Data-Driven Instructional Practice in Action (Part 2)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Data-Driven Instruction and the Practice of Teaching

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Now, principals and teachers are awash in data.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Respect for Teaching: One Person’s Tale

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

___________________________________

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On Changing One’s Mind about Schooling

In Diane Ravitch’s new book (The Death and Life of the Great American School System), she tells of her recent switch from championing school reforms (testing, accountability, and choice) as a federal policymaker, educational historian, and pundit to rejecting these policies. Ravitch’s turnaround got me thinking about what I had believed earlier in my career and believe now fifty years later.

I began teaching high school in 1955 filled with the passion to teach history to youth and help them find their niche in the world while making a better society. At that time, I believed wholeheartedly in words taken from John Dewey’s “Pedagogic Creed” (1897): “… education is the fundamental method of social progress and reform.”

And I tried to practice those utopian words in my teaching in Cleveland (OH) and Washington, D.C. between the early 1960s and mid-1970s. While in retrospect I could easily call this faith in the power of teaching and schooling to make a better life and society naïve, I do not. That passionate idealism about teaching and the role that schooling plays in a democratic, market-driven society gave meaning and drive to those long days working as a teacher, getting married, starting a family, and taking university classes at night.

That confident belief in the power of schools to reform society took me to Washington, D.C. in 1963 to teach Peace Corps returnees how to become teachers at Cardozo High School. I stayed nearly a decade in D.C. teaching and administering school-site and district programs aimed at turning around schools in a largely black city, a virtual billboard for severe inequalities.

I worked in programs that trained young teachers to teach in low-performing schools, programs that organized residents in impoverished neighborhoods to improve their community, programs that created alternative schools and district-wide professional development programs for teachers and administrators. While well intentioned federal and D.C. policymakers attacked the accumulated neglect that had piled up in schools over decades, they adopted these reform-driven programs haphazardly without much grasp of how to implement them in schools and classrooms.

I have few regrets for what I and many other like-minded individuals did during those years. I take pride in the many teachers and students who participated in these reforms who were rescued from deadly, mismanaged schools, and ill-taught classrooms. But the fact remains that by the mid-1970s, with a few notable exceptions, most of these urban school reforms others and I had worked in had become no more than graffiti written in snow. And the social inequalities that we had hoped to reduce, persisted.

After leaving D.C., my subsequent work as a superintendent, high school teacher, professor, and researcher into the history of school reform led me to see that the relationship between public schools, reform, and society was far more entangled than I had thought. Most important, I came to understand that the U.S. has a three-tiered system of schooling based upon performance and socioeconomic status.

Top-tier schools—about 10 percent of all U.S. schools–such as selective urban high schools in New York, Boston, and San Francisco and schools in mostly affluent suburbs such as New Trier High School (IL), Beverly Hills (CA), Scarsdale (NY) meet or exceed national and state curriculum standards. They head lists of high-scoring districts in their respective states. These schools send nearly all of their graduates to four-year colleges and universities.

Second-tier schools—about 50 percent of all schools often located in inner-ring suburbs (e.g., T.C. Williams High School in Alexandria, VA) often meet state standards and send most of their graduating classes to college. But, on occasion, they slip in and out of compliance with federal and state accountability rules, get dinged, and continue on their way as second-tier schools.

Then there is the third tier of schools located in big cities such as D.C., Philadelphia, Detroit, St. Louis, Atlanta, and rural areas where largely poor and minority families live. Most schools in these cities are low-performing and frequently on the brink of being closed. Occasionally, a stellar principal and staff will lift a school into the second tier but that is uncommon.

Such a three-tier system in the U.S., I concluded, maintains social stability (and inequalities) yet, and this is a mighty large “yet,” good teachers and schools even in the lowest tier of schools can promote positive intellectual, behavioral, and social change in many children and youth .

The irony, of course, is that current policymakers from President Obama through local school board presidents and superintendents still mime John Dewey’s words and act as if schools can, indeed, reform society. Knowledge gained from decades of experience as a teacher, administrator, and researcher have made me allergic to utopian rhetoric about the role of schools in society. I have become skeptical of anyone spouting words about schools being in the vanguard of social reform.

Yet, I must also say that those very same experiences have tempered but not dissolved my early idealism. I still believe that content-smart and classroom-wise teachers who know their students well can make significant differences in individual students’ lives even if collectively they cannot cure societal ills.

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

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

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

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

________________SMALL STEPS_____________________

i                                                                                                                                       f

n                                                                                                                                     u

c                                   A                                                  B                                           n

r                                                                                                                                      d

e__________________________________________________a

m                                                                                                                                    m

e                                                                                                                                      e

n                                   C                                                  D                                           n

t                                                                                                                                        t

a                                                                                                                                      a

l                                                                                                                                       l

____________________GRAND MOVES_____________________

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

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

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

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

Which quadrant would you choose?

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

A New Teacher’s Classroom Dilemma

I have used the word “dilemma” in earlier posts (9/22 and 10/27) since superintendents, principals, teachers, and, yes, students face situations that call for difficult choices among conflicting values. So for this post, I offer a throny dilemma with which readers can wrestle.

By dilemmas, I mean situations where you have to choose between two or more competing and prized values. The choice is often hard because in choosing you end up sacrificing something of value to gain a bit of satisfaction on another value.

An example of a common dilemma might help. One that each of us face is the personal/professional dilemma. You value highly your work and you value highly your family and friends. Those are the competing values. But your time and energy are limited. So you have to calculate the trade-offs between doing more of one and less of the other. You have to make choices.

You map out options: Put in fewer hours at work and more time at home. Or the reverse. Take more vacations and give up thoughts of career advancement. These and other options, each with its particular trade-offs, become candidates for a compromise that includes both satisfaction and sacrifice. If you do nothing–another option–you risk losing out with your family and friends or with your job.

This is not a problem that one neatly solves and moves on to the next one. It is a dilemma that won’t go away. It is literally built into your daily routine. There is no tidy solution; it has to be managed because the compromise you work out may unravel and there you are again, facing those unattractive choices.

With that brief definition of a dilemma, consider the following situation that faced this first-year teacher.

In a culturally diverse high school of 1300 students in northern California, Dorothy Ramirez teaches 10th grade biology. In one of her 5 classes she has 32 students of whom one-third are Latino, one-third are African-American, and one-third are white, Alberto, a 17-year old Latino who has turned in his assignments on time and hovers between a C and D, has begun disrupting the class.

Recently, Alberto began to talk with those around him while the teacher is lecturing or leading a whole-group discussion. Even after Ramirez quietly asked Alberto to stop, he continues these side conversations. On two occasions, she kept Alberto after class for a few minutes to ask if there was something going on to account for his behavior. He said nothing. The next day, he repeated the same behavior during a student presentation and was rude to Ramirez when she asked him to stop. Two other students began smirking and talking to one another while the teacher listened to students give their opinions during a whole-group discussion. Ramirez asked Alberto to leave class for 10 minutes to cool off outside the door and he did. The same thing happened the following day.

Ramirez decided to call home because she feared that she was losing control of Alberto. If this occurred, then it might spread like an infection to the rest of the class. She called his parents and discovered that they speak only Spanish. Since she speaks only English, Ramirez enlisted the help of a Spanish-speaking counselor at school who called home and spoke with the mother. The mother told the counselor that she, too, is having trouble with Alberto, the oldest of her three children and she promised to speak to him.

The next day in biology class, Alberto had another run-in with Ramirez over the same conduct. The teacher called the counselor and mother and they met the following day where it came out that the mother couldn’t control Alberto at home. Ramirez suggested speaking with the father. The mother got very upset because the father works two jobs to support the family and if he finds out about Alberto’s behavior at school and home, the father will beat him as he has done before. The meeting adjourned with no action taken but deep concern over what to do if Alberto causes more trouble in class.

1. Which prized values are in conflict for Ramirez?

2. What are Ramirez’s options in managing this dilemma?

3. Which one should she choose? Why?

Leaving the Classroom for Good: The Conundrum in Action

I have never met Sarah Fine who, after four years of teaching English, left Washington, D.C.’s Cesar Chavez Public Charter School in August 2009. I had read her occasional pieces about teaching in the Washington Post and admired her honesty and smarts about D.C. students, parents, and administrators.

Sarah Fine is, of course, another statistic in the high attrition of young, talented teachers who “burn out” after a few years from tough working conditions (long days and evenings, antagonistic principals, heavy teaching load of needy kids). She also gets tired of the persistent question from family and friends: you still teaching? The smell of disrespect for teaching as a second-hand profession rankled Fine no end. Yet she regretted leaving because she knew that her exit was another blow to her students. Her story is one that puts a face to the conundrum of blaming teachers for students’ low performance and then expecting them to turn around and remedy the ills.

In one article, she crisply framed the issue of young, idealistic, mission-driven teachers leaving after only four years of teaching:

“Having a base of teachers who teach for more than a token few years is critical to school reform. It helps principals and school leaders develop trusting relationships with teachers. It helps teachers collaborate with one another. Most of all, it helps students. A teacher with experience is not always a good teacher, but a good teacher is always better after a few years of experience.”

Sarah Fine is (rather was) an “Idealist,” one of three groups of U.S. teachers that researchers surveyed recently. The other groups of teachers were labeled “Contented” and “Disheartened.” More than half of the “Idealists” (23 percent of the teachers surveyed) are under 32 and they entered teaching to help poor and minority students. Over one-third of the “Idealists” say that they will leave teaching in a few years for other jobs in education. The “Contented” (37 percent) are veteran teachers of ten or more years experience who intend to remain in the classroom. Two out of three teach in middle to upper-middle class schools; they are satisfied with their administrators and have sufficient time to craft strong lesson plans. The “Disheartened” (40 percent) are older and more experienced than the “Idealists.” Most teach in low-income schools. They find administrators frustrating; disorder in the school scares them; and they get angry over too much testing.

What these surveys offer is an unsettling tripartite division of nearly four million teachers into those who exit too early to leave any footprints in classrooms, those who feel beleaguered and unappreciated, and a minority of teachers content to teach in affluent schools.

Over half of the teachers, according to this survey, either leave the job or are upset by what they experience daily. Moreover, beyond the survey, teaching, as Sarah Fine reminds us, garners little respect across the country from high-status educated classes—compared to the high regard teachers receive in Canada and western European nations. Whispers about teachers scoring low on the SAT, unambitious college graduates who couldn’t succeed in other jobs or those who look for security and long vacations fill the air that policy elites breathe.

I have no neat solutions to fix either high attrition among young teachers or the persistent disrespect for teaching that exists today. Generous awards established for teachers and special days set aside to honor them just won’t remove the stink of low regard.What drove Sarah Fine from the classroom and what the survey revealed cannot be resolved with teachers receiving medals and cash awards; the problems are rooted in the social and educational structures (e.g., residential segregation, single-salary schedule, weak evaluation procedures, inadequate professional development, large student load, and the age-graded school). The problems are anchored in the history of top-down, efficiency-driven policies (e.g., buying 1:1 laptops; testing students every year) that give teachers little say in the work they do and disrespects the expertise they have in teaching children and youth. For well over a century, reform-driven policymakers have decided what teachers should teach, how they should teach, with what tools and for how long without any serious efforts to tap their experience and wisdom gained in classrooms. These policymakers, of course, mirror the low regard with which teachers are held in this society. Placing token teachers on blue-ribbon committees or policymakers’ hopeful rhetoric about teachers “buying in” to the school reform to insure full implementation or lowering anti-union hostility will hardly dent that deep reservoir of disrespect. Nor will such empty measures keep more Sarah Fines from leaving the classroom.

Teachers as Both Problem and Solution: The Conundrum That Won’t Go Away

Has anyone noticed that much of the blame showered on teachers and unions for blocking school reform by business-admiring pundits and policymakers is usually followed by perky pay-for-performance plans and other solutions wholly dependent upon teachers embracing the changes? Framing teachers as both the problem and the solution is a tough conundrum to unravel. Teachers, however, are not the only ones to grapple with the paradox of being blamed for a problem and then expected to turn around and solve the very same problem.

Consider medical care. Patients, insurance companies, and federal officials criticize physicians and hospitals for errors in practice and ignoring the accelerating cost of providing health care. Tough questions are asked: Which hospitals are best and worst for cardiac surgery or for treating children with cystic fibrosis? Why do doctors commit many errors (illegible handwriting on prescriptions, incomplete charts, etc.)? Should doctors get paid for how often they treat patients or how well they treat them?

In an era of rising health care costs, voter reluctance to increase taxes, holding doctors publicly and personally responsible for outcomes and containing costs have spurred market driven reforms that have swept over the practice of medicine heretofore immune to such debates. For-profit hospitals and private insurers now compete for customers, magazines publish rankings of best U.S. hospitals, and insurance companies link doctors’ practices to their pay. Such instances of business-inspired reforms seek improved delivery of health care to Americans.
These market-driven solutions for health care problems—let’s call them reforms–raise serious issues of trust between doctors and patients over the degree to which private insurance companies or physicians will control medical practice. Deep concerns over doctor-patient relationships and practitioner autonomy get entangled in volatile policy debates over the quality and cost of national health care thus sharply spotlighting the contradiction of more than 800,000 doctors and nearly 6,000 hospitals getting singled out as being a serious problem while looking to these very same people and institutions to remedy the health care crisis.

Teachers in largely minority urban and rural schools have also been framed as both the problem and solution for low-performing students. Expanding parental choice through charter schools, advocating higher pay for administrators and teachers who can show student gains in test scores, promoting more competition among schools are only a few of the packaged ideas borrowed from the business community. This shared paradox among medical and school practitioners of being bashed and then expected to solve the problems for which they are bashed is like a virus that has infected two social institutions critical to the nation’s future. No vaccine, however, exists for this virus. The conundrum is here to stay.

What to do about this abiding paradox?

1. Were national and state leaders to openly acknowledge that blaming teachers as a group for the ills of poor schooling and then expecting those very same awful teachers to turn around and work their hearts out to remedy those ills is simply goofy. Over 3.5 million teachers do the daily work of teaching; they teach reading, wipe noses, find lost backpacks, write recommendations, and grade tests. No online courses, charter schools, vouchers, home schooling, or any other star-crossed idea that business-driven, entrepreneurial reformers design will replace them. So blaming and shaming teachers into working harder is no recipe for improved student learning. Surely, like any group of professionals, teachers have to be prodded and they have to be supported. Prodding they get a lot of; support is where these so-called leaders fall down badly.

2. De-escalating the virulent rhetoric about unions and incompetent teachers would be a reasonable first step. Lowering the noise level from 24/7 cable, the Internet, and talk radio is as hard to do as it is to get bipartisan support among Republicans and Democrats over health care reform in a polarized political climate. Respect for teachers, never high in the U.S. to begin with, has unraveled even further with constant bashing. But hard as it us to ratchet down the noise level does not mean it is impossible.

3. Moving away from critics’ obsessive concentration on unions and the small number of incompetent teachers (or “rubber room” examples of non-working but paid teachers in New York City) and focus on the structures that keep even mediocre teachers from improving is another step. Such structures as single-salary schedule, evaluation procedures, hit-and-miss professional development, daily load of students to teach, number of courses taught, and the age-graded school—all influence what happens in classrooms.

None of these in of themselves can end the conundrum of blaming teachers for untoward student outcomes and then depending on them to fix the problem. But they are a start.