A Dog with a Bone

Bailey Reimer, a teacher in Chicago, has been teaching her kindergartners to love testing.  She considers their well trained, enthusiastic love of it to be the key to her students’ futures.  Her theory is that the more they welcome being evaluated, the better they will do throughout their years in school.  Her views highlight the ongoing divide over the purposes of and best practices for teaching a nation’s children.

Obviously, there is nothing wrong with helping children to feel secure about being assessed; it’s necessary for getting good diagnostic information.  In that sense, building confidence around testing is not a bad goal, but as a large and lauded part of instruction, it is definitely not a great one.  Education is intended to provide every child with the tools and opportunity for full expression of themselves in their work and personal lives.  Love for testing is a low bar in that attainment.  A test has its use.  But, it is meant to be a tool for educators, not a destination for learners.

High quality classrooms do not build their cultures around test taking. They have a high standards for learning and skill acquisition, but they are built around other values such as inquiry, independence, risk taking, self regulation, curiosity, confidence,  collaboration, empathy. They seek to nurture full development through multiple experiences and pay attention to all the hard and soft skills of intellectual, physical, and social/emotional growth. A well informed parent or thoughtful administrator would be far more interested in what else Reimer cares about and what students experience under her care when they are not being tested.

If I were her administrator, I’d have some hard questions about Reimer’s reward system in the back of the room.  It’s true that kids like to see their growth, but explicit publishing of private performance, even under the cover of daisies, is more questionable.  It shifts the emphasis from individual growth to that of comparison and competition.  Not that comparison or competition are bad things; they can be very motivating in a debate or on the field, and both are part of life.  But, it is not a good practice in the intimate area of skill acquisition.  At the very least, it sends an inaccurate message to very young children.

It bears repeating that, even under the best circumstances, children do not learn at the same pace or with equal ease. They do not come into school with the same foundation. This simple reality is indisputable. Whether the difference stems from the impact of genetic anomaly, prenatal care or environment upon brain development or if it’s in the way that different access to resources and enrichment improves or impedes a child’s preparation upon entry into school, how these differences are addressed in the classroom is important, especially for children experiencing school for the first time in their lives.  Is there some reason to reward the child who learned to read at home and who, through no special skill of their own, achieves at a higher and faster pace than her peers? What about the kid who is dyslexic or developmentally delayed or younger or who has less support at home or isn’t a native speaker? Is there a good reason for a child who is chronically behind others to get a daily dose of shaming through visual comparison with the home grown skill star? Implicit shaming is not an appropriate tool for improving the performance of children or adults for that matter.  There are better ways to inspire effort and celebrate attainment.

Even if all her students’ stars and daisies align, there’s also the problem of promoting a culture of extrinsic reward. It is not the best way to develop the best in people. It does not build agency; it turns learning and doing into merely the means to an unrelated end.   It’s a seemingly small error in kindergarten.  How much agency does a 5 year old need? And 5 year olds are brimming with intrinsic desire to learn. But follow that track as it diverges down the road, and it will matter.  By the time children educated on a steady diet of extrinsic reward get to middle school, many of them will be entirely disinterested in learning, doing and creating for its own sake.   Learning is something that is done to them for purposes other than learning. They’ll be fully ready to trade in their opportunity to invest in themselves for the lesser daisy of being weighed, measured and rewarded (or at least not found wanting).   They will divide themselves into winners and losers in the school game. Those who have had real and lamentable delays already will have had years of being demoralized by comparison, and many of those who experienced success will be reduced to grade grubbing as they root after more reward.  There will a wonderful few who have thriving, curious minds, but for many, their natural curiosity will have been tested and rewarded or punished right out of them.

I do not fault Ms. Reimer for this error.  It’s common to confuse test scores with what they represent.  Certainly, she wouldn’t be the first to believe that banging out scores is proof positive that she’s a good (maybe even great) teacher.  And in the current Race To The Top accountability culture, what teacher wouldn’t love a clean and quantified data stream that seems to say, “Good job! Your daisy, too, is moving up the wall.”  At any rate, she’ll have done one good thing; by the time her students leave her, they will have checked off a whole list of small competencies.  They will be aimed at and ready to chase after next year’s daisies.  What more could there possibly be to teaching?

After all, what difference does it make that the kindergartner who came to school full of desire to learn and discover has ended up a happy little test taker who values nothing so much as the moving daisy.  There are rewards for daisies and data points.  As a teacher, I think these are the accomplishments of average teaching…  she has done the job of preparing her students for the next phase… every flower has moved.  And, when they get to me in middle school, I will be grateful for their skill base.  Nonetheless, I will spend the better part of each year trying to get them to unlearn her best lesson.

This is a response to Dmitri Melhorn’s post via Jersey Jazzman

1) Using evidence collected by organizations that have potential conflict of interest is problematic. This entire argument hinges on data collected by sources that are not considered impartial.

2) Ability to sift for better children is a fundamental argument against charters. Parental support (required by KIPP and implicit in the charter application process) is the primary ingredient for student success. We can only recognize the quality of schools that can not sort for children and must backfill to maintain similar class size to the schools they “compete” with.

3) Schools that have received additional financial support from advocacy groups in an economy that is defunding and underfunding schools does not speak to the ability of charters to do better. It speaks to the ability of money to do better.

4) Public schools impacted by charters will see increased enrollment of students who are counseled out, fewer of the better cared for children whose parents will choose schools w fewer behavior problems, lower class size and more resources. This trend undermines public education as a social good and does not support equity.

5) Right to choose your school because you have the income to optout of public education is something that comes with more wealth. Charters do not address this issue for the entire public. They allow for some parents to remove their children from public education which further undermines it as a social good. It results in increased segregation by race and class. It results in inappropriate policies in schools that are funded by public dollars because a school can open just to benefit a particular racial, cultural, political or religious group. That is contrary to the vision of universal free public education.

6)  The notion that any change is better than the status quo dismisses the very negative impacts that are being reported by multiple charter related scandals around the country. If charters are here to stay, they need regulation and oversight. The idea that dumping “bureaucracy” allows for innovation has resulted in a sloppy free for all that is a burden on tax dollars and has a negative impact for children.

7) When we sift through the information about charters, we uncover the advantages in play: funding matters, resources matter, class size matters, parental support matters. These are the ingredients for a good school. It does not require charters to exist. It requires political will, financial investment, and support for parents. We need every child to have the same resources, low class size and support. We need buy in to our public system not optout of public education for desperate recipients of elitist largesse. – See more at: http://jerseyjazzman.blogspot.com/2015/10/charter-schools-exchange-part-i.html?spref=tw#sthash.10febgmu.dpuf

Yesterday, I read a tweet from someone who had just signed and invited others to sign to pledge to believe that all students can learn.  It got me thinking about social media activism: what it is… what it isn’t.

Tweeting, liking, clicking, hashtagging have become common ways to stand for something and publicize your values..to show your support for whatever you support…candidates or kittens.   You can hashtag protect Planned Parenthood.  Tweet for justice. Click to feed a family.  Post this pic or like it to love your neighbor.  Make a meme.  We’ve all done it.  Tweeting and liking and sharing … the lazy man’s showing up. It feels like virtue. It’s as close to call centers for your candidate as you can get without having to actually get there.  In this new world we are led to believe that pledging to believe that children can learn is virtually same as working with them in a classroom or volunteering in an after school center year after year.

With out a doubt, social media presence has value.   A tweet can bring a crowd.  A viral video or a hashtag on a timely phrase can increase awareness, publicize a cause, start a movement.   On the other hand, sometimes social media activism is the weak gesture.  It doesn’t require much effort to sign in and tweet your values.  At times, celebrating them even has a mild odor of online preening.  (Notice my values… such a great thing about me.)  And there is what is implied.  In the case of pledging to believe that students can learn… one can infer the slur underneath… a pledge to believe is an implicit accusation of disbelief.   We who pledge to believe do so because there is a #beliefgap©.  It’s social justice branding, and there’ s a website for that.

So,  in case you want to engage in some low impact showing up or showing off, some self or team branding… you can sign up to pledge to believe that all children can learn…  I could link you to the site, but in the interests of showing your commitment through your actions, I invite whoever wants to sign up to google their own way to the site. It may not be that easy, but sometimes you just have to work for what you believe in while in your pajamas and eating a snack.

Even though his policies were thumbs up to privatization. Even though he supported the use of hypothetical standards as if they were actual.  Even though his practice of blackmailing states through their coffers is a continuing hazard to democracy. Even though his idea of accountability was  engineered failure. Even though he was grateful to a murderous hurricane and  dismissive of white suburban moms and their not as smart as they think children. Even though he authored a brazen attack by government on its citizens and even though this attack has eroded faith in government.  Even though I suspect him of not even being the architect of his own policies.  Yet, as I watched Arne resign from office this week… I thought I saw a man who wanted to do good work, who wanted to be a hero being blindsided by the desire to move the needle no matter what the cost to others .  On a purely human scale, it was a sad moment…

We were fortunate to have Dr. Tisch come and visit our school recently to talk with our teachers, administrators and community members about policies that impact schools and their stakeholders in New York State.  She was very gracious in her remarks and engaged with us.  While there continued to be areas of disagreement, there was a sense that there may be some rational minds up in Albany looking at how to revisit the malicious reform policies that are distracting sincere efforts to improve public education in our state and in our country.   I read the following statement to her:

Dr. Tisch, I want to thank you for coming to visit us. My name is Audrey Hill. I’m a very committed 7^th Grade ELA teacher in this district, I have 24 years of experience and I work very hard for my students.  As I say this to you, I am mindful, and I would like you to be mindeful as well, that it speaks to a culture of slander and scapegoating of public education in America that I feel the need to preface my remarks with that disclaimer.  It speaks to an erosion of public trust.  I’d like to tell you why and ask you a question.

Everyone in this room understands that school improvement is a worthwhile cause in itself… that some schools are in deep need of improvement (as well as equitable funding), and that some communities are without the strong parent, teacher and community support that we enjoy… Nonetheless, none of it justifies a policy designed to orchestrate system wide failure or sacrifice a generation of the state’s children.

You mention the state tests as having an “aspirational bar.”  I am familiar with that term. I have had the opportunity to speak w Peter Cunningham, Exec Dir of Edu-Post and former Asst Secy of Education under Arne Duncan. He also refers to the tests as “aspirational”– we aspire: in essence asking for more than is reasonable or right in order to see what more you can get without any real notion of whether what is asked for is attainable. Yet, the stakeholders (students, teachers, schools and communities) experience very real consequences for not meeting these hypothetical bars that are both several years above level and require students to make more than a year’s growth each year in order for their teachers to be rated effective.

Some will argue that parents need information about how their children are doing, but what information can a parent get from a test with an aspirational bar that is both arbitrary and untested? It not only doesn’t provide parents with information about how their children are doing, it actively deceives them about how they are doing. Put plainly, it is engineered failure.  The impact of that failure should shame all participants.

It is not only a false measure, it is experimental in terms of its impact on the intellectual and emotional development of children. It erodes the teacher student relationship. (I could spend a lot of time talking about that.)  Add to it that they have unreasonably high stakes but are not transparent in their entirety nor open to critique.  And, even though students and parents are told that “these tests only impact adults,” the tests invariably may impact students directly as one of the data points that will be used in making decisions about them.  It impacts them indirectly through a constrained curriculum and a school culture of pernicious anxiety which is a reasonable consequence of institutionalizing a purely speculative bar that even as it provides no actual incentive for students, may influence their placement, hurt community reputation, undermine local control of schools and have a career stopping impact on teachers.  The misuse of testing to achieve other ends has called the very act of testing itself into serious question in some quarters.  It is evidence of a cynical business model that makes unreasonable demands with high consequences for all local stakeholders and no consequences to speak of for its designers and supporters. It risks our entire education system.

It should be of no surprise to you, then, that the public trust is collapsing. Just as it should be of no surprise that a grass roots, parent led, bi-partisan optout movement has been born out of these attempts to engineer the failure of our children, teachers and schools. Private citizens are putting pressure on extremism not folding under it.  They are literally being forced into civil disobedience as a check on an immoral practice by government and its agents.  It is the only rational response to being ignored by elected officials who barrel on and ignore all reasonable arguments.  Seven Regents [in New York] concurred and have responded with what can only be seen as a vote of no confidence to New York’s evaluation plan.  Several others have signed on with regret to something they don’t even believe in.  Parents all over the State are already talking about opting out in September so as to mitigate the impact of testing upon their children’s curriculum next year.

I won’t lie to you, the fact that you are here listening to us makes a lot of us hopeful that we might be heard in Albany. So I want to ask you what do you have to say to parents and education activists who have not been heard in Albany (or Washington, for that matter) who feel that it is not only their right but their responsibility to opt out of a high stakes toxic test culture in their schools? As Chancellor and as a public leader, what are you going to do to address the just issues that are fueling the opt-out movement?