Buzz Kill

I think Richard Sagor has bugged my house. His argument about the difference between blue collar and professional jobs is a discussion that my husband (also a teacher at AHS) and I have had numerous times. We've all, it would appear, come to the conclusion that real change in education will not occur until people, ourselves included, begin to see/treat educators like professionals. Until then "it is assumed that the qualities of creativity, initiative, and entrepreneurship will be supplied by" our bosses--administrators, politicians, lobbyists, etc.--not by educators themselves (29).

Every time a prescribed program or paid consultant is force fed to us, we, the classroom teacher, lose a little bit more of our power, our motivation. "When [we are] told' to implement an 'adopted' strategy' and do it precisely as the instruction manual suggests," there is an assumption on the part of our leadership, however subconscious it may be, that we cannot deal with the tremendous obstacles in our path (32). Far from empowering the educator by providing them with a surefire cure for the warts that ail us, this approach leaves us impotent and frustrated.

Sagor's illustrates the consequence of this top down approach nicely when he gives the scenarios of the superintendent and the CEO. I do not think he's being hyperbolic when he compares the challenge of helping every student reach proficiency by 2014 to putting a man on the moon. Educational reform is an enormous undertaking. Sagor notes that "anyone who doubts that assertion should consider that throughout the world, no school system, no country, no state, no city has every been successful in making every child an academic success" (28). But where the space race lead to incredible innovation and collaboration on the part of NASA's employees, ed reform has had the opposite effect upon teachers--striping us of our autonomy and voice. The difference lies in the way that people view our respective jobs. Sagor argues that when blue collar workers fail to meet productivity goals the blame rests solely at their feet. They must be lazy or incompetent. Conversely, when professionals fail to meet the challenges set before them, "it is most often attributed to the failings inherent in the intervention or treatment attempted, not on the merit of 'worthiness' of the practitioner" (29). It was okay for NASA scientists to miss the mark every once in a while. They were given the opportunity to learn from their mistakes, to work together to overcome these stumbling blocks. Unfortunately, teachers are not afforded the same privilege.

Action research puts the ball back in our court. It gives the people who are on the ground working with kids everyday a voice. It assumes that teachers are professionals, that we have the desire and the know-how to tackle some of the most complex and persuasive problems standing in the way of our goal to make education relevant and empowering for an increasingly diverse student population. Yet this confidence is as terrifying as it is gratifying. For if we truly embrace the ideas behind practitioner research, then we too must develop the confidence in ourselves to face these problems head on. Too often we try to "escape personal responsibility" for the failures in our classrooms/schools "by blaming conditions outside of [our] control"--poverty, lack of parental support, etc. (31). That is no to say that these factors do not impact our students' performance and readiness. In fact, I find it laughable when politicians and policy makers try to dismiss these very real obstacles, as they did in Central Falls, and make wild claims about "super-teachers" being the answer to all of our ills. These are very real, very intimidating problems. But we, as a society, need to change the way that we look at them. Not by pretending they don't exist but rather by acknowledging them and giving educators the freedom, time, and support necessary to research the problem, brainstorm solutions, and take action.

Unfortunately this is easier said then done. In my experience, administrators pay lip service to this idea but rarely if ever take the steps necessary to truly empower teachers. They talk the talk but don't walk the walk. They will read a book like Sagor's and decide a "culture of excellence" is exactly what our school needs. But instead of giving teachers the time and resources that would allow for real collaboration and research to take place organically, they will instead force us into small collaborative teams of their choosing and make us work on whatever agenda they've decided is most pressing at the time. Essentially the exact opposite of what Sagor is advocating.

Take PD days for example. I cannot remember the last time we as a department were given time to just sit down and talk to our peers about the issues/problems we are having in our classrooms. Instead we are given a prescribed agenda which outlines how our time is to be used down to the last minute. Real concerns are pushed aside so we can be trained in things like lesson protocol.

So I guess my question is how do we as teachers advocate for ourselves in a way that would allow us to implement the changes necessary for real change in light of the pressures and restrictions put on us by the powers that be?

Marching to the beat of a single drummer

After reading both Campano and Cochran and Lytle, I realized how much of an impact Dr. Bogad’s class has had on my beliefs about teaching and learning. I came in to SED 552 fully believing that the ability of the standards movement to bring much needed attention to historically underserved student populations was a crucial part of educational reform. Yet during the course of Dr. Bogad’s class, I was forced to re-examine my long held beliefs, to confront my assumptions, and take a hard look at what has been sacrificed educationally for such attention.

I left class with the unsettling notion that deep, life changing learning has been replaced by easily assessed bits of knowledge, that the role of a teacher is no longer to inspire critical thinking but rather to “transmit” a narrow stream of knowledge to her students.

Thus I found myself shaking my head in agreement with Campano when he noted how “the aggrandizement of teaching methods and programs catered toward high-stakes tests has the effect of homogenizing classroom practice and devaluing the resources and experiences students bring to school” and that while “test scores may rise. . . such an approach may also inadvertently limit students’ full potential and stymie educators’ ability to learn from the diversity of their classrooms” (4). Campano argues that real teaching and learning evolve from something different than the “’scientifically based research’” and “’evidence- based education’” discussed in Cochran and Lytle’s piece (10).

Campano echoes the beliefs of many educators who are trying to meet the demands/expectations of the standards movement while creating authentic learning experiences for their students. Unfortunately, the current obsession with test scores, data, and teacher accountability, which derives from a “need to thrive in the new ‘knowledge society’ (Cochran and Lytle 8), has severely
limited, if not silenced altogether, the dialogue amongst educators, policy makers, and the communities they serve regarding the purpose of education. Educators are there to “produce a workforce that can meet the demands of the competitive global market and preserve. . . the nation’s place in that market” (8).

Period. End of story.

But at what cost?

This year, despite increasing expectations, the Attleboro High School English department has managed to meet our AYP goals for all of our low performing sub-groups. Yet, while I do take pride in the fact that we have successfully targeted our under-performing students and devised strategies to help them achieve success on MCAS, I no longer believe that we are empowering our students or “enhancing the life chances of all [our] students so that they have genuine choice about meaningful work, continued education, and civic engagement” (Cochran and Lytle 2). What I see is a student body that is ambivalent about learning, who care more about how long a paper needs to be than about the ideas presented within it. While we are succeeding in creating students capable of passing a standards based test, we are failing in our goal of creating life-long learners who think critically about the world around them and their place in it.

Black Authenticity

Great conversation between Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Touré (who just wrote a book Who's Afraid of Post-Blackness? What It Means to Be Black Now) about black identity. Are you listening Prudence Carter?

Torn Between the Revolution and the Machine

I'm torn, Alfie Kohn. I'm torn. I see where you're coming from. I want to pick up what you're laying down. But I just can't swallow your argument whole.

As I read "The Case Against 'Tougher Standards'," I found myself shaking my head in agreement several times:

"People from parents to Presidents have begun to sond like a cranky, ill-informed a radio talk-show host,with the result that almost anything can be done to students and to schools, no matter how ill-considered, as long as it is done in the name of "raising standards" or "accountability" (1).

I'm definitely in Kohn's camp here. I think that school reform has been hijacked by politicians and businessmen who know almost nothing about what goes on in a classroom. Currently there is no dialogue between policy makers and educators on how to best achieve authentic, sustainable reform in schools. There is in fact no real conversation happening at all--just a repackaging of the same argument by people who seem to ignore research and expert analysis on how children learn best in favor of the easiest, most economical solution to a misconceived problem. The hubris of these so-called reformers convinces them that because they are powerful, successful people in other regards that they must intrinsically know how to fix public education. Yet as anyone who has ever stepped foot in a classroom knows--what looks easy from the outside is one of the most complicated and difficult jobs that can be had. Simplifying the problem into digestible sound bites may "[play] well with the public, but . . . frequently ends up doing more harm than good" (1).

"The Tougher Standards movement . . . gets motivation wrong" (2).

Again, I'm with Kohn here. Kids aren't motivated by grades, at least not in the way we want them to be. Kohn argues that "a preoccupation with performance often undermines interest in learning, quality of learning, and a desire to be challenged" (2). I combat the apathy of my students everyday. Part of this disinterest in learning certainly rests in the culture of "non-learning" that they have grown up in but a great part of the blame rests with us, with school, with ed policy. Our narrow focus on tests, grades, performance, etc. has essentially killed off the joy of discovery that should be inherent in good teaching and learning.

Wesch discussed this in his article "Anti-Teaching: Confronting the Crisis of Significance,"when he laments that "great questions are rarely asked by students in an education system facing a crisis of significance. Much more common are administrative questions: 'How long does this paper need to be?' 'Is attendance mandatory?' Or the worse (and the most common) of all: 'What do we need to know for this test?' Such questions reflect the fact that, for many (student and teachers alike), education has become a relatively meaningless game of grades rather than an important and meaningful exploration of the world in which we live and co-create" (5).

In this regard, I'm right there with Kohn when he asserts that "Rather than scrambling to comply with [NCLB's] provisions, our obligation is to figure out how best to resist" (4). Yah! Let's fight the powers that be! I'm all for getting a bit radical (and for anyone who's ever sat in on an AHS English Department meeting so are most of my colleagues). At some point, we've got to get more political as educators, not just as union members, but as living, breathing educators who know what we're talking about because we're in the mix everyday. We've got to wrest the bullhorn away from those who have riled the masses into frenzy. I'm there. Let's get our berets out of the closet and thwart the system.

But while we're getting all political and whatnot, we have an obligation not to forget who we are fighting for--our students. And this is where Kohn and I begin to disagree.

Kohn makes the claim that "NCLB is not a step in the right direction. It is a deeply damaging, mostly ill-intentioned law, and no one genuinely committed to improving public schools (or to advancing the interests of those who have suffered from decades of neglect and oppression) would want to have anything to do with it" (4).

Excuse me?

Did he just insinuate that I, who do in fact see the good that NCLB has had on our traditionally under-served populations, am not in fact committed to those same children? Jerk.

In my time at AHS, I have witnessed the transformation of our school's collective mentality. When I started special education students were held to almost no standard, pulled out of classes not to help them better understand the material but rather to "keep the distractions down " in the classroom. There was also a general feeling that some students were cut out for learning and others were not. If a student regularly slept in your class, it wasn't your job to figure out how to get them to engage in class. It was perfectly acceptable to write them off in favor of those who showed more commitment to their education.

Nowadays, while certainly no educational utopia, those attitudes are no longer the norm. We've integrated our special education students into our classrooms and watched them succeed in ways that were previously thought impossible. We've created a culture that believes in the ability of all children to learn and grow and teachers have taken on the responsibility of actualizing that belief. There have been growing pains, our jobs have become a lot harder that's for damn sure, but I cannot in good conscience just dismiss this progress, for all its flaws, in some blanket dismissal of the catalyst that sparked these changes.

Kohn is right. We have sacrificed more authentic learning in favor of testing. He is right that this emphasis on grades and performance has done damage to students. But I think he is wrong in saying that NCLB has done nothing right for education. I do not believe AHS would have started really focusing on our "at risk" kids without the pressure of AYP. And so, if for no other reason then the attention that it has brought to students who were not being served by our education system, I will stick to my belief that NCLB is not the weapon of mass destruction that Kohn claims it be.

Marching to the Beat of Our Own Drummers

Excuses, Excuses

Sorry for my tardiness. The Reed household was hit by a nasty stomach flu this weekend. And while I am happy to report that I can once again stand the sight of food (how I missed it), I am still a bit under the weather.

Quotes and Reaction

"How can I dialogue if I always project ignorance onto others and never percieve my own? How can I dialogue if I regard myself as a case apart from others--mere 'its' in whom I cannot recognize other 'I's?" ~Paulo Freire

I thought Freire's quote addressed the heart of Kliewer's work--the importance of dialogue. We must consciously make an effort to see people for who they are, not for who they are not. So many of the men, women, and children profiled in this piece, were silenced because of their disability. They were not seen as equals worthy of entering into a real conversation about their lives, their dreams, their frustrations.

The very idea that Anne was not invited to sit in on her high school transition planning meeting speaks to the level in which we've institutionalized our bias against people with disabilities. How arrogant to assume you have the right to dictate someone's future without their consent? Anne's planning committee viewed her as an "it" not and "I," an issue to be resolved rather than a person with whom they could and should have dialogued with.


"Those students who exhibit the canonical mind are credited with understanding, even when real understanding is limited or absent; many people . . . can pass the test but fail other, perhaps more appropriate probing measures of understanding. Less happily, many who are capable of exhibiting significant understanding appear deficient, simply because they cannot readily traffic in the commonly accepted coin of the educational realm." ~Howard Gardner

Gardner's quote reminded me, yet again, how everything we read in class is connected. The last sentence of this quote speaks to pretty much every article we've read this year. There is an accepted currency which can be used to buy entrance into the culture of power. Those who were not born with an abundance of that currency and do not possess the means to access it are ostracised by that culture. In Kliewer's piece, this lack of currency applies to the culture of education that we have developed in the United States, one that values tests score and IQ points over other forms of intelligence.

Using this measure, many students are shut out from mainstream education, labeled "uneducable." But what does it mean to educate? For John, labled as "uneducable" by his school in North Hollywood, his education started with acceptance into a community. It was through his daily interactions with people who saw "past his chromosomal anomaly to his humanity" that John was able to show the world who he really was and what he was capable of. Education for John wasn't about sitting in his seat, learning from a book or lecture, but real interaction with his community.

People learn differently. The problem is that we have created a system that fails to recognize and value these differences in students. Thus we become the "sorting machine" Kliewer discusses valuing certain types of knowledge and intelligence over others.


"World-wide, the vast majority of adolescents and youth with disabilities do not attend school. Many have never attend school or attended only once in a while, a fact reflected in UNESCO's estimate that the literacy rate for those with disabilities world-wide is only 3 per cent; the rate for girls and women with disabilities hovers closer to 1 per cent.11

School buildings are routinely built with stairs, or far from community centres, making them inaccessible to many. In many countries, young people with disabilities are considered to be incapable of learning, no matter what their disability. Often a disabled student is considered a distraction to other students and simply sent home. Lack of access to schooling may reflect the belief that such young people cannot learn, that they should not be put through the stress of learning or that they are an embarrassment (evidence of bad blood, incest or divine disfavour) and should not be seen regularly in public." ~UNICEF, An Overview of Young People Living with Disabilities – Their Needs and Their Rights

While we certainly have a long way to go when it comes to properly integrating and educating our students with special needs, I think it is important to put our situation into perspective. Many countries and cultures around the world do not even attempt to educate children with special needs.

A few years ago, AHS had the privilege of hosting three teachers from Indonesia who were interested in learning more about American education. One of the things that fascinated these teachers the most during their visit was the fact that our special education students were schooled with the mainstream high school population. It was one of those moments that makes you appreciate living in a nation that attempts to live up to its credo that "all men are created equal." However flawed the reality of our educational system is at least we are sitting in this class, having a conversation about how to better education for all students because there are many, many children around the world who do not even have that.

They do not have a Kathy who fights for their right to use the expensive, science equipment, or a Tina who thinks nothing of spending 20 minutes mimicking the sound of a chainsaw because that's how Wendy likes to express herself, or a Sarah who questions how to reconcile her belief that all students have value with the reality of testing mandates and teacher evaluations.

I'm not trying to be overly romantic here but I think it is important to recognize how our own struggles with these topics reflect our commitment to these fundamental ideals. If only so that when we get frustrated or feel overwhelmed by the challenge of being a good educator, we can find some solace in the fact that at least we're trying.

Language and Identity

The words "culture of power" are never far from the tip of my tongue these days. So it didn't surprise me to see shades of Prudence Carter in both Richard Rodriquez' "Aria" and Virginia Collier's "Teaching Multilingual Children." Both Rodriquez and Collier allude to the dominate culture--this time the linguistic dominance of English--and the importance of helping ESL students gain access to the cultural capital English provides.

Yet as we saw in Carter's work , access to the dominant culture can come at a price. Rodriguez discusses this in his piece. For while he asserts that "what [he] needed to learn in school was that [he] had the right--and the obligation--to speak the public language of los gringos," (34) Rodriguez admits that his linguistic transformation cost him "the special feeling of closeness" (36) he shared with his family. Spanish was something special, something different that Rodriquez and his family shared. It gave them a feeling of closeness and security that they did not experience in the outside world. That's why the scene where Rodriguez walks in on his parents speaking to one another in Spanish only to have them switch to English when addressing him is so devastating. Rodriguez explains how "Those gringo sounds they uttered startled me. Pushed me away. . . I felt my throat twisted by unsounded grief" (35). Now Rodriguez' parents were just doing what they thought best for their children by supporting their efforts to learn the language of the culture of power. But to Rodriguez their acknowledgement of him in English rather than Spanish felt like a rejection, an expulsion from the safety and closeness he had associated with home, with his parents, with Spanish.

The feeling of closeness associated with one's culture is something Carter discusses. I kept thinking of the cultural straddlers in Carter's piece who while able to successfully navigate the codes and norms of the dominant culture discussed feeling more comfortable, more themselves when they were home in their own communities. The black cultural capital, including black linguistic capital, valued in these communities was like the Spanish spoken in Rodriguez' home, a way to define oneself using different standards then those outlined by the culture of power. So like most cultural assimilators when Rodriguez becomes more and more "Americanized", when he publicly becomes Richard instead of Ricardo, he no longer can define himself using these alternative standards and thus loses the safety and familiarity of his "private" identity.

Virginia Collier seems to recognize the risk of forcing ESL students to totally assimilate into mainstream linguistic culture and advocates for an approach to the teaching and learning of English that both respects a student's native language and ensures their proficiency in English. She discusses how the traditional approach to language teaching has been "eradication." This approach "looks upon dialects other than standard as deficient" (226) and that teachers of eradication "see themselves as the tools by which a particular student can rid himself of stigmatized dialect features and become a speak of the 'right' type of standard language--the passport to achievement, success, and acceptance" (227). Unfortunately instead of empowering students by giving them the tools they need to accumulate dominate cultural capital, this approach often disenfranchises students by devaluing their own culture and thus calling into question their worth as individuals.

Both Rodriguez and Collier address the difficulties in effectively teaching ESL students without devaluing their own unique identities. To further illustrate this dilemma, The Huffington Post ran an article a few weeks ago entitled "English Learning Students Far Behind Under English Only Methods" which detailed the struggle that California schools are having closing the achievement gap between their ESL students (who are overwhelming Spanish speaking) and their native English speaking peers. While the headline leads one to believe that the English only education Collier disapprovingly refers to in her work is failing and needs to be revised, the article itself is much more ambiguous. The problem isn't as easily defined as monolingual education versus bilingual education: "Instead, researchers say what matters more is whether schools use data and track student performance on an ongoing basis, whether the curriculum is rigorous and whether teachers are trained to help English learners connect their learning with what they already know in their own language."

Reading these articles convinced me even more that everything we discuss in class is connected. Power, culture, identity, ed reform, it all influences the way that we teach and the way that our students learn.

To Test or Not to Test. . .

i-Pad Madness

I attended the Assessment Technology and Questions of Equity workshops at the Promising Practices conference. The first workshop was "The Demystification of Touch Technology" given by Shawn Rubin and Stephanie Castilla. Their presentation focused on how i-Pads can be used to help teachers more effectively track their student progress through formative assessment (daily/frequent checks-ins of student).

For those of us in need of a brief refresher, below is a simple chart that defines both formative and summative assessment.

Rubin and Castilla, who are employed by the Highlander Dunn Institute, have created a formative assessment i-Pad app that helps track student growth or lack thereof on any skill the teacher wants to focus on. Ideally this technology will allow teachers to better differentiate their instruction to meet the needs of each individual student in their classrooms.

In an article from The New England Post entitled "Providence Charter School Builds and Launches Its Very Own Formative Assessment App for i-Pad," Rubin discusses how before creating and implementing this new technology he was essentially winging his differentiation, "using his gut" to determine if a student had mastered a particular skill or was ready to move on.

This was something I could definitely identify with. I believe in the importance of formative assessment yet too often I find myself making from the gut decisions about my students' readiness. I am also guilty of sometimes forcing kids who have mastered a particular skill to keep working on it so that their peers can catch up. Rubin and Castilla's presentation got me thinking about all the ways that technology can allow me to better differentiate for my students.

Still the issue of resources remains ever a problem. Rubin teaches at a well funded charter school in Providence where his students have ample access to this kind of technology so his incorporation of this app makes perfect sense. I can't see Attleboro High spending the big bucks to get every student an i-Pad. However, Rubin and Castilla did a good job of showing us how just one teacher armed with an i-Pad can begin to use formative assessment to better inform her practice. I am seriously considering whether or not it is something that I should purchase to help me make more informed decisions about my students.

If this kind of technology is something that you are interested in, Highlander Dunn is hosting three workshops on how to use technology (i-Pads, Smartboards, laptops, etc.) to better track student growth and differentiate instruction.

• Thursday, November 10th from 5pm - 7pm for "Differentiating Instruction Through Technology" Registration- $25 (includes pizza)

• Friday, November 18th from 8:30am - 3pm for "Using Touch Technology to Inspire and Motivate Learners" Registration-$150 or $75 if you tell them you attended Promising Practices (includes coffee, donuts, and lunch)
  

• Thursday, December 8th from 5pm - 7pm for "Using iPads for Writing" Registration-$25 (includes pizza)
  

Stop the Madness

The second workshop entitled "How Do You Measure the Work of Schools?" was presented by Christine Kunkel, a RIC faculty member, who was the principal of the KEY Learning Community in Indianapolis. KEY was the first multiple-intelligences school in the United States:



Kunkel's presentation centered around the struggles progressive schools like KEY are facing trying to remain relevant in spite of high stakes testing mandates. Although Kunkel's research is still in the beginning stages, she raised some interesting questions about the purpose of schooling and how schools can prove their effectiveness in ways other than test scores.

It's a complex issue without a simple answer which is why society is having such a hard time devising a method to accurately hold schools and teachers "accountable." Is a school's worth measured by its students' ability to attain high marks on their NECAP or MCAS tests or by its ability to inspire students to learn and grow, to become those "life long learners" we hear so much about? Diane Ravitch and Geoffrey Canada went head to head on this very issue during a debate sponsored by NBC's Education Nation:

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I find myself siding with both Ravitch and Canada. I am so conflicted when it comes to high stakes testing. On one hand, I have seen how testing mandates have forced AHS to focus on the neediest of our students. I can say with some certainty that NCLB has been the impetus for real reform in my high school. No longer can a teacher say that a student "isn't cut out for school." It just isn't tolerated. You either believe that all students can learn and that it is your job to figure out how to reach each of your kids or you quickly discover that AHS is not the place for you. Of course, there are exceptions to this rule--veteran teachers who have had a difficult time adjusting to this idea, bad teachers who have gone under the administration's radar--but I can honestly say that I am proud to be a part of such a progressive, dedicated staff.

Still, I have also seen the damage that test centered curriculum can do to students' intrinsic motivation and creativity. Reading Wesch really made me question my ability to remain relevant to my students. They may leave my class knowing how to write an effective thesis statement but will they leave inspired? Will I have lit that fire within them? I'm starting to doubt it more and more. So what do we do?

In her presentation, Kunkel referenced the work of Sir Ken Robinson, who argues that the answer to America's education problem is that we are attempting to deal with the problems of tomorrow with the strategies of yesterday. His TED talk "Changing Paradigms" was both inspiring and depressing. If you haven't seen it, I highly recommend you take a look: