After the Future

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.  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. 

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 from 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.

***

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.