Dear @juscohen,

So what’s a teachers job then? Unconnected to whether the kids can meet a high bar?

I’m going to answer your questions although you may not have meant them to be answered. Nonetheless,  like Charlie Brown and his football… I’ll take a run at it, Lucy.

First, Your second question is loaded.  I didn’t argue against a high bar. I argued against a false bar. I think you’ll see elements of my answer to your first question  in how I address your second question.  When we discuss my point, we have to ask what do I think a high bar looks like and why am I arguing that the current bar is a false one?

Let’s take on that high bar.

I teach to a very high bar.  I would argue that my standards for teaching are higher than the Common Core in several respects… particularly in the area of critical reasoning. The tested CC standards for the 7th grade are primarily focused upon students learning to use text based evidence to analyze claims made or implied by an author. They do not test using text based evidence to make original claims. While standards formally exist, the State does not consider them important enough to evaluate.  This is a great flaw because it reduces the learner to the consumer of information rather than the creator of information.  I would argue that in my classroom, neither teaching nor learning has been improved by the Common Core, and certainly it has not been improved at all by their assessment. At best, the CCSS has provided a new labeling system and the test has articulated what to value in them. Here are some artifacts that illustrate my bar as well as give some evidence for what I think my job is.

•  Debate Project:  This is a piece of a 7th grade unit on argumentation that I have conducted for the last 15 years in my cluster.  I am still in the process of moving it to the cloud. In this project, students’ critical reasoning skills are honed along with their research, writing, reading, public speaking skills, as well as their use of evidence and justification. This year, I am adding the Harvard video so students can get a whiff of utilitarianism (consequentialism)  and the categorical imperative in a watered down way.  When I have had the time (which I don’t because of the outside intervention and impact of testing on school culture) they read Kennedy, Locke, Chisolm, Paine and Churchill and model writing and thinking upon these and others.  I also do a lot with rhetorical devices and logical fallacies that are not moved to this page yet.  NOTE: The content here will not be reliably measured by the State test, as has been evidenced by schizophrenic scores which shift from year to year for no discernible reason despite clear evidence of my skill as a teacher and my continuing high standards. (I’ll address this in another post about a false bar)

• Magazine Project: Here’s a project I can no longer do because of the time it takes to accomplish.  This was an extensive writing project in which 13 editorial teams created 13 16-24 page full color magazines. They were required to research, write and rewrite, include smaller fun pieces, write ads and design and print their pages. Through this project, students learned the craft of writing in all its aspects and went through multiple substantive revisions of their writing as well as learned about demographics, marketing, information graphics, graphic design and typography.  Parents were so thrilled to have this project that I received $1000 for publishing the magazines every year that I ran it. Extensive writing and revision was useful for the state tests although adapting to short term, no revision writing required some practice. Even so, the practice with multiple revisions helped students learn to revise on the fly. This project was enormously intrinsically motivating. I realize that intrinsic motivation is not necessarily an important point for Education Reform which elevates the value of grit and perseverance over self direction and flow.  Nonetheless, I had a full house of after school extra help because students wanted me to work with them every day after hours to refine a product they cared about.  Nothing proved why they were there better than the fact that they never even asked for their grades; the work itself was the driver.  They forgot that scores are why we’re all here.  NOTE: This project was ended because 75% of the state test is multiple choice and as such, the project did not address structural change in priorities.  Nothing argued better for dropping this engaging and demanding, time intensive, skill rich project than that it would not produce the scores which prove my value. It had to be let go. Rule of thumb: Intact schools with great programs must remove those programs if those programs don’t produce for the state tests. The first order of business is feed the test. Goodbye, win-win. 

• Classics Outside Reading Book Trailer Project: This is a project I no longer do. I started with book trailers, but I tweaked it several years into the unit to link it to classic fiction.  Students read classics and created book trailers that displayed all the necessary elements. In some cases, the classics requirement was bent a little. Book trailers allowed students to use multimedia in order to present information about an outside book they read.  Here’s the rubric for it. They were required to include plot, theme, characterization, conflict, relevant quotes, and reviews about the book. Then they identified the multimedia elements that related to their book.  It was the last unit of the school year. (Yes, I know.. it didn’t reduce to word and sentence based inferences… We do plenty of that elsewhere.) NOTE: obvious candidate for removal.  There might be a question on theme or author’s purpose on the state test, but that can be more efficiently imparted by requiring their ability to identify these by reading short form fiction.  Also, although use of multimedia is listed in the standards, it is not evaluated in terms of students producing anything themselves.

• A full production of Romeo and Juliet: in the original with a beautiful student composed rap musical number in the middle.  This happened only once with a 9th grade class.  Students read the play in class and learned their lines independently. We went into the auditorium every day for several weeks during class. They did most of the staging themselves. Sometimes, I would send certain students by themselves to rehearse and work in the classroom with others.  On those occasions, we would meet at lunch to rehearse what they had worked on that day. It was the first time I discovered that when students care about what they are doing, they don’t need the control features that we usually put in place to get kids to learn. NOTE: These were gifted and talented inner city kids. 

Summation

My response to the question about the high bar addressed several points that I wanted to make sure you don’t miss. It should also have left you with some new questions. First, the several things:

1) I put my work on the table. Being transparent about my work is because I believe that it stands as evidence for me as one teacher (among many) who has a high bar now and who had a high bar for performance before the Common Core.

2) I argue that not only is the higher quality of my accountability to my students not measured by state tests but that the tests have actively interfered with my ability to be accountable to that higher bar.

3) I argue that the English Language Arts Common Core Standards are deficient in the arena of building the capacity of  students to create information. The standards provide for it, but the tests do not measure it.  This would not be a horrible thing if the standards were advisory and flexibly open to improvement, and if they weren’t linked to accountability.  But because neither of those things are true, the reduction of what students need to be able to understand and do in the Education Reform Era is an important reason why students taught in this period are unprepared for the tasks of college and career.  They are encouraged both by a rigid idolatry of the Common Core and by high stakes tests of two thirds of those standards, to consume, analyze and regurgitate. The creation of more complex tasks of regurgitation (asking students to look at how the turn of a word or sentence changes meaning) does not mediate against the fact that students need to both consume and create, analyze and renew.

Here are two new questions:

1) Why are teachers of strong capacity and commitment not getting on board Education Reform’s notions of standards and accountability?

2) If Education Reform needs reform, what is going to be the mechanism for its course correction?

Next time:  A False Bar or Why Education Reform Needs Reform