Are America's Toddlers College and Career Ready?

In a move that surprises very few in the education field, the Partnership for the Assessment of Readiness for College and Career (PARCC) has decided to develop a college and career readiness test for toddlers. To be called the Toddler Intelligence Test (TIT), the development of the TIT is being overseen by a division of PARCC, the Toddler Assessment Team (TAT). A group of entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, hedge fund managers and former tennis stars has been assembled to develop TIT for TAT.

A spokesperson for PARCC, Phil N. Blanks, said in a statement that the company is already well on its way to having standardized tests available for kindergarten and pre-school children, so the toddler test was the next logical area to target. “It’s never too early to develop college and career skills and we at PARCC will leave no child behind when it comes to being tested every year.” When asked why no early childhood education specialists or child psychologists were on the development team, Blanks noted that PARCC had found such experts were overly concerned with the negative impact of so much testing at such a young age. “These people just were not team players; they kept asking questions instead of developing questions.”

When asked what would be on the test, Blanks pointed to key areas of toddler knowledge necessary for college and career readiness. These include toilet training, large motor skill function (the specially designed answer sheet will have larger than usual circles to fill in), keyboarding, binary computer code and, of course, close reading of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address.

Unable to determine how to measure toilet training proficiency on an answer sheet, the developers decided to make this a performance test. When finding volunteers to proctor this part of the test proved difficult, the entire test development was in danger. Luckily, according to Blanks, a group of eager young college graduates stepped in to fill the void. These students, known as Toilet Trainers for America (TTFA), received five weeks of toilet training over the summer, so they could effectively monitor the exam.

Buoyed by the success of the development of the TIT, PARCC has begun preliminary investigation into in utero college and career readiness testing.

Valuing the Professional Educator: Toward an Evaluation Plan that Works, Part 2

In an earlier post that can be found here, I argued for a more enlightened approach to teacher evaluation that recognized the value of each teacher and aimed at feedback that is both useful and led to further professional development. Such an approach would include observations, teacher collaboration, and systematic feedback, as well as artifacts of instruction to include pupil progress indicators.

In this post, I would like to add some detail to that proposal. Specifically, I would like to look at what student progress indicators make sense as a part of a teacher evaluation.

The corporate reformers of education are in love with Value Added Measures (VAMs) as a central pupil progress indicator. Value Added Measures attempt to determine the effectiveness of the teacher through student performance on standardized tests. The Gates Foundation’s ambitious and flawed study of teacher effectiveness called for one-third of the measure of teacher effectiveness to be determined through VAMs.

Research, however, does not support the use of VAMs for any significant part of a teacher evaluation. A report prepared for the Governor’s Task Force on Teacher Evaluation in New Jersey by EQuATE (2011), surveyed the research on VAMs and concluded the following.

            Research studies show that the teacher’s effect on value-added scores, based on [standardized] tests, accounts for only 3-4 percent of the variation. Fully 90 percent of the variation in VAMs is attributable to student characteristics and the interaction of learning/test-taking styles with the instruments used to measure achievement. To ascribe a weight to this measure that exceeds its explanatory power would be malpractice at best.

Linda Darling Hammond, et. al, (2011) cited the following concerns about VAMs.

            1. Value-Added Models of teacher effectiveness are highly unstable.

            2. Teachers’ Value-Added Ratings are significantly affected by differences in the students who are assigned to them.

            3. Value-Added Ratings cannot disentangle the many influences on student progress.

If VAMs are a notably unreliable measure of student progress, what can we suggest that would provide a better picture of student progress? Here is one person’s list of possible artifacts of student growth.

·         Samples of student work showing growth over time

·         Common or locally developed assessments

·         Student work samples scored on common or locally developed rubrics

·         Questionnaires, Checklists or rating scales to measure non-cognitive growth

Examples of student work showing growth over time can include student writing, student journals, classwork or homework assignments, pre- and post-performance on teacher developed quizzes and tests, even sample pages from books read at the beginning of the year and the end of the year.

Examples of common assessments could include establishing a reading level using a recognized format such as DRA or Benchmark, or assessments developed at grade or department level designed for all students in a particular grade or course.

Rubric scored work may employ national or state rubrics used for determining writing quality or locally developed rubrics designed to assess student ability in a range of performance tasks.

Ideally, measures developed to assess non-cognitive factors related to student growth can be developed locally, but many commercially developed questionnaires and checklists are available.

In this vision of an evaluation model, the teacher takes the lead in gathering materials over time that demonstrate student growth in the classroom. This material is then shared in a collegial give and take with supervisors. The teacher has the opportunity to demonstrate effectiveness and the supervisor has the opportunity to provide feedback and make recommendations for continued growth.

Does this model demand time of the teacher and the supervisor? Absolutely. Does it demand time for teacher colleagues to develop common assessments? Yes. Is it idealistic? Perhaps. More importantly though, it values the classroom teacher as the best observer of pupil progress, the local supervisor as the key audience for this information and provides a more reliable measure of teacher effectiveness than that darling of the reformers, the VAM. Most importantly, these suggestions have the potential to impact student learning in a positive way.

References

EQuATE (2011) Creating a Better System: Recommendations for a Systemic Approach to Improving Educator Effectiveness. Report Delivered to the New Jersey Governor’s Task Force on Teacher Evaluation.

Darling-Hammond, et. al (2011) Getting Teacher Evaluation Right: A Background Paper for Policy Makers. Research Briefing, AERA

Banning Books Southern Style

Ironically, as the Common Core calls for more instruction in critical reading, this North Carolina school board strikes a blow for ignorance and narrow mindedness.

North Carolina school board bans Ralph Ellison’s ‘Invisible Man’ (via Raw Story )

A North Carolina school board has banned Ralph Ellison’s 1952 novel Invisible Man from its reading list on Monday, citing a lack of “literary value.” The Asheboro Courier-Tribune reported that the Randolph County Board of Education voted 5-2 to…

---

Round Robin Reading Must Die

Recently while searching for videos of Guided Reading practice to share with teachers at a workshop, I was shocked to find so many of them employed Round Robin Reading as an instructional strategy despite the explicit direction from the chief proponents of Guided Reading, Fountas and Pinnell (1996), that all children read the complete text at the same time silently or in whisper voices.

I was further shocked when I did a presentation to teachers this week and said, “Of course in Guided Reading all students read the full text at the same time, Round Robin Reading is not to be used.” I could tell by the hush in the crowd that I had struck a nerve. A brave soul raised her hand and said, "But that’s how we all do it.” I responded, “Not anymore.”

For the uninitiated, Round Robin Reading is a practice that all of us will recognize from our own schooling. At its most basic, one student is assigned the reading of a paragraph or a page, while the other students are asked to listen and follow along. The class then repeats this one after the other.  I personally remember a social studies class back in the dark ages where this was a dominant form of instruction. While some poor sucker was asked to go first, the smarty pants among us followed closely, ready to pounce on any error so that we could shout out a holier than thou correction to general snickering throughout the room. The less confident in the class were busily trying to count desks to see which paragraph they would be assigned, so they could practice reading their paragraph and avoid the embarrassment of being corrected. I cannot remember ever understanding what was being read by someone else in this class.

Round Robin Reading has been thoroughly discredited as an instructional practice for many years. Here is the case against Round Robin.

1. Round Robin Reading can cause unnecessary sub-vocalization. Those students who are following along tend to sub-vocalize while others are reading aloud because oral reading is slower than silent reading. This can lead to ingrained slower reading rates.

 2. Round Robin Reading lowers the quantity of reading. Oral reading is slower, so kids read less. Only one child is reading, so kids read less.

3. Round Robin Reading does not provide an accurate view of reading for kids. It assigns too much emphasis to correct pronunciation and not enough on comprehension.

4. Round Robin Reading can lower self-esteem. Students do not gain confidence as readers through this practice, because it is an unrehearsed performance task where your errors are corrected, either by the teacher or other students, in a public way.

5. Round Robin Reading denies students the opportunity to self-correct errors, a critical reading skill.

6. Round Robin Reading can cause discipline problems as the rest of the class, bored by the practice, may stop following along and start goofing off.

7. Round Robin Reading takes time away from other more productive instructional activities. A great deal of time is spent in keeping children focused and because oral reading is slower, children may actually be encountering fewer words than they would with more enlightened practice.

8. Round Robin Reading can hamper listening comprehension. The students who are supposed to be listening are often either looking ahead or fooling around. As a comprehension activity this practice is completely unsupportable.

9. Round Robin Reading can be a source of anxiety and embarrassment for children. Reading aloud without the opportunity to rehearse takes the focus off comprehension and places it on avoiding embarrassment.

10. When others jump in to “help” in Round Robin Reading, they are robbing the reader of one key to learning to read well – the ability to self-monitor and use repair strategies when you make a mistake.

The case has been made. Round Robin must die. But what are the alternatives?

In Guided Reading, of course, the gold standard practice is to have all children read the whole text silently, while the teacher listens in to one student reading orally, prompting at the point of difficulty. The teacher then moves on to another student and another student. For students not yet reading silently, the students are taught to read aloud quietly while the teacher listens in one at a time.

There are times when we want students to read aloud. On reason would be for diagnostic purposes, but that is done privately. Genuine reasons for having children read aloud include Reader’s Theater, Radio Reading and other performance based oral readings. This oral reading is always done after ample rehearsal. For a wonderful list of oral reading activities for children please read, Good-Bye Round Robin Reading by Tim Rasinski and Michael Opitz, Heinemann, 1998.

Valuing the Professional Educator: Toward an Evaluation Plan that Works, Part 1

By the time a teacher receives the first evaluation of his/her performance, the school district has already invested a great deal of time and money in that individual. First of all there were the recruiting costs involved in finding the candidate. Secondly, there was the time and effort put in through interviews, demonstration lessons and background checks to determine that the candidate was a good fit for the district and the position. Next there was the hiring process itself and the paperwork and man hours involved there. Finally, the new teacher received some sort of orientation training that may vary from a few hours to several days. In other words, the school district has chosen and created an employee of value, an asset to the district as indicated by time and money invested.

Any system designed to evaluate the performance of this employee must first recognize that this teacher is an employee of value. Acknowledging this brings an entirely new orientation to the evaluation process. Instead of an evaluation system that tries to find teacher shortcomings, evaluation becomes a process of recognizing the value of teachers to the organization and helping professionals consistently improve performance.

This gotcha’ model of evaluation is where the education reformers have made a critical error. The main purpose of the evaluation system is not to catch out underperformers (of which there are far fewer than reformer rhetoric would suggest), but to help teachers become better at what most of them already do pretty well. A sound evaluation system, focused on teacher development, will identify those who are not able to improve performance, but its first goal will be to help the valuable professionals in their own pursuit of continuous improvement.

The reformers do have one thing right, evaluation of teachers needs to get better, but not primarily because we must weed out the underperformers. What we need is to provide valuable feedback to the professionals who can use it to improve performance. The darling of the reformers, Value Added Measures (VAMs), fail as an instrument of teacher evaluation for many reasons, mostly because there is no way to come up with a reliable score as Darling-Hammond, et.al have shown here.

Another failure of VAMs is that they do little to move the profession forward. They provide little information that would be useful to a teacher trying to improve performance or an administrator trying to provide meaningful feedback to a teacher.

What would an evaluation scheme look like that valued teachers and provided the feedback they needed? Here is an outline of the basics.

1. Teachers and school leaders are empowered to jointly customize, adapt, and implement an evaluation framework.
2. Observations are a mix of a few full period visits and several shorter visits. All observations involve feedback to the teacher in some form aimed at professional development.
3.  Feedback is provided on all domains of professional practice including planning, instruction, developing a learning environment, meeting professional responsibilities and professional development.
4. A variety of pupil progress indicators including those designed and scored by the teachers themselves in conjunction with the limited use of some standardized measures.
5.  Collaboration among teachers as a part of a continuous improvement model.

In a future post, I will expand on each of these ideas and how they can work in a school or school district.

Pushing Aside Certified, Committed Young Teachers for Teach for America Wannabees

Two weeks ago I posted a blog entry asking the question, Does Teacher Certification Matter? You can find that post here. Just as training and licensing matter for other professionals like doctors, nurses, lawyers and certified public accountants, it seems a no brainer that training and licensure matters for teachers. In case you think this is not a major issue, I would call your attention to this report from Jonathan Pelto on what is happening in Connecticut. Here is a piece of his report.

Last Monday night, Paul Vallas, Bridgeport’s faux superintendent of schools, revealed that he had hired another 31 Teach for America recruits to staff Bridgeport’s schools this year.   Few, if any of the recruits come from Connecticut and none went to a Ccollege or university to become a teacher.

The TFA recruits come courtesy of a March 2013 deal between Vallas and Nate Snow, the Executive Director for the Connecticut Chapter of Teach for America.  Snow is also   the President of Excel Bridgeport, Inc. the corporate funded lobbying and advocacy group that has been Vallas’ strongest supporter…

Not only are TFA recruits paid at regular teacher salary levels, but in return for supplying the Teach for America recruits, Vallas committed the City of Bridgeport to pay TFA a “fee” of “$3,000 per year for the first two years a teacher is employed.  According to the contract, the annual fee goes up next year to $3,105 a year and then to $3,214 the year after that.

In total, the Vallas/TFA contract calls for the City to hire 125 TFA teachers.  That number would provide Nate Snow’s organization with a finder’s fee in excess of  $750,000.

Vallas you will remember is the same unqualified school leader who brought ruin to the Philadelphia schools, among other urban school districts. Please note that this is $750,000 dollars in finder’s fees for finding and providing 5 weeks of training to unqualified neophytes to man the challenging Bridgeport classrooms. Could you think of other ways to spend that money? Perhaps reducing class size? Repairing crumbling infrastructure? Providing important professional development for current Bridgeport teachers? Hiring a real superintendent?

Pelto rightly points out that these TFA positions deny jobs to fully certified, committed graduates of Connecticut universities who have trained to be teachers. Wouldn’t the Bridgeport schools want to hire some of these folks? We cannot know because these positions were never even advertised to education graduates. The jobs were simply given to Teach for America wannabees.

It is a cautionary tale for all members of a profession under siege. We must all be sure to support the hiring and continued professional development of certified teachers who have shown a commitment to teaching and will not be moving on to an executive position with some hedge fund in two years.

Happy New School Year

With schools opening around the country over the next two weeks, I thought I would share a poem that I hope is a reminder of why we teach and why parents depend so much on the teacher. This one is written from a parent’s point of view and is a reminder of our sacred trust. I hope you have a good start to your new year.

The First Day of School
            by Russ Walsh

Today, dear teacher, I deliver to you
            my heart, my life, my son.

He’s not perfect:

One day he’s noisy,

Next day he’s careless,

Next day he’s both.

            Treat him kindly;

            Guide his growth.

I assure you, dear teacher,

            you’ll learn his name quickly.

He has his opinions.

He speaks them loudly,

Displays them proudly,

So sure he’s right.

            Respect his feelings:

            Harsh words can bite.

I should warn you dear teacher,

            he has no patience for seatwork.

But he’s not lazy,

Just likes to ponder,

And let his mind wander

In every which way direction.

            Value his thinking;

            Allow reflection.

Today dear teacher, I deliver to you

            my heart, my life, my son.

I ask that you listen.

I ask that you watch.

I ask that you care.

            And give him a hug,

            When I’m not there.

Bathing in the Language of Shakespeare

This past week I had the unique opportunity to see four Shakespearean plays in three days. The occasion was our annual visit to the Stratford Festival in Ontario, Canada. This remarkable theater festival offers a variety of plays from musicals like Fiddler on the Roof to Noel Coward chestnuts like Blithe Spirit, but my wife and I go mostly for the Shakespeare that is featured each year. This year we saw truly memorable productions of Othello and The Merchant of Venice and very good productions of Measure for Measure and Romeo and Juliet.

Upon returning home, we went to see my granddaughters where I delivered the obligatory t-shirts, this time emblazoned with Romeo and Juliet on the front. I told the thirteen-year-old I had just seen a production of the show and thought I would bring her a t-shirt to commemorate it. She admired the shirt for a moment and then said, “Oh, Romeo and Juliet! Did you have trouble following the play because of the way he writes?”

I knew what she meant, of course; Shakespeare can be difficult to follow due to the sometimes archaic language, the flowery turns of phrase and the demands of the spoken poetry. I explained to her that I had read the play many times in and out of school and had seen perhaps a half dozen productions of it, so I could follow it pretty well, but yes, even now, I have trouble understanding some of the language.

The question got me thinking about teaching and learning. Do we give kids a chance to become familiar with any writer at a deep level? I had just spent three days immersed in the language of Shakespeare. Iambic pentameter rained down on me as if from a sustained summer shower. I came through the immersion better able to understand and appreciate the greatness of the writing. How often do we give kids the same chance?

Typically in school we deny kids immersion in one author. Instead we supply a smattering of many authors. A smattering of Hawthorne, a smattering of Melville, a smattering of Shakespeare, a smattering of Hemingway. If children do get the chance to become truly immersed in an author, it typically happens outside of school. I remember I fell in love with the writing of John Steinbeck in ninth grade. I read all the Steinbeck I could get my hands on for the next three years, but was never assigned any in school. Contemporary school children may get a similar experience through immersion in J.K. Rowling and the Harry Potter series. This is all well and good, but can we do more?

Why not dedicate a school year or two school years to one great author? Why not immerse children deeply in one writer, so that they might truly come to know that writer under the guidance of a skilled teacher. Why not spend the time to truly look deeply into the writer’s themes, obsessions, tropes, ideas? Do we think that children really need a smattering more than they need close study of one writer? Is there anything we want to teach children about critical reading that we can’t teach through focused attention on one great author?

Who should be the focus of this type of instruction? The list of candidates is deep and diverse. For younger children it might include Arnold Lobel or Cynthia Rylant. For upper elementary children it might be E. B. White or Roald Dahl or Avi or Katherine Paterson. For middle school it might be Cynthia Voight or M.E.Kerr or Chris Crutcher or Robert Cormier. For high school it might be Shakespeare or Steinbeck or Hawthorne or Hemingway or Roth.

For years, teachers in the schools and critics outside of schools have described the American school curriculum as a mile wide and an inch deep. Why not try reversing that proportion?

Wendy Kopp Goes to the Doctor (or Does Certification Matter?)

I have a recurring dream. In my dream Wendy Kopp, founder and chair of the board for Teach for America (TFA), is visiting a remote part of the country preaching the TFA gospel, when she is stricken with a mysterious ailment causing severe headaches. Rushed to the nearest clinic, she is greeted by a young man who asks a few questions, takes her blood pressure, examines her eyes, ears and throat and declares that Wendy is suffering from a brain tumor and must schedule immediate surgery. Alarmed, Wendy asks the young man, “Are you a doctor?”

“Well, no, not technically, but I did graduate from an Ivy League school and I took a five week training course this past summer. One of the lectures was on brain tumors. I am here to make up for the doctor shortage in this rural area.”

The next scene shows Wendy running away screaming while googling “Board Certified Neurologist” on her smart phone.

In professional fields other than teaching, few would question the need for proper credentialing. In the profession of teaching, however, questions about the need for certified teachers in the classroom have been raised for the last two decades. If you read the research, as I have been doing for many years, and more intensively lately, you might get confused. Not surprisingly, the reform types have found lots of research that supports their concept that teaching preparation is not a predictor of teacher quality. Perhaps the most important of these was produced for the Abell Foundation by noted reformer Kate Walsh (no relation, thank goodness). Walsh concludes that the certification process is “neither an efficient nor an effective means by which to ensure a competent teaching force. Worse, it is often counterproductive.”( http://www.abell.org/pubsitems/ed_cert_1101.pdf)

Just as many, if not more, studies demonstrate that teacher certification does indeed matter. Here the most important voice has been Stanford professor, Linda Darling-Hammond. In her landmark 2002 study, she and her co-researchers posit that “teacher  effectiveness appears strongly related to the preparation they have received for teaching.”  (Darling-Hammond, L. et al. Does Teacher Preparation Matter? Evidence about teacher certification, Teach for America and teacher effectiveness)

As a proud possessor of teaching certificates from two states, I would like to think that certification does matter. I know other things matter, too: intellectual ability, content knowledge, experience. But if I am hiring a new teacher, as I did in my last position as Director of Human Resources in a suburban school district, I am going to hire the certified candidate over the non-certified candidate every time. Why? Certainly not because I was required to in these days of alternate routes to teaching, but because I knew that I was reasonably sure of some critical qualifications when I hired a certified teacher. I was assured that the candidate had some understanding of child development, had the ability to translate content knowledge into lessons that would help children learn, and had the knowledge and ability to adapt instruction to different learners' needs. I also had some confidence that the candidate understood how to manage a classroom.

Most importantly, however, I knew that the certified candidate was likely to still be teaching in the district 3, 5 even 10 years from the hire date. Candidates who commit themselves to a teacher certification program have committed themselves to the profession. With experience and professional development, they will get better at what they do, and the district’s investment in them in recruiting, training and retention will be rewarded.

Are there outstanding teachers coming out of programs like Teach for America? Undoubtedly. Is every certified teacher coming out of a teacher training program destined to be an outstanding teacher? Of course not. But ultimately, our schools, our parents and our children are better off with a committed, well-prepared, professional educator in the classroom.

And Wendy Kopp is better off with a certified physician.

What is Good Teaching?

Google the question above and you will get thousands of hits. There is no shortage of opinion and no shortage of research into the topic. Most recently, the most comprehensive study of what makes for effective teaching was conducted by the Gates Foundation. Millions of dollars were spent to pin down the answer and the results were published in the Measures of Effective Teaching (MET). The Gates Foundation claims to have figured out what makes a good teacher (Washington Post, January 8, 2013). It should surprise no one that, even with all that time, energy and money, the MET got it wrong. They made the classic researcher mistake; they went in with a presupposition and then they proved what they wanted to prove.

            While the MET project has brought unprecedented vigor to teacher evaluation research, its results do not settle disagreements about what makes an effective teacher and offer little guidance about how to design real-world teacher evaluation systems. (Rothstein and Mathis retrieved from            http://nepc.colorado.edu/thinktank/review-MET-final-2013)

            Although we don’t question the utility of using evidence of student learning to inform teacher development we suggest that a better question would not assume that value- added scores are the only existing knowledge about effectiveness in teaching. Rather, a good question would build on existing research and investigate how to increase the amount and intensity of effective instruction. (Gabriel and Allington, Education Week, November 2012 | Volume 70 | Number 3)

            So, rather than having figured out what makes a good teacher, the Gates Foundation has learned very little in this project about effective teaching practices.  The project was an expensive flop.  Let’s not compound the error by adopting this expensive flop as the basis for centrally imposed, mechanistic teacher evaluation systems nationwide. (Greene, J. retrieved from             http://jaypgreene.com/2013/01/09/understanding-the-gates-foundations-measuring effective-teachers-project/)

So what is good teaching? As Jeffrey Mirel (2009) has said, “Teaching is an incredibly complex and difficult enterprise.” Establishing a universal set of criteria is extraordinarily difficult. Here is my list, open for debate, of course, but based on a reading of the research and 40 years of experience watching teachers teach.

·         Good teaching causes all children to learn

·         Good teaching helps all students to learn how to learn

·         Good teaching helps all students believe in themselves as learners

·         Good teaching is informed by deep content knowledge

·         Good teaching is informed by deep pedagogical knowledge

·         Good teaching is engaging

·         Good teaching is nurturing

·         Good teaching communicates a passion for learning

·         Good teaching communicates ideas clearly with relevant and memorable examples

·         Good teaching communicates high, but appropriate, expectations for learning

·         Good teaching happens in well-managed, orderly classrooms

·         Good teaching is well-planned

·         Good teaching provides on-going formative assessment of student learning

·         Good teaching provides occasional summative assessment of learning

·         Good teaching is made better through the  information gained from assessments

·         Good teaching is driven by skilled questioning

·         Good teaching is about caring for students as learners and as human beings

·         Good teaching is about attending the sporting events, concerts and activities of students

·         Good teaching is informed by good listening

·         Good teaching is about flexibility

·         Good teaching is about good humor

·         Good teaching is about sharing expertise with colleagues

·         Good teaching is about constantly improving teaching ability through reflection

·         Good teaching is about constantly improving teaching ability through professional development

·         Good teaching is about constantly looking for ways to improve

·         Good teaching is about including parents in the educational lives of their children

·         Good teaching requires training and experience

For anyone to think that this complex task can be reduced to a number that measures a person’s “value” as a teacher is absurd in the extreme.  I would like to see a measure of the “value added” of a caring teacher who attends her students sporting events, or the teacher who spends all weekend designing engaging lessons, or the teacher who provides a kind word to a child having a difficult day. These things are the “stuff” of teaching and they cannot be measured simplistically.

What do you think? I would love to hear what you would add to the list above.

In my next post, I will outline my thoughts on a teacher "valuation" approach that aims not only at assessing practice, but improving it. Yes teaching does matter and good teaching matters a great deal. Assessing it should be in the hands of people who know something about it.

Text Complexity and the Common Core: A Close Reading, Part 2

Last week in my post, The Common Core and Text Complexity: A Close Reading, Part 1, I discussed the problematic aspects of the adjustment of the Lexile scores that was perpetrated to match the Core Content State Standards (CCSS) concept of college and career readiness. Today, I would like to look closely at how the CCSS define text complexity and how this could be empowering to teachers, if teachers take advantage of what the document is saying and seize the initiative.

Appendix A of the CCSS defines text complexity. It is very important that all teachers understand this definition because it is useful and empowering. Text Complexity is made up of three dimensions: quantitative, qualitative, and reader and task. Quantitative measures include the useful, but limited “reading level” measures like the Fry Readability Graph and Lexile scores. The CCSS has focused on Lexile scores and has recalculated them to reflect the push for greater complexity. Qualitative measures include such issues as considerateness of text (clear structure, coherence, audience appropriateness), knowledge demands, use of figurative language, vocabulary, etc. Reader and task measures concern themselves with the cognitive abilities, motivation and experience of students. For a clear and complete explanation of these three elements of text complexity see Fisher, Fry and Lapp (2012) Text Complexity: Raising Rigor in Reading, Newark, DE: IRA.

As you can see, the teacher plays a central role in the selection of the text to be used in instruction. The teacher balances the qualitative demands of the text with the characteristics of the students as readers and the reading task at hand to determine text complexity and appropriateness. It is a heady responsibility and also very good news. The CCSS are asking the teacher, the person best in the position to know, to determine what texts to use based not only on a simple calculation of level, but also based on what the teacher knows about the challenges embedded in the text and the special characteristics of the individual reader.

And yet I worry. I worry that simplistic readings of this call for greater text complexity will lead to disempowerment of teachers and inappropriate reading assignments for students. Will administrators, curriculum writers and text book publishers ignore the role of the teacher in choosing texts and ratchet up text complexity for all students no matter their abilities and needs? And what about the tests? Will the tests show the same degree of considerateness to readers as the CCSS seem to provide in Appendix A?

This why it is critical that those on the front lines, the teachers, are armed with the information below, which is directly stated in Appendix A. When you are pushed on text complexity, push back with this:

          1)  Students need opportunities to stretch their reading abilities but also to experience the satisfaction and pleasure of easy, fluent reading within them, both of which the Standards allow for. (CCSS Appendix A, page 9) (Apparently the standards also allow for prepositions at the end of a sentence!)

           2) Students’ ability to read complex text does not always develop in a linear fashion.(CCSS Appendix A, page 9)

          3)  Teachers who have had success using particular texts that are easier than those required for a given grade band should feel free to continue to use them so long     as the general movement during a given school year is toward texts of higher levels of complexity. Students reading well above and well below grade-band level need additional support. (CCSS Appendix A, page 9)

As I read these statements, I see a clear call for teacher judgment in selecting texts for students. I also see a clear recognition that harder texts are not meant to be a steady diet for the reader. I suspect that many of the creators of the CCSS read many things that are well below their reading level. Children should have the same right.

Why is this important? For one reason, I believe that many educational leaders will hear the call for more complex texts and will try to force teachers to use texts that are simply harder. Remember “rigor” is not in the difficulty of the text, but in the vigor of the instruction. Texts that are too difficult for a particular reader are not rigorous; they are just hard (See my post on rigor here). I also believe that publishing companies, under the guise of the publishers guidelines provided them by the authors of the CCSS for ELA, will soon be on the market with anthologies purported to “meet the standards” that will not meet the needs of many students.

It is the classroom teacher who will be the last line of defense for the students and for appropriate reading instruction. Go into battle with a copy of CCSS Appendix A, with the parts discussed above highlighted, so that you can inform the uninformed.

Text Complexity and the Common Core: A Close Reading, Part 1

Appendix A of the CCSS is intended to explain the concept of text complexity. Here is the first sentence.

            One of the key requirements of the Common Core State Standards
             for Reading is that all students must be able to comprehend texts
            of steadily increasing complexity as they progress through school.

Now doesn't that statement just make you want to say, “Duh!” When has that not been a goal for all students? I personally have never heard a fifth grade teacher say, “I want my kids to be able to read like third graders by the end of the year.” We all want our students to be able to read increasingly complex text.

Appendix A goes on to argue for stepping up the complexity of texts that students are reading because current high school graduates are not college and career ready to read texts that they are required to read in college or the workplace. The problem the authors sight is that “K–12 reading texts have actually trended downward in difficulty in the last half century (CCSS, Appendix A, pg 2).” At the same time text complexity has remained level or increased on the college and workplace level.

In order to address this issue, the authors of the CCSS in ELA (Coleman and Pimentel) have, in conjunction with the company that introduced the Lexile measurement, MetaMetrics, realigned the Lexile scale stair step fashion in increments moving down from what they have determined is the entry Lexile level for college freshmen (Lexile 1335).

A further problem, according to the authors, is that students are provided  “considerable scaffolding—assistance from teachers, class discussions, and the texts themselves (in such forms as summaries, glossaries, and other text features)—with reading (CCSS, Appendix A, pg 3).” In college classrooms, they assert,  much more independence is required in more complex texts.

Let’s take a closer look at these assertions. When it comes to the difficulty of texts being dumbed downward, while true for high school text books, it is simply not true for K-3 reading materials, which have tended to get harder as greater expectations have been placed on early literacy (Hiebert, 2012). There is plenty of evidence to suggest that exiting third grade students reading at a Lexile level of 540L to 580L are successful in future grades. There is no evidence that the new level posited by the standards, 790L by the end of third grade, will lead to college and career success (Hiebert, 2012). This is an arbitrary number not supported by the research.

Hiebert’s analysis of the CCSS recommended Lexile levels in primary reading calls into question the entire scheme to up the Lexile levels across the board. If the 790L is unsupported and inadvisable as a benchmark for third grade, why should we believe that 980L is appropriate for 5^th grade or 1155 for eighth grade? Where is the research supporting these designations? If these designations are used to design tests, how valid will the findings be?

The authors of the CCSS are also concerned with the considerable scaffolding students are provided with K-12, because this kind of scaffolding is not available on the college level. It is true, of course, that we want our students to become more and more independent in reading as they move through school. It is also true that as students are asked to read more and more challenging text, they need and deserve the scaffolding that skilled teachers provide. I wonder why the authors did not ask college professors why they do not provide appropriate scaffolding for their students when they give them difficult readings? Is the job of the K-12 teacher to compensate for the lack of appropriate instruction on the college level?

Based on this analysis, I have the following recommendations to make in the face of the CCSS on text complexity.

            1. Ask the authors of the CCSS to provide research that supports the changed Lexile scores at each level. The research must demonstrate that these are indeed the appropriate levels for students to achieve college and career readiness down the road. Until that research is provided, make no decisions             based on tests designed with these new standards as the model.

            2. For K-3 teachers and administrators, continue the focus on developing fluent, comprehending readers in the 540L-580L Lexile range by the end of grade 3. This range is supported by research as appropriate for future reading success.

            3. Continue to provide appropriate scaffolding for students as they read challenging text and continue to provide easier texts where students can be successful independently.

Despite the views expressed here, the news is not all bleak from Appendix A of the CCSS. In Part 2 of this post, coming soon, I will look at how text complexity is defined and how this definition should empower teachers, if only teachers are allowed to use their knowledge of pedagogy, texts and children to apply what is recommended.

What Constitutes Rigorous Reading?

At the gym yesterday, I climbed resolutely onto the treadmill and set the speed for 3.2 MPH. Next to me on the right a young woman was jogging on her treadmill at a speed at least twice mine. On my left an older gentleman with some physical limitations was walking at a considerably slower pace than mine, but he was clearly working hard to keep moving. We all smiled and nodded at each other in silent acknowledgement that we were each getting a rigorous workout. The rigor was determined by our relative physical conditions (in my case 66 years-old with two recently replaced knees and seriously under tall for my weight), our ages and our goals for the exercise. Three treadmills, three different workouts, three definitions of rigor.

The term rigor is splashed all over the Common Core State Standards. I have a visceral reaction against the term because it seems to suggest that instruction over the past 40 years or so lacked rigor – a suggestion that as a lifelong reading teacher I find offensive. For a wonderful take on why the word rigor is the wrong word in this context check out Joanne Yatvin’s essay here.  My greatest fear is that teachers and administrators will mistake rigor to mean that kids should be reading harder texts. My fear is intensified when I see sample reading lessons in CCSS approved websites like achievethecore.org, that ask children to read texts that are well above their likely reading level.

Just as the rigor of a workout does not reside in the treadmill, the rigor of reading does not reside in the text. In their important book, Notice and Note: Strategies for Close Reading (2013), Beers and Probst say it best: “rigor is not an attribute of text, but a characteristic of the behavior with that text (p.20, emphasis mine).”  As Goldilocks discovered about furniture, texts can be too soft, too hard or “just right.” A text that is too difficult for a child to read it is not rigorous, it is just hard. If I had to run on the treadmill like the young woman next to me, I would soon give up, because the workout is too hard. Likewise when children are faced with text that is too difficult, they will disengage.

And that brings me to my next point.  Any definition of rigor in reading must begin with engagement. As Beers and Probst (2013) again point out, “The essence of rigor is engagement and commitment (pg. 23).”  Without engagement, there is no commitment; without commitment, there is no rigor.

So, to insure rigor, we must ensure engagement and commitment. To ensure engagement and commitment we must be sure that students encounter texts that are both accessible and interesting.

This very often will mean different texts for different students, but it could also mean the same text for a group of students or even the whole class. The key will be the kind of scaffolding provided by the teacher. If a text is particularly challenging, the teacher might choose to read the text aloud. Many rich, I daresay rigorous, discussions can come from a group of engaged students guided to deeper comprehension through a teacher led read aloud. Sometimes the scaffolding will involve a richer pre-reading activity that prepares the students for some of the bumps they may encounter on the road to understanding the text. Sometimes the scaffolding will include text dependent questions that guide the students to greater understanding. Sometimes the scaffolding will be well constructed small group discussions that help students help each other learn.

I think it is useful for the literacy teacher to think of the CCSS call for rigor as a call for deep comprehension of text. Deep comprehension calls for students to be able to answer three basic questions:

            What does the author say in the text? (literal understanding of text)
            How does the author communicate that message? (rhetorical devices, figurative language)
            Why does this text matter? (thematic relevance, both personal and universal)

Armed with these three questions, the teacher can guide the students to deep comprehension of text and a developmentally appropriate rigorous literacy workout.

So under the CCSS it is important to remember that differentiation still matters, having students read text at appropriate levels still matters and having students have many different encounters with text – small group, independent and large group - still matters.

In a future post, I will explore the standard on text complexity and what that should mean for teachers.

A Modest Proposal: How About Real Estate Vouchers?

Education reform types like to say that no child’s educational opportunity should be determined by zip code. Who could not agree with that? That is why I am surprised that the reformy solutions to so-called “failing schools” do nothing to change a child’s zip code. Maybe that is why voucher programs and charter schools have not been successful. You can bend the rules all you want to try to make charter schools successful, but the evidence shows that charter schools in general do no better than the public schools in educating children and some do much worse. You see, the zip code for the children doesn't change.

Vouchers haven’t worked either. I am not sure why we are surprised. Giving a poor family 2 – 5 thousand dollars in a voucher is not going to allow them to find the extra 5K they need to send the child to parochial school, let alone the extra 20 or 30K they would need to send a child to a private school. Vouchers probably would help middle class families defray the cost of sending their children  to a school of their choice, say one with fewer children of color or one that teaches creationism. Perhaps that is why they are so popular among some politicians. But for poor children, the zip code remains the same.

So I would like to put forward a modest proposal for educational reform. Provide poor families in urban areas where the schools are struggling with real estate vouchers. Real estate vouchers would allow these families to move to a new zip code, a zip code with a high performing public school district.

This is really quite simple actually, because despite what the reform types would like us to believe, there is no shortage of very high performing school districts within a fifteen minute drive of most urban areas in the country. Just for example let us take the capital city of that reformy governor, Chris Christie. Trenton, New Jersey’s school district has suffered from years of financial neglect and mismanagement and of course the flight of the monied class to the suburbs. It is a district with many problems, but only a few miles outside Trenton’s borders are at least 6 high performing districts. Districts where the vast majority of the students graduate from high school,  excel at the standardized tests, get into the best colleges and have all the opportunities that it is this country’s contract with our children to provide.

So what we do for parents who would like their children to attend one of these glorious public institutions is provide them with a voucher that allows them to move into these townships with excellent schools. Fortunately, in many of these areas there are McMansions standing empty due to foreclosures in the last few years, so lots of housing is available, and I am sure that the banks and financial institutions would be happy to work with the education reformers to make it possible for these folks to move to these areas. After all the financial sector was responsible for much of the downturn in the economy, so they are surely ready to do something for society at this point.

Let me be clear, these real estate vouchers would be private vouchers. If we took the money from the public school coffers they could never afford to continue providing the excellent education they are already providing. The private sector could use all the monies in their war chests that they currently use for failed experiments like charters and vouchers to underwrite the program. I am sure Teach for America could pitch in a few hundred million from their rich endowment. There is no telling what the Broad and Gates Foundations could contribute. Why just the money that could be redirected from state and national lobbying campaigns could surely provide real estate vouchers for thousands of children.

Of course there may be a downside here for the reformers. If enough inner city folks take advantage of the real estate vouchers, there may be a shortage of housing in the suburbs. The solution though is clear. With the inner city emptying out, the wealthy could move in and gentrify the urban areas. With this influx of the monied class into the city, I bet after a decade or two even the public schools in urban areas would improve; new, clean and safe buildings would be built; the best teachers would be found and children would be receiving a first class education despite the zip code.

The Blue Guitar: Towards a Reader Response Approach to Close Reading

In any reading for meaning activity the text matters, but so does the experience, feelings, thoughts and imagination of the reader.

"They said, 'You have a blue guitar,
You do not play things as they are.'
The man replied, 'Things as they are
Are changed upon the blue guitar.'"

                                    Wallace Stevens

In a blog entry two months ago, I defended reader response theory from what I saw as an attack from proponents of the Core Content State Standards (CCSS). In that entry I said in part, “Teachers use reader response to get students engaged in the reading so that deeper discussion of the text has a basis in student connections to the text (Walsh, 2013).” This month I have been reading a very important new book that I highly recommend to all, Notice and Note: Strategies for Close Reading, by Kylene Beers and Robert Probst. The first thing I noticed about the book is that it is dedicated to Louise Rosenblatt, the great literary theorist who is the creator of reader response theory.

Beers and Probst take on close reading is very different from that posited in the CCSS. They argue that a narrow focus on the “four corners of the page” as the CCSS suggest, ignores what we know about meaning making. “Meaning is created not purely and simply from the words on the page, but from the transaction with those words that takes place in the reader’s mind (Beers and Probst, p.34).” Close reading, they assert, means that we should bring the reader and the text close together. The reader matters and the text matters. As Stevens says in the poem above, we all play upon our own “blue guitar” and the creation of meaning cannot be separated from who we are.

Further, Beers and Probst are concerned that the text-dependent questions that are the cornerstone of the CCSS approach to close reading will not foster student engagement in reading. Text-dependent questions are teacher created questions. The teacher becomes the repository of knowledge and the keeper of the answers (whether from her own study or from the teacher’s guide). Students will see that reading is an exercise in guessing what is in the teacher’s head, rather than an act of grappling with text to create meaning. This is a recipe for disengagement.

In any reading for meaning activity the text matters, but so does the experience, feelings, thoughts and imagination of the reader. Each reader brings a personal “blue guitar” to the printed page. Skillful teachers use that blue guitar to foster genuine engagement and deeper understanding of text. Beers and Probst advocate a kind of close reading that honors what we have learned over the past 70 years about readers and reading.