A Dog with a Bone

The primary focus of the New York State English test  is  weighted toward multiple choice answers which require one right answer.  I wouldn’t argue that there are no critical thinking skills involved in multiple choice tests, because there surely are, especially since multiple choice tests are designed by the evil test makers to include ambiguous distractors meant to  trick students into picking partially correct or not quite as right answers, or as many educators assert, equally correct right answers that will be marked wrong.   A deep and nuanced reading of the text is necessary to tease out which response is really the right one.  So, yes.. as heretical as that may be to some, there are things to teach and to learn about multiple choice tests.  However, it grates against another kind of teaching I find important and that is the notion that there is more than one right answer.  Language, connotation, persuasion, slant, intepretation are not venues for a single response.

In fact, I find that students who focus on a single answer (which are more and more of them in this time of data frenzy) are usually my most literal students.  Often, this is because they equate intransigent grade grubbing with success and inevitably stop their thinking process where they think the grade may be.  My challenge is to integrate test taking and the fact of the one right answer into a curriculum that preferences growth and assertion and support as the more important skills.

Here’s what I tell my incoming 7th graders currently:

First Principle: There is often more than one right answer and more than one way to get to a right answer. Depending on the kind of answers we’re looking for, your answer can be right even when it is different from mine. This means: go out and find your answer… but don’t forget to use the second principle

Second Principle: Your answers are as right as your ability to back them up. If you can back your assertions up with compelling and persuasive evidence, you usually can use them. That means: do your research, find your evidence, make your argument, let the chips fall where they may.

Third Principle: The grade you get is the grade you earn.  It is assessing what you’ve learned.  It is information.  Use the grade you get to inform your actions for the next go round. That being said, if you think I assessed you incorrectly, make your case (refer back to the second principle)

Fourth Principle: Even in circumstances where there is one right answer, the process by which you get to your answer (right or not) is often more useful than the answer itself. Yes, I mean this. (except on the State Test)

Yes, But.. Aren’t Right Answers Important?

Of course, they’re important. It’s not very useful to NASA if they don’t get the right answer on the cold weather capabilities of their ORings but the process of getting to the right answer does include failure (hopefully, not as spectacularly disasterous as the Challenger’s).  Actually, failure is essential.  Sometimes failing is the means to a better success. As a former art teacher of mine put it, “You have to be willing to do bad work if you ever want to do good work.”  This is a good lesson for students, artists, writers, scientists and hockey players.  It teaches learners that as they develop, their standard of excellence moves in front of their ability.  An educated eye (or ear) is developed long before the ability to master a skill.  Once students realize this simple reality of learning, they can allow themselves to accept their best bad work and do it faithfully every day in their inevitable approach of the standard they hope to achieve.

Randy Pausch also put it very well.  We learn most of what we learn indirectly or by what he called a “head fake.” He said, ”… we send out kids out to learn football or soccer or swimming or whatever it is… we actually don’t want our kids to learn football… we send our kids out to learn more important things… teamwork,sportsmanship, perseverance… and you should keep your eye out for [these lessons], because they’re everywhere.”

Teaching to the test teaches  students that getting the right answer is the only measure of success, and that anything but the “right answer” is failure.  It also teaches them that failure is unacceptable.  However, not teaching to the test, given the subtlety and ambiguity of  multiple choice questions on the state test, is a recipe for system wide failure that no one can tolerate.  Children, teachers, principals and communities have every reason to focus on the one right answer because it weights so heavily in their futures, and once the one right answer becomes coded as the single most important measure of their value,  students find it hard to learn, teachers find it hard to teach and administrators find it hard to measure the other more subtle lessons that are embodied in a nuanced and laboratory approach. They’re too focused on superficial learning and measurement… they, along with everyone else, become victims of the all important God of Data.

Dear Student: You seem to be making fun of our test, and we don’t appreciate it. We do not need your implications. We’re looking for that sweet spot between illiteracy and insight…. the text based detail. This is not it. As for any inferences that you might wish to make in the future…. those will be part of a series of wholly interpretative multiple choice questions you’ll get later. Your teacher fails.

Sincerely, Test Company

ps. You look like money to me.

I sent a version of this letter to my representative.  I’m working on cleaning it up and cutting it down.

Dear Representative Who Will Not Be Named,

Thank you for your reply to my concerns.  I continue to feel that present attempts to reform education are misguided, and I hope when you are given the opportunity to vote on issues related to it, you will consider the strong and valid arguments of rising grassroots opposition to these policies.

The goal of educating children to be college and career ready is unassailable, but that is an aphoristic goal not a specific methodology.  I don’t believe the methodology dictated by RTTT and NCLB is the appropriate one.  The standards it institutionalizes are questionable in several regards, and the testing it requires are costly and intrusive. Their high stake  encourages extensive test preparation, particularly in low income schools where test scores are most likely to impact communities.  It encourages complete non standardization of instructional setting and use of tax dollars by embracing charters over public school entities and teacher temps over teaching as a viable profession and middle class career path.

While there is much to commend CCSS, it has some specific areas of weakness that make it a flawed choice for standardization.  As example, it is somewhat literal in its attempt to infuse rigor in the curriculum. For one thing, it is age inappropriate in the early grades.   It may impress some less savvy parents to have their 6 year old using words like ziggurat; however is it important to learn about Mesopotamia at the age of 6, or would learning about the world around them be a more productive and relevant use of their time? Does CCSS promote higher standards in this case or just sooner ones?

Also, the emphasis of non fiction over fiction in the CCSS standards is problematic. While advocates rush in (after the fact) to suggest that this focus is meant to include texts read in all subject areas, realistically, the only test that evaluates CCSS literacy is the ELA. Therefore, intentionally or not, non fiction gets preferential status in ELA instruction. Certainly, the appropriate response would not be to increase the number of tests, so CCSS literacy standards translates into private school educated children being exposed to the great literature and thinkers that inform our world and CCSS trained children getting extensive exposure to “deep reading” of the same several articles over and over and fewer and fewer pieces of great literature.

Consider also the contradictions.  While federal and state policies embrace complete standardization of instruction, they concurrently embrace complete non standardization of instructional setting and internal school policy, not to mention little regulation on the use of taxpayer dollars. A for-profit charter offers to educate children more cheaply than a public school in exchange to access to the dollars not spent on the children in the state.  Why is that in the interests of the taxpayer? We have no interest in the enrichment of individual. It does not enrich our children.  In fact, if anything, taxpayers have an interest in the ability of their neighbors to purchase homes and buy goods.  We derive benefit when our tax dollars are used to support our communities and spread into the pockets of teachers, administrators, pupil personnel, buildings and grounds, not concentrated in the hands of a few people at the top.

Non profit charters are no better.   Leaving aside for the moment the decidedly not non-profit salaries that their CEOs can command, an educated citizen should be against the use of non profit charters to covertly filter children.  While these schools tout their demographic as identical, in fact, they can filter easily through parental support (KIPP) and through attrition rates, so that the schools that remain public in our inner cities become dumping grounds for the rejected and the removed.  I understand (better than many) the need for classrooms to be filled with students who are ready to learn, but this policy preferences supported children over less supported ones and is an explicit form of abandonment.  Surely, there is a better way to address the education of high needs children than to move them around like dirt on the floor from one underfunded public school slated for take over to another? A free public education available to all at the point of delivery is a pillar of democracy. I do not see that this policy supports either.

Finally, as an educator myself, I object to the uses of “reform” to first abandon and then arbitrarily close schools, lay off career teachers and use TFA style temporary teachers to rotate in and out.  This horrific policy undermines an entire middle class career path. Who in their right mind would suggest education as a potential direction for their children when we can look today in states all over this country and see people forced out of work mid career and replaced by 23 year olds who have no experience, little training and no real interest in remaining in the classroom?  Where do we expect college and career ready children to go if we are removing career paths that contribute to continued existence of a thriving middle class? What trust do we expect them to have in a system that institutionalizes such blatant and cynical abuse of power?

The contradictory nature of these reforms should be of issue to any public servant who wishes to leave their communities in at least as good a condition as they found them. I will be watching the positions and voting record of my representatives on this issue and casting my own vote accordingly.

Thank you again for taking the time to respond.

A while back, I wrote an open letter (somewhat edited here) to a young teacher, Marilyn Rhames, who shared her experience in an Ed Week piece called A Course of My Own .  She wrote about her experience in a hostile school environment with a principal who was vicious to both student and teacher alike.  Her conclusions got to the heart of child abuse, but missed an important point about fear in the workplace.  It did not challenge the false subtext of reform that holds that people who work with children don’t have basic human rights at work.

Dear Ms. Rhames,

It’s a terrible thing to listen to an abusive principal tell elementary school students that aren’t good at basketball that they shouldn’t bother to try out for the team because they can’t help the team win . Being told by that same principal that she likes money and that teachers might, at any time, be fired is equally distressing.  I can imagine why you told all these stories in the faculty room when you were in a better school.  They are cautionary tales and shocking, from one point of view.   But, I must disagree with you and with the social studies teacher who piously told you that this all just happened to the children.

It did happen to the children.  But, it didn’t only “happen to them.”  It also happened to YOU.  You were also given a terrible message.  You were told that you were a disposable tool of your industry, that you should fear for your livelihood  every day that you work.   You were presented with the message that working people in many industries are hearing currently; that is, no matter how hard you work, your ability to feed yourself and your family, to offer a future to your children or to feel secure in the knowledge that good work  will be valued is at risk.  You were told that you may be replaced at any time for any reason.  You got the message that your survival depends on the sacrifice of anything and everything that may be asked of you.  You were told to live and work in fear.

You may say, well the issue of teaching is bigger than us.  It’s bigger than a mortgage or a family or ability to retire one day.  I would disagree.  I think that the underlying message is that work is bigger than anything or anyone, and that message is related directly to all of us, young and old.

You suggest that “[e]ducators and policymakers must boil the chatter down to two essential questions: to what degree will this policy enhance student learning and how will we know?” I suggest that if you don’t boil the chatter down a little further than that, you’ll be enhancing student learning for a life destroying purpose.  In accepting terms that define you as expendable, in choosing to manage the anxiety of knowing that that no matter what you do, you have reason to be insecure in your livelihood and your ability to feed and provide for your family, you accept a life diminishing notion of every person’s relationship to their work.  You tacitly agree to work with no regard to its impact on your family, yourself or your children.   You agree in quite blatant terms to have no value.  This may be something that sounds like noble sacrifice to you.  But, you might like to consider what you’re selling as well as what you’re teaching.

Of course, it’s important to work hard for children, to do good work with integrity.  It’s important to understand what children are learning.  But,  it is also important to consider what your learning is preparing them for.  Are you readying them for a life of opportunity or for a life of insecurity and fear, of work without end, of a constant and pernicious anxiety about their survival in an inhumane marketplace? Are you readying them to embrace life or to negate themselves and their families in their turn?  What your employer told you was acceptable for you is what you accept for them, and if you accept that this act is somehow too small a concern in a world that needs change, you’re not just agreeing to your own erasure, you’re agreeing to theirs.

Maybe it’s not such a noble act to manage undeserved fear of reprisal or to stuff anxiety over the consequences of  limited ability to negate the impact of poverty on opportunity.  At least, not when you consider it in light of the fact that in accepting those conditions, you prepare children for your own fate.   Considering the welfare of children as separate from the welfare of families and as separate from the people who work to maintain them is a false dichotomy.  When you fight for a living wage, for decent working conditions, for the professional status of your career, for dignity in the performance of your work, you fight for the future of the children you teach, as well.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights as visualized by Seth Brau and another one that depicts a great short history of Human Rights.  Both are worth seeing and are excellent resources for the classroom, as well.