A Voice of Hope Rises Above the Din

The school year ended a couple of weeks ago here. The halls are empty, we are cleaning up last year’s records, building next year’s schedule student by student.

What goes on now is the work behind the scenes; work done without fanfare or hype, by teachers and staff whose work right now makes next year’s successes possible.

Things are a bit slower, however, and it allows me to catch up on things sent my way that were set aside in the rush to graduation this spring. In that collection of articles, books, and notes was one piece that caught my eye and gave me hope in spite of the ongoing and oft misguided debates about our schools. You can find it here, and I believe you will find this parent’s plea for school reformers to get serious about what really matters in schools inspiring.

I do not know the author personally, though I think I would like Helen Gym. She is the driving force behind something called Parents United for Public Education, good people who work for reforms like free busing for kids to school, smaller class sizes, healthy fresh food in cafeterias—you know, simple stuff that does not make headlines but really makes a difference.

But it was Ms. Gym’s piece on what parents really want when it comes to schools that caught my eye. Here is the short list, but I encourage you to follow the link to her entire piece:

• Programs rich in the arts, sciences, and history that are about more than test scores;
• Critical thinking;
• Small classes;
• An experienced, stable, and professional teaching force.

And what she points out is that while this is what parents want, these simple steps are ignored by politicians who contract out teaching, spend fortunes on tests and pre-packaged curricula, and continue to dumb down our schools with a focus on one-size-fits-all standardization.

Now that I am superintendent of schools in my little district, I can lead on some of these things in spite of state budget cuts and the focus on testing here. As Ms. Gym suggests, we are going to keep our early childhood programs in the face of reduced funds—and we are going to see how to make them more developmentally appropriate. We are going to squeeze just a bit harder to reduce class sizes in our middle school. We are going to continue to offer our staff the best support we can to bring on line a curriculum rich in critical literacy skills. And we are going to create a better website and re-launch our district newsletter to try and do a better job connecting with parents.

And I think I am going to send all of our staff—from teachers to custodians, aides to principals, a copy of Helen Gym’s fine piece of writing.

I have no idea how this will turn out for us, or for Ms. Gym and her allies in Philadelphia. But I do know that on this Saturday morning, in spite of the rain, things seem a bit brighter just knowing she and her friends are on my side.

The Triple Crown

It’s spring, and time for the Triple Crown. But I do not mean in horse racing.

Rather, at Federal Hocking Secondary School it is time for the academic Triple Crown for our seniors.

The first of the three, our Graduation Portfolio presentation, took place last Friday, the day before the Kentucky Derby. Each senior stood before a panel of faculty and defended the portfolio that they had assembled demonstrating their readiness to graduate.

The first section of the portfolio was their plan for after high school, complete with college or job acceptance letters, resumes, letters of reference and their own agenda for life after high school.

Section two demonstrated, through course work or work outside of high school, their competence in math, science, humanities, and at least one elective area. And the third section presented their competence as a citizen, documented through work at school, in their community, and in the society writ large.

All day the staff listened to personal stories of challenge and achievement as our students stood and delivered their best for our appraisal.

Next will be the Senior Project presentations. For the past year every potential graduate has been charged with designing and carrying out an individual project where they learn something new of their choosing.

With the help of an outside learning resource that each student has to identify, they have had to learn a new skill and then present a product that demonstrates that achievement. On Project Showcase night this year our halls will be filled with artifacts ranging from a 1940s restored car to a biodiesel refinery, rehabilitated horses to gourmet desserts, computer programs to gun cabinets, and hand-tied trout flies to gluten-free cookbooks.

Each of these projects has challenged our students to learn on their own, to find a passion and pursue it, and to find someone to teach them something new outside of the school walls. These are skills that will last them a lifetime.

Finally, on the two days prior to graduation, our seniors will take their final performance assessments. I have written about these previously, but in case you missed it, we do not believe the traditional ‘final exam’ best demonstrates what students have learned.

Thus, we schedule half-day performances that range from researching a position paper, writing it and defending it in a seminar, to carrying out a new lab investigation in the chemistry class. It is a moment when our students prove to us that they can use what they have learned in a new context independent of our help. So much more valuable than one more multiple-choice test.

Many people have pointed out that for too many youngsters the senior year of high school is a waste. Having finished all the requirements for college by December, they coast through a spring featuring nothing but proms and pranks. I would agree—but not here. While some schools see the senior year as a victory lap, we see it as the final lap in the one-mile race, a sprint to the finish.

Do we get push back? You bet: Why do we have to do what no other school around is doing? This is too much pressure on my child in the final year. How can I fail to graduate if I have all my credits but did not do my project?

Of course, with many adolescents, push back is the name of the game. But in the end our goal is not to make school easy—it is to make it meaningful. As my colleague Nancy Sizer pointed out in her important book Crossing the Stage the senior year can be a vital capstone to an educational experience, but only if we make it so.

Yes, we push hard down the stretch. But why not? We want our graduates to know that you put in your best effort at any task all the way to the end, not just through the first three-fourths of the task. And given that for many young people high school will be the end of their formal education, it is our responsibility to make sure they are well-prepared in the areas of careers, intellect, and citizenship when they cross our stage later this month.

It is a shame that policy makers do not get the importance of standards such as the ones we use at Federal Hocking. In fact, in Ohio the current administration is heading towards ending the Senior Project requirement, put in just two years ago by then-Gov. Ted Strickland. This while they will keep the five-part multiple-guess graduation test that students take in tenth grade.

No matter, it is springtime here in Southeastern Ohio and the bugle has blown calling our candidates for graduation to the starting line. The race for their own personal Triple Crown is underway; and I am proud of their ability to take up and master this challenge.

March Madness

I used to love March.

I attended the University of North Carolina as an undergraduate and March meant madness of the best kind. There was the ACC Basketball Tourney and then the NCAA playoffs—and of course, March meant spring break as well.

Now, I hate it. Forget the fact that there is so much more to love as I have grown older. Sure, there is still the basketball—and for all you doubters my Tar Heels have returned! But with March my farm comes alive starting with the spring peepers calling from the creeks, the first bass from the ponds, and wildflowers in fields and the smell in the woods telling me spring is here.

While it should be one of my favorite months all of this is overshadowed by the most important part of March for the kids and schools in Ohio--the annual madness called the Ohio Graduation Tests.

For five days during either the second or third week of March (it depends upon when your spring break falls) tenth grade students across Ohio sit for five days for tests that will decide whether or not they will graduate from school two years later. Those same tests also determine the school’s ranking with the state and whether it will fall prey to the Annual Yearly Progress measures that determine its fate with the state and federal government.

For five days students sit for two and one half hours taking tests in Reading, Math, Writing, Science and Social Studies. During these five days students face a barrage of questions covering the Boxer Rebellion to quadratic equations, possessive plurals to theocracies, Punnett squares to the meaning of a poem. Questions that I doubt any adult in Ohio not currently in high school could answer. It is like nothing they have done before and nothing they will ever do again. And yet it is one of the most important measures of their success in school.

We have been giving some version of these tests for nearly 20 years now—and I keep wondering why.

Someone once said (it is attributed to Einstein, but no one is really sure) that the definition of madness is continuing to do the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

Our own March madness is exactly this. We continue to give standardized tests as if giving them will in some way improve schools. Sure enough, each year states enter into the test score sweepstakes (led by Education Week magazine among others) to see whose scores are the highest. So what?

There is no study that links the scores on these exams with success in life, college, the military, or the workplace. There is no study that says these tests have led to a richer or more challenging curriculum, or more engaging teaching practices, or more welcoming schools (in fact, the evidence seems to suggest just the opposite). There is no study that says that the money we are spending on these things is a good investment, with more of a payoff than, say, more teachers, books, supplies, or extracurricular activities. There is simply no evidence that doing more of the same will get us different results.

But when you are suffering from madness, reason does not matter.

Which is probably why I have the Tar Heels winning the national championship in my local pool.

Something Else I Don't Get ...

In an earlier post I shared my confusion about who gets to speak for public education. I am confused again.

Maybe I am missing something but aside from ideology, what is really behind the work in several states to end collective bargaining rights for teachers’ unions?

I’ve been a school principal for 19 years, two of which I spent away from my beloved secondary school in Ohio to start an independent school in Los Angeles. The school in Ohio has a negotiated agreement and a teachers’ union; the one in LA did not. I prefer the union and the contract.

Before I tell you why, let’s be clear about the bigger picture that is going on right now. While teacher unions seem to be taking the blame for whatever is wrong with public schools (and it is not as much as you think but we will leave that for now), there isn’t much evidence that this is the case. In fact, it seems that students in states with unions do better on tests and graduation rates than states without. (The best and most balanced summary of the evidence I have found is here.)

Additionally, while teachers (and all public employees for that matter) seem to be taking it on the chin as states cut their budgets, it is certainly unclear as to whether they are to blame for the current recession. If you want to punish someone for the current economic crisis we would do better to tax bankers, mortgage lenders, credit default swappers. Or better yet, as Ezra Klein in the Washington Post points out, blame the politicians themselves who cut taxes for the rich and other connected friends—tax cuts that did little to create jobs and directly led to the current meltdown.

Clearly, the budget problems could be solved without the union/teacher-bashing--if the politicians wanted that to happen. In my state of Ohio the $8 billion dollar budget hole could be plugged up to the tune of $7 billion just by reducing tax expenditures that cover tax breaks for everything from utilities installing already required environmental equipment to brewers paying their taxes two weeks early (the piece by economist Mark Cassell pointing this out was published in the Columbus Dispatch, offices across the street from the legislature—I wonder if any of them read it).

But on the micro level, as a school administrator I prefer working with, rather than against, the local union for several reasons.

First, coming together to talk about contracts helps us all see where we can work together for our kids. It is tough for a teacher, whose pay depends upon the benevolence of a school head, to speak up when something needs to be done about a lack of resources, too many kids in the class, or coordinating planning times.

Second, I have yet to see any fairer way to determine salary and working conditions than through a negotiated agreement. Without a negotiated agreement I have seen first hand how favored teachers get easier loads and higher pay, while the ones willing to raise questions never seem to reap the fruits of their labor.

Third, contracts set expectations -- clear expectations -- for teachers, too.

Fourth, contracts make clear the process of teacher evaluation. I hear a lot these days about “poor” teachers in schools and how hard it is to get rid of them. Well, I have let several teachers go (I am not proud of that—it just means I could not figure out how to help them improve) and know it can be done. And remember, every teacher in every school has been assessed by a principal or supervisor, and has been recommended for a contract renewal. If you want to find the source of bad teachers in schools, I suggest you start with administrators who are not doing their jobs.

Finally, as a school principal, my job is to work with teachers on improving instruction, not debating how much they get paid or how many hours or days they work. That agreement is between the board and the teachers; my work is about teaching and learning.

I know there are contracts that some administrators loathe…but here’s the deal; two parties agreed to those. That is why they call it negotiation. Are there some things in our contract I don’t like? There might be. But the contract carries the signatures of our publicly elected board of education. If people do not like it, they should elect someone else.

And if statehouse politicians do not like unions, they should just say so. They shouldn’t use the current budget crisis they created as a smoke screen for an agenda they could not force through otherwise.

More of the Same

A while ago I wrote that I was disappointed that no one in Washington was interested in the wisdom to be found in our successful public schools. I put it this way, “But would somebody please explain to me how the success of my staff, and the staffs of many schools just like ours, is no longer of value to a nation that seems to still want a good public education system?”

Today it feels like déjà vu all over again.

I received, from the esteemed U. S. House of Representatives, news that the first hearing to deal with education policy has been scheduled! In the new era of small government, of listening to the people, of getting Washington out of the way of real reform, I was hoping the hearings this time around would be different. No more would policy wonks who have never dared put a foot in a classroom be ushering in school reforms that were unproven at best, damaging at worst.

No, now we would hear from, as Carl Sandburg said, ‘the people, yes, the people.’

Imagine a room full of teachers who were making a difference in the lives of children—teachers who actually taught a child to read, who helped a student discover the love of science, or who knew how to manage a classroom of 28 adolescents when they first dissected a worm—talking to our esteemed members of Congress on what they needed to keep up the good work! Stunning!

The preliminary word was that this hearing, scheduled for later this week, would consider how “many states and local school districts have adopted innovative solutions to improve academic performance, enhance accountability, and involve parents in their child’s education. Federal policy should not undermine important efforts underway at the local level to advance student achievement.

Members of the committee will hear testimony that describes the challenges and opportunities that states and local school districts face in preparing students for success, and examine the current federal role in the nation’s education system.”

Hot damn!

But then I went to the witness list. Four witnesses, with a combined classroom experience of (at least to what they will admit on their official biographies) nine years. Apparently most of that was nearly a quarter of a century ago.

No worries. Maybe they know something about public education and how to make it better.

Well, only if you think the best way to go is to end public education, give parents vouchers, and hope everything turns out all right. The members of Congress will hear from the leader of an Arizona school choice organization whose web site streams cute videos of kids but runs banners about how to gut public schools. And then there is the fellow from the Cato Institute who would be happy if every public school in the country closed tomorrow.

What a shame, and what another lost opportunity. Once again the voices of those closest to kids, of those willing to forgo the law school option at the end of the two year TFA foreign service stint, of those who, like my wife, are spending another night planning for instruction using materials they bought with their own money, will not be heard.

Imagine if we did this to doctors, the military, or business leaders. If we simply held hearings in DC where the most adamant critics of their work were given free rein to call for the socialization of medicine, the elimination of the Department of Defense, or the firing of the most senior CEOs. Too hard to think about? Well, it’s what is happening to our teachers as their voices are silenced and their experience devalued.

Tomorrow, bright and early, I will head to school. I’ll be in the company of expert craft persons who have devoted their lives to teaching kids in one of the poorest areas of our state. They are teachers who make a difference in those students’ lives every day -- from preparing them for college and teaching them how to write for publication to preparing them to be a citizen in our democracy.

Lucky me. And too bad for an America that will continue to be subject to policies from Washington that are more about ideology than ideas.

Putting the "F" Word Back in Education

Smokey Daniels, a well-known literacy guru, was talking about schools at a meeting my staff and I were attending. He stood up and said, “I think we need to put the “F” word back in schools. I mean we need “F” (pause for effect), “U” (another pause), “N” (relieved laughter and clapping).

He’s right, of course. Kids and teachers could use a little more of the “F” word.

When second semester began at my school my school this year you couldn’t find a student in math, science, social studies or English classes.

Instead, the kids were concocting “healthy” cookies in the food lab, banging out ironworks with a blacksmith from England or arguing the finer points of law in mock trial teams.

Me? I was teaching the finer points of fly tying and casting.

It was all part of our annual “intersession” program, a time between the first and second semesters where teachers offer courses based on their expertise outside the academic areas they usually teach and where students learn new skills and activities.

Most of all, it is fun. In this era of high- stakes testing and “accountability,” I have been dismayed by how fun has been taken out of school like air from a balloon. More and more we’ve heard about kindergartners losing recess or play time to test preparation or field trips to cultural sites being scrapped in favor of drill-and-kill drudgery. Time-on-task is measured in minutes, and it squeezes out the occasional classroom diversion or story book read out loud. It’s all in the name of keeping up with some illusive ratings game involving international comparisons of our kids.

Here’s the funny thing: most of those international hot-shot countries aren’t as obsessed with test scores, time-on-task, and all the other stuff we here hold up as the only way to improve schools. Instead, those countries spend time and money on the front end providing for the health and welfare of kids, preparing a strong teaching force and funding their schools in an adequate and sensible way. Then, they stand back and watch all the good stuff happen — probably with a few “intersession” programs like our school uses.

Yes, it’s true that test scores are up in China. Yet employers there say they cannot find employees who can solve problems and come up with creative and innovative solutions. Some of that country’s well-off parents seek to export their children to America for school. Look, China does a great job with cheap, exploited labor producing mass quantities of look-alike goods. Good for them. But that’s not a future I want for my kids.

Historically, it was not kids who had been in school the longest and taken the most tests that led and changed America. Rather, it was the farm boys and girls who knew how to fix tanks with bailing twine and set bones with torn shirts who won World War II. And it was backyard tinkerers like Homer Hickam who launched rockets and created computers. They went to school and took tests, of course. But they also were allowed time to work with their hands and their imaginations.

I am not calling for a return to the “good old days,” a time when some children were consigned to less-demanding classes and other children were not even allowed through the school house door. But I do think we have lost something in our unending quest for lofty standards, more rigor and higher test scores.

That something is the joyfulness of play, and the creativeness of curiosity. We have separated our children from the very world that sustains them. They will be poorer intellectually, emotionally, and spiritually for it.

People smarter than me have pointed this out. Deborah Meier has written how physical and imaginative play is the important work of childhood. Richard Louv has warned us of a “nature deficit disorder. " Sustainability educators have pointed out how children have been disconnected from the physical world which makes their lives possible.

All of these folks are on to the same thing—the best way to engage our children in school is to make sure schooling includes the “F” word.

Our intersession week is one way to do that. And we hold on to it in spite of pressure to cover more content and take more tests. (A confession: tenth-graders spend part of intersession learning “test-taking” skills as a way of making sure they can tackle the state exams. After all, we do live in the real world!)

Amidst all the talk about No Child Left Behind re-authorization, national standards, new tests and budget shortfalls, I suggest those of us who are in the front lines of education – those of us who are actually in the schools -- keep asking the same question: Where can we sneak in a little of the “F” word?

Meet the New Test -- Same as the Old Test

In a recent Washington Post piece, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan repeated a refrain we have heard far too often about the subject of testing.

In a nutshell, Duncan admits that No Child Left Behind and its reliance on standardized, fill-in-the-bubble, multiple guess tests both dumbs-down and narrows instruction. Surprise, surprise.

The Secretary goes on to promise that new consortiums working on assessments will produce “a new test” he claims will “measure what children know across the full range of college and career-ready standards, and measures other skills, such as critical-thinking ability.”

Allow me to express a bit of doubt. For starters, I hope he doesn’t define “new test” as “one test” because that will never accomplish what he claims he wants: an assessment that measures a broad spectrum of student abilities. Further, unless these new tests are uncoupled from the high stakes they currently invoke—such as punishments for schools and teachers—they will be just another standardized, easily scored exam that tell us little about what is really going on in our classrooms.

I am thinking about all of this today because it is the first of two days of our semester performance assessments at our school. At the end of each semester, teachers engage students in extensive, half-day performances of what they have learned. The idea is to have them show what they know through performance rather than filling in bubbles or choosing the right answer from a list of choices.

Here are several examples:

We give our American Government students two opinion pieces that take opposing view points on the recently passed health-care legislation. They are first asked to read the pieces using a literacy strategy called text-marking, and they are assessed on how well they have read. Then, using resources they accessed in class and information they glean from work in the media center, they are asked to draft their own position paper and submit it as an opinion piece for the local newspaper. Finally, they will engage in a Socratic Seminar discussing both the pieces they read and their own writing. A team of teachers using the rubrics students have used all semester long will evaluate each piece of the work.

Chemistry students begin class with a paper-and-pencil activity in which they balance chemical equations and solve for missing quantities. They then move to the lab where they will find a station with the requisite materials to conduct an experiment. The task: complete the experiment and produce a full lab report that includes the hypothesis tested, the results gained, and implications for further research.

And in physical education our students spend the first part of the period using a web site to determine their metabolic levels and basic data. Then they select a candy bar from their teacher’s desk. Now, the kicker: they are asked to design and then perform a 60-minute exercise program based on what they have learned this semester that will work off those calories!

I could go on, but you get the drift.

We are not perfect at this work. That’s why we take time after the assessment days are over to review how the assessments went and, most important, what we learned about our students’ abilities. What we find impacts our teaching next time around.

Compare this kind of assessment to our students’ experience with the Ohio Graduation Test, which is used for both state and federal accountability reporting. Each test -- reading, math, writing, science and social studies -- takes the same amount of time. But rather than ask students to do something with what they know, these tests ask them to regurgitate what they have heard. In fairness, there is some writing on the tests, but most of it still involves selecting the right answer from a list of givens.

Add to this shallowness the fact that our faculty never gets to see full student results or the writing samples and how they were graded. It does little to inform teaching except to let teachers know they should spend more time on The Boxer Rebellion, photosynthesis, or two-step equations, or similar inferences based on aggregate scores of the entire class.

Duncan applauds NCLB for disaggregating data—but bad data disaggregated is still bad data. And let’s be honest. All this so-called “data-driven decision-making” talk should really be called what it is: test-driven decision making. Ohio’s school report cards consist of 26 “data” points, and 24 of them—92%--are test scores.

By the end of this week we will have mountains of information on our students, their achievement, and our teaching. All schools could have the same information. The New York Performance Assessment Consortium has demonstrated time and time again that performance assessments, teacher-designed and evaluated, have led to higher rates of student success both in and after school.

I wish I could believe that the new Congress, in some yet to be found bi-partisan spirit, would end the reliance on standardized tests—much like the higher- achieving nations we point to with admiration. But when Duncan continues to talk about one standardized, high-stakes evaluation, I have more than a few doubts.

In the meantime, our school will continue to use what we learn about our kids through performance assessments to improve instruction and prepare them for the years after high school -- years where what you can do will count for a lot more than what you can memorize.