The New York Daily News today ran an editorial praising the work of state legislators and teacher union groups to come up with a new way of assessing teachers with an eye more than anything else on getting rid of those who are performing below expectations. As always, exactly how to figure out which teachers are “underperforming” is the problem, and the state’s attempt to win some of the Race to the Top money that’s being dangled in front of everyone’s face is driving the conversation. That means, of course, that students’ scores on standardized tests will play a big part in determining whether a teacher is “highly effective, effective, developing or ineffective.”
The reasons why this is highly problematic have been articulated over and over; just wait until the first teacher gets fired because his kids conspired to do poorly on the test. But I have another concern, namely the tendency if not habit of people to confuse learning and knowledge. Here’s the first paragraph of the Daily News editorial:
The state Education Department has fashioned a plan that would start New York on the road toward measuring whether each public school teacher is a superstar or a lemon, based on how well students learn.
It should read:
The state Education Department has fashioned a plan that would start New York on the road toward measuring whether each public school teacher is a superstar or a lemon, based on how much their students know.
I don’t know about you, but very few of the questions I’ve seen on the NY State Regents have anything to do with student learning. Instead they attempt to assess whether or not a student knows how to read, knows how to use a formula, know what the parts of a leaf are, etc. It’s pretty hard to look at those questions and find any that get to “how well students learn.”
Semantics? Maybe. But I think it’s a crucial distinction to make at a time when “knowing” is pretty darn easy considering how many places knowledge resides these days, notwithstanding the complexity of figuring out what’s worth knowing in the first place. And yes, we need to know that our kids know some stuff, no question. But what I really want to know is that my kids are learners, that they are motivated to seek knowledge on their own and use it effectively, that they are problem solvers, that they are self-directed, entrepreneurial, and motivated to change the world. If you can find a way to test that, I’d be more than happy to apply the result as a part of teacher evaluation.
Until then, especially if people’s livelihoods depend on it, let’s at least be clear exactly what we’re measuring.
Will, I agree we want our kids to be true learners. I still wonder though, what content knowledge is core today? What facts should be at a person’s immediate recall? What does someone need to know how to do? Is there a base of information someone should absorb/retain, skills they have at their disposal, and understanding of a variety of concepts, contexts, etc.?
Sorry, lots of questions…
If a human is breathing, he is a “true learner.”
School teaches at best a trillionth of the knowledge available on the planet yet we quibble endlessly over which trillionth of a percent is most important. (short answer – the most trivial and less useful)
Who cares?
If teaching was an actual profession, all curriculum and assessment issues would be involved internally within that profession, not imposed by committees of anonymous bureaucrats.
What is the “true lesson” of education for students when they see their teachers routinely trampled and become increasingly helpless?
This obsession with measurement of human achievement IN ALL OF ITS FORMS is a form of arrogance at best and psychosis at worst.
I meant to say…
…all curriculum and assessment issues would be RESOLVED internally…
Sorry!
So what do you really think, Gary? ;0)
Seriously, I think that pretty much sums things up. What is most ironic to me is that we continue to perpetuate this idea that we can assess learning in this way without driving the love of learning out of our kids. Sad.
I’ve said it before and some people are taken aback or reflexively disagree, “All assessment is a disruption to the learning process.”
Will,
Perhaps we need to launch a “who cares?” movement.
Will, your comment about driving out the love of learning struck home. While trying to implement some new ideas for learing, my senior students said, “Can’t we just read the text and answer questions?” Sad.
Well Grant,
They’ve learned the lessons of school well.
Gary you are so right. I think a great deal of Education’s ills could be corrected if we were a real profession and not a semiprofession. Education is an occupation trying to be a professiona without a well developed professional practice. And we will never be a real profession until we strengthen our instructional culture and create a social practice within ranks for analyzing and understanding our own work.
Most professions hold their own accountable– there is no mutual accountability in education, only mandates from on high, typically from policy makers, but also from those removed from teaching by varying degrees. The culture punishes those who try to be critical friends in the developing of practice. Sheep beget sheep– not sheppards. Those who are doing the work are the ones who understand what it looks like when it is working well.
Teachers need to see themselves as leaders, activists, and advocates for students. They needs to develop student voice. They need to develop their own voice in policy making. Administrators need to understand the power of distributive leadership-especially in today’s culture and shift.
Rather than focus on assessment– why don’t we focus on student learning and its alignment with what we feel should be happening in their lives as learners. Who they are becoming and their personal scholarship- rather than evidence building of literacy from multiple choice tests.
Email me and I’ll tell you about the “Is teaching a profession?” exercise – I would spoil it in a blog comment.
Teachers were outraged when I tweeted the following article about Australian teachers exercising their professionalism, labour rights and human right to refuse and administer standardized tests:
http://bit.ly/aTXPXD
The most common response I received was an angry version of, “I’ll lose my job!” or “I have a family to feed!”
Those self-evident statements assume that either 1) I am a moron or 2) Australian educators don’t work for a living.
Professional educators need to protect defenseless children from an abusive system, not enforce the abusive practices. – Call me crazy…
Martin Luther King, Jr. was evoked in another comment. What would he say about educators expressing helplessness and invoking the Nuremberg Defense?
I care. What our students learn in public school creates the framework around which we base our society. The values and ideas that children are exposed to is important for the future decisions made by our society. Imagine if every classroom started teaching Mein Kampf. Some of the ideas in that book would influence the way that our future government made decisions. It is important to select quality texts that represent the ideals we believe in so that good decisions are made. If we believe in equity and justice for all members of society, then maybe Martin Luther King Jr.’s writings are important to study; important for everyone to study. We begin to fracture our society when we say that learning is the only important part of school. What is learned is equally important.
Schools currently “cover” Martin Luther King, Jr. by meeting a standard that says his entire noble heroic life should be reduced to 1 paragraph of happy talk from one otherwise very angry speech.
http://stager.tv/blog/?p=870
If we TRUSTED TEACHERS and viewed children as COMPETENT LEARNERS, an educator such as yourself could really educate for democracy by making decisions allowing for students to learn something in depth.
The current approaches to curriculum:
• The Flasher – Expose and Cover
• The Bulimic – Binge and Purge
not only make indoctrination more likely, but undermine democracy by removing agency from individuals and result in less understanding.
Disclaimer: I am a Canadian Math Teacher, so getting into the finer points of American curriculum. I have never taught MLK or WW2.
I certainly agree with you that high stakes standardized testing creates an atmosphere that makes in depth teaching difficult. Teachers by in large are given much more leeway in my jurisdiction as to how they are evaluated and how they are allowed to deliver content. From the tone of your comment, it seems that you are arguing against poor pedagogy.
Of course I’m against poor pedagogy.
I really need to start tagging Calvin and Hobbes cartoons in Delicious.
;0)
I just watched your TED talk again, Dan, (about the 6th time) and I realized that it was one of the seeds for this post. Would love to have my kids assessed on whether or not they are “patient problem solvers” instead of whether or not they get the “right answer.” If you’re still reading, would love to hear how your assessments are structured.
I’m progressive by my school’s standards, regressive by the edublogosphere’s. I have Algebra broken into thirty skills. Students need to demonstrate basic proficiency and then mastery on each of those for a 100%. They can do that at any time, in any number of ways, though the most common is on a once-weekly skills test that takes ten minutes out of our class time. On the upside, it relieves a lot of their test anxiety that students can always improve their skill scores. They also feel like their assessments describe them meaningfully, which is a challenge for traditional assessment. On the downside, I haven’t found a reliable way to assess a) concept synthesis or b) autonomous problem solving.
Shawn Cornally is lapping me right now. He has his students write grants for “funding” and develop their own assessment mechanism (ie. posters, oral presentation, written essay, etc.) Inspiring stuff here: http://101studiostreet.com/wordpress/?p=473
Thanks for following up. Shawn’s stuff is great. Why don’t the two of you and some selected others start your own school? ;0)
I think at some point, the way we “see” knowledge and expertise will evolve into a much larger personal portfolio of work. I wonder if it won’t be a Google search-like compilation of our contributions and reflections. No doubt, that represents my bias and the fact that so much of me is out there. But when I think of my kids…that’s immediately where my brain goes.
For both NY and NJ (and all states for that matter) as all faculty in the building are part of the same unit, how do you “measure” success for those people who are in the system, but not the classroom? People such as guidance counselors, LDTC’s, psychologists, nurses, athletic trainers, speech therapists, etc. What metrics do you use to measure the “performance” of these folks? What about other subjects that aren’t “tested”, like PE, Art, Music, ceramics, Home Ec, Woodshop, or library? How do we “measure” those folks?
I’m all for using data to help drive instruction, but schools have always relied on anecdotal observations of an administrator for evaluation. Can you think of any way BESIDES anecdotal observation for the folks I mentioned above?
• What about when my students come to me a year below grade level and I get them to make 1 1/2 year’s growth but they’re still “below grade level” ? Am I considered ineffective?
• What about when certain students have ADHD and their parents choose not to medicate them (and I’m not saying that’s always the best option) and despite implementing 10-15 daily modifications, that student is physically unable to focus for even 50% of the time? Am I responsible for the fact that s/he did not learn all the content?
• What about when parents pull their children out of school for vacations so they miss 4+ weeks of school, including one entire math unit?
You get the point… I agree with Barry. Why is it that the classroom teacher is the one to be evaluated and blamed? Why isn’t everyone accountable? What about the parents who make excuses for their children’s bad behavior which results in those children disrupting the class on a daily basis? We need to support each other and not look for a scape goat for things that are often beyond our control.
None of the reform many of us desire is really possible as long as we hang onto magical thinking like “grade level” and family vacations being the enemy of learning.
School should not be a prison sentence.
I completely agree that how well students learn is of fundamental importance. I don’t know how anyone other than those working with them face to face could assess that.
I remember once reading that about 84% of questions in most classrooms fall at the “knowledge” level of Bloom’s Taxonomy, and to maximize learning (and maximize the changes of helping kids keep their thirst to learn) I do everything I can to keep that percentage down to a teeny fraction of that in my own classroom. While we’re on the subject…
Gary, I hear you on the pointlessness arguing about what trillionth of a percent of all the knowledge in the world is “essential.” Who am I to determine what content my students, each one an individual travelling her own unique path, have to know? And indeed, what level of arrogance (to use your word) does it take for someone else to tell me that they know better than both her and me what content that individual student absolutely has to know, and by what age she has to have acquired it?!
Sometimes – okay, quite frequently – I think the teacher in Truffaut’s classic “L’argent de Poche” had it right when he asked how much better the world,including their schools, would be for kids if they could only vote?
Thanks for those great thoughts, Bill. Much appreciated. The Bloom’s point is a good one, especially in light of the ways social online learning tools can expand the opportunities for those higher level skills. It’s hard to see how multiple choice or short answer tests can do much to assess ability past the lowest steps on the ladder. Ask most parents and they’ll tell you they want their kids to not only know and understand but to be able to apply, analyze, evaluate and create, yet few of them seem to get that none of that is addressed in the tests.
As Gary suggests, who cares what kids “know” in the context of how schools are currently structured. What we should care more deeply about is whether or not teachers are creating a culture that embraces and loves learning, and whether they are supporting kids as they struggle through asking and solving the questions and problems they find most meaningful.
I think it would be good for teachers to care less about the question of “Who am I to decide?”
If not you, then whom?
It might be a lot more productive for teachers to become experts in skills, domains of knowledge, talents so students can learn to learn and learn something in depth through apprenticeship with that teacher.
If not me, then whom? Well… the kids themselves. Granting that I teach in an independent middle school and what works in this context may not work other places.
I’ll concede that I do set an overall structure within which my kids design their units. By the end of the year, they have to have studied aesthetics, ethics, history and psychology. They have to have written a research paper, a persuasive piece, a compare-contrast essay, literary analysis, poetry, and (collaboratively) a script. They have to have made at least one in-class presentation. They have to be able to discuss books they’ve all read. And they will have read and written independently, and learned self-generated vocabulary lists. I try to set up the year so they learn a lot of social skills – listening, compromising, holding one’s ground, agreeing to disagree, collaborating, etc. I care deeply about all this.
I still, however, shy away from selecting any specific content. If one class wants to study the music they listen to and how it relates to who they are and another advertising and the effect of image manipulation on teen girls, is there anything wrong with that? If one class wants to explore how good people can do bad things from an historical perspective and another the relationship between the science and the rhetoric of global warming, is there anything wrong with that? These are examples from units my kids have actually designed in different years.
Again, I don’t begin to pretend that what I’m doing is perfect, nor that it would work well in every situation out there. And maybe I’m missing something. But that’s how I’m working my Humanities 7 course for now.
If you’re acknowledging the value of choice and the arbitrary nature of all curricular topics, then it’s also worth questioning whether middle school kids would REALLY choose to study how media manipulates young girls concepts of body image.
That seems like an adult’s idea of what kids should be interested in.
You never know what kids will choose. One unit two years ago was on the dispute between Korea and Japan as to who has sovereignty over the island of Dokdo a.k.a. Takeshima. For the topic you question…
One year, an aesthetics unit theme question was “what is beauty?” and a related question they wrote was “Who gets to decide what beautiful is?” That led to the media study. This year, a unit on the sources of prejudice (official title “raiseURvoice”) led to an examination of the media’s treatment of women as athletes.
It may make a difference that we are an all-girls school. I think that creates a political climate where these issues are more likely to come up, and a greater openness in discussing them.
Of course I am human, and I suppose I do on occasion come up with activities that relate to the kids’ questions in ways they may not have originally perceived. But really, I am trying to have content come from the kids and connect to their questions as much as possible. Really.
There are a lot of people who are simply tired of paying for it all. Testing, I think, is an answer to that—“Fine, I will give you this money but you better prove you are helping these children because I don’t think you are getting it done”.
How do we answer these people? I don’t think they are going away. Teaching jobs are disappearing everywhere. I am completely with you that testing as it stands is ineffective, damaging, costly.
I want my kids “motivated to change the world” too. I’m just not sure how we politically pay for it.
@Brandt
I think “how do we answer these people?” is answered by Dean Shareski’s post: http://ideasandthoughts.org/2010/05/13/overcoming-our-metric-obsessed-world-with-stories/
We need to tell stories about successful things in our classroom. We need to share and publicize how we are using the internet to collaborate and learn. I truly believe that when parents and our communities hear about great things we are doing in our classrooms they will not care about test scores on standardized tests. When students are excited about authentic learning experiences, parents will be excited too and support us.
We need to win back local community support by providing great learning experiences in our classrooms.
Thanks for the comment. I wish I was as optimistic, but while stories of learning will have some effect, it won’t be until parents think those stories will get their kids into colleges that the assessments will change. Right now, we are so totally wedded to these traditional assessment regimes that are driving what it means to be successful that it’s going to take a long time for things to shift without some real leadership on a national level.
Telling learning stories is a terrific idea, but insufficient.
We also need to go cold-turkey on policies and practices that are detrimental to students… All of us – today!
I love the Calvin and Hobbes because it also demonstrates what happens in classrooms when teachers are pressured to be a “superstar.” The only thing that matters now are grades and performance on the standardized test. They teach to the test. Grade inflation occurs (I am a superstar, see all these “A” grades.) If the teacher proctors their student’s standardized tests, they “help” a lot. Anything goes to save your job and avoid being a “lemon.”
I don’t know the solution to this problem but I do know that it occurs.
2 things:
1. What about Value-Added data for student achievement? That’s what we have here in Tennessee and it works reasonably well. Rather than a teacher being evaluated on raw scores, a teacher is evaluated based on how much progress that student made under his tutelage. Yes, it still relies on testing, but it frames the data in a much wider context, one that marks Cheryl as an EXTREMELY effective teacher.
I’m not trying to be simply the devil’s advocate, but I find that most self-styled educational reformists come from areas of privilege and, often, from itsy-bitsy school districts like San Lorenzo Valley. I work in Memphis City Schools, which is around the 23rd largest district in the country (it sounds less impressive than it really is). Districts need to make decisions on teacher quality because, let me tell you, there are some scary people in the profession in America’s most desperate places.
Thankfully, due to innovative teacher recruitment programs like Teach for America and the New Teacher Project, these areas also have access to exceptional teachers. The project, then, is to find out who’s who. Value-added data is a cheap and easy, though not perfect, way of making this distinction. Like I learned in shop class, you can at any time have two of the following three things: fast, cheap, and good. You can never have all three.
2. The definition of innovation has REALLY got to change. There are teachers doing things in urban schools that I would challenge any edtech guru from the suburbs to attempt. I’ve researched two teachers in the comments of this post and they both come from predominantly white, middle-class schools. When, oh when, will anybody flex their ed muscles on urban areas?
Sure, we’d all like to have our students develop pseudogrants for learning and craft their own educational processes. We’d love it. We’d go nuts for it. But when you’re battling gangs, drugs, and everything else that comes with Low SES, you have to work with what you can.
All I’m asking for is a little bit of understanding. These kids have great potential, and we’re doing what we can, but it comes slowly and it doesn’t really help to hear that what we’re striving and struggling to accomplish with our students is pointless. It’s not pointless; it’s the best that we can do with what we’ve got.
Perspective, my peeps, perspective. The change will NOT come from the national level, Will. The change is already happening, every single day, in the classrooms of teachers who are willing to push extra-hard, get spit on and cursed at, and do whatever it takes to ensure that their students are getting the education they need, by any means necessary.
Teach for America is hardly the solution you seek.
Wow, Gary, that was deep.
Teach for America is far from perfect, but it DOES put smart bodies into classrooms desperate for them, then shuffles them out before burn-out sets in. In the inner-city, Gary, we take what we can get.
I stand by my original statement.
This isn’t the proper venue for debating Teach for America.
I think one of the major hurdles to widescale reform is that the vast majority of educators are not activists. It’s not in their blood. Every year there is something new, something added on, something changed- and every year teachers shift and work with it. The very nature of a classroom teacher is to be flexible and work with what they’ve got. This same frame of mind is not one that lends itself to political activism.
In short, most teachers are simply not rabble rousers. For the most part, they had to be “good students” themselves to land where they’ve landed. They respect authority and have for many years. Not all, mind you, but I’d wager most.
I personally am straddling this same line. I am 100% for change, I’m starting to imagine organizing widespread protests like bubble sheet burning or some other form of peaceful uprising….but that’s not who I am as an educator. I’m not flashy and I don’t like attention on myself, but I badly want change. I’m positive I’m not alone with these feelings. It’s a lot easier to imagine bringing about fullscale changes than it is to actually step up and put the target on your back.
I agree Will and Gary that stories at the local level are insufficient, but they are an important piece that teachers in the trenches can do.
I have a sincere question for you two gentleman and the other “ed-tech leaders” who earn a living speaking, consulting, and writing books. I respect you and your colleagues such as David Warlick, Alphie Kohn, Alan November, Scott McCleod, and many others. I consider you to be the leading voices in education, not just technology. So please take this as an authentic question and not as a critique.
Why do none of you seem to have the ear of Duncan, Obama, or any of the other politicians making terrible education policy?
Education needs some one in power to listen to your voices. Can you explain why this is not happening?
There is no good way to explain why “we” aren’t consulted by politicians.
Some of the people I admire have had audiences with Duncan, but I have little confidence that he will change his views. He, like many policy-makers, and much of the education establishment “lack the capacity for self-correction,” as the late Seymour Sarason used to say so eloquently.
There are obvious answers to your question, like “everyone is an expert on education,” to more nefarious explanations and conspiracy theories for why schools are governed the way they are.
Last point – don’t assume that even the people in your list agree on the large or small issues regarding a deeply complex issue like education.
Thanks for responding. I propose that we “nominate” or find someone to a lobbyist for good education policy. I understand your reasons but disagree with your last point. I think we can all agree on some general principles. I explain in a post here http://concretekax.blogspot.com/2010/05/education-lobbyist-platform.html
I agree with all that Gary says, especially that even we do not agree on the answers to the great and small questions of education. I also agree that Duncan would likely not listen to any one, five, or twenty of us. He has too much invested in the momentum of working our children for political gain (child labor).
What he and they will pay attention to is a population, a crowd, or a mob. I consider it my job to generate conversation, and it doesn’t have to agree with me in specificity. But I try to knock off the mold and invite teachers, parents, and others in the greater community to ask questions and to rethink how our children spend their precious years.
My job is to incite the mob, not gain audience with the king.
— dave —
My job is to incite the mob, not gain audience with the king.
Nicely Done.
So, I’m a public school teacher in NY, and this is my subversive plan for world domination:
1. teach a good course
2. spend a week before the exam showing kids how to determine the best choice for lame crap we didn’t “do” with their graphing calculator
Because of 1 they will know some useful stuff and be demon-like in their problem-defining and -grappling voraciousness and because of 2 I will get to keep my job. I see no other way I can both live with myself and get to keep doing the work I love.
Education ought to be about teaching people how to think, but in our early post-industrial culture the best we can do is a re-hash of what was in place thirty or forty years ago. Assessing teachers on the scores of their students might be meaningful if the we focused more on what children really need to know to be successful. Reading and especially comprehending is an incredibly useful skill. Knowledge of American and world history is important too in the sense that students need to know where we’ve been so that they get a sense of movement. The concept of Regents exams sets a standard and a useful one too, but the assessments need to reflect what is actually important to know and ought be geared toward moving students along a continuum.
The most necessary change has to be the recognition that we need lots of average citizens who can perform average jobs in our society. We need students who can read and express themselves. We need students who understand applied mathematics and science and that is what we ought to assessing and until that changes significantly then any efforts to hold teachers and school accountable will be relatively meaningless.
Schools need to be about preparing students for life as it is and might be, not life as it was and no longer is. When the assessments reflect that reality then holding teachers and school accountable will really matter.
Thanks for this, Will.
You and Calvin inspired this blogpost of mine
http://www.joebower.org/2010/05/if-we-build-it-they-will-come.html
I agree wholeheartedly on the premise that the students are tested on what they mostly know. Case in point California releases test questions for the California Standards Test (CST)in history for 8th graders whom of which are also tested on 6th and 7th grade content. Many of these questions are of the standard type knowledge question of Blooms Taxonomy. Some questions require an application of certain social science skills such as spatial concept and historical interpretation. The point is that the test is a snapshot of one day in the life of the student.
Does it show that they can produce a podcast that incorporates the idea of Manifest Destiny in a rap. No. Does it ask the students to describe the political differences between Jefferson and Hamilton in an essay. No.
Until educators make a conscious effort to educate the public and our politicos on what is really going on in the classroom as Steve Johnson stated we will be stuck with what we have. The solution requires us to use our tools such as this blog and our own to show people what type of learning is taking place. As a previous comment stated it has to happen locally.
Thanks for the comment Chris. Would love to hear from you and others as to some specifics for those efforts.
David,
Since you want to incite a mob, how about passing this info from Deborah Meier along far and wide?
Send a postcard to Michelle Obama – End High Stakes Testing http://bit.ly/b93AVh