Teacher Evaluation Begins with Valuing Teachers

This weekend I will be in Chicago for the 2^nd annual Network for Public Education Conference. I am honored to be among the speakers at the conference where I will be part of a panel discussion on teacher evaluation with teacher and Education Week blogger Nancy Flanagan and the legendary school leader Deb Meier.

Here is what I will plan to say.

Much of the rhetoric around education reform is built upon a false narrative of “bad teachers” who can’t be fired due to tenure and who are causing our education system to go to hell in a handbasket. Governor Andrew Cuomo is so convinced this is the case that he is doubling down on the wholly discredited value added measures (VAMs) approach to evaluating teachers based on student standardized test scores and on “outside evaluators” who will somehow catch all those “bad teachers” that building principles are apparently protecting.

Cuomo and the other reformers have all this totally backwards, of course. A teacher evaluation system is not primarily a system for weeding out the bad, but a system for fostering the growth of the vast majority who are good and willing to get better. First and foremost an evaluation scheme must value the object of the evaluation – the teacher.

A teacher, any teacher, represents an investment by a school district. That investment involves the cost of searching for and interviewing candidates, providing initial training for the neophyte teacher and providing ongoing professional development for that employee. But that value is more than just a financial value, there is also the value invested in that new teacher as a new member of the profession and as the caretaker of children. It is in everyone’s interest that the new teacher succeed.

Once we see this teacher as a person and employee of value we take a wholly different approach to evaluation. Evaluation becomes a means for building the teacher’s value as a professional through a system that is inclusive, supportive and multi-faceted. It has often been said that teaching is one part science and one part art. I would add to that one part magic, the magic that I have often seen happen in classrooms when teachers and children make discoveries together. If teaching is indeed this very complex process, then surely, the evaluation of teaching is every bit as complex.

The qualities of good teaching cannot be captured by a VAM number. While rubrics are a little better than VAMs, they also fail to capture the complexity. In order to truly evaluate the complexity of teaching, we need an evaluation plan that is just as complex. What we need is nuance, not numbers.

I like to think of the task of the teacher evaluator as one of informed impressionism. Just as Monet created his impressionist masterpieces through the accumulative effect of thousands of brush strokes, so too must the teacher evaluator view the teacher through multiple lenses to do justice to the science, art and magic taking place in the classroom.

This informed impressionism means that the evaluator has developed a trusting relationship with the teacher through informal conversations with the teacher and through multiple visits to the classroom that have resulted in useful feedback to the teacher. Evaluation that moves teaching forward depends on trust, first and foremost. What kind of trust can be built from a VAM score?

Informed impressionism means many visits to the classroom, some short and informal, some long and formal. It requires looking at all the domains of instruction including planning, instruction, fostering a learning environment, meeting professional responsibilities, professional development and student learning indicators.

Those student learning indicators might even include some standardized test scores, as long as they can be used to improve instruction, but they would also include student work samples, and teacher and school designed assessments. Like teaching, student learning is complex and it takes many and varied measures to get a clear picture of student learning.

Obviously, this kind of evaluation takes time and money. It requires that administrators have the resources to be instructional leaders and not just building managers. It also means that they have the training required to be, not only skilled observers of instruction, but skilled communicators who can help their teachers develop and improve practice.

For a truly effective model of teacher evaluation, one that will lead to improved instruction, teachers and school leaders must recognize that they are in the game together and they must be empowered to jointly customize, adapt and implement an evaluation design that works best for their school and for their students.

And what about those “bad teachers”? A truly thorough evaluation system may help some that start out weak to improve, but for those who cannot improve, a thorough, collaborative evaluation system will expose the weaknesses much more clearly than any number from an invalid statistical formula or score on a rubric ever could.

How Do You Spell Success (Academy)?

Success Academy, the New York City charter school chain run by the education reform darling Eva Moskowitz, has been a hot topic in the news lately, with two lengthy articles in the New York Times, here and here that highlighted Success Academy’s success in raising test scores, but which also raised questions about the methods used by the schools to achieve this success. The articles spurred a predictable reaction from Moscowitz calling out the reporter for using sensational anecdotes to discredit the methods used in Success Academy schools to achieve those improved test scores. In reality, the articles came across to me and others, including Diane Ravitch as reasonably fair and balanced.

What is lacking in the articles is a perspective on what education should be and how Success Academy falls woefully short of that mark in the pursuit of the higher test scores. This single minded pursuit of test scores brings Moscowitz praise from politicians like New York Governor, Andrew Cuomo, and buckets of money from her hedge fund management  supporters.

How does Success Academy spell success?

·         S – Strict enforcement of a “no excuses” code of behavior

·         U – Underprepared and inexperienced teachers who can be bullied into long hours of work and who are malleable enough to accept a narrowed curriculum and prescriptive discipline policy

·         C - Curriculum that focuses on test preparation to the exclusion of deeper understanding, the arts, and physical education

·         C - Coercive discipline built on shaming students into compliance

·         E – Exclusion of students with learning differences, discipline problems, and English language  learners through repeated suspensions or requiring parents to come to school with the child every day.

·         S – Stressful, competitive, joyless learning environment

·         S – Systematic courting of support of politicians, including closing schools so parents and students can go to Albany to lobby legislators into giving Success Academy more money.

It is clear from even a cursory look at the Success Academy test focused curriculum and draconian discipline policies that this type of “education” would be totally unacceptable to parents sending their children to public school in the suburbs. Is it acceptable to use these methods with inner city (mostly minority) children?

There is no question that children raised in poverty present unique and often intractable challenges to successful learning, but do we really want to say that the only way to make sure these kids do well in school is to submit them to a Dickension model of schooling?

It is a model of schooling deeply imbued with a prejudice against what Michael Harrington called the “Other America.” That is the poor America that we wish to see swept under the rug and where now 25% of America’s children live. Easier to blame the poor for their poverty and to treat their children as inferior beings meant to be driven to compliance through a school model designed by those who consider them inferior beings, than to actually grapple with the issue of poverty.

Easier to view poor children as having deficits that must be remediated, rather than as vital, complex human beings with a variety of strengths and weaknesses, who, like all children, are seeking to find their place in the world.

Success Academy achieves its very narrow successes through what can only be called the abuse of children.

Tonight Governor Cuomo will speak at a $1,250 dollar a seat dinner to raise money for Eva Moskowitz’ Success Academy. Enough said.

Beware the Roadbuilders: Literature as Resistance, by P. L Thomas: A Review

"Fiction offers avenues to Truths, often hard Truths, that otherwise 

remain closed or less often traveled." P. L. Thomas

I have often told my students that informational literature attempts to present what is factually true, but fiction attempts to shine a light on universal truth. In Beware the Roadbuilders: Literature as Resistance, P. L. Thomas invites us to look over his shoulder as he reads personally, feelingly and critically into literature, both canonical and contemporary, in an effort to illuminate the truth beneath issues of equity, social justice and public education. Thomas, a former high school English teacher and current associate professor of education at Furman University in South Carolina, also blogs at the becoming radical. If you are not familiar with his work on the blog I recommend you join me as a regular reader.

The "roadbuilders" of Thomas' title are the education reformers, those plutocrats, pundits and politicians who have seized on urban education as the "civil rights issue of our time" and who, like the colonizing Europeans in Africa a century ago, seek to impose their own definitions of success and progress on the people and institutions they seek to reform. Thomas points to the current rage for "no excuses" charter schools as a prime example of the "roadbuilder" model. In "no excuses" schools students are subjected to a military like structure, rigid classroom rules and demeaning discipline practices in the name of getting "college and career ready." For these reformers, Thomas says,"education is a tool of the elite to train the masses to conform to a world that maintains the current status quo."

But I don't want to give the impression that Beware the Roadbuilders is just another anti-education reform polemic, because it is much richer and much more interesting than that. This is a book for people who love books, who love reading and who love finding connections in literature that help us better understand our world. The book took me back to a reconsideration of some of my favorite authors from the past like James Baldwin, Kurt Vonnegut, Ray Bradbury, Barbara Kingsolver, Isaac Asimov and Adrienne Rich, but also exposed me to authors I had not previously read like Geoffrey Eugenides and George Saunders.

Thomas also includes examples of literature that I have studiously avoided.  It is a credit to Thomas' skills as a writer and an enthusiastic reader that he has piqued my interest in previously shunned (by me) works like zombie literature and super-hero fiction. Reading this book is like sitting in on a conversation with your very well read good friend. That is, if your friend were also totally committed to social justice.

The chapter "On Jeffrey Eugenides Middlesex", is illustrative of Thomas' method. While the novel is best known for the indeterminate gender of the central character, Thomas sees a lesson to be taken from Eugenides' description of Detroit:

Historical fact : people stopped being human in 1913. That was the year Henry Ford put his cars on rollers and made his workers adopt the speed of the assembly line. . . . Part of the new production method’s genius was its division of labor into unskilled tasks. That way you could hire anyone. And fire anyone. (Eugenides, 2003, p. 95)

From Eugenides' discussion of the dehumanizing aspects of the assembly line, the educational assembly line that Thomas sees is one driven by a narrow focus on standardized test scores and calls for teacher accountability driven by those test scores. By destroying teacher autonomy and denigrating professional judgment, teachers become like auto workers on the assembly line: easy to hire and easy to fire. As Thomas puts it, "accountability must be preceded by autonomy; otherwise, accountability is tyranny."

I found a chapter on the work of Maxine Greene to be particularly resonant with the teacher in me. Greene, the great education philosopher and advocate for the centrality of the arts in education, died last year. Thomas' chapter is a moving tribute to her vision of what education really is all about and how an obsession with the seemingly certain (as represented by tests and data) is the enemy of learning, which tends to be ambiguous, unexpected and messy.

Speaking of the ambiguous, unexpected and messy, Thomas introduced me to the work of George Saunders, particularly the delightfully amusing and delightfully insightful, The Very Persistent Gappers of Frip. Here Thomas offers us a virtuoso critical reading of a deceptively simple story. The story turns out to be central to a concept that Thomas develops throughout the book, that of "scarcity and slack." In Thomas' reading the book becomes a witty illustration of what really underlies educational achievement gaps and what reformers call "failing schools." The poor live in a constant state of scarcity of resources (time, money, food, ease) while the wealthy live with an enormous amount of slack, a slack that they have not so much earned as they have inherited because so many live without it. Saunders story shows how much both good and bad fortune are often matters of luck and how the haves can find all kinds of ways to justify not sharing with the have-nots.

Near the end of the book, Thomas comes to a concern that I know is close to his heart because I am a regular reader of his blog. Quoting liberally from Ralph Ellison, author of The Invisible Man, Thomas addresses one of the most important insights regarding poor and minority children and learning. Here is what Ellison had to say about African American students and language at a teacher conference in 1963:

Some of us look at the Negro community in the South and say that these kids have no capacity to manipulate language. Well, these are not the Negroes I know. Because I know that the wordplay of Negro kids in the South would make the experimental poets, the modern poets, green with envy. I don’t mean that these kids possess broad dictionary knowledge, but within the bounds of their familiar environment and within the bounds of their rich oral culture, they possess a great virtuosity with the music and poetry of words.

Thomas argues that we are stuck with a deficit view of  language and a deficit view of children growing up in poverty. This deficit view causes teachers, administrators and policy makers to ignore the strengths that students bring to school in the forms of the very poetic wordplay that Ellison describes above. Thomas frames this all as a part of his argument that reformers will fail if the focus of their pursuit is to make children of poverty more like us. What we must do is embrace the difference, recognize it is not a deficit, and build on students' very real strengths. This approach has the potential to move us forward. Anything less is paternalism at best, racism at worst, and doomed to fail in any case.

In Beware the Roadbuilders, P. L. Thomas leads us on one reader's journey toward critical understanding. It is a journey informed by personal experience and shaped through the reading of great literature. I think of Louise Rosenblatt's phrase, "the lived through experience of the text." Thomas offers us his lived through experience to help open our eyes to the quest for equity that must be at the center of our teaching lives.

If you are a teacher, if you love books, if you care about children and public education and if you want to continue to learn and grow personally and professionally, read this book.

Thomas, P. L. (2015) Beware the Roadbuilders: Literature as Resistance. NY: Garn Press.

A final note: Garn Press, the publisher of this book, is the new imprint from Denny Taylor, professor of literacy studies at Hofstra University and author of  hugely influential books and articles on family literacy. Garn Press has published several books related to the education reform movement including Taylor’s own Nineteen Clues: Great Transformations Can Be Achieved through Collective Action and Anthony Cody’s The Educator and the Oligarch. You can check out their other publications here.

Decode This: Meaning Helps Kids Break the Code

Last night I watched the Academy Award winning movie The Imitation Game, which recounts the story of how a group of British mathematicians and cryptographers, led by the enigmatic genius Alan Turing, broke the Nazi “Enigma” code for transmitting military messages and by doing so shortened World War II by two years saving millions of lives.

The story is a compelling one, not only as a sort of detective story, but also as a very human story of perseverance, passion, heroism and broken lives. As a literacy specialist, though, one message from the film jumped out in bas relief. The elusive code was broken only when the codebreakers realized that the messages followed a discernible pattern. Once the pattern was discovered, in this case the Nazi habit of sending a 6 AM weather report each day and ending each message with “Heil Hitler”, the rudimentary computer that Turing designed was able to generalize to a complete translation of the code. This is essentially what our 5 and 6 year old children do every day – generalize from a few known meaningful elements to break the alphabetic code and come to be fluent readers.

I bolded the word “meaningful” above, because I wish to emphasize that it is meaningful encounters with print that allows children to learn to decode. It is not enough to teach children to match letters to sounds in abstract “phonics” lessons. In order to activate the skilled “code breaking” abilities that all children have, we must present the code in the context of meaningful language. Children learn to speak by encountering oral language in real world contexts, so to will they learn to decode when they are presented with meaningful reading contexts.

Let me be clear about this. I am not saying that children don’t need instruction in phonics. I am saying that the best phonics instruction is embedded in meaningful language interactions, because these meaningful language interactions allow students to generalize the rules of how language works. The influential literacy researcher, blogger and emeritus professor Tim Shanahan puts it this way:

            Learning to read is a multidimensional pursuit. Lots of things have to happen simultaneously. That’s why in my scheme teachers are always teaching words (decoding and meaning), fluency, comprehension, and writing—not one after the other but simultaneously. Kids who are learning to decode should also be learning the cadences of text and how to think about what they read. All at the same time.

Regular readers of this blog know that Shanahan and I don’t always agree, but we are in agreement here. Of course, doing all this instruction “at the same time” is a daunting task for the teacher. What does this instruction look like? Here are a few ideas.

The Name Chart – A Name Chart is simply a chart listing the first names of every child in the class in alphabetical order that is hung in the classroom where every child can see it. Since children are highly motivated to learn the names of their classmates, the name chart becomes a good place for children to make connections about beginning consonant sounds in words. During a shared reading or writing experience, teachers can refer children to the name chart to help students decode a word. For example, if the students encounter the word “shout” in their reading, the teacher can help them decode the word by pointing to the name chart to show that “shout” starts the same as their classmate’s name “Shannon.”

Interactive Writing – Interactive writing or shared pen is a language activity that involves the teacher and children in constructing meaningful messages, while also working on sound symbol relationships. At a “Morning Meeting” or following a class read aloud the teacher leads the children in a writing activity on chart paper for all to see. The teacher does the bulk of the writing, but shares the pen with students who get to practice their growing phonics knowledge by matching the sounds of the words they wish to write with the letters needed to write it. For more on interactive writing see Reading Rockets here.

Shared Reading – In shared reading teachers use a “big book” or poem written on chart paper to lead the children in reading. Children join in the reading with the teacher’s support and the structure allows the teacher to provide instruction in decoding words in a real language context. Reading Rockets has a good description of Shared Reading here.

Cut Up Sentences – Children can practice their growing phonics understanding and sight words through cut up sentences. With teacher assistance, students generate a sentence based on a story they have read or an experience they have had. The teacher (or students) writes the sentence on a sentence strip and reads it with the student. The teacher then cuts up the sentence into separate words and the students are challenged to put it back together. Again a meaningful context forms the basis of a decoding lesson.

Prompting at Point of Difficulty – I have written in an earlier post about the limits of “sounding it out” as a strategy when students encounter difficulty while reading a word in a story. Since decoding depends not just on phonics, but also on the structure of language and the meaning of the story, skilled teachers use prompts like “Does that sound right?” Does that make sense?” and “Does that look right?” to help students coordinate all the cues available to them as they try to decode a novel word.

Word Families – Many words are best understood not as a series of individual letters to be “sounded out”, but as groupings of letters to be thought of as a whole. Research has shown that students can discern these patterns and use them for more efficient decoding. Word families like –ight words are best taught as families with an onset and rime. The word “flight” is made up of the onset “fl” and the rime “ight.” Teaching students to look for these patterns and use words that they already know to generalize to words with like patterns makes decoding more efficient and reading more fluent.

Think Aloud – Often just talking about words and the strategies that skilled readers use to decode can be helpful to students. I like to use think alouds when talking about particularly knotty problems in decoding such as silent letters. Students who over-rely on “sounding it out” may encounter difficulty with a word like “sign.” I like to “think aloud” with the students here. Suppose the students encounter the sentence, “Mom put her finger to her mouth and gave me the sign to be quiet.” In this context I would talk about how the word “sign” comes from the word “signal” and that in English spelling we often keep letters that are silent to help us understand the meaning. So while the letter “g” in “sign” is silent, it is still helpful because it reminds us that this word means something like “signal.” Sharing knowledge and insights about words can help children not only comprehend, but also decode.

Like the cryptographers in The Imitation Game, children have a problem to solve when they encounter new and novel words. The best way to help them solve the problem is to provide instruction that is both targeted and in a meaningful context.

Do Readers Shift from Learning to Read to Reading to Learn?

My brief and mostly relaxing mini-vacation in Florida was interrupted last Monday when the hotel slid a complimentary copy of USA Today under my door. Contained therein was an article by the Thomas Fordham Foundation’s Robert Pondiscio entitled, Shifting from Learning to Read to Reading to Learn.”

As education reform cheerleaders go, Pondiscio is far from the worst. He recognizes some of the educational realities that others ignore, including that high-stakes tests have a greater impact on what gets taught than do standards. He also recognizes that any standardized test of reading comprehension is not so much a reading test as a test of background knowledge. He says

But a reading comprehension test is a de facto test of background knowledge and vocabulary acquired in school and out. It doesn’t take very many missing bits of background knowledge and vocabulary to rob a reading passage of meaning.

Pondiscio even speculates that we should do away with high stakes reading tests beyond grade three. I can certainly agree with him there, although I would do away with them altogether.

When it comes to a discussion of literacy instruction, however, Pondiscio and I part company. In the USA today article Pondiscio says that he wants to clear up some “common misconceptions about reading.” He then perpetuates some common misconceptions about reading.

Pondiscio sees reading as two distinct processes – decoding – which he defines as the skill of matching sounds to letters and learning to blend them, and reading comprehension, which is making sense of the text and which he sees as “intimately entwined with background knowledge and vocabulary.”

Pondiscio sets up a false dichotomy. From the very earliest stages of reading children lean on their background knowledge and vocabulary, not only to make sense of text, but to decode. I explained the limits of “sounding it out” as a decoding strategy in a previous post. Beginning readers coordinate their phonics knowledge with their oral language knowledge and their efforts to make sense of what they are reading to decode. Here is the example I used in the previous post:

            How would you complete this sentence?

            The boy studied for the big test all ___________.

            Chances are you have generated words like the following: day, night, evening, afternoon, morning, week.

            Notice that all the words generated were nouns. All native and proficient speakers of English know that a noun will come in this place in the sentence because this is Standard English syntax. Only a noun will "sound right."

            Notice also that all the words you generated to end this sentence are nouns of time. Because we expect English to "make sense" we use our semantic understanding of the language to predict a meaningful word for the context.

            Now suppose that I showed the sentence this way:

            The boy studied for the big test all n__________.

            Immediately you are likely to say "night", because it looks right, sounds right and makes sense. Notice also that if you tried "sounding out" this word, you would run into trouble because the "gh" is silent. 

From this more complete view of decoding, we see the reader as a problem solver drawing on many pieces of information, including comprehension of the text up to this point, to decode. So, even in learning to decode, children who have rich and broad background knowledge and who are native speakers of English have an advantage that is not unlike the advantage that they would have in a test of comprehension.

When it comes to what he considers the second part of this dichotomy, reading comprehension, Pondiscio argues that reading comprehension is not a skill.

To understand Pondiscio’s stance on reading comprehension, it is important to have some background knowledge on him. Before joining the Fordham Foundation, he worked as Director of Communications for the Core Knowledge Foundation. The Core Knowledge Foundation, of course, is the organization founded by E. D. Hirsch and dedicated to the proposition that what is missing from American education is lots of knowledge of “stuff.” The Core Knowledge Foundation is devoted to the idea that kids need to learn lots of “stuff” and this “stuff” is the essence of education.

So it is not surprising that Pondiscio’s view of reading comprehension is dominated by the idea that you need to know lots of stuff to read and comprehend well. He is not entirely wrong about this, although I suspect that we could all have some good arguments around what “stuff” we should all know and that in the age of the internet whether it is more important to acquire knowledge of stuff or knowledge about how to find and critically analyze all the “stuff” that is out there.

Where he is wrong is in asserting that reading comprehension is not a skill, because it most certainly is. Pondiscio is partly right when he asserts that reading comprehension is greatly impacted by background knowledge, something that was not acknowledged by the “chief architects” of the Common Core. But reading comprehension is also partly a skill and it is a skill that can and should be directly taught (See Fielding and Pearson here and Duke and Pearson here).

What are the skills of reading comprehension that we should be directly teaching? According to Duke and Pearson they include the following.

·         preview and prediction

·         think aloud (monitoring for understanding and clarifying)

·         visualization

·         text structure

·         summarization

·         questioning

·         determining vocabulary from context

All of our good direct instruction in reading comprehension strategies cannot take the place of lots of opportunities for children to read widely in a variety of texts. On this point Pondiscio and I agree. Reading widely is critical to building the background knowledge for further reading. I think this wide reading is likely to be more productive if we also help students do it more skillfully through informed instruction in the skills related to comprehending text.

It is more useful to think of reading not as a dichotomy divided into the “skill” of decoding and a content knowledge driven comprehension, but rather as a unified and active search for meaning practiced at various levels of proficiency by children who are developing both the skill and the will to read. Children don’t shift from learning to read to reading to learn as Pondiscio suggests; they actively read to make sense of what they read from the first time they pick up a book. This effort to make sense drives the development of decoding skills, comprehension strategies and content knowledge.

The Tyranny of the One Right Answer

My son was a bit of an outside of the box thinker; a type that has never been very welcome in the American public high school. So, we were resigned to the fact that he would often struggle in school, particularly in math, which he hated. Our concern came to a head, though, when it became apparent that the boy might not graduate from high school because he could not pass algebra. Dutifully, I sat down with him and asked what we could possibly do to make sure he passed this time. My son, never one to answer a direct question with a direct answer, responded, “You know what the problem with math is, Dad?”

“No, what is it?”

“It’s this obsession with the one right answer.”

I laughed in spite of myself. I, of course, explained that sometimes in life you need that one right answer. If you are building a bridge or balancing a check book or trying to locate a place on a map, you need that one right answer. But I also took some pride in the response. After all, I had become a social studies teacher, in part, because I enjoyed the give and take of a good discussion about issues that had many possible, and no absolutely correct, answers.

I am reminded of this story today, because I am reading about the impact of the country’s current obsession with standardized tests on creativity, innovation and divergent thinking. By far the most important book on this topic is Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Dragon? Why China has the Best (And Worst) Educational System in the World by Yong Zhao. Zhao was born and educated in China. He came to the United States to attend graduate school and is currently a professor at the University of Oregon. He says that China has achieved preeminence in the world in student performance on standardized tests, but has done so at the cost of creativity, originality and individualism.

Zhao believes the United States government's obsession with test scores and international comparisons like the Programme of International Student Assessment (PISA) that show the United States students lagging behind students in East Asian countries and Finland is misplaced. In an interview with the New York Times he says

[E]xcessive focus on test scores hinders a real education, which is more about helping each and every child grow rather than forcing them to achieve high test scores. In other words, PISA and other tests measure something very different from the quality of education...

What are the possible costs to a country like China that relies on a standardized test driven educational system focused on accountability and higher test scores?

[A] narrow education experience that is centrally dictated, uniformly programmed and constantly monitored by standardized tests is unlikely to value individual talents, respect students’ interest and passion, cultivate creativity or entrepreneurial thinking, or foster the development of non cognitive capacities. But it is the diversity of talents, passion-driven creativity and entrepreneurship, and social-emotional well-being of individuals that are needed for the future economy.

And what kind of education should we be focused on in the United States?

The education we need is actually quite simply “follow the child.” We need an education that enhances individual strengths, follows children’s passions and fosters their social-emotional development. We do not need an authoritarian education that aims to fix children’s deficits according to externally prescribed standards. 

The danger that the American educational system faces is palpable and real. By focusing on standardized test score comparisons with countries that do not match our culture or our children we risk destroying all that is good in this country's educational system. A world class educational system is one that focuses on the academic, social, emotional and physical development of every individual child. 

As I talk to teachers, parents and students in our schools today, I hear their concern. Many are aware that something is being lost. For teachers it is often the opportunity to follow students interests when an interesting question occurs. For parents it is concern over time devoted to test preparation that could be spent on art, music or physical education. For students it is the anxiety produced by having to take tests with ill defined consequences and heightened expectations. 

When students take a standardized test, they usually face a multiple choice question with four choices. Often several choices could be correct, but students know that only one answer will be considered correct. Standardized tests do not leave room for alternatives. They embody the tyranny of the one right answer.

Educational policy makers on the national and state level have bought into standardized tests as the one right answer. They are wrong and the tyranny of that one right answer may very well come to haunt us in the future when we begin to ask, "Where has American innovation and creativity gone?"

This is not a multiple choice question. We may find that American innovation and creative thought has gone the way of the dodo bird, driven to extinction by an environment that holds test scores to be the route to improved learning.

Last week, 70% of the students at Princeton High School in New Jersey opted out of taking the Common Core aligned PARCC standardized test. Apparently, they determined that after weighing all the variables, they were better off not taking it. Now that is in the grand tradition of American innovation, creativity and independence.

Standardized Tests: Truth and Consequences

What responsibility do standardized test advocates have to the tested?

In recent posts I have been addressing issues related to student testing on the PARCC, SBAC and DIBELS. My research for these posts has led me down many dark alleys and more than a few rabbit holes, but one piece of information I came across created a real "Eureka!" moment in my standardized test addled brain. The discovery, which was roaming fuzzily around in my mind for a long time, finally came into focus when I discovered the concept of consequential validity.

Most of you who are certified teachers probably remember something about test validity from that ed. psch. course you took as an undergraduate. Simply stated a standardized test is said to be valid (at least statistically) if it measures what it claims to measure. So, a test of reading comprehension would be required to demonstrate that it indeed measured reading comprehension and not something else, like say, the relative wealth of the people taking the test. But in 1989 a psychologist named Samuel Messick posited that tests had a higher calling to answer to than just a statistical validity. A test also needed to be valid in the way it was used and interpreted. Messick called this new take on testing consequential validity.

Consequential validity requires test makers and test givers and test interpreters to ask, "What are the risks if the tests are invalid or incorrectly interpreted?" and "Is the test worthwhile given the risks?"

The recent history of the test and punish movement in America would suggest that we are coming up very short in the consequential validity department. A recent report from Fair Test chronicles the failure of the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) law of 2002 to meet any of its stated goals. NCLB, of course, brought on yearly standardized testing in grades 3-8 with the promise of narrowing the achievement gap in America's schools. Fair Test found that NCLB has been notably unsuccessful in narrowing gaps and that in many cases (such as English Language Learners, students with disabilities) the gaps are wider than they were in 1998.

Clearly, the NCLB testing regime has failed to narrow achievement gaps, but that is not the worst news. Just what have been the consequences for children of this move to more standardized testing? According to Fair Test the consequences include widespread evidence of curriculum narrowing, extensive teaching to the test, pushing low-scorers out of school and widespread cheating scandals.

I could add a few more consequences to this list. Since these tests were used to label schools erroneously as "failing", the tests have undermined the morale of teaching staffs and demonized schools in urban areas struggling with myriad issues ranging from student poverty to lack of textbooks to crumbling infrastructure. Many elementary schools have done away with recess to cram in more test prep. New elementary schools were built without a playground, because the test trumped student active play. Less time was allotted for arts instruction, so that students could focus on tested subjects. Could future researchers point back to NCLB and find other consequences like increased obesity and a declining participation in the arts?

In 2009, the Obama administration doubled down on NCLB with their program entitled Race to the Top (RTTT). RTTT called for new tests tied to the Common Core State Standards and for using the scores from those tests, not only to rate schools and children, but also to evaluate teachers. What are the likely consequences of rating teachers based on these tests? According to the Education Policy Institute we can expect the following:

Tying teacher evaluation and sanctions to test score results can discourage teachers from wanting to work in schools with the neediest students, while the large, unpredictable variation in the results and their perceived unfairness can undermine teacher morale. Surveys have found that teacher attrition and demoralization have been associated with test-based accountability efforts, particularly in high-need schools.

So, one consequence of the new testing regime is likely to be to make it even harder for urban schools to recruit the best, brightest, most dedicated teachers. In New York where the new tests have already been instituted, State Department of Education officials predicted that as a consequence of the new test only 30% of children would be found proficient. Low and behold this prophesy came true, perhaps because those same officials were responsible for determining the "cut scores" after the test results were in. 

What were the consequences? Further humiliation of children, teachers and schools and a general outcry from concerned parents. The parental concern led federal Secretary of Education to declare that these "white suburban moms" were surprised to find their kids were not as smart as they thought. No officials seemed to consider that the tests were not as smart as they might be.

As the new tests spread across the country we can predict that students’ scores will fall. Testing advocates will cheer and say the new tougher standards have been validated and they will use the scores to push for more school choice, more charter schools, more teacher union bashing and more tests.

These are the consequences we can look forward to as the push for more standardized testing continues. These tests have already proven that they have no validity as a tool for narrowing achievement gaps or for improving the lives of the vast majority of the 25% of American children living in poverty. 

When we look at the consequences of standardized testing, low student and teacher moral, narrowed curriculum, cheating scandals, test prep parading as learning, it is also clear that this level of high stakes standardized testing in schools fails the test of consequential validity.

To return to Messick again I would ask, "Are these tests worth the risks?" The clear answer is absolutely not.

As Lily Tomlin's wise little girl character, Edith Ann would say, "And that's the truth!"

Dump DIBELS

DIBELS (Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills) is an early reading assessment measure that is widely used in schools.  According to their web site DIBELS

Are a set of procedures and measures for assessing the acquisition of early literacy skills from kindergarten through sixth grade. They are designed to be short (one minute) fluency measures used to regularly monitor the development of early literacy and early reading skills.

In practice DIBELS is a set of one-minute tests of a student’s ability to name letters, segment phonemes, identify initial sounds in words, read nonsense words, read fluently and retell. The creators of DIBELS argue that student ability to perform these tasks in strictly timed situations predicts their future reading success or struggles.

DIBELS came to be widely used because it was closely tied to the Reading First and NCLB initiatives of the last 15 years. DIBELS fit nicely into the Reading First push for “scientifically researched” practices. The creators of DIBELS, a group of researchers out of the University of Oregon, were able to generate lots of experimental data showing DIBELS was a reliable instrument. Many school districts were forced to adopt DIBELS assessments in order to qualify for government funding.

But from the start DIBELS has generated controversy. A special education commissioner for the U. S. Department of Education named Ed Kame ‘enui, resigned after a Congressional investigation found that he had “gained significant financial benefit” by promoting DIBELS from his government position. Two other Department of Education employees were also implicated in the investigation. Perhaps more importantly, many, many highly respected literacy researchers have found that the impact of DIBELS has moved instruction away from what we know works for children.

P. David Pearson, one of the leading literacy experts in the country and a man known to avoid hyperbole and for taking a centrist view on issues related to literacy instruction had this to say about DIBELS:

I have decided to join that group of scholars and teachers and parents who are convinced that DIBELS is the worst thing to happen to the teaching of reading since the development of flash cards (Goodman, K. et. al. (2007) The Truth About Dibels).

In the same volume, literacy researcher Sandra Wilde found that while the DIBELS claims “to strongly predict whether individual children are likely to fail to learn to read. It just doesn’t.”

Also in The Truth About DIBELS, University of Arizona professor emeritus and long-time reading theorist Kenneth Goodman posits that

DIBELS is based upon a flawed view of the nature of the reading process and, because of this fundamental flaw, provides all who use it with a misrepresentation of reading development. It digs too deeply into the infrastructure of reading skill and process and comes up with a lot of bits and pieces but not the orchestrated whole of reading as a skilled human process.

In a technical report out of the Literacy Achievement Research Center, Pressley, et. al (2005) found that DIBELS

mis-predicts reading performance on other assessments much of the time, and at best is a measure of who reads quickly without regard to whether the reader comprehends what is read.”

What is it that makes DIBELS the “worst thing to happen to reading instruction since flash cards?” As Pearson sees it, the use of DIBELS in the schools has an undue influence on the curriculum, driving reading instruction to a focus on the little bits of reading and away from a focus on the whole of literacy instruction. Students are held accountable to the indicators of reading progress rather than actual reading progress and teachers are forced to instruct in ways that violate well-documented theories of development and broader curricular goals. In other words, DIBELS becomes the driver of the curriculum and the curriculum is narrowed in unproductive ways as a result.

Ultimately, Pearson says, DIBELS fails the test of consequential validity. In other words, the widespread employment of DIBELS has had dire consequences on the actual teaching of reading. Teachers have been forced through this test to focus on a narrow definition of the “stuff” of learning to read, rather than on the broader context of what reading actually is – the ability to make sense of squiggles on a page made by an author.  The consequences of DIBELS makes it unworthy to use as an assessment tool.

If DIBELS has become a scourge in your school or school district, I suggest you gather up the research cited here and question those who are foisting this highly flawed, and ultimately counterproductive, assessment practice on your students and fellow teachers.

PARCC Math Test Readability

Two weeks ago I ventured into the world of PARCC testing with several posts on the readability of the reading comprehension passages of the new Common Core aligned PARCC tests, which are being administered right now in many states. You can find those posts here, here and here. Some readers expressed concern about the readability of the PARCC math exams and asked me to take a look at it.

Background: Readability on a math exam matters. While we might assume that a math exam assesses a students ability to perform various mathematical computations, all of the math questions on the PARCC required some literacy skills as well. A study by Abedi and Lord published in Applied Measurement in Education found that linguistic complexity of math word problems can have a significant impact on the test scores of inexperienced problem solvers, English Language Learners and students with disabilities. The question that must be asked is simply, "Does the PARCC measure computation skills or a combination of literacy skills and computation skills?" And we might further ask, "Will students with on grade level reading skills be disadvantaged by the reading required on the math exam?"

Method: I will not rehash all my reservations about readability measures here. You can look at the posts on the reading comprehension part of the PARCC if you would like a fuller explanation. Suffice it to say here that readability measures can only give us an approximation of the difficulty of any one text on any one reader, so all results need to be taken with a grain of salt.

For the purposes of this post, I looked at the PARCC Mathematics Practice Tests. In order to get a sample of 300 hundred words to do a readability measure, I sampled word problems from the beginning, middle, and end of the test. I hoped this would give me a sense of the readability of the word problems. I ran the passages for each grade level 3-8 through several readability formulas: Lexile, Flesch-Kincaid (FK), Fry and Flesch Reading Ease (FRE) scale. Lexile is the preferred readability formula of the Common Core architects and are expressed as grade ranges. These Lexile ranges were adjusted upward as a part of the Common Core's push for "college and career readiness."The other scales are commonly used readability measures. The Flesch Reading Ease Scale provides a number rating based on 90-100 being easy reading for 11-year-olds and 60-70 being easy for most 12-13 year-olds.

Findings: 

• 3rd Grade
• Lexile        830 (3rd grade range is 520 - 820)
• FK              4.6 grade level
• Fry             4 grade level
• FRE            81.6
• 4th Grade
• Lexile        890  (4th Grade range is 740 - 940)
• FK              5.1
• Fry             5.3
• FRE           80.3
• 5th Grade   
• Lexile         820 (5th Grade range is 830 - 1010)
• FK              5.4
• Fry             5.8
• FRE           77.8
• 6th Grade
• Lexile        1000 (6th grade range is 925 - 1070)
• FK              4.6
• Fry              5
• FRE            77.8
• 7th Grade
• Lexile         810 (7th grade range is 970-1120)
• FK              4.8
• Fry             5.2
• FRE           80.5
• 8th Grade
• Lexile        1000 (8th grade range is1010-1185)
• FK              8.1
• Fry             8.2
• FRE           60.9

Discussion: 

1. On grade level readers in grades 3 and 4 are going to find the reading required on the PARCC math tests to be very challenging. This will surely impact their scores on the test.
2. On grade level readers in grades 5-8 should be able to handle the reading demands of the test.
3. Below grade level readers, English Language Learners, and students with disabilities related to language processing will find the reading required for these tests very challenging. This will impact their scores on the PARCC math tests.

Conclusions: Because readability formulas are volatile and inexact, we must draw conclusions carefully. I have not examined  the qualitative aspects of these texts (how readable do they appear in light of the age of the children reading them); however, some tentative conclusions can be drawn from this initial look.

1. Teachers, administrators and parents must treat the results of the PARCC math tests with extreme caution.  The math test scores will surely be influenced by the ability of the students to read the material. Separating out what is a computational weakness and what is a reading weakness will be left to the observation and intervention of the classroom teacher.
2. Questions must be asked about the validity of the test scores in grades 3 and 4 based on the challenging level of the reading. In third grade, even by the revised and Common Core championed Lexile measures, the reading is very challenging and perhaps inappropriate for the age and grade level of the children.
3. These tests are clearly too imprecise to be used for any kind of high stakes decisions, including student placement, teacher evaluation or school effectiveness. Any attempts to use these tests for such purposes will be fraught with error and would have potentially damaging results for children, teachers, parents and schools.

Grammar Police, Winston Churchill and Me

Instead of grammar rules, let's focus on grammar tools

Thanks to my friend and fellow blogger, Dave Raudenbush,  for pointing out that today is National Grammar Day. I went to the web site for National Grammar Day and found it apparently dedicated, not so much to good grammar, as to good old American hucksterism. The site is there mostly to sell the sponsors' books and t-shirts. See what I did there, grammar fans? "Sponsors'" with an apostrophe after the "s" indicates more than one and that is what I mean to say. The site did point me to some handy grammar tips from "Grammar Girl", so you might want to check it out.

My favorite grammar story comes from Winston Churchill. Besides being the Prime Minister of England and one of the great political leaders of the twentieth century, Churchill was a notable writer. His histories of World War II are still considered must reading for historians. The story goes that once some cheeky editor suggested changes to a Churchill manuscript, because it contained, horror of horrors, a preposition at the end of a sentence. Churchill responded to this red pen wielding upstart with the following: "Your suggestion that I edit this sentence is a bit of impertinence up with which I shall not put."

I have since learned that the story may be apocryphal, but true or not, the tale illustrates an important point. Much of what we are taught as the rules of grammar are simply not rules. There is no reason to avoid ending a sentence with a preposition, unless adding the preposition is redundant as in "Where are you at?", which is incorrect because "Where are you?" carries the same meaning. However, as the Churchill story illustrates, avoiding a preposition at the end of a sentence can lead to awkward construction. Prepositions at the end of a sentence is something we should all be able to put up with:).

Those eagle-eyed grammarians out there may have noticed that I used "however" to begin a sentence in the last paragraph. My seventh grade English teacher, Mrs. McGarry, would be appalled. But this is another of those grammar rules we all have been taught that simply are not true. Beginning a sentence with a coordinating conjunction is perfectly grammatical. Here is what the Chicago Style Manual has to say on the subject.

There is a widespread belief—one with no historical or grammatical foundation—that it is an error to begin a sentence with a conjunction such as and, but or so. In fact, a substantial percentage (often as many as 10 percent) of the sentences in first-rate writing begin with conjunctions. It has been so for centuries, and even the most conservative grammarians have followed this practice.

Grammarians speculate that long ago teachers noticed that students tended to overuse "and" or "but" at the beginning of sentences and so they banned the practice. Apparently, teachers have repeated this false "rule" over the following years, decades and centuries.

There is one grammar error that I keep hearing and which drives me batty. I am referring to the incorrect use of the word "myself" as a substitute for "me." For example, "The boss wants to meet with John and myself." The correct usage is, of course, "The boss wants to meet with John and me." "Myself" is a reflexive pronoun that is used only in conjunction with the pronoun "I." So it is correct to say, "I did it all by myself",  or "I myself completed the task. "Myself" has become so ubiquitous as a substitute for "me", that when I use "me" correctly in a sentence, I get the distinct impression that people think I've gotten it wrong myself. Please, don't blame me.

In general, as teachers, I think we should avoid teaching grammar as a set of rules and start to teach it as a set of tools for the writer. Writers manipulate grammar for their own purposes all the time. Here is a paragraph from the Cynthia Rylant story, "My Grandmother's Hair."

We talked of many things as I combed her fine hair. Our talk was quiet, and it had to do with those things we both knew about: cats, baking-powder biscuits, Sunday school class.  Mrs. Epperly's big bull. Cherry picking. The striped red dress Aunt Violet sent me.

Wow, three sentence fragments in a row. Why does Rylant do this? I would speculate that Rylant liked the rhythm created here. It helps to create the tone of nostalgia and reminiscence that the story carries forward. My seventh grade teacher, Mrs. McGarry, would have bled all over this paragraph with her red pen had I turned it in, but as we see, great writers manipulate grammar to their purposes.

I know what you are thinking, "It's OK for Rylant to break the rules, because she knows what the rules are, but kids need to learn the rules first." I am not so sure. What better way to learn the difference between a complete sentence and a fragment than to actually use fragments and complete sentences in our writing and then talk about them as choices a writer makes?

For a wonderful book on teaching grammar as a tool for writers, I recommend Image Grammar by Harry Noden. The book is out of print now, but still available at used book stores. There is also an online resource companion to the book that you can find here.

If we can engage our student writers in conversations about grammatical choices, rather than trying to inculcate them with grammar rules, I think we have a better chance of creating writers who learn the rules, and learn to bend them, along the way.