Tim Fredrick's ELA Teaching Blog

The Republicans really, really want to energize their base

With the issue of gay marriage exhausted, Republicans have turned to issues in education to energize their ultra-conservative base.  Are they proposing burning down every public school?  Publicly hanging teachers?  Well, they're not that scared they're going to lose the mid-term elections.  They're just bringing out a national voucher program.  Ugh.

I love the quote in the NY Times article on the subject.  The author mentions the report that came out recently which stated that public school kids did just as well as private school kids.  What was Education Secretary Margaret Spellings reaction?  The results were "inconclusive" - which we all means, "they don't agree with our position".  You and I know that if the results came out saying the opposite, that private school kids did better, the administration would be lauding the researchers as heros.

They make me sick.

Something's wrong with high schools

There's got to be something wrong with high schools.  That is the only conclusion one can draw when you look at this report published in EdWeek.  Some important points:

• Nationally, third of drop-outs never get past the ninth grade.
• According to EdWeek, the graduation rate in NYC is 38.9%; according to the city it is 53.2%.
• The city considers a GED as graduation.

From the first point, one could draw the conclusion that the transition from middle school/junior high to high school is not a smooth one and, for 1 out of 3 drop-outs, where they got "stuck".  This says a lot about how well middle schools are preparing students for high schools.  This could be for a variety of reasons, but I would guess that it has to do with a huge lack of communication between the two levels.  Middle schools (at least the ones I've seen) look more like elementary schools than high schools.  I'm not saying that's necessarily bad, but we must certainly be aware that there is a disconnect here.  Something's got to change - middle or high school (or, probably, both).

Also, let's keep in mind that "high school" as it is conceived of now was never really meant to graduate 100% of students.  In my parents' day, many students dropped out to work or join the army.  When "high school" was developed, this was a reality.  Our expectations have changed, but what we do has not.  We expect 100% graduation, but maintain a model of secondary schooling that cannot achieve that.

Now, to New York City.  It will be interesting to see how graduation rates shift in a few years after all the new small schools have been able to graduate a few classes.  My feeling is that we will see a rise in graduation rates because these smaller schools are more able to give students individual attention.  In larger schools, students are easily falling through the cracks.  Not so much in smaller schools.  The small school movement has done a lot to change how we see "high school," but I still don't think it is enough.  Making it smaller does make it more personal.  That's a good step.  But, the instructional models have not changed.  Classes are still largely compartmentalized and students don't see connections between subject matters.  So, they go between classes not seeing how all this learning adds up to changing how they view the world.  Teenagers have lots of questions about themselves and the world, but we aren't answering them in the high school.  This is the next step we need to take.  Move away from departments and more into full-on, no-holds-barred interdisciplinary work.  But, who's willing to take this next step?

Links:
The EdWeek Report
NY Times article on EdWeek Report

Girls demand sex ed and get it!

I don't usually visit the NY Post because they are so wrong on so many educational topics (as well as all topics!), but this story came through my reader (I'm obsessed with Google Reader) and I can't help but be proud of these 7th grade girls.  They demanded to have a sex ed class and got it.  They hadn't received the state-mandated class, partially because of parents' concerns.

I remember getting sex ed in 7th and 8th grade - and I went to Catholic grade school - and this was 20 years ago.  Sex ed is really lacking in this city.  I had a male student a few years ago who got a girl pregnant because he wasn't properly educated in how the whole sex thing works.  "I didn't know," he said about how pulling out is not a good contraceptive method.  If he had known, think about his and the mother's life would be different.

How can we preach that knowledge is power, but not give students such vital knowledge? 

Links:
NY Post article

Boys and high school graduation rates

There's one of those articles in the New York Times where they state the obvious over and over again: boy's graduation rates are horrible - and even more so in New York!  (Although, it sounds like the methods of data collection and analysis are a bit questionable - any thoughts on that?)

It is no suprise to us as educators that this is the case.  We can see it every day.  As I've discussed before, the problem is us!  We are not offering curriculum that speaks to boys.  Boys are very much interested in life and learning.  They are curious and they wonder about how things work.  School just isn't working for them.

This adds further to my desire to see high schools dramatically changed.  Secondary education is desperately in need of an overhaul - complete and total.  The current model is not working.  I imagine something more like elementary schools - interdisciplinary units that encompass the entire day.  Give students more choice over what they study.  (Why is it that elementary aged children are often given this freedome, but high schoolers aren't?  Wouldn't it make more sense to allow them - as they grow in maturity and intelligence - more independence in their learning paths?)  All of this woul dmake sense for boys AND girls.

What's stopping us?  Why do we hold onto this model?  Perhaps change scares us - the educators.  We are unwilling to let go of what has worked for us in our own education to consider what could be improved.

Is anyone out there willing to engage in an extended thought experiment?  Let's work on making a model of a high school that we feel would work in today's world.  I'm very serious about this ... if you are interested, leave a comment or e-mail me privately.  We could come up with a model and write an article.  Someone has to start some change!

TIME article on the high school drop out rate

There's a cover article at TIME on the large high school drop out rate.  It reports something that isn't exactly a surprise or all that shining - more and more students are not finishing high school  How to fix this problem?  More money and more tests are not the answer. 

More and more students are dropping out because high schools are becoming more and more obsolete in their practices.  A majority of high schools are still large learning factories.  They were designed during the Industrial Revolution - working off the success of assembly line manufacturing, school officals designed large schools to be assembly line learning.  At the time, college was only for the wealthy elite.  Most people didn't go to college so preparing a large majority of teenagers for college was wildly unnecessary.

There's nothing wrong with high schools - they are doing exactly what they were designed to do.  When the current system of educating adolescent was developed, many students did not complete it and many of those who did weren't going on in their education.

What we really need is a complete and total restructing of how we look at high school.  The current design needs to be thrown out the window and real innovations need to take place.  Can we do this though?  Can educators throw out everything we know about educating adolescents to completely redesign high schools.

One thing I would completely throw out is the barriers between subject matters.  Students go from class to class - math to Spanish to English to history to biology - never seeing how the world really works.  In the world, those delineations are not clear.  If I were completely restructuirng high schools in this country that would be at the top of my list.   

How would you completely restructure American high schools?

The New York Times: Standardized Tests Face A Crisis Over Standards

The New York Times has an interesting article today on standardized tests.  I know, I know - there are so many now (tests ... and articles about them).  We know the atrocities and this article adds another atrocity to what seems to be an ever-growing list.  In order to make the tests cheaper and less time-consuming to score, states are avoiding short answer and essays and using more multiple choice questions.

While testing errors make headlines, Mr. Toch writes that even more worrisome is the pressure on states to dumb down their tests — to switch from challenging tests with essay questions to multiple choice to save money and meet federal reporting deadlines. He points out how much cheaper and faster machine-scored multiple-choice tests are to grade. Florida can do a million multiple-choice tests in a day, while correcting tests with essay questions can take weeks. It costs a test company 50 cents to $5 to score an essay, compared with pennies for each multiple-choice question.

The result? "Many of the tests that states are introducing under N.C.L.B. contain many questions that require students to merely recall and restate facts, rather than do more demanding tasks like applying or evaluating information," Mr. Toch writes in his study, which can be found at www.educationsector.org.

A recent Education Week survey found that 42 percent of students are now taking state reading and math tests that are entirely multiple choice. To save time and money, Kansas and Mississippi switched to all-multiple-choice tests this year.

So, we've completely disregarded classroom educators' abilities to assess students and turned it over to (a), (b), (c), or (all of the above).  Very bright.  Sometimes I wonder about the people who make these decisions.  How good was their education?

Teacher Retention

At the Gotham Gazette: Keeping New Teachers from Dropping Out by Ellen Meyers of Teachers Network

A thoughtful article about why there is such a high turn-over rate in teachers and how we can keep them in the profession.

Some highlights:

Misperceptions about the profession ...

Teaching has never been the cushy job imagined by the public, which mistakenly believes that a teacher’s day ends when school lets out. People outside the field often do not seem to understand that teachers spend hours of additional time making lesson plans, reviewing homework, grading tests.

When I tell people what I do for a living, they get so excited for me with all the time off I must have.  Little do they know ...

It's hard work ...

How can we expect people with minimal preparation to be successful in a profession that requires the skills of “parent surrogate, nurse, police officer, detective, psychologist, mediator, bathroom monitor, toilet paper dispenser, janitor, room decorator, quartermaster for school supplies, manager, organizer, lesson planner, cheerleader, lunchroom monitor, negotiator,” as one experienced teacher has put it.

Teaching is all about relationships — the building of relationships between teacher and students. That’s why it is so hard. One elementary school teacher must have relationships with up to 35 very different individuals, each with diverse learning styles, needs, and levels of engagement. A high school teacher will typically teach 150 students.

There is research on the extraordinary number of decisions that a teacher has to make at any given moment —- more decisions minute-by-minute than a brain surgeon. The most conservative estimate from this data has teachers making approximately 130 decisions per hour during a six-hour school day, and this reflects only those decisions made within the classroom. This is extraordinarily daunting and often intimidating for new teachers. It makes support from administrators and colleagues so vital.

I've worked an office job and teaching.  I can tell you that teaching is much harder.  I'm exhausted at the end of the day.  It is hard work physically, intellectually, and emotionally.  Many people enter the profession thinking that it is easy and "you get your summers off".  Many (and some of them my friends) seem to have entered the profession only because it allows them the time off to travel extensively.  That's not a reason to enter a difficult profession.

What new teachers need ...

Schools have to reduce the teaching load for new teachers and stop giving them the assignments that no senior teacher wants. New teachers need to observe other more experienced teachers, but this is impossible with a full teaching load. Changing this and lessening demand on new teachers will require incentives for senior teachers to take on the tough assignments. The teachers union has advocated pay differentials for experienced teachers willing to work in hard-to-staff schools.

The biggest paradox in our school system is that the least experience teachers go to the most needy classrooms.  This is perhaps the biggest disservice that we need to correct.  We will not close the achievement gap unless with fix this problem.

Houston's impending merit pay doom

Starting off my morning reading an article from the NYTimes about Houston's system of merit pay tied to test scores [free registration required] was not a good way to begin the day.

Are we actually taking steps backwards?

This will work against improvement.  The public may not recognize this and the press certainly doesn't, but every teacher does: A teacher is not the only factor in determining how well students do on tests.  For instance, wealthier families can afford tutors and other preparation programs to assist their children in scoring higher.  Many families can't afford this and their children would not score as high as their wealthier counterparts. 

In addition, there are a variety of social factors that affect test scores.  If a family is struggling to eat or lives in a shelter, the child's schooling isn't really high on the priority list.  Health problems can also contribute to lower scores - it is a scientific fact that there are higher rates of asthma among children in urban areas and the children with asthma miss more school.

What does this all mean?  Since teachers recognize that there is more to raising test scores than just them, many (if not most) will try to get jobs in schools that are already performing well.  With a larger pool of applicants, the schools who are already performing well will hire the best teachers.  The teachers who are left (the more ... undesirable ones) will have no choice but to go to the lower performing schools.

Merit pay based on test scores is only going to cause the achievement gap in test scores to widen as the better teachers work at the schools with better test scores.

I'm not against merit pay in and of itself.  It could work, depending on the criteria used to judge a teacher.  Using test scores alone spells impending doom for the students of Houston.

The NY Times states the obvious again

The New York Times loves to write articles about education which concern issues that any decent educator would know about and pretend that it is some kind of investigative reporting.  Perhaps the public doesn't know these things, though, so I'll let NYT slide.

The latest article is on if we can really tell if a students in a school are learning by standardized tests.  (No.)  The compare annual state test scores to the recent NAEP scores and wonder why one test could show an increase in learning and the other would show a decrease in learning. (Uh ... because they are two different tests and the teachers obviously only taught to ONE of them.)  Here are some great quotes from the article and my reader's response (a la Louise Rosenblatt):

Our leaders in Washington and the state capitals have not trusted teachers, principals and superintendents to grade and assess their own students rigorously.

The quote above boils down the problem to a T.  With each of these tests, teachers are being told that they are stupid and unqualified to assess their students' abilities.  Plain and simple.

Nationwide, millions of students may or may not be proficient, depending on which test you favor.

I've said it before and I'll say it again (and I'm not the only one saying it) ... tests only test how well a student takes tests.  That's it.  Nothing more.

"To us, more information is better," said Tom Luce, an assistant secretary in the federal Department of Education. "People say, 'Well, it's confusing.' But I think the American people can deal with two different pieces of information at once."

Really?  According to the federal test results, they can barely deal with one.  Typical Bush Administration spin.

Robert Schaeffer, public education director of the liberal group FairTest, says, "It shows these so-called objective measures are arbitrary, easily manipulated and profoundly political."

Yes.  Assessment and evaluation will never, ever, ever, ever be completely objective.  Even standardized tests are subjective in the fact that a human being (or an overpaid committee of human beings) made up the tests and decided what would be tested and how.  If this is the case - that all assessment is subjective - why do we continue to trust suits in an office who develop tests over the child's teacher?

Can you really boil it down to a number?

No, you cannot.  Learning is more complex that that.  Public education is not a business.  Learning is not profit and can't be communicated in numbers.

But, we don't trust teachers.  My question is: if you can't trust your child's teacher, who are you going to trust about your child's education?  Someone said to me this weekend that parents/voters/tax payers aren't wary about their child's teachers - they're worried about the unknown element - all those other teachers out there.  This tells me that we just assume that a teacher is incompetent and ineffective unless we know otherwise.

Quite a shame. 

NYT reports what teachers already know ... again

An article in the NY Times about how the rise in scores on the 4th grade ELA test is due to the test being easier than the previous years'.  Duh.

It's amazing.  Everyone in education recognizes that these test scores mean nothing in relation to the abilities of students.  Tests can be made easier.  Scales can be messed with so even a bad score looks good.  Yet, politicans and administrators love to pat themselves on the back using the scores.  Unbelievable.