I never thought I’d see the day:
School District Superintendent Maria Goodloe-Johnson offers a profound and practical observation: a quality education trumps diversity.
Coming on the tail of this month’s hand-wringing over Seattle’s growing non-white ethnic communities, it’s nice to see that someone is willing to admit that schools are meant to educate, not to right society’s wrongs.
Last week was finals week, the last gasp of the school year. Well, not quite the last gasp, because we have an extra week afterward, for some inexplicable reason. I apologize for my blogging hiatus, but I’ve been neck-deep in essays for the last week, trying to decipher teenage scrawl.
It always amazes me that a student (who seems like an otherwise sane human being) will choose not to study, even knowing that finals will come, whether he is ready or not.
Did you know that Ho Chi Minh was an important figure in the Korean War? I didn’t either. Several of my students, though, are convinced of it. Also, that Brazil’s economy is mainly based on fishing. It’s not.
But it’s all over now. Nearly all of my students passed, which makes me happy. I always take it personally when a student doesn’t pass. I know that some students are determined to fail because they just don’t care, but the battle I fight is getting them to care. To care about things like Ho Chi Minh, the economy of South America, and the foundations of democracy. If they fail, I’ve lost the battle.
But it’s over now, and I will get back to regular blogging this week.
Somehow, until today I hadn’t paid much attention to the Kay Powers controversy in the Everett School District. Reading through the Times today, though, I came across this, and was so flabbergasted at the idea of a district secretly videotaping a teacher who is not suspected of being a pedophile/terrorist/murderer/etc. that I just had to do a little research into the case.
Let me just state that there are no heroes here. This is not the Dreyfus Affair. Kay Powers, a teacher so beloved she has her own MySpace support page, with 20+ years teaching experience, allowed some students to publish an underground newspaper using school equipment. She allowed them to be in the school building after hours, drove some of them home, and left them unsupervised for an unspecified amount of time. The purpose of this newspaper, apparently, was to provide an alternative to the school-sponsored publication, which was routinely vetted by the Cascade High School administration before it was published.
Okay, so that’s that. Powers made some bad choices. She violated school policy in fairly minor and not-really-student-endangering ways. Yes, one could argue that unsupervised students might run amok, but the type of students who publish underground newspapers in cooperation with a veteran teacher are unlikely to get into all that much trouble. As a veteran teacher, Powers should have known better, though, and certainly deserved a reprimand. She should also have paid for the school materials that were consumed. The whole situation should have been handled in-house, by her immediate supervisor.
Instead, ESD went off the deep end. Covert video surveillance in Powers’ classroom led to her dismissal, an attempt to revoke her teaching license, and a media circus. There was even a death threat against the Superintendent. Since the firing, the school district has allowed Powers to teach one more year at another district school before retiring, reneging on their earlier decision. The district has spent over $14000 so far prosecuting the case, and will likely spend more as a result of the union’s complaint.
All of this brings me down to my three questions about the case:
First, why haven’t cooler heads prevailed in the Everett School District? Was what Powers was doing really so threatening it required video surveillance?
Second, once the school district decided to fire Powers, why couldn’t they go through with it? (I actually know the answer to this question. It is almost impossible to fire a tenured teacher in the State of Washington, no matter what they do, thanks to the powerful teachers’ unions.) Shouldn’t an employer be able to fire an employee who has deliberately disobeyed direct orders?
The third is my screed: Why do the students who support Powers on the MySpace page created for her feel comfortable referring to her as “Che Powers,” expressing their support with “Viva la Powers” shirts, and reviling the Mill Creek “bourgeoisie?”
What on earth are they teaching these kids? Does Powers identify herself with Che Guevara? If so, the ESD has a lot more problems than just an underground newspaper. I am, of course, overplaying this, but still–if she’s such a good teacher, why hasn’t she told her kids not to venerate murderous zealots like Guevara? That’s one of the basic rules in my classes: Don’t venerate murderous zealots. It’s right after “raise your hand.”
As I said before. No heroes. Not Powers, not the district, not the students. And public education is now $14000 in the hole because of it.
After linking yesterday to some sample math questions from the WASL, today I’m going to use one as an example of why the WASL is a bad test. I’m not addressing the much bigger problems that WA state schools have with math, just the types of questions on the test itself.
Schools of education teach teachers that assessment is a delicate thing, best handled by a deft practitioner. Time and effort goes into writing tests, and the worst thing that a teacher can do is provide a test that is poorly written. Poorly written test questions are unclear, test more than one concept with the same question, try to trick students, or contain errors of fact. For example:
If you cut a cardboard tube, you will find that it is a rectangle. How much cardboard is used in a tube if its length is 5.5 inches and its circumference is 6 inches. Explain your answer in detail.
This is from the high school WASL practice problems. It is bad in a whopping three ways.
In order to be a good question, the above example would have to be rewritten as follows:
What is the outside surface area of a hollow cylinder with a length of 5.5 inches and a circumference of 6 inches?
This question clearly states the problem, using standard terminology, in a way that most students can understand. It does not mislead, nor does it ask for a long written answer. Any student who had studied the geometry of three-dimensional shapes could easily demonstrate his or her learning by providing an answer to this question. It is a geometry question, and would be answered numerically.
It only gets worse. Move on to the “number sense” part of the test. Many of these questions are little more than math tricks, few of which one would encounter in real life, and they all end with the sinister “explain your answer in detail.”
The product of two whole numbers is 10,000. If neither number contains a zero digit, what are the two numbers? Explain your answer in detail.
I cannot imagine a situation in life in which I would have to figure this out.
The test even has Sudoku:
A “Magic Square” has the property that the sum of the three numbers in each and every row, column, and diagonal is the same. What number should be in the center box of the Magic Square shown below? Explain your answer in detail.
9 17 19 ? 3 15
Millions of dollars have already gone into the WASL, but there’s a point at which we need to cut our losses. Unless the format of the test is fundamentally changed, there’s little chance of widespread student success, at least on the math portion, because the test itself is deeply flawed.
In addition to establishing technology standards and creating technology courses that will prepare our students for life after high school, Washington State schools need to improve assessment.
The purpose of assessment is to determine whether or not students have reached learning targets. Washington’s learning targets for K-10 are actually pretty good [except math (pdf), apparently]. The Essential Academic Learning Requirements (EALRs) cover the basics for all grades, laying out what students should know and the skills they should master at each level of their schooling. I’ve taught from EALRs, and they’re a good road map for teachers, as far as they go.
But what about the assessment? The WASL is our major assessment in Washington State, as any number of interest groups will tell you. Now, the WASL is such a politicized thing that I think we sometimes lose sight of what it’s supposed to do. It is supposed to tell us if we’re teaching the EALRs. That’s it. Are we meeting our targets?
As such, I am strongly in favor of the WASL. We absolutely need a standardized test so that we know how our students are doing across the state. Those who are opposed to all standardized testing do not understand public education’s responsibilities to, you know, the public. So I’m for the WASL in theory.
In practice, however, the WASL’s shorcomings are well-documented. Mainly, it boils down to four issues:
Reforming the WASL would have a major, positive impact on our high schools (and all the other schools, for that matter). We need to streamline assessment and learning, create a better test, and format the assessment system so that teachers, parents, students, and government all receive meaningful feedback from the testing process.
Four Bellevue high schools have made it into the nation’s top 100. I have to say, I really admire the Bellevue school district. They have an awesome Advanced Placement program, and I’ve attended two week-long AP summer institutes there. Their commitment to educational excellence is without equal in Washington State.
After my last post, I thought it would be good to do a series on the changes I believe necessary to improve our state’s high schools. As a high school teacher, this is my bread and butter. Not a day goes by when I don’t think about how to make my classroom better, and not a week goes by when I don’t think about how secondary schooling could be improved in general.
For my first installment, I’m going to talk about something dear to my heart–technology, specifically, computers and the internet.
I have a shocking revelation for the educational community.
The internet is not new anymore.
I know, this comes as a great surprise to you, considering the way we teachers treat it. The internet is so…big. And scary. There could be naked pictures on it. Or myspace. Or even hotmail.
Most teachers are afraid to touch the internet with a yardstick. This makes sense, because most teachers are not under thirty. That does not mean that they do not have huge educational experience and advice to offer, but it does mean that they are not a part of the web generation. They are so afraid of Web 1.0 that they can’t even approach what Web 2.0 has to offer in terms of educational opportunities. (Yes, some older teachers embrace technology. No, not all young teachers are tech savvy. Will I generalize anyway? Yes, I will.)
The age-technology gap extends into all areas of educational planning. Particularly into the realms of those who make decisions about graduation requirements and course offerings. Because of this, our schools are completely dropping the ball in tech ed.
Here is a real-life example. I have now taught at two suburban high schools in Washington State, one public and one private. Both answered to more-or-less the same graduation requirements, as set forth by OSPI. The tech classes required at both schools were laughable. They did little more than teach students how to use Microsoft Word. The handful of “geeks” at the schools who were actually computer-savvy taught themselves. There were higher-level tech classes available, but they were only electives.
Year after year, I have been faced with students whose idea of internet research was to type “what is the capitl of india” into Google and click on the site at the top of the list, usually Wikipedia. And I was teaching juniors and seniors. Nowhere in their educational careers had they encountered a class that taught them how to actually use technology effectively. There is not even a technology requirement for high school graduation in Washington.
Real-life example number two. The Professional Certificate, which all Washington State certified teachers have to get after their first few years of teaching, requires all teachers, from kindergarten to high school band, to teach the ethical use of technology in their classrooms. So the teachers plug it in where they can, willy-nilly, in order to fulfill the requirement. This accomplishes NOTHING. Less than nothing. It ensures that tech ed will be sprinkled through a student’s career, with no solid foundation and no consistency.
Here are a few humble suggestions for our schools:
From Save Seattle Schools:
More than ever, high schools need to be a conveyor belt to college.
This is from an article about how high schools should be improved, preparing students for the college degrees necessary to middle-class life. I know it sounds good on the surface, but, honestly, this plan seems kind of short-sighted to me.
I prefer to dream big.
What if high school prepared students for a middle-class life, instead? What if, rather than keeping high schools a sort of middle-school-part-deux on the way to college, we actually improved high schools to a functional and beneficial level?
What if Washington State’s high schools were so good that our students could get jobs, good jobs, right out of high school? What if our state-mandated and state-funded education system was good enough to be enough?
If eighth graders could do this 123 years ago, why can’t our 12th graders do it now? High school needs to be more than a holding tank. Employability shouldn’t come with a $60,000+ tax.
From today’s Seattle P-I editorial board:
For teachers, greater uniformity [of curriculum] can mean stronger support, such as the availability of prepared lesson plans instead of having to write their own content for classroom instruction.
As any seventh-grader can tell you, good teachers make their own lesson plans. Bad teachers read out of the book. Any argument that claims that more regulation will help teachers is specious. Teaching is a creative field. Good teachers are endlessly creative, pinpointing student needs and manufacturing lessons designed to increase students’ knowledge and understanding. This is difficult and time-consuming, but it is the job.
So-called “streamlined” or “teacher-proof” curricula reduce the job of teacher to that of baby-sitter. Give a well-qualified teacher freedom to work within her classroom, and she will far exceed the results of the cuckoo who drones scripted lesson plans from a spiral notebook. Teaching is a lot like economics. Free markets make rich nations. Free teachers make rich educational environments.
In that spirit, how to develop a lesson plan.
I just love studies. Eat chocolate. Don’t each chocolate. Butter. Margarine. Sit at a 35-degree angle. Every day, Google News coughs up 547 articles on the latest study, every one designed to make our lives even better than the last.
One of my favorite hobbies is to look at study sponsors, to try to figure out what interest they might have in the study’s outcome. Today, we have a classic example of conflicted interest, in the form of a study put out by the American Association of University Women.
Their study claims to “debunk the boy’s crisis,” saying that current reports about boys not doing as well in school as girls are all wrong. Well–there’s a problem with that. As in any field, education studies need independent verification. A women’s group saying that boys don’t have school problems is like Big Sugar saying you shouldn’t eat artificial sweeteners–suspect.
As for the actual claims of the study, they are a mixed bag. The idea that income has more to do with achievement than gender is a non-starter. You can’t “debunk” an idea by saying “Look! This other thing over here is so much worse!” One fact that the study does reference, which ought to be a huge, glaring signal to the educational community is this:
Women have earned 57 percent of bachelor’s degrees since 1982 and outperformed boys on high school grade-point averages. In 2005, male students had a GPA of 2.86 and girls, 3.09.
But wait–doesn’t that mean that there is an achievement gap between male and female students? I thought this study was claiming that there wasn’t. No, wait, it’s claiming that the achievement gap between boys and girls doesn’t matter, because poverty is so much worse. The Executive Summary of the study (pdf) states clearly that the organization believes that the undergraduate graduation gap between men and women doesn’t matter. They admit that it exists, but, you see, it doesn’t matter. Because AAUW says so.
There are three common problems in educational research. The first is an over-reliance on personal testimony and individual narratives. The second is the frequent inattention to standard, scientific research procedures (separating causation and correlation, isolating research topics, maintaining an appropriate control group, ensuring a sufficient sample size). The third is the relationship between the researcher and the research topic.
This study from the AAUW falls into the last two problem areas. Whether its claims are true or not doesn’t matter, because