), and Online Courses.

Enjoy!

From Quill Pens to Computer Adaptive Testing: Old and New Technological Devices

There are many definitions of instructional technology. One concentrates on devices teachers use in classrooms.  Another definition focuses on the different ways that teachers have used such devices as tools to advance learning in lessons. Even other definitions frame technology as processes, ways of organizing classrooms, schools, and districts.

I examine the second definition in this post: the connection between writing tools students used and the perpetual demand over the past two millennia of teachers in every culture to find out what students have learned. Here I consider the quill and steel-tipped pen, pencil, ball-point pen, and yes, the computer.

I begin with the quill pen.

Here is how Robert Travers (1983, pp. 97-98) described quill pens.

The quill pen was first mentioned in the writings of Saint Isodore of Seville in the seventh century…. The quill seems to have been by far the best writing instrument invented in its time for it displaces all other forms. It became the main instrument used in schools, apart from the slate…. Even in the late 1800s, the quill pen was still the most widely used instrument for writing. Quills [came] from the wings of geese, but swan quills were also highly valued. For fine work, the quills of crows were sometimes used.

In 1809, an inventor, Joseph Bramah, developed a machine for cutting quills into lengths, and the short lengths were then inserted into a wooden holder….The separation of the point and the holder led to many inventions, and one of these was the [metal-tipped pen]….The first factory for the mass production of the steel pen was established in New Jersey in 1870….

When the steel pen entered education, a revolution in school practice [occurred]. Writing with the quill had been a slow, unhurried art…. [T]he writer had to stop frequently in order to reshape and sharpen the quill. Since writing was a slow art, pride was taken in it….The steel pen changed that. The steel pen made it possible to write continuously over long periods. There was ever increasing pressure on the pupil to produce written material in quantity. The new medium for written work then became used for examinations, which became substitutes for the form of oral examination provided by the recitation [where students would be quizzed in public for their knowledge]….

By 1890, students had become so used to the steel pen that examinations were commonly administered using this writing instrument as a tool to produce rapidly written answers.

In the Pittsburgh (PA) public schools as an elementary school student in 1940 at a now demolished Minersville elementary school, I sat at one of the above desks with the hole for the then-defunct inkwell.

What about pencils? Like metal-tipped pens, mass-produced pencils did not appear in most classrooms until the early decades of the 20th century. And with pencils, teachers assessed what students learned through hand-written homework, quizzes, essays, and multiple-choice tests (introduced in the U.S. during World War I). These inexpensive devices–mass-produced ball-point pens arrived in schools in the 1940s—made assessing students’ knowledge inexpensive–after all, no one pays students to take tests or for lost time learning–and efficient in judging promotion, retention, graduation, and other high-stakes outcomes.

Now arrives computer adaptive testing (CAT). Used a great deal in the private sector for employment and other purposes, over the past few decades, computerized testing has entered schools. In Measures of Academic Progress (MAP), for example, students sit in front of computer screens and take tests that are tailored to their ability. When a student answers an item (usually multiple-choice) correctly, then the student is given a harder item to answer. If the student gives a wrong answer, then the screen shows an easier question. This goes on until the computer bank runs out of items to administer students or the computer has sufficient information to give the student a score. Whichever happens first, then the test is over.

Highly touted by promoters and vendors–see McGraw-Hill YouTube segment for an example of hype–CAT is part of the package that new national tests accompanying Common Core standards will include by 2014. There are, as with any new technological device, clear advantages and disadvantages of this form of assessment (see Computer Adaptive Testing).

Like quill  and steel-tipped pens dipped in ink, pencils, and ballpoint pens, here is another technological device that is being bent toward finding out what students know. Ideally, of course, there would be no need for CAT or the mountain high summative tests currently in vogue across the country were the nation’s teachers sufficiently trusted to use the many ways teachers assess daily what their students know and can do. And further, for districts to build and increase teacher knowledge and skills in assessment That kind of time investment in teacher knowledge and skills and the accompanying trust in teachers and schools to assess and report the results are, sad to say, missing-in-action.

So watch computer adaptive testing become the new steel-tipped pen of the late-19th century.

Math Professor Teaches High School Classes (Darryl Yong)

Darryl Yong is a professor of mathematics at Harvey Mudd College in Claremont (CA). For the entire PDF, see rtx121001408pDarry Yong

During the 2009–2010 academic year I did something unusual for a university mathematician on sabbatical: I taught high school mathematics in a large urban school district. This might not be so strange except that my school does not have a teacher preparation program and only graduates a few students per year who intend to be teachers.

Why did I do this? I, like many of you, am deeply concerned about mathematics education and I wanted to see what a typical high school in my city is like. Because I regularly work with high school mathematics teachers, I wanted to experience the life of a high school teacher for myself. I had neither a research project nor an agenda for changing schools or teachers.

I kept a blog during my adventure, but it took some months after that experience before I could  begin to process all that had happened. Four lessons emerged from my experience that I hope will give college and university educators a clearer view of what teaching high school mathematics is like.

Before we get to those four lessons, some background information might help. First, you should know that my story is not going to turn out like Stand and Deliver, Dangerous Minds, or any other inspirational Hollywood movie about a teacher who helped students achieve great things through painful sacrifice and struggle. The Hollywood idealization of a teacher as a martyr who sacrifices her personal life for the sake of her students propagates unrealistic and unhealthy expectations. Teaching is hard, but it shouldn’t have to be that hard.

This is also not the story of a professor coming down from his ivory tower and becoming outraged by the horrors of how children are taught in schools. I find these narratives unproductive.

This article conveys one person’s perceptions of the struggles that novice teachers face in one school and discusses what the general public rarely hears about public education.

I applied for teaching positions just like other teachers in my district, though I did not take all of the necessary steps to become credentialed.

Visiting Faculty Permits, which were authorized between 2007 and 2013 through California Senate Bill 859 by Senator Jack Scott, gave me a convenient way to teach in the California public school system without a credential.

I was hired at a school that serves about 1,100 students. It is one of three high schools in a working-class neighborhood. Roughly 40 percent of the students at this high school are English language learners, 80 percent qualify for free or reduced meals, 85 percent identify as Hispanic or Latino.

In 2009 only 3 percent of students at this school were deemed proficient on the Algebra 1 California  Standards Test (CST). That year, I taught Algebra 1, Algebra 2, Geometry, and a math intervention class (an additional period of mathematics for students who are struggling in mathematics). Even though I taught four different classes, I did not teach a full load (six classes at this school). One of my Algebra 1 classes was an inclusion class—half of those students had learning disabilities or some other reason to warrant having an Individualized Education Program (IEP). In that class, all students, with IEPs or without, learned math together….

In many respects I got what I wanted that year: an authentic experience of teaching in a high need urban school. I didn’t want to teach calculus or teach only “gifted” students. I didn’t want to receive any concessions because of my qualifications.

My experience was closer to that of a new high school teacher with no prior experience than that of a seasoned educator moving from one institution to another. I had to cut my teeth on many things like a rookie teacher. For example, I had to learn how to avoid taking things that students said or did to me personally. I learned that my students’ behaviors in class were often a result of grave personal issues (violence, gangs, fear of  deportation, etc.). I made many mistakes that year, but I was also spared many more mistakes because of trusted friends who are or were high school math teachers.

Lesson 1: Schools Are Complex Systems Involving People, Culture, and Policies

The news is full of stories about how our school systems are failing along with accompanying claimed explanations. There is a lot of blame that goes around, even at schools. I have heard  some university mathematicians blame high school teachers for the poor preparation of their students. At this high school, I heard teachers blaming elementary school teachers for the poor preparation of their students.

During my short high school teaching experience, I learned that most explanations for why our schools are failing are simplistic and inadequate.

For example, consider this frequently cited reason for our underperforming schools: bad teachers. We need to “hold teachers accountable” and “get rid of the bad teachers”. I have yet to meet a teacher who willingly wants to be an ineffective instructor—every teacher I know has a desire to do a good job. Of course, I met math teachers at my school who didn’t know their subject area as well as they should have. Nevertheless, the idea that we can simply replace “bad teachers” with enthusiastic new ones ignores the reality that years of hard work and experience are required to become an effective teacher. In addition, our schools and districts are not doing enough to help teachers grow in their content knowledge and teaching practice.

Some place blame on bad school administrators. In my opinion, our high school was poorly run, but our administrators didn’t always have the resources to do their job well. Our administration mostly reacted to events and crises instead of implementing sensible practices. There was very little feedback given to us teachers about our teaching.

In fact, over the entire year I had an administrator in my classroom observing me for a total of about ninety seconds. I received no meaningful feedback on my teaching. But it’s difficult to blame him when you consider how understaffed the school was. Because the school lacked a counselor at the beginning of that school year, the assistant principal had to take on those responsibilities while supervising students during breaks, dealing with disciplinary issues, communicating with parents, and putting out fires.

Some people have asked me whether it was difficult to teach in a school with lots of poor families who didn’t care about education. Not only is that stereotype inaccurate, it represents another line of reasoning that is simplistic. During that year I encountered some families who didn’t seem to care about their kids’ education and many that did. Sometimes when I called a student’s home I would get a parent who was involved and would intervene, sometimes not. I encountered one young woman who returned to high school as a senior after having taken some time off to care for her baby. Unfortunately, right at the end of the school year, this woman’s mother stopped offering to take care of her baby and she had to quit school.

Does that mean her family didn’t care about education? I don’t think we can tell. I think the best we can say is that each student is a person whose attitudes and capacity for learning is greatly shaped by past and present circumstances.

Simplistic diagnoses are dangerous because they encourage quick fixes. Instead of long-term plans for systemic change, school reform becomes a series of short-lived fads that cause teachers to become jaded by unfulfilled promises of improvement.

At my high school, la mode du jour was project-based learning (PBL). All teachers were trained in PBL (oh, how schools love acronyms) and required to design and implement one project for a class that year. The potential benefits of authentic problems that engage students in meaningful thinking and help them to develop useful life skills are  great, but the program was not implemented wholeheartedly. When I talked to one of my colleagues at this school a year later, I found out that PBL was no longer being practiced schoolwide. How can we expect to see meaningful improvement when we change from one fad to another every few years? The unfortunate truth is that the work of improving schools is long, arduous,and not at all sexy….

Lesson 2. Student Self-Concept Is the Best Explanatory Variable for Student Success

I have won teaching awards at the institutions where I’ve worked, but I intentionally held low expectations for my effectiveness as a high school teacher. Even so, I felt depressingly ineffective as a teacher most of that year. While it’s not wise to generalize from a single case, my experience shows that having strong content knowledge in one’s field is a necessary but insufficient condition for student learning to take place.

In the education research literature there are some econometric studies that attempt to measure how different variables (district spending per student, parents’ education level, past academic performance, training of teacher, students’ socioeconomic status, etc.) correlate with student achievement. So, which variables matter most?

According to John Hattie, the variable that correlates most strongly with student achievement is student self-concept. This is a very robust finding. His amazing book [2] synthesizes over 800 meta-analytic research papers on education (thereby covering over 15,000 journal articles!) to determine the variables that most strongly correlate with student achievement.

Self-concept is a person’s concept of “self” in a particular domain. The difference between self-esteem and self-concept is that the former is an overall view of oneself, whereas self-concept is domain specific. For example, I see myself as a successful learner of mathematics but a pretty poor painter and basketball player. The vast majority of people in our country have a low math self concept—many almost see it as a badge of honor to be bad at math….

Self-concept is shaped by prior academic achievement and one’s beliefs about who has access to mathematical skill and what it means to be “good” at mathematics. During this year I repeatedly observed that my attempts to make learning engaging (by using fun activities, putting mathematics in contexts that students could relate to, making connections to prior learning) were helpful, but not nearly as helpful as attending to students’ self-concepts as learners of mathematics.

If a student’s self-concept is based on past academic achievement and future performance correlates strongly with self-concept, how can we break this cycle? I learned that, regardless of how “tough” some students are or how weak their math skills are, teenagers still love feeling successful when they become good at something or when they figure something out. A sequence of small successes can lead students to develop intrinsic motivation to learn and take risks in a classroom. One way to stage these sequences of successes is through minute, detailed, careful scaffolding of mathematics content….

Lesson 3. Teaching Is a Far Less Respected Profession Than It Should Be

Many parents of school-age children will tell you their kids’ teachers are great but that “bad teachers” are part of the reason why the school system as a whole is failing. To me, this is one of many indicators of the level of respect that we afford teachers and teaching as a profession. In my opinion, discussions about teacher compensation just scratch the surface. I believe that the deeper issue is that our society, including some people in the school system, doesn’t see teaching as a growth oriented, intellectually demanding career deserving of our nation’s best and brightest individuals.

Teachers receive messages every day about how much they are valued as professionals. The way students and parents talked to teachers at our school, the process of signing in and out of work every day, down to the inconvenience of not being given a key to the school office (where the copier was) were examples of such messages. But the most disturbing messages came from the weekly professional development meetings that all teachers had to attend…..

Only rarely did I leave one of these weekly professional development meetings feeling invigorated. These were usually meetings in which teachers shared information about the students that we had in common or when the mathematics department met together without an administrator present. Unfortunately, the vast majority of these professional development meetings made me feel as if I had been babysat for an hour. And many of my teacher friends tell me that my experience is not unique….

Lesson 4. It’s Not the Written Curriculum That Matters, It’s the Assessed Curriculum

Many university mathematicians who take an interest in mathematics education tend to focus on mathematics curricula. For instance, university mathematicians feature prominently in debates about reform versus traditional textbooks that fuel the “math wars”. Perhaps the reason for this interest is that textbooks give us an easy way to join conversations about mathematics education.

Each of us learned mathematics as children, so feel we have something to contribute to the choice and design of math textbooks. Unfortunately, most of us university mathematicians are very different from the majority of students in our nation who have to study mathematics in high school. I, too, am interested in mathematics curricula and was excited to teach a range of classes and to use both reform and traditional curricula. However, at the beginning of that year I greatly overestimated the impact of textbooks on student learning.

The word “curriculum” has various meanings. The intended curriculum comprises state, district, and school standards that dictate what students are supposed to learn and when they are to learn it and, to some extent, how they are to learn it. The new Common Core State Standards are an example of this. Written curricula are the textbooks that schools and districts choose for teachers, but since teachers vary greatly in their adherence to and usage of textbooks, it is important that we pay attention to the curriculum that they enact. All of these lead to the attained curriculum, a construct for what students actually learn.

And then there’s the assessed curriculum. I knew little about this concept before my adventure started, but by the end of the school year I became keenly aware of it. Because we live in an era of accountability and standardized testing, my state and district use various assessments to measure how much students have learned. In a perfect world, the intended curriculum would align with the written and assessed curricula, but in practice they often do not agree. When this happens, teachers find themselves in the awkward position of having to decide how to sacrifice one set of learning intentions for another.

My principal was enthusiastic about a reform Algebra 1 curriculum. I was impressed by many wonderful features of this curriculum and wanted to follow it faithfully, but it did not align with our district’s periodic assessments. For example, there was a moment during that year when I had to decide whether to teach my students how to blindly follow a recipe to use the quadratic formula (since they weren’t yet ready to understand the derivation of that formula) or continue along the path set by our textbook and let them get all of those questions on the periodic assessment wrong. I chose the former and to this day still feel horrible about that decision. Over time I found my teaching becoming increasing aligned with the assessed curriculum: I reorganized the sequence of topics in this reform curriculum and altered how certain topics were introduced or emphasized. This led to a rather weak implementation of the written curriculum and a less coherent Algebra 1 course.

I believe that assessment is crucial to knowing whether students are learning and whether the strategies that schools and districts employ are working. However, we need to remember that these assessments enforce standards for student learning more powerfully than written curricula.

While that may not be a bad thing, thoughtful, well-aligned assessments tend to be expensive and labor intensive (both to develop and to grade). And the likelihood of creating and implementing these kinds of assessments is low given the severe financial condition of most states and districts….

Chicago Teachers’ Strike, Performance Evaluation, and School Reform (Jack Schneider and Ethan Hutt)

For the fifth consecutive day in Chicago, nearly 30,000 teachers are out on strike. At issue are many of the contractual details that typically complicate collective bargaining—pay, benefits, and the length of the work day. But the heart of the dispute roiling the Windy City is something relatively new in contract talks: a complicated statistical algorithm.

District leaders in Chicago, following the lead of reformers in cities nationwide, are pushing for a “value-added” evaluation system. Unlike traditional forms of evaluation, which rely primarily on classroom observations, policymakers in Chicago propose to quantify teacher quality through the analysis of student achievement data. Using cutting-edge statistical methodologies to analyze standardized test scores, the district would determine the value “added” by each teacher and use that information as a basis for making personnel decisions.

Teachers are opposed to this approach for a number of reasons. But educational researchers are generally opposed to it, too, and their reasoning is far less varied: value-added evaluation is unreliable.

As researchers have shown, value-added methodologies are still very much works-in-progress. Scholars like Heather Hill have found that value-added scores correlate not only with quality of instruction, but also with the population of students they teach. Researchers examining schools in Palm Beach, Florida discovered that more than 40 percent of teachers scoring in the bottom decile one year, according to value-added measurements, somehow scored in the top two deciles the following year. And according to a recent Mathematica study, the error rate for comparing teacher performance was 35 percent. Such figures could only inspire confidence among those working to suspend disbelief.

And yet suspending disbelief is exactly what reformers are doing. Instead of slowing down the push for value-added, they’re plowing full steam ahead. Why?

The promise of a mechanized quality-control process, it turns out, has long captivated education reformers. And while the statistical algorithm in question right now in Chicago happens to be quite new, reformer obsession with ostensibly standardized, objective, and efficient means of gauging value is, in fact, quite old. Unfortunately, as the past reveals, plunging headlong into a cutting-edge measurement technology is also quite problematic.

Example 1:
Nearly a century ago, school leaders saw a breakthrough in measurement technology as a way of measuring teacher quality. By using newly-designed IQ tests to assess “native ability,” school administrators could translate student scores on standardized tests into measures of teacher effectiveness. Of course, not everyone was on board with this effort. As one school superintendent noted, some educators were concerned “that the means for making quantitative and qualitative measures of the school product” were “too limited to provide an adequate basis for judgment.” But the promise of the future was too tempting and, as he argued, though it was “impossible” to measure teacher quality rigorously, “a good beginning” had been made. Reformers plowed ahead.

The IQ movement was deeply flawed. The instruments were faulty and culturally-biased. The methodology was inconsistent and poorly applied. And the interpretations were horrifying. “If both parents are feeble-minded all the children will be feeble-minded,” wrote H.H. Goddard in 1914. “Such matings,” he reasoned, “should not be allowed.” Others drew equally shocking conclusions. E.G. Boring, a distinguished psychologist of the period, wrote in 1920 that “the average man of many nations is a moron.” The average Italian-American adult, he calculated, had a mental age of 11.01 years. African-Americans were at the bottom of his list, with an average mental age of 10.41.

Value-added proponents like to make the argument that “some data is better than no data.” Yet in the case of the mental testing movement, that was patently false. For the hundreds of thousands of students
tracked into dead-end curricula, to say nothing of the forced sterilization campaigns that took place outside of schools, reform was imprudent and irresponsible.

But one need not go back so far into the educational past for examples of half-baked quality-control reforms peddled by zealous policymakers.

Example 2:
In the 1970s, 37 states hurriedly adopted “minimum competency testing” legislation and implemented “exit examinations,” ignoring the concerns of experts in the field. As one panel of scholars observed, the plan was “basically unworkable” and exceeded “the present measurement arts of the teaching profession.” Reformers, however, were not easily dissuaded.

The result of the minimum competency movement was the development of a high stakes accountability regime and years of litigation. Reformers claimed that the information revealed by such tests would provide the sunlight and shame that schools needed to improve. Yet while they awaited that outcome, thousands of students suffered the indignity of being labeled “functionally illiterate,” were forced into remedial classes, and had their diplomas withheld despite having enough units to graduate—all on the basis of a test that leading scholars described as “an indefensible technology.”

Contrary to what reformers claimed, the information provided by such deeply flawed tests did little to improve students’ learning or the quality of schools.

Today’s policymakers, like those of the past, want to adopt new tools as swiftly as possible. Even flawed value-added measures, they argue, are better than nothing. Yet the risks of early adoption, as the past reveals, can far outweigh the rewards. Simply put, acting rashly on incomplete information makes mistakes more costly than necessary.

Today’s value-added boosters believe themselves to be somehow different—acting on better incomplete information. Yet the idea that incomplete information can be good strains credulity.

Good technologies do tend to improve over time. And if advocates of value-added models are confident that they can work out the kinks, they should continue to judiciously experiment with them. In the meantime, however, such models should be kept out of all high-stakes personnel decisions. Until we can make them sufficiently work, they shouldn’t count.

________________________________

Jack Schneider is an Assistant Professor of Education at the College of the Holy Cross and author of Excellence For All: How a New Breed of Reformers Is Transforming America’s Public Schools. Ethan Hutt is a doctoral candidate at the Stanford University School of Education and has been named “one of the world’s best emerging social entrepreneurs” by the Echoing Green Foundation.

Acquiring Media Literacy and Using Technology

I described three teachers integrating film into their lessons in the previous post. The content of each film was connected to the unit that each teacher had developed and, presumably, the content standards that California wanted teachers to follow. The hardware they used were DVD players or teacher laptops connected to LCD projectors.

What they did not do was investigate the assumptions and biases in the films themselves or question the accuracy of the sources that writers, directors, and actors used in creating and making the film. Although California curriculum standards call for media literacy skills in English/ language arts and history/social science in K-12 grades, current high-stakes state tests contain no items that examine media literacy. With state and federal officials pressing teachers and students to score well on tests media literacy lessons are down low on most teachers’ “to do” lists. So I do not criticize these three teachers for not helping students analyze the films they watched to acquire skills in media literacy. For the past half-century, most teachers have not integrated media literacy into their lessons even as little and big screens have come to dominate the lives of children and adults outside of school.

Having students become media literate across school subjects has been talked about since the early 1960s but has hardly made a dent in lessons that most teachers teach. In Britain, Canada, and European nations there has been far more talk and even some action (media literacy Europe/Canada ). Much less so in the U.S.

What do I mean by teaching children skills of media literacy? I offer two examples of lessons using new technologies, one in a Canadian elementary school on analyzing candy ads after students had read Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and a Providence (RI) high school social studies lesson on World War II.

Watch on YouTube the Canadian elementary school teacher, using an interactive white board, teach a lesson on candy ads.

For the high school lesson, journalist Dana Goldstein describes a lesson where the teacher had students use laptops to analyze sources–her example of students working on media literacy skills.

I sat in on Jennifer Geller’s 10th grade Contemporary World History class at the Providence Career and Technical Academy. That day’s state-mandated lesson objective was to “trace patterns chronologically for events leading to World War II in Europe.” But Geller, a 12-year veteran in the district, used technology to layer a more ambitious and contemporary media literacy skills-building session on top of the dry history.

First the sophomores read the following paragraph in their Prentice Hall World History textbook:

With the [German] government paralyzed by divisions, both Nazis and Communists won more seats in the Reichstag, or lower house of the legislature. Fearing the growth of Communist political power, conservative politicians turned to Hitler. Although they despised him, they believed they could control him. Then, with conservative support, Hitler was appointed Chancellor in 1933 through legal means under the Weimar constitution.

Geller asked the kids to go to the back of room and pick up individual laptops, which had been borrowed for the day from the school’s library. Their task for the rest of the period was to search online for additional accurate information about Hilter’s rise to power that had not been included in their textbook, and then present it to the class.

Geller engaged the kids in a conversation about how search engines work. “Does anyone know how the first link on Google becomes the first one?” she asked. “It’s not the best — it’s that the most people linked to or clicked on that site. You should not always trust the first thing you see!”

Geller encouraged the students to look at Wikipedia, but skeptically. “Anyone can write these articles,” she explained. “The fact that anyone can change them or fix them means if something is wrong, it can be fixed. You have to be careful with it, just like you have to be careful with your textbook.”

Geller continued, “Who do you think gets to write a textbook? And how often is it updated? Maybe a downside is the textbook doesn’t change much from year to year.”

After searching online, the students learned that it wasn’t just “conservative politicians” who supported Hitler. In fact, a full third of the German public had voted for the Nazi party. “That’s why you use two sources!” Geller proclaimed.

The lesson was relevant to both historical research and day-to-day fact finding online. It also gave the students something pretty disturbing to think about regarding the relatively broad support enjoyed by Hitler and the Nazi Party in 1933. This struck me as an ideal classroom use of technology — and all it required were laptops and a wifi connection.

In both lessons, new technologies were used to get students engaged in tasks that built and used critical thinking skills to parse a textbook paragraph and candy ads. But as Bill Ferriter pointed out, the technology didn’t spur students, it was the teacher’s questions about candy ads and a textbook passage about Hitler becoming Chancellor that mattered. Laptops and an interactive white board didn’t motivate students to become media literate, the teachers did.

Khan Academy: The Hype and the Reality (Karim Kai Ami)

Karim Kai Ani is a  former middle school teacher  and  founder of Mathalicious. This post appeared in Valerie Strauss’s  “Answer Sheet” in the Washington Post on July 23, 2012. Following the post is Sal Khan’s response.

In a new profile in Time magazine, Sal Khan, founder of the popular Khan Academy, explains how he prepares for each of his video lessons. He doesn’t use a script. In fact, he admits, “I don’t know what I’m going to say half the time.”

During a recent address to Washington D.C.-area educators, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan highlighted the importance of teacher education and professional development, and urged that we as a country provide teachers with more time to collaborate and plan lessons for their students. He then turned and praised Khan as a leading innovator transforming education for millions of students around the country.

The highest ranking official in American education says that effective teaching requires training and planning, and then holds up as his archetype someone who openly admits to showing up to class every day unprepared. If a teacher said that, they’d be fired. And yet in the past year Sal Khan has been hailed as the “world’s teacher;” the “Messiah of Math;” and the savior for everything that ails public education.

The narrative surrounding Khan Academy has, it seems, gotten a bit out of hand.

It’s not Sal’s fault. He didn’t set out to become one of the biggest celebrities in education but simply to help his cousins with their math homework. But Ann Doerr, wife of venture capitalist John Doerr, picked up on it. Then Bill Gates. Then the San Jose Mercury, “60 Minutes,” the New York Times … and all of a sudden Khan Academy, a collection of low-res videos offering step-by-step instructions for how to solve math problems, was being hailed as the Next Big Thing in education.

And big it is: Khan Academy boasts almost 3,300 videos that have been viewed over 160 million times. That’s a heroic achievement.

But there’s a problem: the videos aren’t very good.

VIDEO CODE: http://www.khanacademy.org/math/algebra/linear-equations-and-inequalitie/v/algebra–slope

Take Khan’s explanation of slope, which he defines as “rise over run.” An effective math teacher will point out that “rise over run” isn’t the definition of slope at all but merely a way to calculate it. In fact, slope is a rate that describes how two variables change in relation to one another: how a car’s distance changes over time (miles per additional hour); how the price of an iPod changes as you buy more memory (dollars per additional gigabyte).

To the lay person this may seem like a trivial distinction, but slope is one of the most fundamental concepts in secondary math. If students don’t understand slope at the conceptual level, they won’t understand functions. If they don’t understand functions, they won’t understand Algebra. And if they don’t understand Algebra, they can’t understand Calculus. It’s that simple.

Or rather, it’s not. Because effective teaching is incredibly complex. It requires planning. It requires reflection. And it certainly requires more than just “two minutes of research on Google,” which is how Khan describes his own pre-lesson routine.

As a result, experienced educators have begun to push back against what they see as fundamental problems with Khan’s approach to teaching. In June, two professors from Grand Valley State University created their own video in which they pointed out errors in Khan’s lesson on negative numbers: not things they disagreed with, but things he got plain wrong. To his credit, Khan did replace the video. However, instead of using this as an opportunity to engage educators and improve his teaching, he dismissed the criticism.

“It’s kind of weird,” Khan explained, “when people are nitpicking about multiplying negative numbers.”

When asked why so many teachers have such adverse reactions to Khan Academy, Khan suggests it’s because they’re jealous. “It’d piss me off, too, if I had been teaching for 30 years and suddenly this ex-hedge-fund guy is hailed as the world’s teacher.”

Of course, teachers aren’t “pissed off” because Sal Khan is the world’s teacher. They’re concerned that he’s a bad teacher who people think is great; that the guy who’s delivered over 170 million lessons to students around the world openly brags about being unprepared and considers the precise explanation of mathematical concepts to be mere “nitpicking.” Experienced educators are concerned that when bad teaching happens in the classroom, it’s a crisis; but that when it happens on YouTube, it’s a “revolution.”

Because the truth is that there’s nothing revolutionary about Khan Academy at all. In fact, Khan’s style of instruction is identical to what students have seen for generations: a do this then do this approach to teaching that presents mathematics as a meaningless series of steps. Khan himself says that “math is not just random things to memorize and regurgitate,” yet that’s exactly how his videos present it.

Sal Khan has done something remarkable in creating such a vast and varied library, and he deserves to be recognized. His commitment to making the site free is a rare and selfless act, and he deserves to be praised. Sal Khan is a good guy with a good mission. What he’s not, though, is a good teacher.

Unfortunately, the media hype surrounding Khan Academy has created a level of expectation far beyond what it – indeed, what any person or website – could ever reasonably deliver. Reporters have confused journalism with sycophantism, and the entire narrative has become a head-scratching example of the suspension of common sense.

The real problem with Khan Academy is not the low-quality videos or the absence of any pedagogical intentionality. It’s just one resource among many, after all. Rather, the danger is that we believe the promise of silver bullets – of simple solutions to complex problems – and in so doing become deaf to what really needs to be done.

As Arne Duncan said, we need to invest in professional development, and provide teachers with the support and resources they need to be successful. We need to give them time to collaborate, and create relevant content that engages students and develops not just rote skills but also conceptual understanding. We have to help new teachers figure out classroom management – to reach the student who shows up late to class every day and never brings a pencil – and free up veteran teachers to mentor younger colleagues.

I recently attended the inaugural #TwitterMathCamp, a collection of teachers who traveled from around the country (plus two Canucks!)…during their vacation…and paid out of pocket…to discuss how best to introduce proportions and whether slope always requires units.

We need to stop focusing on the teachers who are doing it wrong and instead recognize the ones who are doing it right: the Frank Noscheses and the Kate Nowaks; the Sadie Estrellas and the Sam Shaws; the ones who spend their time trying to become better to make someone else’s kids smarter.

We have to recognize the good, and then cultivate it.

Before we can do that, though, we have to agree on what “good” is. I don’t know what I’m going to say half the time isn’t good enough, and we have to stop pretending that it is.

We face very real challenges in K-12 education today, and they will not be solved with just a Wacom tablet and a YouTube account. Instead, they’ll be solved by teachers who understand their content; who understand how children learn; who walk into the classroom every day and think, “I know exactly what I’m going to say, because that’s what teaching means.”

Sal Khan’s response to Valerie Strauss at the Washington Post July 25, 2012

Hi Valerie,

We here at the Khan Academy appreciate a public discourse on education and really encourage as much feedback as possible.  We believe that we are in the early days of what we are and feedback will only make that better.  I agree with you that no organization should be upheld as a magic bullet for education woes.  We have never said that we are a cure-all and think we have a lot to do just to fulfill our potential as a valuable tool for students and teachers. Unfortunately, some of the headlines on articles are more grandiose, but we have no say in this.

In your previous post, you talk about the value of experiential learning versus lecture-based.  We agree 100% with you; that is what KA is about too–allowing classrooms to be more interactive and experiential.  See this video: http://www.khanacademy.org/talks-and-interviews/v/ideal-math-and-science-class-time.

We are also running project based summer camps.

With that said, there have been some major errors on your blog.  In particular, Karim’s corrections are very incorrect (I encourage you to seek out an impartial math professor). 

 Slope actually is defined as change in y over change in x (or rise over run).

Karim’s definition is actually incorrect. Slope is not just a rate between two variables. It is how the variable plotted on the vertical axis changes with respect to the variable plotted on the horizontal axis (or “rise over run”). For example, if price were on the x-axis and memory on the y-axis, then Karim’s “how the price of an iPod changes as you buy more memory” would not be slope (it would be the inverse).

And, yes, slope is often unit-less (especially when measuring the slope of say the surface of a mountain which is where the whole idea comes from — you are dividing a distance by a distance so the units cancel).

I walk through this in a video at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TNaQJjLAhkI

I also think you might misunderstand our “business model.”  Unlike Mathalicious which is for-profit (and if it does well, Karim will become very wealthy), Khan Academy is a 501c3 not-for-profit.  I take a salary from it that is approved by the board, but I do not own it (no one does).  It can never IPO or be sold.  It is a public charity.

Let me know if you’d like to chat further.

regards,

Sal

How Much and What Kind of Teacher Education Do Novices Need?

An official with an influential foundation eager to transform teacher education was convinced that:

[T]eacher education could occur rapidly given the long tenure in classrooms already served by intending teachers:
The underlying assumption was that bright candidates, after spending sixteen years in elementary, secondary, and college classrooms, have inevitably absorbed a good deal of knowledge about classroom management and techniques of teaching, and that with this backlog of experience a high level of professional skill could be rapidly reached through special courses, seminars, classroom experience, and discussions.

Year? 1969. Program? Masters in Arts of Teaching. Person? Alvin Eurich, Vice-President of the Ford Foundation.

By the end of the 1970s, MATs had largely disappeared. But the belief that smart young people could be converted into smart teachers because they had been students for over 16 years, well, that lives on in Teach for America and similar programs that have brief summer programs for novice teachers before the initiates enter full time teaching.

Here’s Amanda Ripley comparing fighter pilot preparation to teacher training:

Before the Air Force technician George Deneault flew combat missions, he had to practice—a lot. “You can’t fool around on combat aircraft.” But when Deneault retired and became a special-ed math teacher, he walked into a Virginia classroom cold. When asked which was easier—being a military commander or being a teacher—he didn’t hesitate. “Commander.”

Now that researchers have quantified the impact that teachers make, we should do more to train them rigorously. And we could learn from the military, where a mantra of readiness is referred to as the “Eight P’s”: “Proper prior planning and preparation prevent piss-poor performance.”

The only way the brain learns to handle unpredictable environments is to practice. Before student teachers enter classes, Boston’s Match Teacher Residency program puts them through 100 hours of drills with students and adults acting like slouching, fiddling, back-talking kids. The brain learns to respond to routine misbehavior, so it can focus on the harder work of teaching. The Institute for Simulation and Training runs a virtual classroom at 12 education colleges nationwide—using artificial intelligence, five child avatars, and a behind-the-scenes actor. Some trainees find the simulation so arduous that they decide not to go into teaching after all.

But these innovations are rare. The average teacher-to-be does about 12 to 15 weeks of student teaching. Once on the job, most teachers get only nominal supervision, and 46 percent quit within five years.

It is time, finally, to start training teachers the way we train doctors and pilots, with intense, realistic practice, using humans, simulations, and master instructors—time to stop saying teaching is hard work and start acting like it.

What Amanda Ripley omitted from her comparison of fighter pilots and novice teachers is that flight training for U.S. Air Force and U.S. Navy fighter pilots takes over a year of intense 12-hour days of academic and practice-focused training. Such a fact messes up her facile point.

Novice teachers do become effective teachers through supervised practice, knowing their subject matter, and practicing skills again and again for thousands of hours over three to five years of actual work in classrooms. It certainly takes more than a few weeks of lectures in a summer program for Teach for America and 100 hours in a boot-camp simulation of classroom lessons.

Even a new practice-focused graduate program for current charter school teachers and TFA-ers in regular schools requires two years of classes taken while novices are teaching full-time. These programs hold graduates accountable for their students’ academic achievement; they study and use Doug Lemov’s 49 strategies cataloged in “Teach Like a Champion,” a teacher and founder of a charter school.

Alvin Eurich’s assumption in 1969 that smart college graduates can learn to teach in short-term MAT programs appears quaint today. And comparisons to training fighter pilots are slippery because training is longer and more intense than quoted by one journalist. The press for quick, telescoped training programs for smart college graduates that are practical in focusing on asking the right questions, dealing with student wrong answers, and maintaining classroom control remains a staple of “no excuses” reformers who want to bake bread in an instant without ovens.

Teachers Working with Teachers: School Districts (Part 3)

Occasionally, school systems cultivate both professional development across their districts and school-based learning communities focused on instructional improvement. In Pittsburgh (PA) in the early 1980s, for example, Superintendent Richard Wallace closed a high school with low test scores and declining enrollment and re-opened it as a magnet school for students and training center for the district’s high school teachers.

Between 1983-1989, the teacher center brought nearly one thousand teachers in 11 other district high schools to the training center to spend eight weeks learning the Madeline Hunter approach to lessons, content knowledge in their discipline, and ways to improve their teaching through seminars, observations of master teachers, and conferences. After eight weeks, teachers returned to their high school assignments. Evaluations posted high teacher satisfaction with the experience, difficulties after they returned to their classrooms, and gains in student test scores.  [i]

Between the late-1980s and mid-1990s, New York City Community district 2 under the leadership of Superintendent Anthony Alvarado stressed continuous instructional improvement across 48 elementary and middle schools. Through a variety of mechanisms such as the Professional Development Laboratory, Intervisitations and Peer Networks, and Instructional Consulting Service, principals worked closely with teachers on instructional improvement because “good ideas come from talented people working together” and “collegiality, caring, and respect” make a difference in what occurs in classrooms. Targeted instructional improvement led to Focused Literacy programs in over a dozen low-performing schools. In those schools, teachers taught lessons that were “more intensive, more structured, and more teacher-centered version of the district’s broader literacy program.” And the district’s academic achievement rose annually moving up into the ranks of higher performing community districts.[ii]

Also consider how the largely minority and poor Sanger school district in the Central Valley of California with nearly 11,000 students in 19 schools approached instructional improvement through professional development. In 2004, the district itself and seven schools were designated as failing schools under NCLB and placed into Program Improvement, a state effort to turn around failing schools. Within five years, all seven schools had recovered sufficiently to leave Program Improvement and four of those schools became State Distinguished Schools. In addition, by 2009, 12 of the 13 elementary schools exceeded the target score of 800 that the state set for the Academic Performance Index. This is an extraordinary accomplishment for a high-poverty, largely minority district facing all of the complexity that such systems encounter daily.[iii]

How did they do it? Opinions differ, of course, on which factors made the difference but researchers and informed observers do agree on the following:

*Continuing superintendent leadership over the long haul; Marc Johnson has been superintendent since 2002 and Rich Smith, his deputy, since 2004.

*Steadfast focus on instructional improvement through direct instruction to meet state curriculum standards and improve performance on state tests.

*Establishing systematic and intensive district-wide professional development and school-based teacher learning communities aimed at improved classroom practices in daily lessons.

Evaluators described the strategy:

They adopted the [Rick] DuFour’s model of teacher professional learning communities (PLCs) as the vehicle for teachers to work collaboratively to improve student achievement and develop a sense of collective responsibility. They chose a model of direct instruction, Explicit Direct Instruction (EDI), with structures designed to help low performing and language minority students work on grade-level standards with frequent checking for understanding. To support students struggling at grade level, district leaders designed their own version of Response to Intervention (RTI), creating both in-class intervention and a range of intervention classes to meet the specific needs of students at risk of falling behind. To provide added help to English learners, the district expanded its emphasis on English language development (ELD).[iv]

Johnson’s vision and inspiration and Smith’s practical implementation of the vision and the above multi-faceted program help explain Sanger’s successful turnaround of a failing district.

Districts providing support for teacher collaboration such as what happened in Sanger in California’s Central Valley, Community District 2 in New York City, and Pittsburgh did not occur magically. Nor was it magical when grade-level and departmental learning communities and school-wide groups of teachers worked together on instructional improvement with administrative support where stable leadership over a decade or more made possible the building of further knowledge and skills among teachers. It is that collaboration bent toward improving teaching and learning that is essential for schools to adapt to the DNA of complex systems to achieve instructional effectiveness and student academic improvement.

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[i] Edward Miech, Bill Nave, Frederick Mosteller, “Large Scale Professional Development for Schoolteachers: Cases from Pittsburgh,New York City, and the National School Refo

rm Faculty,” New Directions for Evaluation, 2001, pp. 83-100;

[ii] Richard Elmore and Deanna Burney, “Continuous Improvement in Community District# 2, New York City,”1998, (Pittsburgh, PA: High Performance Learning Communities Project, Learning Research and Development Center, University of Pittsburgh). In 2002, Mayor Michael Bloomberg took over district schools and he reorganized the schools, ending community districts.

[iii] Jane David and Joan Talbert, “Turning Around a High-Poverty School District:

Learning from Sanger Unified’s Success,” An external Evaluation for the S. H. Cowell Foundation, November 2010. Also see John Fensterwald, “Lessons from High-peformers,” Thoughts on Public Education at: http://toped.svefoundation.org/2010/10/26/lessons-from-high-performing-districts/

[iv]David and Talbert, p. 10.