Where’s Waldo? Searching For the Liberal Education Agenda at The Conference on America’s Future

June 15, 2010 – 8:35 am

I love to watch kids read those Where’s Waldo? books. I love the way they search intensely across busy pages and then erupt with glee at the discovery of their favorite character. I was searching for something similar when I attended a progressive political conference last week in Washington D.C. But my search did not end gleefully.

Flanking the main stage at The Conference on America’s Future were two smartly designed towers emblazoned with the top progressive priorities of the day: New Energy, Green Jobs, Curb Wall Street, Fair Trade, Worker’s Rights, Immigration Reform, Clean Elections, Invest in Jobs, Rebuild America, Real Security, Equal Justice for All. I scanned the towers up and down for several minutes. Waldo was nowhere in sight. I was looking for education, but I never found it.

With the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act coming in the next 6-12 months, education is a hot topic. But apparently not for progressives. In addition to omitting education from the list of policy priorities, the conference included no sessions on education, and the people with whom I discussed the subject seemed interested only in being angry, bitter, and often incorrect in their characterization of No Child Left Behind and other current ed reform strategies like curriculum standards, charter schools, and merit pay.

The point I tried to make all week to anyone who would listen was not that I felt left out. I was merely concerned—yet again—about the absence of a viable, positive, and clearly articulated liberal agenda. If conservative ideas continue to shape the future of education, who do we think future generations of educated voters will vote for?

In recent years, the Left has been the Party of “No” in education. Aside from the Economic Policy Institute’s Bigger, Better, Bolder Approach—which looks attractive but seems difficult to define, impossible to sound bite, and politically unviable—I’m not aware of any concrete education policy plans from our left-leaning leaders. Maybe I’ve missed something (and if I have, I’m eager to know), but other than being anti-this and anti-that, I don’t see us taking a positive stand on much of anything in education these days.

As a center-left ed reformer, I could use a few good ideas as I cruise around the country working in schools and talking to people about what needs to be done to fix our broken system. I understand education policy, and I certainly have my opinions about the direction we should be taking, but I’m not a political player or a policy wonk. I don’t even live in Washington D.C.

Since I’m not an “anti” guy when it comes to education, I’ve had no choice but to line up behind the conservative agenda just so I can stay in the game. To hold onto my soul, I’ve composed my own Democratic variations on Republican themes. And though I think I do well by our kids and our party, my voice is muted because it has no policies or political leaders to amplify it.

If education is not on our agenda now, then when? We’ve had nine years since No Child Left Behind was enacted. We’ve been able to identify the weaknesses in that approach, but we haven’t come up with viable alternatives. Even Republicans admit that NCLB hasn’t gone as planned. But with no new ideas on the table, it seems like we’re planning to stay the course. Who knows? If we give it enough time, it just might work.

So, if we’re against testing, what are we for? If we don’t like charter schools, are there other school structures we might like? If we’re worried about corporate corruption, privatization, or undue philanthropic influence in public education, do we have anything besides our anxiety to offer? Clearly, going back to the status quo circa 1995 isn’t on our minds. But in what practical ways are we looking to the future?

The ESEA will be reauthorized some time during President Obama’s term, probably within the next year. The current “blueprint” amounts largely to a continuation of the same policies we didn’t like before and aren’t likely to like in the future. But because we haven’t come up with anything workable in the past nine years, it looks like we may be in for nine more of the same. That’s the equivalent of a generation and a half of K-12 school children. If we plan to sit by and wait another 18 years before we put something better in front of the American people, please let me know now. I love my work and I want to keep doing it. I’d much rather work for our side than for theirs. But if they’re the only folks who have a side, I won’t have much choice. And neither will our children and their families.

By stevepeha | Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , | Comments (8)

June Issue: Teacher Effectiveness

June 11, 2010 – 10:34 am

This post shares three teachers’ perspectives on what it means to be an effective teacher. In addition to teaching, Rebecca Schmidt, Donna Smart Isaacs, and Dave Orphal work closely with three Rethink Learning Now Partner organizations: the Center for Inspired Teaching, the All Kinds of Minds Institute, and the Center for Teaching Quality, respectively. The Rethink Learning Now campaign, a national grass-roots initiative designed to restore the focus of education reform on learning, and the core conditions that best support it. Each month, the campaign is featuring a new issue in K-12 education and providing things people can read, watch, listen to and do to raise awareness. For June the topic teacher effectiveness.

What makes a teacher more effective?

Education policymakers, researchers, funders, and pundits are currently focusing a great deal of attention on defining and measuring teaching effectiveness. They hope to discover the magic formula that will unlock every student’s potential to learn, and render them creative, critical thinkers prepared for the university and the workplace. Often, they point to research that shows that many of the factors that are traditionally rewarded by compensation and tenure systems for teachers – such as holding advanced degrees, or having extreme longevity in the profession –correlate less with teaching effectiveness.

Read More »

By Laura Bornfreund | Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged | Comments (2)

Washington Post to Feature a Story a Week for 2010 (and beyond?)

June 7, 2010 – 10:22 am

Great news! Beginning tomorrow morning, the Washington Post’s Valerie Strauss will feature a new learning story each week between now and the re-authorization of the Elementary and Secondary Act (whenever that is).

Fittingly, the series will begin with the learning story of U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan. But there’s still time to share your own story and have it featured — go to rethinklearningnow.com and tell us about your most effective teacher, and/or your most powerful learning experience!

By samchaltain | Posted in Uncategorized | Comments (0)

How to combine learning, assessment, accountability

May 21, 2010 – 1:35 pm

By Lisa Guisbond and Monty Neill, FairTest

[This first appeared on The Answer
Sheet, Valerie Strauss' blog for the Washington Post.]

You can’t fatten a pig by weighing it.

Politicians sometimes trot out this homespun expression to show they understand how frustrated many students, parents and teachers are about the way the current fixation on standardized testing crowds out time for deeper learning.

It’s a great irony of the current accountability movement that policies like No Child Left Behind starve our children of time to think, create and learn in order to measure them with simplistic tests.

In FairTest’s previous Answer Sheet guest blog, we described a way to weigh and fatten the pig at the same time. The idea is to replace standardized testing as the main measure, the tool that rules school, with classroom-based measures of student growth.

Teachers and schools would assemble evidence of learning that includes essays, research reports, and individual and group projects. This way, we would ensure that students are having meaningful learning experiences (not just filling in test bubbles) and look at the results of those experiences to see how they are progressing.

Now we look at the slightly more complicated question of how to use multiple measures and growth measures to provide accountability.

Multiple-measure accountability systems use classroom-based records of student growth in various subjects as a major part of the evidence of how schools are doing.

Other factors could include student grades, graduation and dropout rates, the percentage of students who advance to the next grade, portion of students taking honors/advanced level classes and Advanced Placement classes, college enrollment and persistence rates, employment histories after high school, surveys of school climate, and, yes, scores on standardized tests.

In contrast to NCLB’s narrow approach, this collection of data paints a multidimensional picture of how schools are doing. By giving schools credit for addressing different facets of a good education, they are encouraged to create richer, more well-rounded educational experiences for children.

FairTest and the Forum on Educational Accountability have developed the framework for such a system as an alternative to NCLB.

One knock on this approach is that these types of evidence can’t be processed and reported as quickly as test scores. But the importance of speed depends on purpose. Accountability should not be about quickly labeling schools under-performing and meting out punishments, which can make the learning climate worse. It should be about gathering multifaceted data and using it to guide improvements.

Another criticism is that the mix of evidence is not as “objective” as standardized test results and is less reliable. But there’s no way to measure the kind of critical thinking kids should acquire without using open-response questions and larger projects that need to be assessed by human beings.

The question is what we really want: A narrow curriculum measured by cheap, fast, limited tests, or a richer curriculum that can only be evaluated with more complex evidence?

The details of how to process this richer set of data can get complicated quickly, but it is far from impossible.

Nebraska successfully implemented a statewide system comprised of locally developed assessments that often included classroom-based work. The state system was designed so that assessments were based on the state’s academic standards (or state-approved local standards), had consistent scoring, were unbiased and were developmentally appropriate.

The benefits, according to Nebraska educators, were many, including helping teachers learn how to do their jobs better, assess more accurately and deeply, and gather and organize the evidence of learning that can demonstrate to parents, communities and policy-makers what students have achieved. Unfortunately, the Bush administration helped kill the innovative Nebraska program.

Another good example is the Learning Record, developed first in England for literacy (reading, writing, speaking, listening) for use with low-income children, many of whom had first languages other than English. The LR provides a well-structured method for assembling a rich array of evidence of student learning.

The question is not whether classroom-based evidence can be used for public reporting and accountability. It can and has.

The challenges are whether the U.S. is willing to go beyond a fixation with narrow definition of “objectivity,” whether it will invest in training teachers how to teach and assess learning well, and whether it will turn accountability into a helpful tool instead of a destructive punishment.

This blog first appeared at http://voices.washingtonpost.com/answer-sheet/standardized-tests/combining-learning-assessment.html#more

FairTest’s website is http://www.fairtest.org.

-0-

By Monty Neill | Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged | Comments (1)

Ask Mrs. Obama For Her Support!

May 11, 2010 – 9:49 am

When Mrs. Obama was on the campaign trail she said the following about the Bush Administration’s No Child Left Behind Program:

No Child Left Behind  is strangling the life out of most schools.  If my future were determined by my performance on a standardized test I wouldn’t be here. I guarantee that.

Many agree with her criticism. If you do, ask her to help end the reliance on high-stakes standardized tests.

On Friday, May 28, Time out From Testing, a Rethink Learning Now partner, is urging parents, teachers, students, and anyone else interested to send a postcard to Michelle Obama with this message:

Dear Mrs. Obama:

We want the same high-quality education for our public school children that you provide for Malia and Sasha.

Children are not test scores.

Encourage the President to end the use of high-stakes standardized tests!

Sincerely,

Name

Address

Signature

Mail to:

First Lady Michelle Obama

White House

Washington DC

Ask your friends, family, and co-workers to do the same!

By Laura Bornfreund | Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged | Comments (2)

May Issue: Performance Assessment

May 4, 2010 – 12:51 pm

Each month, the Rethink Learning Now campaign will feature a new issue each month, and provide specific things people can READ, WATCH, LISTEN TO, and DO in order to raise awareness, share their voice, and make a difference. This month, the topic is performance assessment. To learn more, read the following Op-Ed, written by Forum for Education & Democracy Convener, Deborah Meier.

As the Obama administration explores new ways to support a national culture of learning – as opposed to our current national culture of testing – it faces a central dilemma: How to satisfy all of our country’s education stakeholders at once.

There are our students, who need timely and instructive feedback that reflects what they really know and are able to do; our parents, who need accurate evidence about their children’s progress; our teachers, who need information that helps them improve the quality of their professional practice and better meet the learning needs of their students; and the general public, which needs to know if schools and teachers are helping children learn how to use their minds well.

Before the conversation progresses any further, I have some unsolicited advice: Don’t expect to satisfy all four needs with the same policy.

For our nation’s students, the evaluative process should be treated less like the part of the driver’s test where we complete a pen-and-paper exam, and more like the part where we actually get in a car and show what we can do on a real road with real traffic and real-time scenarios unfolding all around us.

There’s a term for this sort of approach – performance assessment – and it requires schools to invest in seven interrelated components: active learning; formative and summative documentation; strategies for corrective action; multiple ways for students to express and exhibit learning; graduation-level performance tasks that are aligned with the school’s learning standards; external evaluators of student work; and a focus on professional development. (To learn more about performance assessment, visit http://rethinklearningnow.com/principles/learning.)

Read More »

By Laura Bornfreund | Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged | Comments (1)

It Happens Almost Every Day

April 30, 2010 – 8:24 am

Almost every day during the school year, I receive e-mails from teachers asking for help with various challenges. The most common challenge is that their students are so far below grade level in reading and writing that they can’t handle their current grade level curriculum. Their teachers don’t know how to teach reading and writing because they were never trained to do so and haven’t endeavored to learn on their own. So everyone’s stuck, and everyone’s frustrated.

There is a straightforward solution to this problem. But it is almost never implemented. To help teachers as much as I can, I always tell them the solution. Then I tell them something else they can teach their kids, something that at least gives them a chance of succeeding in some way some day when school has finished not educating them.

On Apr 28, 2010, at 10:21 AM, luv2teachBCS@aol.com wrote:

Dear Mr. Peha,

I’m a second year lateral entry teacher. I currently teach 9th graders, but the reading and writing levels in my classes vary from about 1st grade to maybe 5th grade, and that might be a stretch. I do not know where to start or how to help these students. We currently do not have a reading or a writing program at our high school, and I only have these students for about 50 minutes each day.

Please help! How can I teach these students to read and write?

It saddens me that students are making it to high school and are unable to read and write. I plan to speak with my Principal and Department Chair to discuss implementing a reading program at our school. It is definitely needed. It’s not fair to our students if we continue to push them along and pass them without requiring them to learn to read and write. I feel as if we are setting them up for failure.

We do read in class but the textbook is not exciting, and most of my kids can’t read it anyway, so I’m in desperate need of appropriate material. Any advice you can give is greatly appreciated.

Sincerely,

Bonnie Smith

Read More »

By stevepeha | Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , | Comments (2)

Pushed Out

April 29, 2010 – 5:02 pm

Before I moved to D.C., I worked for the City of Orlando  on an initiative called the Parramore Kidz Zone (PKZ). (Read more about it here.)  Parramore is a small neighborhood in downtown Orlando where about 2,100 kids live. The poverty rate in the neighborhood is high; educational attainment is low.

There are lots of older youth and young adults, aged 16-24, who roam the neighborhood  looking for a way to support themselves and for someone to care. They are creative, bright, and curious, but many are on a dangerous, unhealthy path. Why? Many of these young people  were “pushed out” of high school.

In Florida, students must pass the FCAT, the state standardized test, to graduate from high school. The FCAT is also used to grade schools. Using an A-F scale, schools are assigned a grade and given financial rewards based on the number of students that pass the FCAT. In high school, students take the FCAT in 10th grade. If they don’t pass, for graduation purposes, they can try again in 11th and 12th grade.

All too often, some students, as early as their tenth grade year, are encouraged by their school to enroll in alternative education programs (technical education programs or GED programs). Students are told they lack too many credits or are too far behind. They are told technical education or getting their GED would be better for them  the school says. But students and their parents are not told the long-term consequences of their decisions.  The decision is often made quickly, and is presented with the school’s best interest in mind, not the student’s. Schools are passively encouraged to do this. They don’t intend to harm students.

But,  if  the students that are so far behind have enrolled in other alternative options when test day comes around, they won’t bring down the school’s grade. In addition, they don’t count as dropouts, because technically, they haven’t “dropped out.” They have been pushed out.  Our public education system has failed these students and led them down a path that will likely hurt their long-term chances of being successful in life.

PKZ finds these students and helps them find a better path. PKZ also helps connect younger children and their families to the opportunities and supports they need so they never get that far behind. Read one promising story here.

By Laura Bornfreund | Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , | Comments (0)

Challenging Students

April 29, 2010 – 4:10 pm

School was a challenge for my brother.

Reports cards often included statements like:
“behavior remains a problem for Andrew”
“it is a challenge for him to sit still”
“he is working on keeping his hands to himself and not talking so much”
“he struggles to stay focused on the task at hand”

Perhaps it is more accurate to say my brother was a challenge for his schools.

This is because my little brother is brilliant. Throughout school he was almost always bored. Every call home to my parents contained an untold story of Andrew’s quest for something interesting to do.

I know this is true because his best year in school, by far, was when he had a teacher who loved science as much as he did. She spent huge portions of the day doing hands-on experiments. That year Andrew’s report card looked very different. It said things about his creativity, curiosity, and eagerness to learn.

At home, keeping my brother out of trouble was not hard. Supply him with interesting books about how things work and some broken appliances and he was hooked for hours. Let him play with tools and wood scraps and he’d invent something beyond your wildest dreams. Give him the chance to create games with the neighbors and he was in his glory.

Traditional schools are not set up to handle people like my brother. He’s not the classic sit-in-a-chair-studiously-for-hours “gifted” kid that we’re taught to expect when we think of genius. But neither are most kids, and I don’t think that means intelligence is just exceptionally rare.

Andrew grew up before ADD had a label and a medication. Perhaps today Ritalin would enable him to fit the mold better.

But even beyond the possibility of a clinical diagnosis, as an educator I wish that Andrew’s teachers had understood him as well as his family did. Even if they didn’t have old telephones for him to take apart and put back together, his teachers would have been amazed by the knowledge he could glean at the age of ten from a scientific article. If they’d simply let him work with a partner on one of their uninspired assignments, he would have gotten the job done just because he would have been able to exercise his interpersonal intelligence.

Challenge comes in all forms for children. What Andrew learned from the kind of challenge he experienced in grade school was that he could learn more outside the classroom than he could within it.

I know he’s not alone in that discovery. He graduated, but countless other bored students simply get tired of wasting their time and don’t. How do we curb that tide? How can we create more of the educational challenge that engages, and less that makes students want to walk away? How do we make school meaningful for all children, not just the ones who can find meaning in a conventional instructional format?

By Jenna Fournel | Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged | Comments (0)

A Local Focus on the School-to-Prison Pipeline

April 26, 2010 – 7:03 am

Last October, a Georgia middle school student, realized he mistakenly brought a fishing knife to school.  Attempting to be responsible, he took the knife to the office. He was arrested, convicted of a felony, and expelled. The Georgia Legislature is working to pass a bill to keep absurd practices like this from happening again.

A teacher in Los Angeles reports on outrageous “truancy sweeps” by city police.  The teacher argues that ticketing students helps to poison the school environment.

Last month, the New York Times reported that a rising number of districts are already reversing course [on zero tolerance] and trying new approaches, including behavioral counseling and mediation, to reduce conflict and create safer, quieter schools while ejecting only the worst offenders. The article also discusses a 2008 incident in North Carolina (heard last month before the State Supreme Court) where students were suspended for an entire semester and were denied educational services as “extra punishment.”

In Philadelphia, youth members of Youth United for Change (YUC) are organizing to prevent pushout in schools. YUC is conducting research to figure out how to address the problem. They are surveying out-of-school youth and conducting focus groups and interviews.

The Innovation Academy in San Diego school is practicing “positive discipline,” where children learn to handle disputes together and create rules.

Do you know about any positive practices happening in the schools in your community? What are they?

By Laura Bornfreund | Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , | Comments (2)