Jack Whelan for School Board Seattle District 2

Quote of the Day: Alfie Kohn

We are living through what future historians will surely describe as one of the darkest eras in American education -- a time when teachers, as well as the very idea of democratic public education, came under attack; when carrots and sticks tied to results on terrible tests were sold to the public as bold "reform"; when politicians who understand nothing about learning relied uncritically on corporate models and metaphors to set education policy; when the goal of schooling was as misconceived as the methods, framed not in terms of what children need but in terms of "global competitiveness" -- that is, how U.S. corporations can triumph over their counterparts in other countries.

There will come a time when people will look back at this era and ask, "How the hell could they have let this happen?" (Source)

At some point, when I have more time, I want to do an anlysis of the language used by corporate ed. reformers.  It uses words like "achievement", " data-driven",  "accountability", "performance-based", and "incentives". 

Parents and educators need to understand better than they do that this mentality is destroying the traditional humanistic foundation for the American public education and replacing it with a technocratic one. In a technocracy the only thing that matters are bureaucratic mandates and the things that can be measured, i.e., the quantitative.  The qualitative doesn't count, but the qualitative is all, really, that matters.  Ask yourselves what you want for your kids or grandkids: Do you want teachers whose primary motivation is to boost your child's test scores or teachers whose primary motivation is to help to unfold your child's potential over time.  Achievement is important, but it's secondary to healthy development.

Do we want kids whose primary skill is in taking tests and gaming the system, or do we want kids who have developed the intrinsic motivation to become lifelong learners? That's the most important skill schools need to teach--how to learn, how to process and communicate the barrage of information that will inundate them at work and in their private lives. We want our schools to develop in their students adaptive, supple minds that are curious and comfortable with complexity. And that means something different for every child.

That's certainly not something we're seeing from our political elites, whose simplistic, fear-based thinking and primitive motivations are leading this country to the brink. And the last thing we want is these foolish, out-of-touch people dictating what we must do in our schools. That's why I'm running for school board--to push back against this insanity.  The current board, especially the incumbents running for election this cycle, have been far too comfortable with this wrong-headed technocratic mentality. They proved it when they extended Maria Goodloe-Johnson's contract earlier thise year and raised her salary to the north side of $260K.  If nothing else--and there is so much else--that alone is reason to vote them out.

Poverty and Education

I don't understand in a personal way the challenges that poverty creates for families, and schools and teachers...I don't ever want to minimize it. Poverty is a terrible obstacle. But we can't let it be an excuse. 

So says Bill Gates and almost everyone else who is involved in the corporate ed reform movement. For an interesting rebuttal, this piece  on Poverty and Education by Jim Taylor from which the above quote was taken.

When people argue that we cannot use poverty to let schools off the hook because to do so is to give in to the soft bigotry of low expectations, I listen patiently; I understand their concerns. I get that low expectations can be a self-fulfilling prophecy, and I recognize some schools and kids beat the poverty odds. But their successes are not scalable. They are statistical outliers. And they will remain so until something changes at a more fundamental level regarding structural, systemic poverty. There's a reason that all these top-down ed. reform measures don't work and won't work in the aggregate unless, in the aggregate, fundamental things change for kids who grow up in poverty.

The reality is that the Social Darwinist mentality of policy elites in D.C., these Republicans and Neoliberal Democrats who think the market will solve everything, is making it harder to deal with the root causes of poverty because it continues the zero-sum game that is at the essence of their market-driven ideology. That ideology is all about rewarding winners and punishing losers. That ideology insures that there will always be losers. That ideology assumes that if you are a loser you deserve to be--no excuses. How can that be seriously entertained as an approach that can work to solve the problem of underperforming kids and schools? How does that even begin to make sense?

I like the sentiment behind the phrase "No Child Left Behind", but the policy that has flowed from it has little to do with the sentiment. The Obama/Duncan slogan "Race to the Top" is more honest. Both slogans articulate American commonplaces, but they work in opposition to one another. Whoever gets to the top, obviously, leaves everybody else behind. And isn't that what we're seeing--schools and kids getting left behind as more and more educators game the system to win in the high-stakes testing competition? Even the winners are losers in this distorted scheme because to accept the rules of this ridiculous game to begin with is already to accept defeat.

In the end, there are no top-down solutions; there is no way to guarantee success--there is only the effort to create the conditions that allow for the greatest possibility of success. The top-down, one-size fits all corporate mentality that now reigns does not create those conditions.

Are you familiar with the Taylor Mali bit about "What Teachers Make"?  In it he talks about how he can make a C+ feel like winning the medal of honor for one kid, and for another make and A- feel like a slap in the face because it wasn't his best work. Maybe the same applies to schools. A C+ for some schools is a major accomplishment given the poverty-related challenges such schools and their teachers have to contend with.

I'm not for making excuses for schools or teachers who are not doing their jobs. I am for recognizing that success is relative, that the successes of many schools and teachers, the small miracles that they frequently effect, are real, and they are not measurable by some standardized test. Quantitative metrics cannot measure quality, and in the end quality is all that matters.

Growing Organic Learning Communities

First a few program notes, so to speak: I spoke to the 43rd LD District Democrats Tuesday evening and was able to obtain their endorsement.  Considering my late entry into the race, I'm very pleased to have it along with the King County Democrats' endorsement, which I received last month. Both will help this campaign enormously, and I am grateful for their confidence in me.

I did the interview on KUOW Wednesday morning (podcast link--I am the second candidate interviewed around the 10 minute mark).  I think it went ok.  I would have preferred to talk more about what I really care about, which is restoring good order and stability to a dysfunctional district in desparate disarrary. The budgetary problems are symptomatic of deeper issues.

 There are two points that I wish I made more clearly.  First, you cannot build stability from the top down, and, second, you cannot build on a flawed foundation.  The district suffers from both problems, and that's what needs to change. Everything else will flow from that.

I see schools as living, plant-like organisms. (I know--I'm mixing metaphors, but work with me.) They succeed or fail depending on many factors, but most important is the quality of the soil in which they grow.  And the quality of that soil is determined by the community it serves--whether it be a local, neighborhood community or a community that forms around a particular program. 

The school board's job is to listen to these communities, to understand their needs, and  to direct district saff to meet them as best it can within the constraints of the budget. That's not how it works now.  Sure, parents get to say their piece at public fora, but for the most part their ideas go unheeded unless they arlready conform to the agenda set on high by the district and those parties that have the most influence on district policy. The board as it is presently constituted pays more attention to the we-know-better "experts" than it does to the families these experts were supposedly hired to serve. I think the mess we have on our hands is ample proof they don't know better. 

This has got to change, and a first step to do it is returning to site-based management, but going further with it than in the John Stanford era.  I want to see the role of the principal change over time from "manager" to head teacher.  I want to see a new process of collaborative evaluation in which principals continue to play their role in evaluating teachers, but so do parents.  And I want parents and teachers also to play a role in evaluating principals.  Principals need to know whom they serve, and that is not in the first instance the superintendent--it's their school communities.

I want accountability to be collaborative and community-centered.  I don't want to see principals like Martin Floe fired on the say-so of one inexperienced director, and I don't want to see teachers put on probation on the say-so of one principal.  I don't want to see "improvement plans" used as a club to punish, but I do want to see better ways to support teachers and principals who are struggling for whatever reason.  I think we have a lot to learn in this particular respect  from non-American systems,  particularly those in Finland and Shanghai. 

I know there has been some interest in some south-end communities in introducing charter schools. I understand why.  Those communities are tired of being jerked around by a dysfunctional district that doesn't listen to them, and they want some control over their kids' education.  I'm a great fan of the International Baccalaureate Program, and maybe that would work at Rainier Beach H.S., but did anyone ask the parents in that community if that's what they want?  

TFA or charter schools are not the answer. I would prefer to see some alternative school initiatives developed as a solution to failing schools.  I'd like to recruit a handful of seasoned educators with a track record of effectiveness in failing schools to take the lead in working with families to assemble a faculty and develop organic, alternative-school learning communities designed to meet those families' educational needs.  I have in mind, of course, the kind of thing Deborah Meier established in her East Central Park Schools. If it can be done in Harlem, it can be done in Seattle. It's just a matter of having the will, the imagination, and the good judgment to find the right people to do the job.

I don't think there are any simple solutions to complex human problems, and I don't think you can impose solutions from district headquarters; you have to grow them.  You have to plant good seeds, you have to water and fertilize, and sure, you have to do a little weeding now and then. But real solutions ultimately grow from below and are sustained fr0m below.  The role of those above is mostly to support that growth and let nature take its course. They cannot make it happen, nor should they try.  

 

 

 

More on the Atlanta Testing Scandal (Updated)

The Seattle Times in an editorial Sunday morning  defends the high-stakes test after the Atlanta scandal.  It's interesting, though, that right next to the editorial in the hard copy edition of Sunday's paper is an op-ed by David Sirota (can't find the ST link) about the sanity of the education system in Finland. Why does sanity seem such an impossibility in this country? Is sanity so far out of reach even in a manageable, smart city like Seattle and its school district? I've given up any hope for sanity in Washington, D.C. But I haven't lost hope for Seattle.

Here's my quick response to the Seattle Times: Students and teachers are individually responsible to make the choice to cheat or not to cheat--and of course it's wrong to cheat and nobody should do it--but the Times doesn't understand the power of Campbell's Law in action.  When so much is at stake for teachers and students, there is enormous incentive to game the system. The quest to find loopholes inevitably evolves into an outright culture of cheating. You have a situation, similar to the doping culture in sports, in which you're considered a fool if you don't cheat because cheating becomes the norm. A culture of cheating clearly clearly developed in Atlanta, and when that kind of culture develops, it takes heroic effort not to succumb. It's folly to support a system that requires heroic resistance to do the right thing.

Whatever marginal benefits come from administering tests like the MAP three times a year--even to kindergartners--they are dwarfed by the expense, the waste of time, the stress on the teachers and the kids, and the likelihood of creating enormous pressures to cheat. What's the Times solution?  Save the test, but make it harder to cheat on it. Once again predictable, conventional wisdom that typifies the so-called Best-and-Brightest Syndrome that got us into Vietnman and Iraq: Once you have committed to technocratic, dehumanizing folly, never question your assumptions, just keep pouring more money into it.

UPDATE: See this article: "The Atlanta Scandal: When Teachers Are Disempowered and Abused" in Education Views.  Excerpt:

The intimidation of teachers is more important than the cheating, because, as the Investigation Report makes clear, cheating on the scale of Atlanta could only occur by crushing the first line of defense against cheating: the voice and sense of integrity of the teachers. I urge people to read the reports, because Atlanta is not very different than DCPS and other troubled, mostly urban, school systems. Make no mistake: We Are All Atlanta Teachers.

“Almost without exception, teachers and principals said that the single most important factor to this administration is ‘data.’ They said that ‘data is (sic) the driver,’ ‘data drives instruction,’ and ‘the data controls everything.’” “But data can also be used as an abusive and cruel weapon to embarrass and punish classroom teachers and principals or as a pretext to termination. After hundreds of interviews, it has become clear that Dr. Hall and her staff used data as a way to exert oppressive pressure to meet targets.”

“As a result of the APS failure to temper its drive for success with ethical guidelines, the message was: ‘Get the scores up by any means necessary;’ in Dr. Hall’s words, ‘No exceptions and no excuses.’”

 

Teaching to the Test 2

A lot of  news on the testing front in the last week. From last Friday's Seattle Times:

A tall man with a booming voice, [third-grade-teacher Damian] Joseph has a way of inspiring his students to work harder. He knows the challenges some of them face because he, too, grew up poor. But he also knows they can do it, because he did.

All the way to the testing room, he kept the pep talk going.

"Let's do this," he said, as students lined up at the door. At the first corner in the hall: "We don't back down." At the top of the stairs: "Everybody say it: 'Finish stronger.' "

Not that it's all about testing. While Joseph and the other teachers want scores to go up, they also want to inspire students to love learning, to be good citizens.

That said, they concentrated heavily throughout the year on the tested subjects — mostly reading and math. It wasn't until after the tests were behind them, with just a few weeks of school left, that Joseph started cursive writing and brought out one of the science experiments he'd felt were too time-consuming to do earlier.

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From Moday's New York Times:

Catching up to the reality already faced by many of its members, the nation’s largest teachers’ union on Monday affirmed for the first time that evidence of student learning must be considered in the evaluations of school teachers around the country.

In passing the new policy at its assembly here, the 3.2 million-member union, the National Education Association, hopes to take a leadership role in the growing national movement to hold teachers accountable for what students learn — an effort from which it has so far conspicuously stood apart.

But blunting the policy’s potential impact, the union also made clear that it continued to oppose the use of existing standardized test scores to judge teachers, a core part of the federally backed teacher evaluation overhauls already under way in at least 15 states.

“N.E.A. is and always will be opposed to high-stakes, test-driven evaluations,” said Becky Pringle, the secretary-treasurer of the union, addressing the banner-strung convention hall filled with the 8,200-member assembly that votes on union policy.

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From Tuesday's  New York Times:

A [Georgia] state investigation released Tuesday showed rampant, systematic cheating on test scores in this city’s long-troubled public schools, ending two years of increasing skepticism over remarkable improvements touted by school leaders.

 

The results of the investigation, made public by Gov. Nathan Deal, showed that the cheating occurred at 44 schools and involved at least 178 teachers and principals, almost half of whom have confessed, the governor said. A culture of fear, intimidation and retaliation existed in the district, which led to a conspiracy of silence, he said in a prepared statement. “There will be consequences,” Mr. Deal said.

 

That will certainly include dismissals, according to school board members and the interim superintendent, Erroll B. Davis Jr., and could possibly result in criminal charges. 

The Seattle Times has been following the progress of  West Seattle Elementary over the past year. The story that appeared last week was intended mainly as a celebration of the hard work done by teachers like Damian Joseph and his students at that school, and I would like to offer my congratulations to them as well.  But the real story is how teaching to the test distorts the entire educational process. Read the story that's being told between the lines. 

It's no wonder TFA alum Chrissie Coxon/Wright is quitting teaching. What sane person would want to live with that kind of insane pressure from year to year. It's not teaching; it's more like training for one of these Darwinian TV reality shows like "Survivor". Is this what we want to subject our third graders--or any of our elementary age kids--to on a continuous basis?  I'm all for students and teachers working hard and striving for excellence, but this is not the way to do it. Damian Joseph and his kids shouldn't be put through that kind of pointless stress. Joseph's energies and talents could be put to much better use.

Then Monday this story of how the NEA is caving to pressure to make student performance a criterion for teacher evaluations. The union says it's opposed to high-stakes standardized testing as a way to do that, but the fact is that that is pretty much the only way it's being done where it's already being done. It's all the rage among elites who think they know better. So how long will the union be able to hold the line on that?  The pressure to make the standardized test the whole point of American public school education is enormous.

And then a few days later, this story in the New York Times about massive cheating in Atlanta. A perfect example of Campbell's law in action. This is the future of education in America unless we start pushing back on the local level against this insanity.

Diane Ravitch in a blog post last year discusses the destructive effect of testing on schools nationwide:

Over the past several years, efforts to "hold teachers accountable" and "hold schools accountable" have produced perverse consequences. Instead of better education, we are getting cheating scandals, teaching to bad tests, a narrowed curriculum, lowered standards, and gaming of the system. Even if it produces higher test scores (of dubious validity), high-stakes accountability does not produce better education.

In their eagerness to show "results," states are dumbing down their standards. The New York state education department dropped cut scores on the state tests from 2006 (the year that annual testing in grades 3-8 was introduced) to 2009. In 2006, a student in 7th grade could achieve "proficiency" by getting 59.6 percent of the points correct on the state math test; by 2009, a student in the same grade needed only 44 percent of the available points. Back in the pre-accountability days, a score of 60 percent would have been a D, not a mark of proficiency, and a score of 44 percent would have been a failing grade. According to a report by The Civic Committee of the Commercial Club of Chicago, the gains registered in the elementary schools of Chicago during Arne Duncan's tenure were almost entirely the result of changes to the scoring of the tests, rather than evidence of any genuine improvement in student learning.

When gains are manufactured in these ways, children are cheated. Children who need extra help don't get it, but adults trade high-fives for their "success" in raising scores and enjoy the adulation of the media.

Standards, yes.  Standardizaton No. High-atakes testing does not promote higher-quality education for our kids, if anything it is driving out the teachers who are capable of delivering it. It's not just that good teachers are quitting; it's that they're being fired if they resist this insanity in any way. High-stakes testing follows Campbell's Law in one way in Seattle and in an another more extreme way in Atlanta--it distorts and corrupts the social processes it is intended to monitor.

But it doesn't matter because the "best and the brightest", who know nothing about real education as it happens in the classroom, think they know better any way--and they insist on it.   It's a solution only a control-freak bureaucrat could love.

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If you were teaching a low-performing third-grader who came to you who wanted to learn piano, would you pressure her to perform as well as the other kids, or would you work with her to help her to take the next step at a pace she could handle comfortably?  Yes, you want to challenge her to do her best.  Yes, you want to encourage her for every step forward she makes.  Yes, you want to get excited when she passes important benchmarks in the development of her skill. But more than anything, you want her to feel some excitement about the progress she is making and some love of the music that someday she will be able to make.  Should there be some standard by which her effort and level of skill should eventually be measured?  Yes.  But not with some super, high-pressure standardized test that everybody is freaking out about.

Is teaching reading and math skills to 8 and 9-year-olds really any different?  Why in the world would you put a third-grader through this kind of torture?  Is this some kind of Darwinian Survivor What exactly does it accomplish in the long run?  Isn't it  just as likely to reinforce a sense of failure in those who didn't make it to 200 points? 

The story of the kid in the Seattle Times story who got only 199 points was just heartbreaking.  Why does he have to know?  For all practical purposes when you take into consideraton the statistical deviation, he does meet the goal--for him to be told he didn't is ridiculous. But the bigger problem is that these tests if they are used at all, and I don't think their expense justifies it, should be used only to give teachers some idea where their kids are so they can design learning programs for them and get them the extra help they need if they aren't making the progress they should be.

On the Question of Stability and Good Order

I understand the concerns of people who think ousting one set of board members for another just  moves us more in the direction of chaos than good order. Any organization, if it is to flourish, needs stability and consistent leadership, and so, one might reason, we need to keep the current school board incumbents in office to give them more time and the district more stability.  According to this line of thinking, Seattle can't afford to put in a new set of board members and suffer through its climbing up yet another learning curve. And as unhappy as one might be with the current board, it's better to work with the devil you know than the devil you don't.

Under normal circumstances, I think that argument would carry a lot of weight. But we're not in normal circumstances. This district has hurtled from crisis to crisis for over a decade now, but I do not believe that these crises are due to unstable leadership or inexperience on the part of the board. They are due, rather, to a mentality that has infected it, as it has infected elite thinking about education in the U.S.  in the last decade. I don't know even to what degree the incumbents are consciously aware of it, but their votes reflect this mentality, and until that mentality changes, real stability and flourishing for our school district is not possible. You cannot build anything stable on a foundation that is flawed.

That mentality is called "education reform", and it traces back through No Child Left Behind and before it. It's become the tail wagging the dog, and the dog is dizzy, nauseated, and disoriented from all the shaking, and if we are to restore stability, order, and the well being of the dog, we need to stop the tail that is shaking it. 

If people are concerned about restoring good order to SPS, it has to start with a vision for its future that is grounded in reality.  In a democratic society, stability is something you build from the bottom up, not from the top down.  And so the bias, as I see it, should always be in favor of local decision making. The district has the responsibility to set general guidelines for learning objectives and standards.  But  standards and standardization are not the same thing. Clear learning objectives and standards need to be identified district-wide, but local schools working as collaborative learning communities need to figure out for themselves how to work together to achieve those objectives and meet those standards.  Standardized tests just are not an effective tool to achieve that. 

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Good order obtains where the principle of subsidiarity reigns.  'Subsidiarity' is a fancy word that describes a common-sense American democratic ideal:  local communities should be trusted to organize and govern themselves. The people who make the most important decisions should be the people who are most directly affected by them.  Real life is lived by people in their local communities, not in central headquarters. Central authorities are there to support local communities, not to micromanage or impose their centralized agendas. They intervene only when egregious problems arise that the local community hasn't the capability or the will to solve on its own.

"Education reform", as the phrase has been used for the last decade, is among other things a euphemism for imposing a more corporate or military chain-of-command model within our school districts.  The impetus for promoting this model derives from thinking that the only way to deal with the "crisis" in our schools is to give autocratic powers to superintendents to knock heads and demand results. In this model, superintendents are not there to support principals, but to micromanage them, and principals are not there to support their teachers, but to make sure they are following a tightly scripted agenda. That agenda, since NCLB, has been all about the test and generating numbers that indicate progress by its narrow metric. And the whole system has been made sick by it.

This sickening process came into view this Spring when interim superintendent Susan Enfield fired Martin Floe at Ingraham H.S. She said it was a data-driven decision based on Ingraham's poor test scores.  Nobody who knows anything about Ingraham's learning community could believe what they were hearing from downtown.  The entire community of parents, faculty, students, and alums organized a robust protest in response to this decision, and the interim superintendent was forced to back down. In subsequent interviews, Dr. Enfield, in rather patronizing remarks, said that parents and teachers did not understand that this was a well thought-out, calculated decision, but that she would give Principal Floe another chance.  She also said  that Floe would be monitored with an "improvement plan." If you understand anything about the "education reform" mentality, you know what that means: "Either you do it my way, or you're gone."

The problem at Ingraham is not with Martin Floe and the learning community he has helped to develop there.  The problem lies with the downtown mentality that thinks even for a minute that he deserves to be fired. 

We need to transform the downtown mentality into one that empowers and supports local learning communities, rather than punishing them when they go off script and  seek their own good-faith solutions for problems they understand better than the people downtown. The people downtown do not know better in Ingraham's instance and in most other instances either. The local realities are too complex, and there is no reason not to trust the intelligence of parents, faculty, and administrators to find their own solutions.

And getting standardized test scores up should not be the central problem to be solved in the first place.  Everyone wants improved student achievement, but it's wrong to think that there's a significant correlation between higher test scores and higher levels of student achievement. Standardized test scores are a solution to a problem only out-of-touch bureaucats like.

It's up to the board to find the leadership that understands its role in supporting local learning communities rather than dictating to them its top-down agenda. 'Top down' almost never works, and top-down interventiions should only be invoked in emergency situations.

Seattle is a smart town.  The city has within it the resources that should enable it to solve the instability and disorder that has followed from its incessant crises in its Public School System. But it can't and won't as long as the "ed. reform" mentality dominates its leadership culture.

 

 

Lowell APP to Be Split Yet Again?

I just came back from the meeting called to get feedback from Lowell parents about the proposed decision last week to move the 4th and 5th grades of the APP program to Lincoln for a year. Apparently the school's capacity is 500 students. This year Lowell had 573 students, and next year they expect around 700. 

Something has to give, and the district planners seem to be leaning toward  splitting the program by sending 187 4th and 5th graders to Lincoln, although they are open to the possibility to have three different 1-5  APP sites--the two now at Lowell and Thurgood Marshall, and a third to be located somewhere in the North End. Also on the table is a third option to move the entire APP program to Lincoln.  This option is favored by most of the APP families, but not by the families that will be left behind at  Lowell.

The APP parents are adamant about rejecting the plan to split off the 4th & 5th grades.  They're not crazy about the three-site plan because they don't want to go through another split like the one they had a couple of years ago when half the program went to Thurgood Marshall.  And so the sentiment in the room dominated by APP parents was that if the program can't be kept intact grades 1-5 at Lowell, they want the whole program moved to Lincoln until a permanent site can be found.

I agree that moving the 187 4th and 5th graders to Lincoln is the least desirable option. Nobody likes it, except maybe some of the cost and logistics people at the district. It comes down to (1) sticking with a two-site, grades 1-5 structure but with one school in a new non-Lowell site--or (2) a three-site option retaining Lowell as one of the sites and adding another site in the north end. There are cost factors, but more important are the disruption factors to all the families involved--including the non-APP families who will stay at Lowell no matter what happens to the APP kids.

The crazy thing is that they have to make a decision by July 8!  Once again a demonstration of the district's superb planning skills. It just seems to move ad hoc from one  crisis to the next. One of the Lowell teachers got up near the end and told the Board to "Get your house in order".  He said that when he tells teachers from other districts he teaches for SPS, they say, "You work for Seattle Schools?  How?"  And then he told the board to either "Do your job or step aside."

I'll have more on this as the story evolves, but based on what I heard tonight I'm leaning toward the three-site solution.  I think it  fits the long-term interests of district families and would be the least disruptive in the short run==families don't get split, less of a commute for north end parents, and the remaining families at Lowell aren't abruptly abandoned. (And yes, the kids would have to say good-bye to many of their friends again) But most of the disscussion  tonight seemed to assume it was either sending just the 4th and 5th graders to Lincoln or the whole program to Lincoln.  I don't have any serious objection to having two sites.  I'm concerned though for the disruption it would cause to the Lowell Left Behind, so to say.  We need to hear more about the three-site option.

I'd be glad to hear from any Lowell parents on this issue.

Constructivism vs. Direct Instruction: A Common Sense Approach

My wife grew up in the Bronx.  She did not live in a world where having a car was valued. She walked or used public transportation for everything, and she believed zealously that the internal combustion engine is the destroyer of civilizations and neighborhoods.  She didn't know how to drive when I first met her, and she had no interest in learning. That was fine when we lived in Manhattan for the first six years of our marriage, but when we moved to Seattle I insisted that I would teach her to drive. No need to go into the details here--about the red lights we ran, the one-way streets we went up the wrong way--it was a disaster.  

It wasn't her fault. It was mine because my direct instructional skills in this area were primitive. I made assumptions about her level of knowledge and motivation that had little or no basis in reality, and it never occurred to me that her learning style was different from mine.

When I taught my son to drive, it was a completely different experience. He  knew more about the rules of the road than I did.  He had spent years observing and asking questions.  When the time came to get his license, he could have got into a car and done fine with little or no direct instruction. He just needed me in the car because the law required it, and because I could give him a helpful hint or two about parallel parking or merging into traffic on I-5.

In this situation my wife needed a teacher trained in direct instruction--which she eventually got from a driving school; in my son's case, a more constructivist approach would have been fine.

Constructivism is a learning theory that dates back at least as far as Socrates helping Meno's illiterate slave to "discover" fundamental principles  in geometry, but it has had its greatest impact on American education through John Dewey's Democracy and Education and Jean Piaget's lifetime of research on cognitive development in children. Both have played a big role in developing theories and curricula for progressive education.  Constructivist learning is experiential, group-centered, and discovery oriented.  The teacher is more of a facilitator than a knowledgeable expert. And while I'm all for experiential learning, Dewey, and Piaget, I'm not necessarily a fan of the way their ideas have been used in developing curricula, particularly in math, and especially in the Discovering Math program.

Direct Instruction, on the other hand, comprises a range of teaching styles from rigidly scripted, step-by-step curricula like  SRA Reading Mastery and Corrective Reading to the kind of lecturing all of us are or were exposed to, for better or worse,  in high school and college classrooms. Direct Instruction therefore requires a knowledgeable expert who conveys his or her knowledge through verbal instruction.

Direct Instruction at it's worst is dry and didactic--my burnt-out high school American history teacher comes to mind.  But it doesn't have to be.  Our most memorable teachers from high school and college were more than group and experiential facilitators. They were passionately committed to their subjects and infected us with their enthusiasm and their love of their subject. And remember Mr. Miyagi from The Karate Kid? His teaching style was a bit unconventional, but it was a very effective and creative form of direct instruction by a master teacher.

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If you want to learn piano, and if you have some musical talent and a lot of motivation and discipline, you could probably teach yourself to become a decent player.  If you have athletic talent, you could probably do a decent job of teaching yourself golf--and  have fun playing.  But if the goal is to play piano or golf at a very high level, you will get there a lot faster if you have a good teacher to provide you with solid direct instruction and drills to develop the habits of mind and body that are necessary to play at that high level. 

The great thing about civilization is that we don't all have to figure out for ourselves how to build a wheel or a fire.  We learn from those who already know and who pass their knowledge on to us, and if we absorb and work with their instruction, we can attain a level of mastery much quicker than if we try to figure it out for ourselves.

This is particularly true when teaching anything that is part of a large, complex, rich subject matter with a tradition of best practices for  doing it--like martial arts, law, biology, history, music, or math.  The first step is to lay a solid foundation in fundamentals--later on in the process, you can allow the student to improvise or work more creatively.  It's just common sense.  You master the tradition's fundamentals and best practices first, then you can improvise or innovate or discover.

Here's the point: Direct Instruction is the way to go when there is subject matter students need to learn from those who already know and care about it.  Direct instruction is particularly important at the beginning stages of learning when a solid foundation and good fundamentals are necessary for future learning.  The experiential and discovery part are important too, but these experiences will be richer if there is a foundation in place to have experiences with a better chance not to miss the meaning.

Which kids are having the richer experience when they take that trip to Washington, D.C.?  Those who are experiencing it without any knowledge of American history or those who have a good teacher who has already made American history come alive for them?  Knowing something about the Civil War and the 600,000 killed in it makes a difference when you walk around Arlington Cemetery.  Knowing something about the Constitution and the arguments and struggles to create it makes a difference when you visit the White House, the Supreme Court, and the Capitol building.

Both constructivist and direct instruction, obviously, have their place in any curriculum.  In my classes at the UW, I use both.  There are situations in which groups have powerful learning experiences when they work together to solve problems as a group. But I think we've all had group experiences that amounted to a little more than pooled ignorance or were dominated by one or two aggressive blowhards. Good teachers know how to adapt their teaching of the curriculum to different students and to different aspects of the curricula. I'm lucky because I have control over how to do that in my classroom.  Public School teachers too often don't.  One size does not fit all, but they are required to teach as if it does. And there are moments in any pedagogy when one approach is appropriate and the other just isn't.

The bottom line: Whether you have a Mr. Miyagi or Mr. Rogers, the only thing that matters is whether students are leaarning and loving to learn.  That they are making progress and mastering the materials presented in a well-designed curriculum. The Discovering Math curriculum has been a disaster not because there isn't some interesting progressive pedagogical theory behind it.  There is and I get it. It's a disaster because it doesn't produce the kind of learning that kids need to function at the next level.

It's unbalanced in the constructivist/experiential direction.  The kids are not getting fundamentals and parents and volunteer tutors aren't able to work with the curricula to support the kids who are having trouble. It's not delivering kids who are ready to hit the ground running at the university level if they aspire to careers in engineering and the math-heavy sciences.  The curve is being set by the kids from Asia or private schools or home schools, and as a result too many kids from public schools, even those who thought they were good in math, are finding that they can't compete. This is fundamental disservice to our kids. We need to have a math curriculum that does not require the parents who can afford it to send their kids to Kumon, and those who can't afford it--well tough luck.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Teaching to the Test 1

"The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor."  Campbell's Law, Donald T. Campbell, 1976

Also known as "Heisenberg", pointing by analogy to the uncertainty principle by which the process of measuring something changes what is being measured.  Since No Child Left Behind (NCLB) elite opinion has been obsessing about closing achievement gaps and using high-stakes testing as  tool to achieve it.  I don't think anybody disputes that there has to be an assessment process.  I do think that high-stakes testing is not the way to do it.

Since No Child Left Behind, the distortions and corruptions to the American education system have been egregious, and it's time to recognize that this approach to improving standards has become the tail wagging the dog, and the only result has been to produce a sick and rather confused dog.  We have to get back to basics, and we have to pay attention to the fundamental health of the dog.  We have to ask ourselves what do we really want our education system to produce?  And my answer is a love of learning. If you have an educational culture that produces a love of learning, then everything else falls into place.

Don't we all want our kids to be high-spirited and free?  Don't we want them to be curious and to have developed a life-long thirst for knowledge and learning? Is that what our education system sees as its purpose?  I don't think so, and if it's there at all in our schools  it's because there are good teachers who have not let themselves be beaten down by the system that cares only about scores not about learning. 

Everybody wants to be good at something, but you can't get good at something you don't like or love to do.  You can't be a good student unless you love to learn, and you can't be a good teacher unless you love to teach. And you cannot love to teach unless first you have developed a love of learning, because you cannot inspire in the kids you teach a love of learning unless you have it yourself and exercise it on a daily basis in the classroom.

Since NCLB We are trending toward an education system in which the love of learning is becoming irrelevant. Why? Because the only thing that matters is the scores students get on these high-stakes tests.  What I would like to see is a way of measuring the degree to which a school or an entire district has fostered a culture that values above all else a love of learning.  Everything else would fall into place, if we did.  We'd find that test scores would go up without worrying too much about them. We would use tests not as a club with which to punish teachers and principals  but as a way of identifying problems that could then be solved through a collaborative process.

Every healthy kid has within his or her soul the desire to grow and learn. Everyone wants to be capable, competent, to contribute, to have the respect and admiration of those she admires and respects.  Kids want to respect the adults in their lives, but they don't respect them, and have good reason not to when the program adults present them is at a fundamental level b.s.produced by bureaucrats with a misguided reform agenda.

It's ridiculous that we have a one-size fits all education system because we have a one-size fits all testing system. It's ridiculous that we think of education as some kind of information inculcation and testing process. Ultimately education is about relationships, the relationships kids form with one another and the ones they form with adults that they respect.  And they can't respect adult teachers, coaches, counselors, and administrators who are micromanaged, overly scripted automatons following rules that somebody in Olympia or D.C. developed with good intentions, but have created more problems than they have solved.  Kids will develop a love of learning when they are exposed to adults and peers who have a love of learning. Not people who are just going through the motions scripted for them by someone far removed from the classroom.

In the same way that kids have a natural love of learning whether they know it or not, teachers have a love of teaching whether they know it or not.  We need and education system that ignites and sustains the flame of passionate learning and passionate teaching. You can never be good at something you don't love doing.

One of my goals, should I be elected to the school board, is to push so that the system makes it easier for good teachers to do their jobs and for mediocre or burned out teachers to learn from and be inspired by the good teachers. We need to develop better methods for teachers to learn and implement best practices, but more than that we need for teachers and principals to support one another, to help one another to be as good as they can be, to remind one another why they got into the teaching business in the first place. 

We--all of us--need to remember that schools are not about implementing some elite fad of the month, but to do the basic work that has been done century in and century out at least since Socrates gathered the youth of Athens around him, i.e.,  when kids and adults, the inexperienced and experienced, the aspirants and masters come together out of a shared love of learning  to just do it.

In a future post I'd like to talk about how the International Baccalaureate curriculum and assessment process might point a way toward developing an educational culture that promotes  both a love of learning and a way to assess to what degree the learning culture at a particular school actually delivers learning.

 

Ed Reform & the Culture of Intimidation

From Diane Ravitch, Death & Life of the Great American School System, pp.  61-62

The teachers and principals. . . were bitter about the high-handed way in which the reforms were imposed on them. Teachers, especially veterans, spoke about being harassed.  They complained about mandates and directives that narrowed what they were permitted to teach.  The Bersin era, several said, was a "reign of terror."  Those who didn't go along were bullied. Teachers were punished by grade switching: A first grade teacher might be reassigned on short notice to teach sixth grade, while a sixth-grade teacher would be reassigned to teach kindergarten or first grade.  Principals spoke in hushed voices about the abrupt public removal in June 1999 of the fifteen administrators.  The theory behind these tactics, several said, was "culture shock," keeping everyone on edge, afraid, insecure.

One principal who was promoted to the central office by Bersin spoke with regret about the district's 90 percent turnover in principals.  When the fifteen administrators were fired, he said, it sent a message: "Comply or be destroyed." The influx of large numbers of new principals brought new problems.  They had no "deep reservoir of experience" and felt "intense pressure to push change," so they bludgeoned people" when they walked through classrooms, thinking that by taking harsh actions, they could forcibly change people's beliefs. "people complied because of fear, " he said.  "All up and down the system, there was fear." . . .

This administrator was blunt about his time as a principal under the Blueprint.  "Putting coaches in every school," he said was "a great idea, badly implemented." The coaches sowed animosity, especially among experienced teachers.  The coaches made teachers feel less competent, not respected. Teachers saw them as policemen and did not trust them. . . . The general sense among teachers was that the coaches were there to catch teachers making mistakes, to report them, not help them.

. . . He said, "Survival became paramount.  Everyone was afraid of speaking out.  We were muzzled." He survived, he said, because his teachers united to protect hm, and he protected them.  

This excerpt from Ravitch's book describes the reign of terror that the San Diego Schools experienced under its Robespierre, Alan Bersin, a lawyer and former prosecutor whom San Diego hired as its superintendent from 1998 to 2005. Bersin during this time and following has been onsidered a courageous reformer, and his methods were praised and emulated by those in the 'ed-reform' community throughout the country.

So has this kind of thing been emulated in SPS? Maybe not to this extreme--yet. But talk to an experienced teacher, and if she's candid, she'll tell you that this kind of thing does go on within our district.  And I would suggest to you that it is a template that you can use to begin to understand what was going on regarding the firing of Ingraham's Martin Floe.

Have you heard of the Broad Superintendent Academy?  It's a place where America's "most talented executives"  go to be indoctrinated and trained in the ways of  "education reform". (Seattle's recently departed Marie Goodloe Johnson was trained there.) What is education reform?  It's  Republican, anti-union and market-centered talking points about how to improve schools coupled with trendy, leftish, rigidly scripted constructivist (i.e, "fuzzy math:) curriculum ideas. In other words the worst of both the political right and the cultural left.

Whatever you might think about some of the ideas these education reformers propose, here's the thing you need to understand about the culture of education reform:  It's mostly about arrogant, technocratic elites, who know nothing about education, but  think they know better anyhow, forcing their ideas on experienced, effective teachers and principals, who do in fact know better,  And when these reforms don't work, as they almost never do,  they blame the teachers or whomever, but never themselves, well because they are rich, smart people who know better. 

David Halberstam classic,  The Best and the Brightest, was all about this mentality.  It's about how very smart technocrats with rigid top-down ideas think they can bend reality to their wills.  The book was about the mess created by the technocratic  Democrats in Vietnam, but it could have been written about the mess Republicans created in their social engineering experiment in Iraq and Afghanistan.  And Ravitch's book is very much a description about how this top-down, social-engineering mentality is making a mess of the American education system.

In Seattle Public Schools we're lucky that the Broad-trained Marie Goodloe-Johnson was fired. Her firing, of course,  had more to do with a culture of cronyism that has infected SPS, but it gives us now the opportunity to change directions, but she was a member in good standing of this education reform community, and we are fortunate she did not have more time to implement her agenda. The school board that Seattle elects  this fall will have to take aggressive steps to clean up the cronyism, but the more important task is to hire a superintendent who does not live in this ideological "education-reform" bubble.

Americans across the country have suffered the leadership of people who lived in this bubble for most of the last decade because they know that the schools have problems, and they were willing to give these "reformers" a shot.  These reforms have failed across the board, and now it's time to change the model.

I hope to make clear in future posts what I think that model should look like.

 

This Election Is Extraordinary

This election is extraordinary because it will define the direction of SPS for the next decade. No decision the board faces will be more important than determining the district’s administrative leadership for these critical next several years. In the last decade we’ve seen the SPS seduced by the so-called educational-reform agendas of foundations that have tried to reshape American education system in its own privatizing image.  We’ve seen this influence in the hiring of the Broad-trained Maria Goodloe-Johnson. We saw this influence in the recent agenda-driven firing of Martin Floe at Ingraham High School, and we saw it in Goodloe-Johnson’s bringing in Teach for America last year.

I’ve heard the argument that the current board is doing a good job in a difficult situation and that we need continuity and stability in district leadership to move forward in rebuilding our district.  But you cannot have stability if you build on a foundation that is profoundly flawed, and I think that anybody with even a little knowledge about what has gone on within the district recognizes that Sherry Carr and other members like Peter Maier and Steve Sundquist are themselves elements composing this flawed foundation.

I will advocate for a nationwide  search [that begins locally and then extends nationwide] for a new superintendent.  Ms. Enfield’s candidacy for the position needs to be considered alongside other qualified candidates.

I would move to suspend the District’s "Strategic Plan", which was financed by a 1.2 million Broad Foundation grant, because it a tissue of platitudes and unachievable objectives.

I would work hard to prioritize resources allocation to support teachers in classrooms and ongoing teacher development.

I would work within the limits of state law to mitigate as much as possible the destructive effects of high-stakes testing on our educational priorities.

I will work hard to support the development of readiness programs for preschoolers to mitigate as much as possible the deficits that low-income kids have when they enter kindergarten.

Why I Am Running for School Board

Like many Americans, I am concerned that our democracy is getting away from us. The reasons are complex, but one of the primary drivers is the inordinate role big money plays in determining policy.  We’re living in a country now where we all still value free speech, but now that any amount of  money equals speech, those with more money have more  speech.  It’s fundamentally undemocratic.

I support anybody who commits himself to pushing back the influence of big money on the national stage,  but if we can't successfully push back on the local level,  what hope have we for success on the national level?  School districts across the country are being hijacked by wealthy foundations with a misguided privatizing, anti-union market-driven education reform agenda. It’s all upside down, and I want to work to turn it right-side up.

The shift in the last decade by schools of education, school boards, and so-called enlightened opinion to accommodate the agendas of the Walton Foundation, the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation, and, yes, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has been very disturbing.  I don’t doubt that these foundations are sincere in their efforts to solve real problems, but I believe they are creating bigger ones in their attempt to shape American education in their own privatizing, market-driven image.  They are the bull in the China shop of American democracy at its most grass roots, where the community decides what kind of education it wants to provide for its kids.  That’s for local communities to decide--not hugely wealthy foundations with global reach.

This is huge issue for SPS, and it's why the selection of the next super by the next board is so critical. It's all about reasserting the traditional chain of command that starts with local community that elects school boards who hire superintendents who do the community’s will—not the will of mega-wealthy foundations with an agenda.  In the last decade we’ve seen Seattle seduced by these agendas.  We’ve seen it in hiring of the Broad-trained Maria Goodloe-Johnson. We saw this in the recent firing of Martin Floe at Ingraham High School, and we saw it in the Goodloe-Johnson’s bringing in Teach for America last Fall.  And we see it in the way schools of education like the one at the UW are being seduced by these foundations’ agendas.  

Ordinary citizens have to start pushing back, and my candidacy at its most foundational level is about pushing back in this way.  Everything else flows from that—establishing a robust curriculum and sensible standards, finding effective ways to support teachers in the classroom, developing community standards for teacher and principal performance,  and developing an approach that allows for sensible adaptations in a dynamic globally converging world.

Top-Downism or Down-Upism

I am an educator who has  worked in a classroom for the last twenty-five years at the University of Washington. I understand what happens in a classroom, and I understand that everything else in the huge apparatus that makes up the American education system has value only insofar as it supports what happens in the classroom. Teachers are there on the front lines to do the only really important things that schools do--which is to help kids acquire the knowledge, skills, and confidence they will need to be productive, effective adults. 

Hierarchies are important, but they're important from the bottom up.  The most important things happen on the bottom--in the classroom--where students and teachers interact. Principals are there to support teachers and superintendents are there to support principals.  And school board directors are there to serve the larger community to make sure that the superintendent's office and the district managers have their priorities straight and their heads screwed on right.

I don't think the superintendent's office has it straight or right, and I think it's time for the community to elect new board directors who do. A democracy when it works correctly is all about down-upism.  And it's time for the community--especially the parents whose kids are in Seattle School--to send a message to the people at the Stanford Center, the folks in departments of education, and the democratically unaccountable people in foundations who think they know better and use their money to experiment with faddish ideas.

The classroom isn't the only place where learning happens, but it's the one place where local communities can come to some basic consenus about the kind of future it wants  for its kids. It's the one place where democracy really has an immediate impact that we see in our families and in our neighborhoods. And it starts in the election of a board that understands that.  It's a non-paying, volunteer job--but because its responsibilities are  so close to the concerns of the people who live and work at the bottom, it's terribly important. 

In another post I'll be tallking about finding the balance point between decentralization and centralization.

 

My Two Minute Stump Speech

The group now running the Seattle School District is out of touch with reality. It’s time for the reality-based community to assert control over our kids’ education. 

My name is Jack Whelan. I am running for School Board Position 2, which is currently held by Sherry Carr.  Since 1986, I have been on the faculty of the Foster School of Business at the University of Washington, where I teach communications.  My wife has taught for SPS mostly as a special education teacher since 1992.  My son graduated from Green Lake Elementary and Ingraham High School.  

Current district leaders have proved that they are out of touch with financial reality. They allowed millions of dollars to disappear in Pottergate and the sale of Martin Luther King to the lowest bidder. They blew millions on a faddish, ineffective high school math curriculum. They allowed an inexperienced district Executive Director to blindside a beloved, effective, straight-shooting educator like Martin Floe at Ingraham High School.  Shall I go on?

Sherry Carr has supported establishment policies that have led to the reality-challenged scandals listed above. We need to replace her with someone who has common-sense ideas about how to deliver a quality education to all our kids.

Here’s my platform:

• I will push for curricula and classroom practices that promote competency, confidence, and the ability to learn how to learn.

• I will push back against tail-wagging-the-dog, high-stakes testing.

• I will push for scarce resources to be allocated to classrooms rather than to administrative pet projects.

• I will push back against top-down, centralized, agenda-driven micromanaging.

• I will push back against the corporate-driven, privatizing, anti-union, education reform agenda.

We must insure that our students gain the knowledge and adaptive skills they need to understand the world we live in.  We must insure they are prepared for the responsibilities of democratic citizenship in a complex society.