Beyond School

Who is Arne Duncan and how will his choice as Secretary of Education affect education in the US (and, for better or worse in this hegemonic age, much of the rest of the world)? I’ve spent so many hours since the announcement reading reactions online that both my eyes and my brain cells are fried. (Enjoy the Diigo bookmarks if you’re masochistic.) All that reading will have to steep for a while before I can serve it as tea.

Until that happens, I’m going to focus on one controversy surrounding Duncan, and toss out some thoughts on it. That controversy is performance pay for teachers.

Bill Ferriter’s excellent recent post on this issue at the Tempered Radical got me thinking. I replied there,

Thinking about it a little more, this is what I can come up with so far:

We’d have to define “merit” to include the higher-order thinking skills – analysis, synthesis, evalutation/critical thinking, creativity – that the best learning projects require. This is not the opposite of the “fact-based, right/wrong, multiple choice” testing that NCLB and the College Board/AP/SAT pushes, but what you might call the upward extension of it. Mastery of facts is the beginning, not the end, of the assessment for meritorious teaching and learning.

If we start there, that means teacher merit is measured by the types of projects that are assigned in the classroom – not by the standardized testing industry – and by the performance of students who complete these projects. This further means that said teacher measurement is performed not centrally, but locally – or perhaps by boards consisting of local and central judges. (I know that “central” is vague.)

My thinking is that if teachers were rewarded for designing learning activities that measured positively against a checklist of such higher-order thinking traits – and crucially, that the measurement was based not on a single unit, but on a portfolio of all units assigned throughout the semester or year (this eliminates the dog-and-pony show liability of single principal evaluations) – then the best teachers would be rewarded with higher pay, while the worst ones would have an incentive to change their practice for the better. Teaching to the test wouldn’t be the goal any more; teaching to higher instructional standards would be.

As for what those higher instructional standards would look like, we need look no further than Linda Darling-Hammond for answers. Her presentation linked in an earlier post lays the groundwork for such guidelines.

As I commented on Will’s post about the Duncan pick,

Since Darling-Hammond led BO’s ed transition team, she may have had his ear long enough to fill it with good sense on how to reform NCLB’s assessments for the better – so that they align with better teaching-and-learning.

And I just discovered Bill Ferriter posted a follow-up to my comment, so off I go to fry a few more cells. Bill’s worth it.

Picture this: enterprising students in cities in Texas, particularly, and other cities nationwide – along with counterparts in Romania, which just mandated a Creationism-only science curriculum (I kid you not), and maybe Turkey, for good measure – organize Smart Mobs to strike, peacefully and simultaneously, out of the blue to demand only 21st century science – yes, I mean evolution – be included in their biology and other science textbooks.

And they do it quickly, before Texas’ Creationist-dominated Board of Education votes next Spring to insert Creationism yet again into its science standards. (See this post.)

They happen at such places as the Texas capitol building, the lobbies of textbook publishers’ headquarters, science museums, the national capitol, and wherever else seems like a good idea.

And they simply follow the steps of this excellent video (h/t to the Personal Democracy Forum):

And, because they’re good, peaceful citizens showing the will and responsibility to act for the education they deserve, the students who organize these events (more than once, please) include this as a bullet on their college application, to show that they’re more original and more consequential than the herd that joins the schooly National Honor Society and such. And the admissions officers at the best colleges see that bullet, and place their applications in the acceptance pile.

And they live actively and powerfully ever after.

If Obama’s doing it, kids, maybe it’s something you should consider as worth your time to learn. It might just help your future more than a couple hundred extra points on your SAT.

(Add to TheIndyDebate map)

"Old dogs" my mange-ridden tail. (I'm the guy with the receding hairline, inset lower left.)

I’ve been meaning to scratch this itch of a digitized reading/writing/speaking unit for any school with basic podcasting gear for a while, but have been too busy.

Busy with a new job, here in Seoul, writing and announcing radio news. I applied for it a good two months ago, and after a glacial hiring process, got the nod in mid-November. (Some of my fellow tweets know this.)¹

And while it’s obvious that I enjoyed the advantage of being a foreigner when it came to breaking into radio at my age, I want to add that it didn’t hurt to have a background teaching reading, writing, and speaking skills for eight years. The old joke I loved as a new Humanities graduate – “I have a Liberal Arts degree: Will that be for here or to go?” – seems less funny now, because less true.  The basic skills – reading, writing, speaking, listening, which really just mean communicating, in the end – have more value to them than we often credit.

That teaching unit I mentioned? I think about it most days as I drive home from work. In a nutshell, it’s this: invite your students to turn your content, whatever your subject matter, into five-minute “top of the hour” newscasts, applying the craft of writing for radio (great resource here), and then speaking for radio. Then have them follow up, at certain points, with “talk radio” in which they discuss and debate their “content news.” In addition to that work-flow’s simple progression from fact-mastery (identify the main ideas of each section of a chapter and distill them into a short, well-crafted précis) to higher-order thinking (analyze, synthesize, evaluate those main ideas in a natural discussion), there are two more bonuses: first, the technology slice is so simple it’s invisible (in live studio news broadcasts, you only get one chance to announce the news, so for students that means hit record, read for five minutes, then wrap by hitting “stop” and call it a day), and technology should ideally be as invisible as pen and paper; and second, the activity develops all the real-world skills that come with real journalism and broadcasting (or, as Wes Fryer puts it in regards to podcasting, “narrowcasting”).

Glancing back at my last post about Linda Darling-Hammond on performance-based assessment, this type of learning-while-doing workshop measures performance across a wide range of literacy skills: reading for main ideas, writing them with economy and accuracy (and no passive voice, mostly action verbs, citation of sources, distinctions between “alleging” and “charging,” and more), and best of all, speaking with proper pace, volume, inflection, emphasis, pitch variety, and all the other qualities radio announcers have to master to avoid losing their listeners to the next station on the dial.

It’s “real-world project-based learning” that uses the same skills as outlining, note-taking, and giving those schooly little front-of-the-classroom speeches.

The only glitch I can see is this: if you have 20 students that you put into pairs, they can’t all record at the same time in class, so they’ll have to do the actual recording outside of class. They can still have the class period as the workshop to read and write their news scripts, and practice announcing them to each other. They can also discuss and outline the questions and topics for the higher-order “talk show” piece.

Here’s the process we follow at my station. I really think it could be duplicated in an 80-minute block. At work, I do it as part of a team of two. Here it is:

7:30 to 8:30 a.m.: Read newswires (in class, this could be, say, a chapter from a history textbook), select ten articles (sections from the textbook) for the 5-minute 9:00 hourly, divide the labor, then condense those news articles – which read aloud would take two or three minutes each – into crisp little 20-to-30 second summaries of main ideas.

That means cutting about 90% of the length, without cutting the important ideas. (In other words, that means: critical reading for main ideas.)

8:30 to 8:50 a.m.: Practice reading the scripts, making last-minute adjustments where necessary. Focus on the oral skills here: breath control, pace and pause, acceleration and deceleration, words and phrases to emphasize (just consciously watch or listen to any TV or radio newscaster, and notice how different their speaking is from normal off-air speech).

8:50 to 9:00: Go upstairs to the studio, make sure your pages are in order.

9 to 9:05: Announce the news. No second chances.

Again, the reading, writing, and practicing take 80 minutes – a standard block period. The actual recording would have to be done outside of class (Skype, anyone?).

Now for the testimonial: When training for this gig, my first few attempts at speaking were disasters. Adrenaline would make me read too fast. I couldn’t control my breath, so you’d hear huge whooshing sounds as I came up for air after long sentences. My voice and hands shook. I couldn’t meet the 5-minute final out deadline. I couldn’t turn pages skillfully – you’d hear rattling paper or, worse, page one seque to page three because I’d lifted two pages instead of one, resulting in an economy article ending with a surreal sports score followed by a brain-frozen omigod pause. My vocal style would start strong, but during the underwater feeling of the third and fourth minute, I’d drop into a monotone without realizing it. And more.

But my partner’s constructive feedback and encouragement, and self-critique by listening to the performance, and imitation of newscasters online and on air, soon – within a week – led to massive improvement in both writing and speaking, by all accounts. I still have the job, so that must be the general consensus. My point here is that, done regularly, giving students time to stumble and fail, then try again until they succeed and become finally comfortable with all this literacy, will, I’m convinced, make them much stronger readers, writers, and speakers than ye olde schooly lecture-outline-take notes-summarize-give a speech drill.

It was the same with the reading and writing. My partner and I took forever, the first few days, to be able to hone in on the main ideas in all the articles we re-wrote, leading to no practice-time before going live and worse. But now, our speed has at least doubled. We’ve developed the skills, in other words, of skimming, evaluating, separating central from supporting information, and re-writing those quickly and clearly.

So, when I re-enter the classroom next year (yes, you heard that right), this performance-based workflow will be one I introduce early in the year, and sustain throughout it.

I know it’s not original, by the way, and I’m sure many teachers are doing this type of thing. I’m just struck by it because I’ve experienced it from the other (and real-world) end, as a learner.

1. The station is the first all-English radio station in Korean history, and launched December 1. La-de-da. [↩]

Doug Noon at Borderlands wrote a post, “Assessments for Learning,” that I want to stop time to respond to, but until that’s possible, this quickie:

Doug Linked to a presentation at the Forum for Education and Democracy that featured short-listed Secretary of Education Linda Darling-Hammond and others discussing performance-based assessment: “assessing students based on demonstrations of what they know, understand, and can do.”

You can view the full event here, or watch each speaker’s segment in video here. If you don’t have time to watch the whole thing, at least watch Darling-Hammond’s presentation. Here’s the blurb:

“What we have thought of as fairly rare in this country [i.e., the USA] is quite common in most of the high-achieving countries internationally,” Linda Darling-Hammond began. (See her presentation here.) Beginning with a list of 21^st century skills, Darling-Hammond contrasted US tests – which require recall of a simple fact or ask students for a one-sentence explanation – with exams abroad that include designing science experiments, refining computer programs and explaining the reasoning behind solutions for complex problems. “[In many nations,] there’s a teaching and learning system, that operates to provide rich curriculum and strong outcomes,” Darling-Hammond said. “They are what assure that the higher-order skills are actually taught and practiced.” [emphasis added]

Darling-Hammond gives overviews of state and local assessment design and purpose from such high-performing countries as Finland, Hong Kong, and Australia, and includes the International Baccalaureate (IB) program as well. I challenge anyone to watch it and still argue that the rote bubble-filling of US assessment is the best way to go.

Also worth a watch are the presentations by Ann Cook of the NY Performance Standards Consortium, and by filmmaker and Consortium school graduate Kiri Davis. Again, see the site for more – and notice, at the bottom of the page, you can download

a report by Conveners Linda Darling-Hammond and George Wood, “Assessment for the 21st Century: Using Performance Assessments to Measure Student Learning More Effectively.”

Finally, if the Obama team is serious about listening to us at Change.gov’s education page, then it can’t hurt to throw a comment there supporting Darling-Hammond as Sec. of Ed. She’s got the vision and values to help kids instead of corporations, and teach the whole child instead of the state test.

Found linked in a recent WaPo article, “Should Teachers Ignore Poverty’s Impact?”

Just a bit of fun, because I hope this isn’t the serious viewpoint of the “accountability” fetishists out there. Enjoy a few laughs watching the Nice White Lady’s Burden:

I missed this one: Chicago education officials were ready to consider a proposal for a “gay-friendly” school, but the GLBT group that originally proposed the plan withdrew it.  Apparently, they didn’t want to bend to requests that the school be “all-inclusive, for kids that are straight, gay, obese,” and not exclusively GLBT.

Many of you know I was harassed for three years for being perceived as gay at my high school back in the ’70s, so I’m fascinated by recent research into the effects of this harassment on students nationwide. Key findings:

• widespread verbal and physical harassment, assault
• average GPA’s a half point lower than perceived straight students
• frequent truancy among 35%, compared to 5% of perceived straight students
• increased drop-out risk
• bad effects on college choices

And that sounds just like my 1970s.

So, despite opposition by GLBT groups that argue such a school would segregate GLBT students like second-class citizens, I have to disagree. As an old veteran of these wars, I’m proof, in a sense, of the counter-claim by Gay Lesbian and Straight Education Network founder Kevin Jennings:

If we keep doing nothing, we are going to keep getting these horrifying levels of harassment, greater rates of skipping, not going to college and more tragic violence like the murder of Lawrence King. Those are our choices. We can continue to do nothing, and we know the results, or we can save young people’s lives and offer them an education and a future.

It’s a tough one, but I have to side here with the bullied of all, not just rainbow, stripes. Because little seems to have changed in 30 years.

Photo: Gay-Straight Alliance Schoolbus by jglsongs

So, because the Texas vote will set science standards for the next decade, textbook publishers will likely be aiming to please the creationists until 2018. And other states, to repeat Loewen, will have to choose amongst science textbooks designed for these Creationists in charge of Texas schools.

That’s why it matters. By 2018, Obama will have left his (knock wood) second term in office for a two full years – but most students during his presidency will have studied anti-science textbooks because of the actions of the Texas Board of Education.

Call it an Obama presidency with a Palin education policy.

3. Solutions?

Is it possible to influence the Texas BOE to vote down the provision in January or the following spring? It seems unlikely. Most of the members belong to the extreme religious right, with open ties to the creationist Discovery Institute that supported similar anti-science campaigns in Kansas and Pennsylvania.

But unlikely is not impossible. So here are some ideas:

1. Call on Obama to use the bully pulpit.

Click image to see Climate Change message on YouTube.

Last month, Obama declared an end to climate change science deniers. Earlier in the campaign, he openly voiced his opposition to creationism in all its guises during the campaign. If he appealed not to the ideological BOE, but to the nation – and the textbook industry – to shout down Texas, that might limit the damage to textbook content nationwide.²

2. Use Smart Mob and/or Tipping Point campaigns

Pressure the Texas BOE and, again, the textbook publishers, with opposition. Get schools nationwide to declare their support for evolution-friendly textbooks, and their refusal to buy anything else. (If I were to do that, show of hands: who would support it by spreading the word?)

3. Longer term, organize to defeat the creationists in school board elections.

It’s amazing that Board of Education officials need no scientific or educational expertise to be elected, yet they control the curriculum, standards, and funds of the public school system in Texas.

Worse, as U. of Arkansas Prof. Jay Greene argues,

Local school board elections on off-election days have very low turnout, often in the single digits. Given the obscurity of local school politics, it’s easier for the employees and their organized interests to dominate school politics. They’re just about the only ones following what is going on and voting in those elections.

What’s good for the creationist goose can be good for the scientific gander too – if only the gander played the politics smarter.

4. [Your ideas here]

1. Here’s a good first-hand account of the hearings in Austin. [↩]
2. Add to TheIndyDebate map. [↩]

NCLB as a potential world epidemic

To riff off an old saw, “When America sneezes, the world catches a cold.” This is beyond obvious when we think of the Iraq invasion, the refusal to sign the Kyoto Protocol, and countless other examples.

Less obvious, though, are the effects of American education policy on the world. The “standards and accountability” movement, exemplified most notoriously by No Child Left Behind, can appear to be a mostly domestic, purely American issue.

But that appearance is wrong.

For evidence, look no further than New York City Education Chancellor Joel Klein’s recent visit to Australia – at the invitation of Australia’s Education Minister. Klein’s visit is stirring the same controversies in Australia that his policies have caused in the USA: should teacher unions be crippled? Should Australia look to the likes of Rupert Murdoch to privatize public education in the same way some Americans are looking to Bill Gates?

(We could extend this discussion to the encroachment of good ol’ American creationism and “Intelligent” Design into Australian science classrooms as well, but will leave that depressing subject for another post. My own secular warfare, here in Korea, with creationism edu-evangelists requires a stronger stomach and sense of humor than I have right now.)

Obama as education epidemiologist?

All of this points to the global importance of the incoming Obama administration’s education policies. Where will he stand on NCLB, on Charter Schools, on equity and finance and teacher tenure?

Cagey as ever, Obama has so far sent mixed signals. Pro-union, anti-privatizing advocates are heartened by his selection of progressive NCLB critic Linda Darling-Hammond as his education transition team manager, and hope he’ll follow up by appointing her Secretary of Education. But anti-union advocates who favor the likes of Klein and Washington D.C. school chancellor Michelle Rhee take hope in Obama’s stated support for expanding federal charter schools.

A closer inspection of Obama/Biden’s official education plan on Change.gov, though, suggests that progressives have more reasons to hope than the Klein-Rhee types. It seems to lay out reforms aiming at a “kinder, gentler,” more holistic NCLB. From the site:

Reform No Child Left Behind: Obama and Biden will reform NCLB, which starts by funding the law. Obama and Biden believe teachers should not be forced to spend the academic year preparing students to fill in bubbles on standardized tests. They will improve the assessments used to track student progress . . . and improve student learning in a timely, individualized manner. Obama and Biden will also improve NCLB’s accountability system so that we are supporting schools that need improvement, rather than punishing them.

A heretical close?

The other elements of the plan are encouraging and well worth the read, but – heresy warning - nowhere in the plan do we see any mention of the one issue that, in my view, the anti-union camp rightly raises: how to remove inept teachers from schools. Let’s be honest: we teachers have all worked with “omigod” colleagues we’d never want to inflict on a child.

Corey Bower writes a nicely pragmatic post about the tensions between protecting unions and eliminating undesirable teachers, in which he speculates,

I don’t think any union, or any union member, would argue that we should protect bad teachers. My guess is that [unions could support] some sort of provision that allowed for the dismissal of the worst teachers.

Speculation is all well and good – but does anybody have concrete examples of such a thing in their unions?¹

1. Add to TheIndyDebate map. [↩]

Bill Farren of Education for Well-Being, one of my favorite sites, writes about the fatal assumption of economic theory, and some new economics textbooks that may mark a paradigm-shift by questioning those assumptions from a green economics standpoint. Well worth a read, for both economics and environmental science teachers.

And Dr. Jim Horn, who writes at Schools Matter, a blog I’ve consistently enjoyed since subscribing a couple of months ago, writes a good analysis of the usual suspects who will be lining up outside Obama’s door to push more of the same educational policies from the Bush years here.  Jim describes the focus of Schools Matter in his tagline:

This space explores issues in public education policy, and it advocates for a commitment to and a re-examination of the democratic purposes of schools. If there is some urgency in the message, it is due to the current reform efforts that are based on a radical re-invention of education, now spearheaded by a psychometric blitzkrieg of “metastasizing testing” aimed at dismantling a public education system that took almost 200 years to build.

I hope to interview Jim about his take on charter v. public schools soon, so stay tuned. In the meantime, if anybody is, or knows of, a strong proponent of charter schools to give a counter-argument, feel free to leave a name in comments or on my contact page.

Last week, Wikispaces invited me to give a Wikispaces in Education Webinar about four wiki projects I’ve done in high school English and history classes: The Broken World Wiki Textbook, a student-made textbook of modern world history from WW1 to WW2, featuring text, images, and embedded videos and student video lectures (and linked to a companion reflective class blog); the French Revolution Ant Farm Diaries, an historical fiction Writing-to-Learn unit in which student-created fictional characters interracted with their classmates’ characters in interlinked diary entries; King Lear Street Talk, a modern adaptation of Shakespeare’s King Lear, forcing the close line-by-line reading of 16th-century English necessary to adapt it to “Sopranos”-style modern English; and the 1001 Flat World Tales, a global creative writing workshop using the Six Traits of Effective Writing and a peer-reviewed Writing Workshop joining students from Hawaii, Colorado, and my classroom in Seoul.

The first three projects listed above were “local” collaborations, the fourth one global. I discuss in the webinar my thoughts on the relative merits of both approaches in the webinar. (I posted about those reflections most fully here.)

Thanks to Wikispaces for the opportunity to look back over two years of experiments in wiki pedagogy and introduce them all in one fell swoop.

If you want to read the “think-aloud” posts I wrote when designing these projects, check January to June or so of the Archives.

Here’s the event (it should start when I do, at almost 26:50, and finish a half hour later. The first 30 minutes are a tour of Wikispaces for beginners. The black blob on the screencast will disappear within a few seconds.):