$4 Billion Race

I've read several articles in recent weeks about the $4 billion that the U.S. government is planning to spend on the department of education's "Race to the Top" program. Looking up from the magazine articles or the online reports, I see my administrators scurrying off to meetings on this very topic. Talk is about funding, hustling, standards, performance pay, incentives, and how this is all going to look.

To this country boy it already doesn't look good.

I've never known throwing money at people to bring out the best in them. I'm all for a fair wage for an honest day's work. As an English teacher I coach students through about 2,000 pages of essays and research papers a year. Helping students read critically and write effectively, I figure I do my fair share. But it's not just about English teachers. What all teachers do day-in-day-out is vital to our collective, democratic future. It's important work to be valued and compensated handsomely, but not to be pimped and whored with pay incentives and extortion of headlines of "failed schools."

Some fifty years ago, my uncle, a farmer, had a cheeky motto: "You can buy better, but you can't pay any more." He had it printed on yardsticks and we all got a chuckle out of the nonsense. Nowadays, I'm beginning to see the joke, but I'm not laughing.

This is what I mean: I am passionate about my students, their future, and the discipline we share. But those are the reasons I teach. I'm not some salesperson who will teach longer, faster, more to reach a quota. I already work 80 hours a week on my craft. In the past year I've garnered top honors in my state for my teaching and National Board certification without pecuniary incentive or end-of-the-year bonus. Throwing money at me won't provide me with more time and motivation, especially as more of what is being asked is to be devoid-of-passion standards that have little to do with my students, their future, and the discipline. Rather so called "initiatives" will work to sap it from all authentic meaning and purpose with bubble test items: What is the best meaning of the word "craft" in this paragraph? A boat, B writing, C art, D work.

Throwing money at educators, won't bring out the best in them or in their students. We've seen what money has done to the standard of living in our culture; we've seen what a concern for "how it looks" has done for "what it is" and "how it feels," sacrificing style for substance, standards for understanding. Now we are asking teachers, some of our most optimistic and idealistic citizens--those workers who have been shown to be the least motivated by pay incentives--to go for the buck a.k.a. to race for the top. Ostensibly, to be the best. It doesn't make sense. We know from experience in every sector--but most notably of late the financial sector where dollar signs reign--we know, the most idealistic will be maligned, the lesser will fall for the bribe, and the least of these will cheat for it.

Placing more pressure, attention, and importance on poor measurements of students is a miscarriage of pedagogical planning. The tests show more about social, economic, and cultural advantage and disadvantage than about intelligence, and less about purposeful learning or teacher value-added effect. Moreover, the tests are skewed to favor certain verbal and math skills and are mute on others.

Much knowledge and skills so important to our students future defy being boxed in on such tests. Would not only the students that are born to excel in these vital disciplines be discouraged from pursuing and developing their given talents, but also the teachers who teach these subject be denied the incentives? What might happen to our country's lead in creativity, innovation, sports, arts, entertainment industries--none of which are tested by standardized tests? (Could that be a reason they are so good?)

These questions about varying disciplines point to the problem of teaching teams and collaboration among professionals. Merit pay promises to make competitors of us all. Why should one teacher share the strategies that are going to give her an edge on the year-end bonus even if it means greater learning for all students? It's taken the decades of my experience to see teachers become less territorial and open to team-planning; this "race" is poised to undermine such joint efforts posthaste and take us back a generation.

A parent of one of my students recently asked me what can we do? I'm not sure there's much to be done so long as lobbyists for the testing companies loiter in our capitol buildings, so long as the politicians long for a simplistic message, so long as citizens are fooled to by test results, and so long as universites do not stem the tide with better research and measures that can offer the alternatives. The last of these is probably our best hope. We need policy makers to reverse the trend. But in my more fearful moments, I worry that many policy makers are in fact hoping that we teach less not more to our students. It's insidious.

I'm not under the illusion that there's much I can do about this save quit teaching, and little that will solve. So I'll keep teaching to the test as nominal as possible, stay in the race so to speak, but try to do as much as possible to teach around the test in effort to serve students' futures. I don't have $4 billion to reward schools that help students innovate, create, and solve, let alone the billion that will be spent on misinformation about "racing to the top." Nor am I under the illusion that that those schools, teachers, and students that will be acclaimed as the top will be substantially better than the ones below--they'll only get paid off for spending so much time prepping for a test. A short term gain for a loss of a generation of learning.

The ones who don't make it will be maligned but what will be worse is the learning lost in teaching to the test that they failed. It's a lose-lose proposition. With $4 billion on this Race to the Top, my uncle's adage sadly takes on new meaning.

"You can buy better, but you can't pay any more."

iPod Curriculum

First let me say, for those who don’t know me from previous posts, I’m a digital media literacy advocate. I believe that it’s imperative for media literacy and digital skills to be taught in the English Language Arts classrooms, and elsewhere. But I also believe that students must be taught these skills in tandem with traditional literacies of reading, writing, speaking, listening, viewing, and representing. The new media expand these literacies, but first they stand on them.
Without the traditional skills and understandings of basic language arts, digital literacies become just so much pushing buttons, tinkering with software (soon to be updated and outmoded), and presenting the superficial.

I am reminded of Mike Schmoker’s essay “The Crayola Curriculum,” published nearly a decade ago in Education Week. A professional stickler for academic results, Schmoker raises the alarm for classroom activity without learning, products that lack process, and process that lacks rigor.
Technology in education often has the allure of that was once held by the diorama, the poster, and the book jacket project. Nowadays, we see PhotoStories, iMovies, and PowerPoints accepted without anything more critical than “Wow!” “Cool!” and “Neat!” Not only are digitally made projects new and glitzy, they may even beyond the can-do of the teacher, which grants them special but superficial esteem. Add to this the mandate that the teacher-learn-along-with-if-not-from-the-students, and it’s tough to develop best practices, let alone be sure that language arts our being taught and learned at a deep level.

As an advocate for media literacy and digital skills in the English Language Arts classroom, I must constantly remind myself to plan backwards using essential questions, outcomes, and objectives that use technology in service to reading and writing and other traditional literacies. Although digital literacy is part of literacy, the tools of the trade are still thinking and practice, expression and audience. Another factor in the equation is time. Figuring out how much time to teach, which skills, and what is relevant to the curricular unit at hand is key. Sometimes the Crayolas make more sense than the computers.

Students, too, are a strong motivating factor. They love the technology, especially if they can check surf a few of their favorite sites in lieu of staying on task. What teacher doesn’t want to be popular not only with administrators pushing the tech but also with students who gravitate toward the cool teacher that brings out the laptops daily. The question for us professionals is –now as ever--what and how is being taught effectively and efficiently?

Technology has become part and parcel to English Language Arts. Perhaps it’s been that way since stylus and clay, stage and theatron, Gutenberg and moveable type. Today, skills of expression, representation, and reception are multiplying at a blurred pace. Teaching our students the basics is still essential to teaching the latest device, lest our students produce creative and satisfying but mindless and vain Power Points, iMovies and video games, and become casualties of “The iPod Curriculum,” unable to read, write, and think about texts critically.

Image credit: Remix of "Sweet Sweet Phone." By Miss Karen. 10 June 2007 and "Crayola Lineup." By Laffy4k. 26 Feb. 2007. Flickr. Used by permission provided by Creative Commons License: BY.

A Meter of Happiness and Success

A few years ago I blogged about "booby-trapping your day for happiness," or at least some happy moments. Now research backs up this idea. And it's not just good advice for teachers. Kids too, and in fact everyone benefits from at least three positive experiences for every one negative.

In a recent U.S. News and World Report article, "Positive Psychology for Kids: Teaching Resilience with Positive Education," points to experts' findings of how accenting the positive in experiences can help students cope with the stress of learning. And that means learning how to deal with failure as well as success.

This goes much better than mere self-esteem. In the past decade or so, I've seen the hollow sense of self-esteem students have been given by the empty words of "great job" and "excellent" no matter what the outcome. Rather than our gilding every effort no matter how weak or futile, students need to learn to find the silver-lining in the clouds of their mistakes and missteps.

The article also links to a free website to test your own happiness ratio, designed by Barbara Frederickson, a professor at University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.

"Doing so might help you learn the sources of your positive emotions and the
triggers for you negative ones. 'The truth emerging from the science is that
feeling good as it is a wise investment in our future,' she says."

Studies are showing that teaching our students as well as ourselves how to interrupt the negative scripts we have in self-talk and with each other can lead to greater achievements in the long run and longer life. Resiliency.

As a result of inflated grades and so called lessons in self-esteem, I've seen students in my office in tears over the "first B" and dealt with parents who complain about a score because they "know" their child is an "A student." What ridiculous--pressure on students with all the emphasis not on achievement and learning but on scores and false ideas of esteem.

Remembering the maxims about learning more from our mistakes than from our success, I ask whether students did their best, what they learned from the activity, what they learned from the score, and what they can do to make their best better. Only be being honest with children, with what is expected and what is accomplished can we truly accentuate the positive, teach the positive, and teach resiliency--all which is much more lasting and fulfilling than a cliche high-five for mediocrity.

Assessment Winter Solstice

It somehow seemed fitting that on the Winter Solstice, the darkest day of the year, I found myself in a meeting with a few principals and department facilitators answering inane questions from the PA Dept. of Ed. about how our school handles local assessments for students who do not meet proficiency on the state tests in math and reading. In lieu of a state graduation exam that has been approved but not funded, PDE is asking critical questions about local proficiency assessments, particularly in math and reading.

I say inane, not out of indifference to the students, but to the tests. These tests measure so little and yet the stakes are made higher with each passing year, amounting to narrowing of curricula, demoralizing learning communities, and stigmatizing administrators, teachers, and students alike. What's worse is that the students who are not demonstrating well on these tests have the most to lose from added efforts to teach to the test. The majority of these students are already maxed out in the schedule to get the minimum graduation requirements. To add required remediation classes to their schedules, squeezing out technology, art, business, or consumer economics or any core discipline elective, seems like insult to injury. For several such students, there are not enough periods in the day to teach to the test. Everyone in our meeting shrugs "what can we do?"

Students have no voice in this, let alone professional educators. Parents and the general community are led by the media to believe these test results matter more than teaching students authentic skills, practical knowledge, real application, creativity, problem-solving, innovation, fine arts and true science. Those of us who know the damage these tests do seem least equipped to appeal to those who promote them. Test lobbyists are much more organized and funded than test recipients. It seems there is no hope but for the hope that state and federal leaders drop standardized testing as a model.

Brrrrrr! It's cold out here in Western Pennsylvania.

Image Credit: Jon Young UK. "100_00626" (Sun and Silhouetted Trees) . 27 Dec. 2006 Flickr.com. 24 Dec. 2008.

Time is of the Essence: "Our Students are Showing Up Tomorrow"

Sir Ken Robinson, author of the must-read Out of Our Minds: Learning to Be Creative and advocate for arts and sciences education that is inclusive, expansive, and collaborative, presents compelling arguments against standardized testing and for programs that encourage creative, imaginative, and innovative thinking.

I met him last week at the Regional Arts Collaborative, held near Pittsburgh. It was delight to meet a man knighted for his leadership of a national commission on creativity, education and the economy for the UK government bringing together leading business people, scientists, artists and educators.

Now living in America, Robinson points out that No Child Left Behind, with its regimen of assessments and funding "amounts to leaving millions of children behind" and kills their creativity, while demoralizing and stigmatizing students, educators, and whole learning communities.

He calls this crisis, "a scandalous misuse of human resources," at a time when we need to encourage performative skills in our children more than ever. When, as Sir Ken notes, "a college degree is not a passport, but a visa" to success in a future that we can't predict,it is absurd that educators and students must contend with standardized testing that narrows curriculum to traditional reading, writing, math and science. These subjects are certainly important, yet with high-stakes testing placing incredible emphasis on children being able to demonstrate knowledge that fits into bubble sheets, we see critical thinking, collaborative skills, technology applications, and aesthetic capabilities being pushed out of curriculum.

Sir Ken notes a waste of the most important resource our unsteady economy needs most--human potential, which can be realized in creative, performative pursuits in the arts and sciences. Furthermore, dichotomy arts and sciences is not only artificial but also--and more dangerous--obsolete in this new century. I agree that such tests do more to limit students abilities and potential for learning, while at the same time have the effect of making school irrelevant to our students.

The emphasis for the sort of education Sir Ken calls for, schooling that involves high level applications authentic work in arts and sciences, and that involves collaboration, creativity, problem solving, performance, would produce a relevance and rigor to develop active intelligence and cognitive development that are missing in our schools and needed for our future.

In good measure time and energy of teachers and students are being misfocused on a very limited skill and knowledge set that won't serve our futures. So call your representative? Wait out the upcoming election? No way, says Sir Ken. Legislation of recall or reform will take years. And he flatly points out that this can't wait: "Our students are showing up tomorrow."

We educators are the ones that must work to ensure our curricula are preparing our students for economic, cultural, and personal success. Sir Ken presents a rallying cry in his book and his presentations around the world. He reminds us that sustainable "human organizations are organic not systemic." The time has come--as always has been the case--for the centrality of teachers in educational reform. Curriculum design and assessement design cannot match the wit of teachers to make our schools relevant and rigorous for our students.

Sir Ken's knightly call for educational transformation reminds me of Postman and Weingartner's a generation ago. Effective teachers know of Teaching as a Subversive Activity. Some educational ideas are always right for the practice.

Essences of Teaching: No. 4: Summoning Our Courage

Fourth in a Series of Three . . . or More

(Review Part 1, Part 2, Part 3)

If I may add a fourth "S' along with storytelling, scholarship, and sharing, I would add the essential of summoning our courage to face and meet the challenges of our profession. Unlike random heroes of a dramatic moment, a time of peril or personal tragedy, people whom we hail as "hero" when faced by a non-negotiable situation of extreme circumstance, teachers must summon courage each and every day, with each and every classroom, and with each and every child. Our heroism comes from a steadfast vision of what should be the case, of what future we imagine, and what we know children can do, think and learn.Many Challenges

We must summon our courage inside and outside the classroom. To address the struggles of students can be daunting. Whether our students have learning disabilities, physical disabilities, emotional problems, drug addictions, English as a second language, or are bullied for sexual orientation, religion, or minority ethnicity--the sheer number of variables of what calls a teacher to intervene can make it tempting to "let that one slide." Yet we teachers know if they "let that one slide," then we've let a child slip through the cracks, and so rather great teachers take stands against mediocrity, make eddies in the river of complacency, place roadblocks to bullying and defamation, and shake off the hindrances to learning. As we do so we become exemplars of resiliency and accomplishment – the true sources of self-esteem for ourselves and our students.

A Tsunami of Technology

A great challenge is presented by incredible increase of technology that is reshaping the way students think and learn and therefore demanding we change the way teach. We must summon our courage, for this is not a pedagogical trend or a wave to ride out, it is a tsunami of technology and it is cresting above our heads. To survive, our communities must embrace the use of technology and support its funding. Teachers must be given training support and make every opportunity to learn and work with new and emerging technologies on an on-going basis. "Our schools are going to change more in the next ten years than they have in the last hundred. Everyone reading these words will be part of that change. Get ready." So says James Daly, editor of Edutopia magazine. Summon your courage.

Standardized Tests

With George Orwellian flair of a name and Aldous Huxley's dystopian vision of education, the No Child Left Behind Act has ushered in Big Brother's Brave New World version of teaching and learning—every student to turn out like the next by 2014. Its euphemistic name makes it difficult to argue against its substance, for no teacher, no legislator, no community member would not be in favor of the phrase. But as professionals of in the field, experts in pedagogy, we know a name is a name is a name and that the current plan in practice does not smell like a rose. Standardized tests encourage cookie-cutter curricula that are limited in scope, purpose, and utility, while our students are unlimited in needs, potential, and talent.

Standardized tests, as they are now, with high-stakes emphasis and heavy penalties and few educational rewards are stifling our learning communities while offering little in the way of inquiry, relevance, or the future.

Since standardized tests have been introduced in the 1990s in Pennsylvania, one by one,--writing, then reading and math, now science, and with more proposed on the way--we know the Class of 2009 has sat in a class from Kindergarten to Twelfth Grade preparing for and taking and retaking government mandated standardized tests for at least 180 days. One whole year of their public schooling spent on a standardized testing. A whole year!

Standardized testing by definition negates variables of divergent thinking and innovation. Standardized testing by definition negates the uniqueness of our students, their differentiated abilities, and their varietal talents. Standardized testing by definition negates the ingenuity of our teachers, their ability to develop relevant curriculum, and their professional talents to deliver instruction in meaningful, learning activities and provide real-world assessments. The more we use standardized tests to measure student ability, the less our schools are empowered to offer students opportunities to show their true achievement. Each year that a school meets Annual Yearly Progress of testing, is a milestone of that school's curriculum's regress toward becoming irrelevant.

Such milestones become tombstones to the kind of student performance our state and our nation country needs in order to compete in a global marketplace, a marketplace in which the successes will be built upon creativity as much as productivity, upon designing as much as performing, and upon collaboration as much as invention. When have you seen a standardized test that calls students to be creative, to design, and to collaborate? They don't exist. We must, as Robinson says, be "out of our minds" if we think standardized tests are the measure of whether we have left a child behind. The tests themselves leave children behind.

Thus, we must summon our courage. We teachers must resolve to replace testing with authentic assessments that mean learning for students and accountability for educators.We must summon our stories and our scholarship--what we as professionals know to be true from research and in the life of a classroom and in the life of each child.

Grading, Online Reporting, and Good Enough

I've been experiencing the same sort of thing Traci Gardner mentions in her blog post for NCTE "What's My Grade?" My school started using an online grade reporting program. It's stable if terribly clunky--6 clicks and two sign-ins to post each class. Just as Traci notes, students rarely ask how they are doing in class. Instead they want to know why they have a zero for a homework. "Well, let's take a look." Most often it is because the assignment was turned in after the "all call" and though it's in my gradebook, it hasn't been entered into GradeQuick, or it's made it that far but not uploaded to EdLine. Teachers are to upload to EdLine every two weeks. That's a good thing.

I think Traci would agree. Her school's system is more instantaneous. By now, students (and parents) at my disctrict are getting used to the two-week schedule. And I have some time to grade the assignment, record it in my book, and enter it into GradeQuick, before I upload it to EdLine. All this takes time.

We have a seven-and-a-half-hour grading day every quarter. Every time contract talks come along, it is a bone of contention. "Do teachers really need this time?" school directors ask. I don't know about my colleagues but as an English teacher I can do the math: If it takes 10 minutes to grade an essay and I have 120 essays, I need 20 hours. And if I have 5 hours of prep time per week, then if I did nothing else (like parent contact, wrestle with the copier, check-in with a guideance counselor, give makeup exam, ad infinitum) I could have the essays graded (not recorded, just graded) in 4 weeks. So the seven hours of grading days is used for catching up with the makeups, figuring in participation, recording, and double-checking.

Time is time, and teachers never have enough. What is more troubling to me is, for all its efficiency of reporting grades, online reporting systems are nudging the emphasis from learning to earning. The customer service feel of online reporting seems to suggest that students (and parents) have more to demand from their scores. Scores become something to micro-manage from home and interrupt the learning process. And in some ways the very reporting of every point takes the effect of professional judgment out of the teacher's power. How can I give an C to a struggling, but deserving student who knows he has an 69 (one point away) because he's been watching his record?

There's a trickle down effect to this. As the students realize every hundredths of a point matter, every homework assignment and its score matters. Again, the focus is not on the learning, it's on a number. Grades become a fixed timeline of scores instead of a representative process of progress.

I was fortunate to grow up in the days of hand-written report cards. A time when students trusted their teachers to assess them. And parents who backed the teachers. Though I might have wondered a little a couple of times, I never had to question a teacher about a grade. If the teacher said I got deserved a "C" and I had given it my all, then I got a "C." And my parents only question was "Did you do your best?" regardless of whether of the grade. That was good enough.

And what I learned in the process: what was my best. To this day I know whether I've done my best or not. My best on some things is an A+. Sometimes I can eek out a B-. Other things I fail. But I never have to ask why I got a zero.