Thursday
February 28, 2008
From yesterday’s Chicago Tribune:
Amid controversy about the way bilingual students are taught and tested in Illinois, a tiny school district in the northern suburbs is waging a quiet campaign to allow schools to teach these students primarily in English.
Officials at Diamond Lake School District 76 in Mundelein say their decision to adopt an English-based program five years ago yielded higher test scores. But it could also mean the loss of $175,000 in state and federal funding this year—enough to force trims in summer school and other programs…
The State Board of Education initially lauded Diamond Lake for the academic gains made by its bilingual pupils, then discovered the change in how the district was teaching them and suspended funding, said Supt. Roger Prosise.
ISBE’s spokesman Matt Vanover says,
“When we monitor the bilingual program, we’re looking at the services they are supposed to legally provide. We’re not looking at how they are doing.”
Well, OK, that is certainly part of ISBE’s role. But I’m sure even Vanover can see how silly that statement sounds in the context of education. If the students aren’t doing well, what’s the point of the mandates? If other services are providing good results, could the law be, perhaps, too rigid?
On the other hand, this month’s Catalyst focuses on the opposite side of the debate over the ratio of English to native language instruction in bilingual classrooms, with a piece outlining the benefits of dual language instruction, which provides support for students to maintain their fluency in their native language in addition to teaching English.
I’ll confess I have very little background in bilingual education. I’d be very interested in hearing from TEN members who know more about this topic than I do.
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Monday
February 25, 2008
According to NPR, several years ago, a survey called homework “the most haphazard educational practice in America’s schools” Now MetLife has released its own study on homework. [pdf]
According to the MetLife study, more experienced teachers are more likely to view homework as an essential learning tool than new teachers, possibly because they express more confidence in their ability to create engaging assignments. Shocking nobody, 90% of high school students are either listening to music, watching TV, talking on the phone, or emailing friends while doing their homework.
Not too surprisingly, parents and students are much more likely than teachers to see homework as “busywork” and unconnected to class learning, though they agree overall that homework (in theory) is important.
This was the line in the survey I found most interesting:
Parents who report that homework is not important feel more alienated from their child’s school, are less likely to have rules about homework, and are more likely to say that homework is burdensome.
Well that’s a tangled mess, and I think most teachers have struggled with where to start with this. Do you start with the part where they feel it’s not important? With the alienation? With the lack of structures in place at home?
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Thursday
February 21, 2008
Dear Valued Teachers and Golden Apple Friends:
Join the Golden Apple Foundation as we celebrate the success of the Teaching Excellence Network!
Join us on Tuesday, March 4 at Black Rock Pub in Chicago from 5:00 to 8:00 p.m. to network with other teachers, meet Golden Apple staff members, and celebrate the success of TEN’s launch! Black Rock is at 3614 N. Damen, on the corner of Damen and Addison, minutes from 90/94 (Damen or Addison exit) and a two block walk from the Addison Brown Line stop .
Come out and enjoy free drinks and appetizers! We are thankful to have you as a part of our community and are looking forward to seeing you. Please feel free to invite other interested teachers, too. CLICK HERE TO RSVP!
Many thanks for your support!
Jenni (TEN Outreach Coordinator), henry@goldenapple.org
Sarah (TEN Program Director), weisz@goldenapple.org
P.S. Our plan is to do more TEN events, in different areas of Illinois. Please let Jenni know if you have ideas about a good location!
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Monday
February 18, 2008
Educational Technology blogger Will Richardson pointed me to this Washington Post op-ed written by a veteran teacher at a high school in Alexandria, VA.
Last September, we moved into a new $98 million building in Alexandria, one of the most expensive high schools ever built…
So you’d think T.C. teachers would be ecstatic. But it’s just the opposite—faculty morale is the lowest and cynicism the highest I’ve seen in years. The problem? What a former Alexandria school superintendent calls “technolust”—a disorder affecting publicity-obsessed school administrators nationwide that manifests itself in an insatiable need to acquire the latest, fastest, most exotic computer gadgets, whether teachers and students need them or want them. Technolust is in its advanced stages at T.C., where our administrators have made such a fetish of technology that some of my colleagues are referring to us as “Gizmo High.”
It’s not at all surprising that teachers are frustrated at what sounds like a pretty rigid implementation of technology for its own sake. There are great examples of schools that are doing this much better, that are bringing their teachers along as partners in technology implementation, that are building a schoolwide culture of technology rather than just sticking devices in classrooms.
There’s always a tension in educational change - really in any kind of change. Everyone knows that it’s only grassroots change that feels really authentic. People come to the realization on their own that change is good, so they are fully on board and invested in the change.
That kind of change takes a really, really long time, though. At some point doesn’t someone have to step in to spread the benefits discovered by all those early changers?
Where is the sweet spot between waiting too long for everyone to come to a great realization on their own and forcing too many people to do something without believing in its value?
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Saturday
February 16, 2008
Via the weekly Carnival of Education, I came upon a post from Teacher in a Strange Land describing a recent US News and World Report special report on the most overrated careers. Including teaching.
According to US News, here are some of the reasons people choose teaching:
Helping the next generation flower sounds like a great vocation. Plus you get summers off. Teachers have good job security, too, with benefits that are often more generous than those in the private sector. And...you get summers off. If you stick with the career, salaries can approach six figures. On top of that, you get summers off!
Why is it so “overrated”? Well, according to the piece, it’s because classes are heterogeneously grouped and it’s hard to teach all the kids well, the government forces you to teach material that’s too hard for your kids, and sometimes they make you work in the summer.
Alternative careers he suggests are teaching at a private school “aimed at students of a particular ability level” or working as a private tutor or corporate trainer.
Well, huh. I don’t know what group of teachers he’s been talking to. I can’t think of many teachers who chose teaching on a whim, who thought it would be easy, who aren’t willing to shoulder the challenges it brings. Is teaching difficult and frustrating sometimes? Yes! But overrated? I’m baffled.
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Thursday
February 14, 2008
Catalyst Magazine reports that seven Chicago schools will be piloting a new teacher evaluation program this spring.
The new rubric is based on the work of Charlotte Danielson. This idea has been kicking around CPS for years; Catalyst reported on it in a special issue on teacher evaluation back in 2003. Golden Apple has used the Danielson rubric for years to guide our selection of excellent teachers for the Golden Apple Award.
Danielson’s rubric organizes teaching into four domains:
The model is not without its critics, though:
Critics of Danielson’s model note that it’s not tied to how students do in class and on tests…
William Sanders, a researcher who has created a system to use student test scores to measure teacher performance, says Danielson assumes wrongly that a certain set of teacher skills and knowledge will invariably bring about better results. “It’s based upon the assumption that the process is highly correlated with the outcome,” he says.
I disagree with his implication that excellent teaching practice doesn’t necessarily improve student learning. But I can’t exactly say that I’ve seen the kind of proof that excellent practice does improve student learning that would silence critics. Part of the problem is that those of us who support the kind of evaluation of teaching proposed by Danielson are also the kind of teachers who don’t think standardized tests are a great assessment of student learning. So, where’s the intellectually rigorous rubric for student learning outcomes that we can all get behind?
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Monday
February 11, 2008
Via This Week in Education, the Hoover Institute has published a study of the political opinions of teachers, using data from NORC opinion polls from 1976-2006.
Here’s what they found. In general more educated Americans are more liberal in their political views than less educated Americans. Teachers, however, tend to be slightly less liberal than non-teachers with similar levels of education. Some examples pulled from the study:
[W]hen we compare teachers and others with similarly high levels of education, we find that teachers tend on average to be less supportive of free-speech rights. On the issue of free speech, teachers are progressive relative to nonteachers, but conservative relative to nonteachers with high levels of schooling.
[I]n each of the four decades, teachers are from 10 to 15 percentage points less likely than other Americans with 16 or more years of schooling to see nothing wrong with homosexuality.
Americans who place themselves in the middle or upper classes, women, and the more highly educated all tend to favor abortion being legal. But teachers are about 14 percentage points more likely to oppose abortion for any reason than highly educated nonteachers—that is, they are more conservative on the issue.
On the other hand:
Teachers’ conservative propensity does not appear to be uniform across their values. They are more liberal than nonteachers, for example, when it comes to school prayer, a stance seemingly inconsistent with their strong religious turn. Moreover, they seem to be more likely to see the world as good, and they tend to be more trusting than other Americans.
As the author points out, in our democratic society, we want our teachers to be “more on the side of freedom and equality than of censorship, coercion, and inequality,” and “we should expect our teachers to be committed to the democratic ideal as an organizing principle for our society and for instruction in their classrooms.”
The Washington Post’s Marc Fisher responds to this point,
That makes good sense to me, and certainly there’s cause for pride in the findings that teachers are trusting and optimistic and want to protect the church-state divide. But some of the other attitudes Slater reports indicate a tradition-bound rigidity in the teacher corps. Some of our best schools and teachers are deeply grounded in very traditional and highly principled foundations, and surely there’s value in both the progressive and traditional approaches to education. What these findings don’t tell us is whether teachers’ attitudes point to the kind of traditional thinking that thrives on open inquiry or to a more fearful and defensive traditionalism.
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Saturday
February 09, 2008
At the statewide No Child Left Behind conference on Wednesday, the lunchtime keynote speaker was Alfred W. Tatum, an education professor at UIC. He spoke on the challenges of engaging adolescent males - especially African-Americans - in reading.
He focused again and again on the importance of text:
Students aren’t getting texts in school to help them critique, understand, and compete with the texts they are exposed to out of school.
Essentially, he despairs that schools are giving up on teaching struggling readers by focusing the curriculum on basic reading comprehension of texts with no meaning. He told the story of observing a student teacher trying to tutor a struggling 16-year-old boy with a Berenstain Bears book. Possibly at his reading level, but anything but appropriate for his life experience.
In a related Educational Leadership article, Tatum expands on this idea:
History is laden with these kinds of enabling texts for African American males. An enabling text is one that moves beyond a sole cognitive focus—such as skill and strategy development—to include a social, cultural, political, spiritual, or economic focus.
During the last 30 years, however, the kinds of texts that African American males as a group encounter in schools have been characteristically “dis-abling.” They lack that broader perspective and largely ignore students’ local contexts and their desire as adolescents for self-definition, focusing instead on skill and strategy development. This shift is largely influenced by policy decisions to measure reading output using psychometric instruments.
These instruments, the use and misuse of the data resulting from these instruments...had dire effects on African American adolescents. These practices have created an oppositional identity in students, a resistance to school-related tasks, and a diminished sense of self as an academic being.
The article includes a list of suggested enabling texts. Also check out this TEN blog post for a related conversation.
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Thursday
February 07, 2008
An interesting proposal from Grant Wiggins:
Teachers would be required once per month to shadow a student for an entire day – go to class, go to lunch, go to the bathroom, etc. – to understand with great empathy how school looks and feels from the student side...This is really the only way for teachers to come to grips with how boring and chaotic much of school life really is for kids.
Has anyone done this? Did it impact your teaching? I remember doing this in student teaching, but the memory faded quickly. I’m not sure his once-a-month idea is possible, but what about once per year?
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Monday
February 04, 2008
Education blogger Eduwonkette has a great list of questions that need to be asked about teacher evaluation, especially as more districts consider experimenting with “value-added” evaluation which uses student outcome data to evaluate teacher quality.
Here’s a quick paraphrase of her questions. The full article, including links to lots of interesting related articles is here.
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Saturday
February 02, 2008
A few days ago, USA Today reported on the increasing prominence of financial/material incentives for students success. From a raffle for a TV to straight-up cash payments for high test scores, more districts are experimenting. Here’s the argument in favor, from the USA Today story:
The two-year New York City experiment, begun last September, essentially pays students monthly to do their best on skills tests. If it seems like an economist’s dream, that’s because it’s the brainchild of wunderkind Harvard economist Roland Fryer, who also serves as the schools’ chief equality officer. He came up with the idea while trying to figure out how to make school “tangible” for disadvantaged kids with few successful role models. “I just thought that giving them some short-term incentives to do what’s in their long-term best interests would be a good way to go.”
While teachers talk about success, he says, it’s not enough to tell a kid that, in the long term, hard work will pay off. “We’re asking them to look down a path that they have probably never seen anyone go down … and then to have the wisdom and the fortitude to wait for their reward.”
In her blog Bridging Differences, education analyst Diane Ravitch responds:
And as psychologist Barry Schwartz of Swarthmore wrote in The New York Times several months back, ‘if we have to pay people to do the right thing, no one will do the right thing unless they are paid to do it.’ Down the drain will be any idea of intrinsic motivation, as well as any sense of civic duty.
Then there is the question of exactly what these tests mean and why they matter so much. Imagine that the incentivists carry the day. We will have created an educational system that strives mightily (and maybe even successfully) to teach kids to check off the right box when given a choice of four. Pray tell, in what line of work will that skill be valuable in the future? I don’t know.
I instinctively agree with Ravitch and Schwartz on this. But there is an important issue that underlies the incentive programs that we shouldn’t ignore. Kids, especially kids who don’t come from communities where school success is modeled and implicitly required, need some concrete idea of what they’re going to get out of working hard in school. Maybe we don’t need financial incentives, but this does speak to a need for more programs that get kids from impoverished neighborhoods out to see colleges, to see communities other than their own, to see adults for whom education has paid off.
But, it’s essential to present students with a nuanced view of how success happens. Education blogger Eduwonkette cites this quote from the book Ain’t No Making It that highlights for me the essential flaw with the way schools try to instill a sense of long-term payoff for students:
The familiar refrain of “Behave yourself, study hard, earn good grades, graduate with your class, go on to college, get a good job, and make a lot of money” reinforces the feelings of personal inadequacy and failure that working-class students are likely to bear as a matter of course. By this logic, those who have not made it have only themselves to blame. Because it shrouds class, race, and gender barriers to success, the achievement ideology promulgates a lie, one that some students come to recognize as such.
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