On to the Next Thing

I take it as a pretty good sign for health care reform that President Obama is starting to move on to other major projects - notably strengthening financial regulations and improving the No Child Left Behind law. Both are in need of a lot of help.

My favorite of the new provisions being considered for NCLB is to focus less on measuring the kids who are proficient at grade level and more on getting kids to make progress from wherever they started. This makes sense to me because that's something over which the school actually has control (at least relatively speaking). The schools take whoever comes to them, regardless of whether or not they're at grade level. It just makes sense to me to measure schools and school quality by how far they advance children, not just who's able to get past the line of proficiency. When we do it the old way, schools doing great work with difficult populations are rewarded less than schools doing mediocre work with easier populations. That doesn't make sense to me and I'm glad to see that I'm not alone.

Also, as a former social studies teacher, I'm glad to see that states may be expanding their testing regime beyond reading and math. Hopefully an expansion there will lead to less narrowing of curriculum in the name of test prep and adequate yearly progress.

As with everything, the devil is always in the details so I'm not going to offer a final assessment just yet. But from what I'm seeing now, they're on the right track with this one.

Change We Can Believe In

Not content with just reforming education through the Race to the Top fund, President Obama has come out swinging again on education. This time, he's talking about rewriting the No Child Left Behind law. At the risk of repeating what's already been on about 1,000 edublogs, way to go.

At this point, it's pretty clear that No Child Left Behind, though well intentioned, has some serious flaws. It's over-reliance on standardized tests is a huge example of that. So what does Obama do? He sets out to deemphasize standardized tests in determining which schools are succeeding and which are failing. If this really happens, it could lead to a huge shift away from the skill, drill, and kill methodology that's become pretty much a necessity in the NCLB era. Let's move away from the high stakes tests and toward a more complete measure of student and school performance.

Arne Duncan said, "We want accountability reforms that factor in student growth, progress in closing achievement gaps, proficiency towards college and career-ready standards, high school graduation and college enrollment rates."

Yes we do.

A New Decade

First of all, happy new year everyone. Indeed, it's a happy new decade and I hope that everyone finds this decade even better than the last, whatever it was called.

On that note, the New Yorker ran a predictably droll piece in their Talk of the Town section about how the lack of consensus about what to call the previous decade might have been a harbinger for the lack of consensus on a variety of other issues that came before us during the previous ten years. While I'm still not entirely sure what we're going to be calling the last decade, in terms of educational epochs, it was pretty clear.

Without question, the aughts (if that's really what we're going to insist on calling them) were the No Child Left Behind decade. That was the defining feature of education policy as first the law was passed and then more and more states started putting greater and greater emphasis on high stakes student testing. Look around New York or pretty much anywhere else and you see that test scores not only reign supreme, but that many aren't even questioning that testing emphasis is the way it should be. It's just part of the landscape.

I know it's early (4 days out of a total 3650), but I've already got a nominee for what the new decade in education will be: the Race to the Top decade. Clearly that's the big focus right now and with all that money on the line, it's no wonder. Whether or not the focus stays on that one initiative for the next ten years is doubtful. I know I'd bet against it. However, the sentiment summed up by the effort is, I think, going to be here to stay.

In short, Race to the Top is about tweaking the effects of NCLB without fundamentally altering the landscape that it created. We're seeing pushes for national standards and for states increasing their standards and creating more school choice. All of this is what NCLB set out to do, but didn't do that well. In other words, we're still tinkering with the same program, but we're trying to correct the mistakes that were made the first time around.

Part of me can't really imagine that the moniker "Race to the Top Decade" is really going to be sticking around 10 years from today. But if it is, remember that you heard it here first.

More Outside the Bubble Thinking

As a former band geek myelf, it's always nice to hear that all those years practicing scales may have added up to something other than a mastery of do, re, mi's. Not that that isn't a useful skill to have. Still, when you read something like this report showing that taking music classes can improve reading skills (in addition to, presumably, music skills), it's hard not to stand up a little bit straighter. Of course, that news won't come as a shock to those who regularly read this blog.

Despite this academic benefit, we're still hearing reports all over the place (especially in New York) that music and other arts programs are being cut to make way for more test prep. Essentially, with limited hours each day, schools are cutting out the extras to focus entirely on the curriculars. Not to fear, says the GAO, their study finds that school time devoted to art and music hasn't decreased even with our increased emphasis on standardized tests. Seems like encouraging news. Turns out there's nothing to worry about after all.

But check out this quote from the report" "Our study identified a more likely reduction in time spent on arts education at schools identified as needing improvement and those with higher percentages of minority students."

In other words, the schools that most focus on test prep and raising scores are most likely to cut arts programs. This is your taxpayer money at work discovering that insight.

So where does that leave us? It leaves us in a pretty familiar position. Those who are succeeding are getting additional resources that will help them succeed further. Those who are not succeeding are not getting the resources and falling farther behind.

Outside the Bubble

I often hear or read that the unintended (but not unexpected) side effect of No Child Left Behind with its focus on standardized testing in the core subjects is that arts education goes by the wayside. In an effort to boost test scores, schools and teachers focus on what's being tested. That makes of sense to me and it probably shouldn't surprise people that it's done. But by focusing so exclusively on these core subjects, the schools are really missing out.

Take the Corbett Elementary School in Tucson, Arizona. They've instituted a hugely intensive interdisciplinary music program in the school. They're writing operas in the fifth grade instead of practicing multiple choice tests all day. And you know what? Their test scores are going up. Even compared to schools in the area with similar demographics, Corbett is making big strides. The variable is the focus on arts in the curriculum.

And that's just in the classroom. As the New York Times reported earlier this week, a study in the Journal of Pediatrics linked good classroom behavior with increased recess time. Kids who got at least 15 minutes of recess were able to focus much better in class the rest of the day. Kind of the stitch in time philosophy.

With all of our focus on making sure that kids know which bubbles to fill in on a scantron sheet, we may be missing out on some very useful learning opportunities that still go back to that bottom line of student achievement. We just need to remember to think outside the bubble.


EXTRA: Starting next week, Teachable Moment will move to a Monday, Wednesday, Friday schedule. I have some other writing projects that I'm working on and mornings seem to be the only time I can get them done. So starting next week I'll try to make up with extra quality what is lacking in quanitity. Thanks for reading.

Accountability and Shane Battier

When you look at it from the right angle, everything relates to education. Take the article about basketball player Shane Battier from the February 13th issue of New York Times Magazine. On the surface, it seems like it's just about a basketball player. But I read it as an insightful commentary on the weaknesses of our standardized system of accountability and measuring success.

The Battier article is interesting if you're a fan of basketball. If not, I probably wouldn't recommend it. The gist of the article is this: while Shane Battier's statistics (points, rebounds, steals, assists, etc) aren't all that great, he does so many unmeasured things that make him a great team player. While the data on his individual achievement doesn't necessarily show it, he makes the teams he plays on much better and the teams he plays against much worse.

So now you know that you should appreciate Shane Battier much more the next time you watch the Houston Rockets play. But let's pivot and see how this affects education.

If we were to view points, rebounds, and all that as a standardized test score, Battier wouldn't be doing all that well. He probably wouldn't be meeting standards (certainly not for a starter) and it's unlikely he'd be showing much yearly progress. You might even go so far as to label him a failing player.

But we know from this article that Battier is a highly valued player and member of his team. If we based all of our judgements on his scores we would completely miss that.

This isn't to say that if you're looking for a player to draft out of college or trade for that you shouldn't be looking at things like points and rebounds. I am saying that you shouldn't base everything on a statistical line. Similarly, I don't know if we can look at schools, teachers, and students based solely on that line. There's too great a chance of missing something fundamental.

Speaking of things that over-rely on statistical data, Arne Duncan has said that he's open to renaming the No Child Left Behind Act. Almost immediately, Eduwonk opened a contest to re-name the law. It's definitely worth checking out. My favorite has to be: Double Back Around To Pick Up The Children We Left Behind Act.

UPDATE: Turns out this post had pretty much already been written by Matthew Ladner. Great minds ...

Failing Kids? Failing System?

The news has already made its way through a good portion of the educational blogosphere, but I wanted to dedicate a post to the Minnesota principals survey that found that 97% of principals don't think all schools will meet the federal NCLB standards by 2012. Even though this is almost certainly correct (the same survey found that less than 50% of the schools in Minnesota made adequate yearly progress last year), it's being seen as something big - we're just not exactly sure what. From my vantage point, there's three possible ways to read these results: a lack of faith in the kids, a lack of faith in the standards, or a lack of faith in the measurement.

The first and probably most serious reading is that principals don't think their children are able to achieve at baseline competency levels. It goes back to the idea that not all kids are able to achieve at a high level. This would be a major problem. If our educators don't think the kids can achieve, what hope do they have? I'm not saying that every kid should be expected to perform advanced calculus. Heck, I can't even do basic calculus (or even algebra after this long since a math class). But we do need to believe and strive so that every child attains a basic competency that will allow them to succeed in life. If this survey reflects an absence of that belief, then I'm very worried for the children of Minnesota. But maybe that's not it at all.

Maybe the results reflect a lack of faith in the standards. In other words, maybe the standards are set too high (or abstractly) so that kids who do have the skills needed to succeed in life still don't meet those standards. We have to be careful here because following that road could lead to infamous "dumbing down" which is the bane of education reformers everywhere. But maybe it's that the standards don't match the necessary life skills. Or maybe it's not that at all.

Maybe it's a lack of faith in the measurments (tests) themselves. That is to say that kids who are meeting the standards and can demonstrate it in their lives and in the course of normal classroom activities can't do so on the test. This would argue for a rethinking of how we measure academic competency in the classroom.

It's probably not as black and white as all that. Each of the 700 principals who answered the survey probably had their own indvidual reasons for doing so. Likely it was some combination of the factors I described above, but maybe they also had something entirely different.

However, from my perspective this is a cry for help. These are principals who honestly don't think that children across the state are going to be performing at the levels society expects of them in the next five years. Regardless of what their motivations for answering that way are, it's clear that something needs to be done. The principals are telling us that things now aren't working.

An NCLB Epiphany

Michael Petrilli, a self-proclaimed "true believer" in the No Child Left Behind Law and former Bush administration official who worked on implementing the law itself, has an interesting piece in the National Review where he concludes that "NCLB as enacted is fundamentally flawed and probably beyond repair."

In short, Petrilli has come to the same conclusion that educators across the country have been screaming about for years now. Namely, that requiring "highly-qualified teachers" sounds great on paper, but isn't so sensical in practice, that mandating state-defined proficiency leads to a race to the bottom, that focusing on accountability through testing leads to a narrowly focused curriculum/test prep factory, and that there aren't enough good schools around to ensure that every child could go to one if we allowed for school choice.

Amen, Michael.

That being said, he still holds to five ideas that he says are central to NCLB and that he does still support, even if the law doesn't.

1. All children (even the poor ones) have the ability to learn
2. Accountability helps schools and individuals improve
3. Good teachers are needed for good education
4. Giving parents choice has positive benefits
5. Improving education is a "national imperative" in which the federal government can have a productive role

I agree wholeheartedly and without reservation to 1, 3, and 5. I suspect that one would have a hard time finding anyone in the educational world (even the non-"reformers") who disagree with 1 and 3. Even 5 would get you a pretty good degree of agreement. It's the even numbers up there that present some potential sticky points.

As I've written on this site over and over again, "accountability" is a great word that it's hard to argue against, but doesn't really mean anything. Does it mean testing? High stakes testing? High stakes for students? Teachers? Schools? What does it actually mean? It's well and good to say that people should be accountable for teaching and learning. In theory, I'm for that. I just haven't seen a good system yet for making that happen in a way that doesn't lead to the problems that even Petrilli outlines.

As for school choice, again, Petrilli put his finger right on the issue: even if we give everyone a choice of where they'll be going to school, there aren't enough good schools for every child to be in one. If there were, then every child would already be in a good school. It's just basic logic on this. So instead of starting with the idea of school choice, let's start with the idea of making the schools better. Then everyone benefits. And I don't think anyone would disagree with that goal.

Testing Mania

If you're interested in getting the mental gears turning, check out this piece by John Goodlad in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. It goes on a little bit long, but it's worth reading as it kind of gives the history of how we came to our current educational state under No Child Left Behind.

My favorite part in the article comes pretty early when Goodland writes, "I did not see any point in trying to fix what was not broken but should be terminated. ... Our proclivity for testing has been around a long time and probably will continue to be. The challenge is to choose wisely what and how we test."

The point I'm taking from that is not that NCLB is not working the way it's supposed to, it's that the program is working, but that it's just a bad idea. Hear, hear.

NCLB was not what brought us to our testing mania. Goodland pretty convincingly lays out that we were on a long road toward that end. NCLB is the culmination of that mania. It's the official enshrinement of the "accountability" movement at a national level.

I'm not against accountability. I am against the obsession of casting a single test score as the sole basis for our educational system. As Diane Ravitch writes in a pretty great posting on her blog, "By making test scores the sole gauge of progress, one can expect to see cheating and test prepping, and other quasi-legitimate and outright illegitimate ways of reaching the only goal that matters. When teachers, principals, and students are given rewards and punishments for only one measure, that measure may well rise, but at a cost."

That cost is becoming more and more clear as our testing mania continues.

Everyone's an Expert

I don't know what exactly it is about education that makes everyone an expert about it. Maybe it comes down to the fact that everyone went to school at one time or another and so think they have a pretty good idea about how things should work. After all, what could be hard about creating pedagogically sound, age-appropriate lessons to millions of individual children across the country? Seems like anyone could chime in on how to improve that.

In that vein, Lou Gerstner, the former CEO of IBM, has his solution. In short, he wants to run the school system nationally more like a business. Never mind that running businesses like a business hasn't been terribly successful lately. This makes sense to Lou and, because everyone's an expert on schools, he can get attention for saying it.

Now, there are some diamonds in the dunghill of his "solution." He does favor a system of national standards, which as I've written before makes a certain amount of sense. Assuming that we actually are going to focus on accountability (beware the unspeak), then we need goals to hold schools accountable to. Letting states set their own goals is just a race to the bottom. So he may be onto something there.

Where he goes off the rails in my mind is in his plan to consolidate all the districts in the country into 50 to 70 mega-districts. From a business perspective, I can see how centralizing production and all that makes sense. But we aren't mass producing here. We're not trying to sell the same product a bajillion times to make lots of money. In education, we're trying to reach each individual student on an individual level and move them forward as far as we can each year. The school system isn't an assembly line where one teacher dumps a vat of knowledge into a kid's brain before sending them on to the next teacher for another vat to be dumped. That's just not how education works and we forget that at our peril.

The government's last big attempt at centralizing pedagogy has been something less than an overwhelming success. The Reading First program was one of the centerpieces of the No Child Left Behind Act. Now, $6 billion (that's right, 9 zeroes) into the program, we find out that the students in the program made no greater gains in reading comprehension than students not in the program. Once again we see that a one size fits all solution didn't work for every child in America. Do we get it yet?

Still Don't Get It

As I was writing yesterday about the failures of No Child Left Behind to provide a meaningful sort of accountability on high school drop out rates, the Department of Education was preparing to release new rules designed to boost that accountability. The only problem is that when the new rules were released, there was nothing in them that will actually boost accountability. The administration still just doesn't get it.

According to the new rules, states must show they are making progress in raising graduation rates not only across the board, but also within each demographic group. This has actually been one of the good things about NCLB. It requires reporting that shows where the achievement gap is happening. It doesn't allow for one group's results to hide the results of another. So in order for states to say they're making progress in their graduation rates, the states need to show that they're making progress for all students. I like that idea.

Where the new rules don't do anything meaningful is that they leave it up to the states to say what constitutes appropriate progress. I went over this yesterday, but it's frankly ridiculous. Given the system that's in place with the law (make progress or lose funding) there's no incentive for states to set ambitious goals. Instead, there's a very strong incentive to set the bar very low. That's what New York is doing. And it's hardly alone in that.

The Department of Education can talk all they want about holding schools accountable. Obviously it makes good press for them. But as long as the ones being held "accountable" get to make their own rules, we aren't going to get very far. I mean, imagine if we let all those kids being tested in third through eighth grade decide what score they needed to get to show they're ready for the next grade. We wouldn't even be able to pretend that we were holding standards. So why do we allow it when it's states instead of kids?

How Low Can You Go?

When the No Child Left Behind Act was passed, it was supposed to fight the "soft bigotry of low expectations" by testing all kids and making sure that each state had specific goals that it had to meet and would be held accountable to. The only problem is that no one at the federal level said what those goals had to be. Given that states lose money in NCLB if they don't meet their goals, guess what happened. The states set ridiculously low goals.

If you check out the chart here you can see the high school graduation goals as set by state. Some states like Indiana have the bar set at what looks to be about 95%, meaning their goal for 95% of Indiana school kids to graduate from high school. That's a nice ambitious and meaningful goal. A few other states have the bar set at about 90%. But then you get down to the New York section of the chart. New York, the cultural center of the nation, has set as its goal a graduation rate of 55%. That's not even where we are now, that's the goal! Just incredible. The state set as its goal 0.1% progress each year. How is that a goal? How is that really going to be helping kids? What happened to getting rid of the low expectations?

Perhaps even more than the unfunded mandate part of NCLB, the thing that bugs me most is how it looks like we're holding schools and teachers and kids accountable, but we aren't actually doing any of those things. It's just a big show to look busy in case anyone happens to look over and see what we're doing.

Given this, it's not a huge surprise that kids today are less likely than their parents to graduate from high school. That's right. The system is regressing so that kids today have less opportunity than their parents. Kind of like the American Dream in reverse.

That's bad enough. It's worse that we're pretending to make progress when we aren't actually progressing.