The NYT Disappoints

Today's editorial in The New York Times, "Are They Learning?," comments on the cheating scandal in Atlanta. It is the most disappointing commentary I've read in some time.

It is disappointing because of the simplistic, wrong-headed conclusion the editors express.

It proves just how little the pundits are paying attention to what has been going on in our public schools. And if they aren't paying attention, who is?

It is disappointing because NYT has bought the arguments sold to the public and the media by very powerful special interest groups.

It is disappointing in the extreme because the editors do not blame the testing culture for the rampant cheating that has gone on.  Testing, in their eyes, is OK.  In their words: "It's the cheats who need to go, not the tests."

The editorial underscores that regular classroom teachers have an even smaller voice than ever as we Race to the Top of a Mountain of Testing and Test Scores.  Will no one ever listen to those who live in the landscape?

To answer the paper's question in a word: "No."  Our children are not learning.

Classroom teachers have been decrying the death of learning for the past ten years, and now the NYT and all the rest have come down on the wrong side:  Keep the tests.  Punish the adults.

I can fully understand how teachers can be pressured into changing scores.  We are at the bottom of a very long hierarchy, and doing what we're told is communicated in many, many ways.

Teachers are encouraged to "get along" and "be team players."   If teachers are not fired outright, their professional lives can be made a living hell.  Many good teachers have already been driven from the classroom.

In the current climate the numbers of reports and plans required by administration have multiplied to the point of exhausting teachers outside of the classroom, while demanding ever more in the classroom. We often suffer through the demands with our hands tied, neither controlling district nor school-wide decision making.

In the testing culture, teaching professionals have been systematically de-professionalized.  Districts have scripted instruction, set pacing guides that include regular testing windows, cannabilized instruction time for testing schedules, and pulled students--the well-known "bubble kids"--to remediate, remediate, remediate.

Large scale meetings have routinely focused on the numbers and have often resorted to humiliating whole groups of teachers.  ("Stand up if you are in a school that did not make AYP."   "What are you going to do this year to wipe that 'L' for 'Loser' off your forehead?"  These are sadly real comments heard in real meetings.)

For the thousandth time, yes, we need accountability.  But it needs to be non-invasive, low-stress, and less frequent then the "test every child every year in every subject" being pushed by the current Department of Education.  The NAEP that the Times calls impervious to tampering is a fine example of how we can routinely measure progress in our schools.

Here's a news flash: kids do not progress in a linear fashion.  Sometimes they regress, circle around, and then leap forward.   (Ask your tennis pro.  He'll tell you the same thing about athletes.)  We can't keep pushing kids through an education extruder.  It won't work.  They won't learn that way.  They aren't learning that way.

On the other hand, adults learn very quickly that if we need high pass rates to keep our jobs, then high pass rates will be had--learning be damned.

We need reform, and it needs to look like this: Take all that testing money and invest it in teachers.

While we've pushed tests for the last ten years we have done nothing to ensure that we have well-trained, effective adults in the classroom.  Ironically, we have gone in the opposite direction, letting any and all take a stab at teaching.  (TFA, Troops to Teachers, Career-switchers, long-term subs, etc.)

In the age when we are learning more daily about the brain and how brain-friendly strategies can improve learning for all, we are throwing open the doors and letting those with even less training take on the complex problems of helping our growing numbers of impoverished children succeed.  And, unsurprisingly, the less-trained teacher is fleeing even faster than the career teacher.

The Times is wrong.  We don't need better tests, better accountability, or better laws.

We need an army of well-trained teachers.

If the Times is this far off the mark, good luck convincing the public that better teachers not better tests are what our children need.

Please March.

Cheating on tests...

The New York Times reports today that there is the suspicion of widespread cheating on student testing in Georgia. Looks like somebody--kids? teachers? administrators?--erased a large number of incorrect answers and replaced them with the correct answers.

Further on the article it states:

Principals and teachers are under intense pressure to improve scores. If schools fail under No Child Left Behind, they are placed in a “needs improvement” category and must offer extra tutoring and allow parents to transfer their children to higher performing schools.

And further on the article comments:

In October, The Journal-Constitution identified 10 Atlanta schools that had an extraordinary gain in scores, including two that went from among the worst to among the best in a year. Officials at the district, which gives $2,000 cash bonuses to educators at schools that meet improvement goals, said they did not believe there had been cheating. All of those schools are now on the “severe concern” list.

Maybe we thought Educators were some kind of sainted human beings who would not fall prey to the external pressures of greed and an avoidance of shame?

So how are we thinking about that "pay for performance" option for teachers? Any chance that some teachers might fudge things with the kids a little bit if earning power is on the line?

Naw....that would never happen.

Time Periods

We've been outlining the literary time periods in class, looking at historical events and the philosophic discussions of the time that emerge in literature and art.  A hopeful way of focusing on the big ideas rather than the details (which seem hard for my aging brain to hold on to anymore!).

Made me consider the eras I've lived through.

After a couple of  years it seemed clear that school children tend to distill the national conversation to broad axioms as they parrot what they hear at home - using pithy arguments to bolster their own when they are trying to make a point.  Looking back on 30 years, I see definite trends.

When I first taught in the late 70's, many kids would, at some point or another, declare "I've got my rights!"  I heard this many times from students, usually when they were in trouble over one infraction or another.  It was their version of the civil rights discussion.

Gone from the classroom through most of the 80's I have no idea what emerged as the comment-du-jour ("I want big hair!" ?)  but for the last dozen years I've heard the same refrain: "I want to be rich!"  If I had a dollar for every time a student stated this as their goal....  

Along with that statement was the unstated: "I'll be rich at any cost."  With the current meltdown, and the tide going out as Warren Buffet mentioned, it seems that many fortunes were made just that way: any way - cheating, inflating worth, passing the buck, etc. etc.  In the classroom cheating has soared as getting into a good college in order to get a good job and there fore get rich became the over arching goal.  Its been kinda hard to make the learning-for-learning's-sake argument when worth has been measured in dollars for so long.

I think this "I want to be rich" refrain has just come to a screeching halt.