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.

Remember When?

Remember when education wasn't being talked about during the presidential campaign? Boy does that seem to have changed. Now it's one of the three things that we need to invest in to create a better future for America. Times have changed. Now let's see how we do with massive (about $100 billion) federal investments into education. Should be interesting.

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 ...

Achievement Gap Discovered

Add Florida middle schools to the list of locales that have officially discovered the achievement gap and are sweating over what to do about it. As last week's Orlando Sentinel reported, many middle schools are offering high school level classes to their students, giving them an opportunity to take more challenging course work. It turns out that those classes are made up predominantly of white students. And the achievement gap has been discovered.

Here's the part that makes me shake my head. Now that Florida officials have discovered the achievement gap, they're trying to decide what to do about it. One of the solutions they're apparently considering is doing away with this program. What? Talk about treating the symptom without going to the root of the problem.

The real issue (as I read the article) is not that this advanced classes program is so discriminatory in who it accepts that only white kids get in. Far from it. Rather, the problem is that by the time the kids reach the age of eligibility for the program there's already a gap in academic preparedness that favors white students. Getting rid of the program is not the answer, academic and social interventions that prevent the achievement gap from opening is where the answer lies.

Look at it this way. If I get on the scale and think that I weigh too much, I shouldn't just throw the scale out. I should focus on eating better and exercising more. Getting rid of the scale doesn't solve my problem, it just keeps me from being reminded of it.

Getting rid of these advanced level courses doesn't close the achievement gap, it just hides it. The real problem would still be there.

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.

Some Big Ifs

Teachers union president Randi Weingarten had an op-ed in Monday's Washington Post making the case for national standards for learning. On the one hand, it was nice to see the union head making a stand for what is unquestionably a major education reform. Hopefully that at least sets back some of the union-as-obstructionist charges that we hear. However, the whole idea of national standards rests on a few very big ifs.

National standards do make a certain amount of sense if we're committed to a national program of testing and accountability. For better or worse, this does seem to be the road we're on in the NCLB era. We've seen what happens when the federal government says to meet standards, but then doesn't define what those standards are - it's the oft-cited race to the bottom. So if we're dedicated to this course, then national standards do make sense.

However, if we're going to set up national standards, we'll probably also have to set up a national standardized test. Weingarten makes the point that it would be unfair in football if teams had to move the ball differing yardage to gain a first down. True. She says that when states have different promotional standards you're getting the same effect. True. But unless we have a national test to measure these standards, then it will be like saying that every team has to go 10 yards but then letting each team measure 10 yards as they see fit. We'd end up with the same race to the bottom that we have now. This time it would be in testing instruments rather than the standards themselves. So if we want meaningful national standards, we'll also need a standardized national test.

And, of course, all of this only makes sense if we can set a good set of standards in the first place, which I'm not 100% convinced of. As we saw in Texas, there's a lot of potential for mischief in the process. Even if we brought in a broad-based group of "educators, elected officials, community leaders, and experts in pedagogy and particular content" I am not convinced that we would be able to arrive at a single set of clear, measurable standards that would (and should) apply equally to every single student in the 50 states.

I should say here that I'm not necessarily opposed to the idea of national standards. In many ways I think they could be an improvement over our current system of testing regime. However, there are some major ifs associated with pursuing this course. Until they are addressed I will continue to have my doubts.

Governance is Just Governance

Even as New York is wrestling with what to do about mayoral control of the schools, other cities across the nation are considering adopting mayoral control in some form or another. The latest city to be considering taking the plunge is Milwaukee.

However, Milwaukee - not content to just jump right in and sort out the effects later - wants to see how it worked in other cities first. Thus, the Greater Milwaukee Foundation commissioned a report by the Public Policy Forum on mayoral control of major city school systems. Completely unshockingly, the results are mixed.

Here's a key sentence from the report to roll around in your mind a little bit. The report found that, "In the end, governance reform may result in improvements in a district's fiscal condition, but may not have sustainable impacts on student achievement, especially of low-income and minority students."

In other words, governance affects the administrative side of schools, but less so the pedagogical sides. Seems pretty obvious to me.

When we talk about mayoral control we talk about larger systemic issues that may or may not filter down into the individual classrooms. At the root, the level of success enjoyed by schools and school systems depends on the quality of teachers in the classrooms. Unless the mayor takes over control of each classroom, then we shouldn't expect achievement in those classrooms to magically reform itself on his or her whims.

That said, this is not to say that mayoral control isn't still a worthwhile structure. After all, a district in poor financial shape will have more difficulty providing teachers with the resources they will need to be successful. But Milwaukee (and New York) shouldn't expect some achievement gap closing miracle just because authority for the school system rests in City Hall.