Tag: policy

If Your District is Doing This, Convince Them to be the Adults

It’s at :51 in the video below that my disagreement with these local policies comes into sharp focus.

“I think it clarifies what an inappropriate student-teacher relationship is,” the interviewed teacher says, “and it identifies the means by which we have learned some of those relationships begin.”

That sound you hear is the intent missing the mark entirely.

It makes sense that a school district should want to protect students from inappropriate adults not because they are a school district, but because it is the job of the community to protect its youngest and most vulnerable from such influences.

Closing down all means of communication online doesn’t keep students safe, it makes them vulnerable or leaves them that way. I’ve always had online social networking connections with my students. Initially, in the days of myspace, I attempted keeping two accounts. One was the Mr. Chase who would accept student friend requests. The other was Zac who would accept the odd invite from college friends and people I was meeting in life.

Moving to Philadelphia (and Facebook), I collapsed them into one account. When it came down to it, Mr. Chase and Zac weren’t far apart and I found myself wanting to live by the standards I was hoping my students would adopt as our district attempted to terrify them into online sterility with threats of the immortality of their online selves.

Throughout all of that time, I’ve never once worried that I would be setting an improper example for students or calling my professionalism into question. In my online public life, I act as I do in my physical public life – someone who is charged with helping students decide whom they want to become and then being worth of that charge.

Moreover, this is how you break down communities. It is how you leave children unattended. It is how you miss cries for help and avoid bonds that can lead to lifelong mentoring and assistance.

Telling teachers they can have no contact in social spaces with students is not “clarifying inappropriate…relationships.” It is avoiding the conversation about what inappropriate relationships should look like, adding to the implicit accusations that teachers cannot be trusted outside the panopticon of school walls, and reducing the common social capital possible in online neighborhoods.

Instead, teachers must be given the tools and space to consider appropriate interactions and online content, helped to understand the proper channels when students share sensitive information online, and be trusted to be the same guides for digital citizenship that we should be expecting them to be for offline citizenship in our schools, communities and classrooms.

129/365 Poverty is a Thing and We’re Getting Worse at Fighting it

From a recent Bill Moyers post:

Most people in poverty do not receive cash assistance. In 1996, for every 100 families with children in poverty, there were 68 families who accessed cash assistance. In 2011, for every 100 families with children in poverty, 27 accessed cash assistance.

With the Farm Bill’s faltering in Congress putting food assistance for children in poverty in a dangerous limbo, maybe it’s time we agreed poverty as the most important issue in education. Anyone who thinks differently can remove themselves from the line of helpful voices.

125/365 Is There Such a Thing as Too Much Transparency?

While I’m sure this idea has some connections in my brain to the U.S.’s current hemorrhaging of classified information, the real drive of what I’m about to think through has to do with policy, process, and our ability to come to the table and get work done.

In preparation to be interviewed today, I was asked to take a sheet of paper, visualize in my head the current state of education and then draw it to be explained during my interview.

What I ended up drawing was a series of faces, bisected along the vertical access, appearing angry and contemptuous on the left side and happy and open on the right side. Also, only the right side of each face had an ear. From each of the mouths (right and left sides) I drew lines that made their way to other faces after getting lost in a knot of other lines from other faces in the middle of the paper. I labeled the faces: Educators, Businesses, Students, Communities, Policymakers, Academics.

It wasn’t until I sat down to draw that the problem I’ve been attempting to explain verbally to people for the last few weeks came into focus.

What if our drive for transparency and our expectation of publicly-consumable communication is hindering our ability to get actual work done.

Let’s take policymakers for a start. They, like members of all other groups, are connected to some other set of constituents – peers, voters, allies of other sorts. When they sit down a whatever table is being sat at to work through the problem-of-the-moment, contemporary thinking calls for “transparency” before they even approach said table. They are expected to make known their views on the issue at hand, the other parties, what they plan to do and what they will do for their constituencies. In many cases, during the conversations, they are tweeting and posting to Facebook and updating their constituencies as to their progress. Much of the time, this includes explaining how firmly they are holding to the preconceived notions they touted pre-table.

This transparency of process, of motive, and of intent is harmful. It leaves no room for listening. It commits to a course of action before any other courses can be considered. For these policymakers or any of the other stakeholders practicing this breed of transparency, to do anything other than what is expected would mean the loss of face and (more damaging) the loss of power.

As much as I believe in transparency (and I vigorously do), perhaps it is time to admit not all steps of all processes need be transparent. Perhaps consideration of a new curriculum or policy to be adopted would go differently if those representing the stakeholders were able to be at the table alone so that they might be able to say, “I don’t know what we’re going to do, and I don’t think some of the points you’ve been making are half bad” without worrying about being billed as sellouts to their causes.

I understand the dangers and histories connected to closed-door, back room meetings, and I’m not proposing decision-making free of accountability. Our constant need to know, though, and our constant drive to offer our praise or condemnation before the thinking is through might be impeding progress.

When my students would write in my room, I stepped back. I reasoned it might not be helpful to them or their final products if I looked over their shoulders and said, “That’s what you’re going to write?” in the middle of their sentences.

Perhaps there’s a lesson there.

Thanks to Dean for inadvertently making me think about this stuff.

Image via JayGoldman.

57/365 Investigating Ch. 3 of ‘Losing Ground’ by Charles A. Murray

As part of this week’s reading for my policy course, we’ve been asked to take a look at Charles Murray’s seminal tome, Losing Ground. While my reaction to the text is different than my reading of Dewey’s Experience & Education, it seemed this might be a good chance to put another side of the argument into perspective.

In Ch. 3, Murray walks readers through the shift in thinking from the intelligentsia of the mid-to-late 60s. Before digging in to the one sentence that made it incredibly difficult for me to continue reading this chapter, let me outline some of the common cause I was able to muster from these pages.

Murray outlines what he describes as a certain way of thinking becoming unfashionable during the time period. Pre-1964 thinking was that those unhappy with their jobs should take matters into their own hands to change their position and, recognizing the difficulties inherent in that premise, the system was doing all it could to help them. Murray’s argument here was 1964 exposed the faulty nature of the second premise and thereby the impossibility of the first.

Where we find common ground is in his conversation of how the shift took place and the lack of conversation or dialogue – the lack of a difficult conversation – about what should be done and what was right.

There was no great debate in the interim, no moment at which the nation could observe itself changing its national policy. The change happened unannounced.

Charles Murray. Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950-1980, 10th Anniversary Edition (p. 45). Kindle Edition.

Somewhere in the last few years, the sentiment above shifted to reflect the lack of conversation or debate in how we set the fashionable education reforms that are currently en vogue.

Where Murray lost me, was with the following sentence:

Before 1964, blacks were unique. They constituted the only group suffering discrimination so pervasive and so persistent that laws for that group were broadly accepted as necessary.

Charles Murray. Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950-1980, 10th Anniversary Edition (p. 43). Kindle Edition.

I don’t know what to say about that belief or to that belief, so I’m going to let it sit in my brain for a while.

17/365 Back to Dewey 1.5 – ‘The Nature of Freedom’

It may be a loss rather than a gain to escape from the control of another person only to find one’s conduct dictated by immediate whim and caprice; that is, at the mercy of impulses into whose formation intelligent judgment has not entered. A person whose conduct is controlled in this way has at most only the illusion of freedom. Actually forces over which he has no command direct him.

– John Dewey

Experience & Education

This post continues a mini-series examining John Dewey’s Experience & Education chapter-by-chapter.

Though one of the shorter of the 8 chapters in this already-short tome, no. 5 packs a punch as I Dewey takes a moment to extoll the virtues of freedom – particularly freedom in schools.

Enforced quiet and acquiescence prevent pupils from disclosing their real natures. They enforce artificial uniformity. They put seeming before being. They place a premium upon preserving the outward appearance of attention, decorum, and obedience. And everyone who is acquainted with schools in which this system prevailed well knows that thoughts, imaginations, desires, and sly activities ran their own unchecked course behind this facade.

What sells this passage for me, which ultimately sums up the chapter perfectly, is Dewey’s own wink to the idea that, “We’ve all been there, right?” While the vast majority of his arguments and reasoning have been rooted in the language of philosophy up to this point, in Ch. 5, Dewey pulls back the curtain a bit to acknowledge that, in progressive education, he’s also describing the types of schools he would have liked to attend.

Freedom in learning, Dewey is writing, allows for action in learning. This, stands in stark opposition to the passivity he identifies in traditional school experiences.

And just as I was starting to wonder about this constant action and the criticism I could see it inviting, Dewey paused for a moment to speak to the importance of pausing. Learning, (true, active learning) my should be followed by moments of stillness and reflection so that students can take the information and knowledge they’ve gathered in their actions and organize it in a way that makes their experiences meaningful and opens questions for further experiences.

Freedom, yes. Freedom without organization and reflection, no.

A practical consideration of Robert Rothman’s thoughts on the Common Core

In the July/August issue of the Harvard Education Letter, Robert Rothman, senior fellow at the Alliance for Excellent Education, outlined “Nine Ways the Common Core will Change Classroom Practice.”

He pointed to four ways mathematics education will change and five ways the CCSS will impact English Language Arts instruction in the US. I leave critique of the mathematical implications to those more experienced in teaching math than I am. My focus, instead, is on Rothman’s assertions about how the CCSS will change how we teach students English.

5. More Nonfiction. Reflecting the fact that students will read primarily expository texts after high school, the Standards call for a much greater emphasis on nonfiction. The document proposes that about half the reading in elementary school and 75 percent in high school should be nonfiction. This would include informational texts in content areas as well as literary nonfiction in English language arts; publishing companies are likely to respond by revising their textbooks. Narrative fiction will become less prevalent. The Standards also expect students to write more expository prose.

The caution here is to think about factors that lead to people thinking of themselves as readers and writers. I don’t just mean thinking of themselves as people who can read and write, but as people who enjoy reading and writing as well.

We do a great job of telling students they are “readers” or “writers,” and many schools are able to focus on drilling students to say/chant aloud, “I am a reader,” or “I am a writer.”

As others have pointed out before me, these standards run the risk of preempting students’ development of their own reading tastes and identities as readers. It also ignores the possible effects of varied fictional structures on individuals’ habits of thinking and problem solving. Those people I know and respect as the deepest and most insightful analytical thinkers are also some of the most voracious readers of fictional texts I know.

Both have a place at the table, and to prescribe a reading diet as though all minds need the same percentage of texts is as potentially harmful as prescribing an eating diet as though all bodies need the same foods according to the same schedule.

6. Focus on Evidence. In reading, students will be expected to use evidence to demonstrate their comprehension of texts and to read closely in order to make evidence-based claims. To prepare them to do so, teachers will need to take time to read carefully with their students and in many cases reread texts several times. In writing, students are expected to cite evidence to justify statements rather than rely on opinions or personal feelings.

So tempting to make an off-handed remark about the possible implications of an evidence-driven populace on the standards of political elections and journalism, but I will resist.

I am concerned each time we breeze past the words “take time,” without pausing to consider from where that time will come. Will this mean cutting further into arts education, free time, play, physical activity?

If it is not an extension of the school day, what pieces of instruction within the existing structures will be sacrificed? At the most basic level it is a slight to teachers, presuming they are operating with a dearth of expectations on their time with children.

7. “Staircase” of Text Complexity. Students will be expected to read and comprehend increasingly complex texts in order to reach the level of complexity required for success in college courses and the workplace. The Standards document cites evidence that the complexity of texts used in schools has actually declined over the past forty years. To reverse this trend, teachers will have to choose materials that are appropriate for their grade level; states and organizations are now developing tools to help teachers evaluate complexity.

“Grade level?” To paraphrase Monty Python, “Now we see the ignorance inherent in the system.” Teachers must have and must demand the professional respect of choosing texts appropriate to the students in their classroom, not to the grade level to which students are arbitrarily assigned. As reading scholars like Nancy Atwell have discovered, such an approach doesn’t retard student progress in literacy acquisition, but hastens it.

For teachers, this will also mean revising practice to do away with the arbitrary assignment of whole-class texts and considering individual assignments and needs.

8. Speaking and Listening. The Standards expect students to be able to demonstrate that they can speak and listen effectively—two aspects of literacy rarely included in state standards. One of the consortia developing assessments to measure student performance against the Standards will create a speaking and listening assessment. Expect to see teachers asking students to engage in small-group and whole-class discussions and evaluating them on how well they understand the speakers’ points.

Less about speaking and listening, this point speaks to the lack of teacher agency present in a commodified education landscape.

No matter the quality of the consortium’s assessment, it will be seen, by teachers, as someone else’s assessment. The proctoring of such assessments will be, at its basest level, always be seen as jumping the hoop to get to the real teaching.

A key question here is “Do we want all of our students to speak and listen well or do we want all of our students to speak and listen in the same way?” We are plotting a course toward the latter.

9. Literacy in the Content Areas. The Standards include criteria for literacy in history/social science, science, and technical subjects. This reflects a recognition that understanding texts in each of these subject areas requires a unique set of skills and that instruction in understanding, say, a historical document is an integral part of teaching history. This means that history teachers will need to spend time making sure that students are able to glean information from a document and make judgments about its credibility. Science teachers will need to do the same for materials in that discipline.

Yes.

I agree.

Here is how this has been attempted in almost every school and district I’ve seen across the country:

  1. Training is developed to give teachers the school or district’s preferred method of teaching literacy in, say, science classrooms. This isn’t done in the belief that teachers are incompetent, but in an act of benevolence. The matter is urgent, and asking teachers to develop their own approaches will take time none of them thinks he has in the schedule.
  2. Teachers will take back these prescribed approaches to their classrooms and begin implementing them. Some will not implement them. Some will make them their own. Most will do as they are told for fear of repercussions. Test results will move slightly, but then become stale a year or two after.
  3. Frustrated, administrators will seek out a new way to tell teachers to implement literacy practices, assuming something was wrong with the original approach. Step 1 will be repeated in this process.
  4. Teachers will repeat Step 2. This time, those teachers who whole-heartedly accepted the first approach will be slightly jaded. It won’t be as obvious because their acceptance will have been replaced by teachers new to the school/district who have not seen this cycle before.
  5. The cycle will continue. Teacher agency, creativity, and voice will diminish.

To prepare teachers to make these shifts, states and private organizations are planning and implementing substantial professional development efforts. In Kentucky, for example, the state department of education is undertaking a massive campaign to inform teachers about the Standards and their implications for practice and is making available sample lessons and other materials on a website. But these efforts will only be successful if all teachers understand the Standards and how they differ from current practice.

Key here is the lack of any act of inquiry required by teachers. Utilizing the authority-centric approach of content delivery we are attempting to eliminate in classrooms, state education departments will disseminate materials and step-by-step guides like so many classroom worksheets.

If understanding is our highest goal, we have aimed too low.

Learning Grounds Ep. 005: In which Daniel discusses policy, microecon and education as a public good

In this episode of Learning Grounds, Education Policy and Management student Daniel explains what he’s learning in the education policy realm and how that might shape his ideas as he heads back into the classroom as an elementary teacher. Also, Zac challenges Scott and Daniel to convince him education is a public good.

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Things I Know 259 of 365: teach.gov soon to be the new Windows Vista

This yesterday from Education Week:

Duncan Tuesday then announced that the Education Department would be handing over control of its TEACH campaign—including website teach.gov—to [Microsoft] the Redmond, Wash.-based software company which has recently become an increasingly visible education technology partner.

and later

Meanwhile, Duncan announced the handover to Microsoft of the TEACH campaign, the federal government’s online teaching advocacy and recruitment initiative, at the software company’s Partners in Learning Global Forum Tuesday in the nation’s capital.

The handover will eventually involve a transfer of the initiative’s website from a government to a non-profit Web domain, as well as efforts from Microsoft to bring in other private partners.

To re-cap, one of the largest software companies in the world with a vested financial interest in having direct access to teachers and schools across the country will now have control of a formerly public site of resources for advocating and guiding interested people to the teaching profession.

This isn’t the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, this is Microsoft – a for-profit company. Policy oversight has eroded to such an extent that no veil is necessary as portions of public education are made private.

I just checked. The National Board for Professional Teaching Standards still appears to be in operation. Not that it matters. They need not worry about advocacy, or the other original goals of teach.gov:

  • Increasing the number, quality and diversity of people seeking to become teachers, particularly in high-need schools (rural and urban) and subject areas in greatest demand: Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM), English Language Learners (ELL), and Special Education;
  • Connecting aspiring teachers with information about the pathways to teaching including preparation, certification, training and mentoring;
  • Celebrating and honoring the profession of teaching

No need for the National Board for Professional Teaching Practices or any other teacher’s organization to worry about “celebrating and honoring the profession of teaching,” Microsoft is on it.

Things I Know 203 of 365: My dad could climb a rope

If I were to draw on a paper what gym does for me, I would make one dot and then I would erase it.

– Elizabeth Berg

On matters of policy, my father and I are traditionally at odds. Fiscal, foreign, defense, entitlements, everything.

Education is no exception.

While I’m able to steer clear of most of the others when we get together, I’m not so great at keeping my mouth shut when my dad starts talking about education policy.

Last night, we started talking about testing and Sec. Duncan’s decree easing the expectations of schools around the country to get to 100% proficiency as called for by No Child Left Behind.

My father is of the, “I guess that’s just another thing we don’t expect of our kids anymore” mindset.

He works in the technology office of the school district from which he graduated. As anyone can imagine, this means he often sees the worst from teachers. Rarely do faculty members bake cookies for tech team.

To further illustrate his point of the lowering of the bar for today’s students, my dad talked about a rope.

He first encountered the climbing rope on his first day of middle school P.E.

It kicked his butt.

A competitive swimmer from way back, my dad thought he should have been able to make his way up the rope with no problem. Such was not the case.

For weeks, my father struggled to make it to the top of the climbing rope.

For weeks, he could not make it.

This, for my father, was the bar to which all students should be held.

“I walked through the gym the other day, and do you know what I saw?”

Not pausing for a response, my dad continued, “The rope has knots in it.”

I was confused.

He explained.

The same climbing rope, which had been my father’s adversary for weeks in his youth, had single knots running in it every few feet up to the rafters.

Dad explained this and sat looking at me for a moment.

“It took me weeks to get up that rope, but when I did, I knew I could.”

He lamented the knotting of the rope the same way he was lamenting the easing of NCLB’s testing requirements.

“Are we too worried kids aren’t going to feel good about themselves, so we make everything easy on them?”

I see his point – I really do.

For the same reason folks are worried playgrounds are becoming too safe, learning should have some scraped knees, some trial and error.

My problem with my dad’s point accepts his metaphor and rejects his premise.

What are we still asking kids to climb ropes?

Maybe, in dad’s day, the climbing rope was the best we could do to figure a upper-body strength and endurance. Maybe, way back when, we had no other choice than to make a student’s learning and abilities a matter of public display. Maybe, when my old man was coming up, we didn’t know any better.

I doubt any of that was the case, but I’m willing to give him the benefit of the doubt.

Today, though, we certainly have better methods and tools at our disposal.

Cut down the ropes, find out the best ways to figure out if kids are fit and healthy, and then truly teach them how to do it better for reasons other than their peers will laugh at them if they don’t.

Yeah. The metaphor works.

Let’s cut down some ropes.

Things I Know 92 of 365: Bringing equity to schools will take more than an Act of Congress

A full and fair discussion is essential to democracy.

– George Soros

In my first year of teaching, my friend and colleague Darlene explained to a class of eighth grade students the difference between something being equal and something being fair. “Equal means we all get the same thing,” she said, “Fair means we all get what we need.”

Writing for the Huffington Post Thursday, Rep. Chaka Fattah (D-PA) announced he would be introducing the Fiscal Fairness Act and the Student Bill of Rights Act to the House as a means of taking steps to provide more equitable educations to the nation’s children.

Perhaps because of that lesson from Darlene, The Fiscal Fairness Act (FFA) caught my attention.

According to Fatah, the FFA would strengthen Title I by “requiring districts (1) spend at least as much per student from state and local funds in Title I schools as non-Title I schools before receiving federal dollars, (2) count and report all school-level expenditures, including actual teacher salaries, and (3) report per-pupil expenditures and make the information available to educators, parents and community members.

According to the good folks at Ed Week, the FFA also limits the school-to-school difference in state and local funding from 10 to 3 percent.

This sounds great – on the surface.

Yes, ensuring state and local resources are being distributed equitably to all schools within a district is ensures greater access to resources for historically disadvantaged populations.

It also ensures the schools now receiving greater resources will see those resources diminished and then be asked to do as well or better by students while working with fewer resources.

Do more with less.

The spirit of Fattah’s bill, offered as an amendment to the reauthorization to the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), is well-meaning. In practice, I worry it will mean robbing Peter to pay Paul.

I’m not criticizing Fattah. State and local governments should have equalized spending in Title I and non-Title I schools when the ESEA was signed. Instead, many governments looked for loopholes and made Title I a way to continue spending where they were already spending and use Title I to fill in the gaps – poorly.

It was a risky decision going against the spirit of the law if following the letter.

Fattah’s proposed amendments also bring teacher pay into the equation. Historically, resource-poor schools have had high student-to-teacher ratios and failed to attract higher paid veteran teachers. The FFA would require districts to take teacher salary (approximately four-fifths of a school’s budget) into consideration when accounting for how state and local dollars are spent. Currently, salaries aren’t part of the equation when districts report how they’re allocating funds among Title I and non-Title I schools.

The best consequence of this idea would be that districts incentivize the move of veteran teachers from resource-rich to resource-poor schools within a district. This, combined with the hiring of more teachers in resource-poor schools to reduce class sizes would result in more experienced teachers and smaller student-to-teacher ratios in historically disadvantaged schools.

In considering an idea, we must also ask its worst consequence.

It is highly doubtful state and local governments will allocate funding equivalent to what is necessary to fund the teachers that would bring all districts receiving Title I funds into compliance.

In order to equalize state and local spending, districts would more likely begin to terminate the employment of the least experienced teachers within resource-rich schools. This would increase student-to-teacher ratios to levels comparable to resource-poor schools.

Not only that, it would prevent collaboration between experienced veteran teachers who have spent years amassing wisdom in the classroom and younger teachers who have often been most recently trained in new teaching practices as well.

Fattah’s proposed bill (along with Sens. Michael Bennett (D-CO) and Thad Cochran’s (R-MS) companion bill in the Senate) must be measured so as not to become an unfolding mandate that weakens educational quality.

American education requires a system that brings equity to funding and improves the education and learning of all students. The Fiscal Fairness Act may make things equal, but it doesn’t make them fair.