Thu Dec 24, 2009
A Look at One School District's Struggle with Curriculum Reform
Curriculum. Now there's an exciting topic! Unless you're a professional educator like I am, it's probably not even a part of your regular vocabulary.
But here in Palm Beach County Florida our community has been embroiled in a controversy about just that topic. In a nutshell, last Spring a new Chief Academic Officer (Jeffry Hernandez) was hired to oversee a total overhaul of the approach our teachers were to take in delivering instruction. This new approach was to be based on three sweeping changes in all 162 schools in our district:
***"Departmentalization" of elementary schools where young students now move from teacher to teacher through the day just like secondary students do
***A rigorous testing schedule that required testing of all students in all subject areas every three weeks
***A standardized approach to delivering instruction using an online library of lessons and pacing charts that all teachers were to follow. Additional standards were introduced into the very layout of classrooms and the items that were to appear on every classroom whiteboard.
The justification for these changes was put about as baldly as one could put it. Only high stakes test scores and other indicators measured by the requirements of No Child Left Behind law mattered any longer. Our school district has a "moral imperative" to increase the test scores of all students--especially those who were not meeting the standards--or we would be labeled as failures.
None of these new initiatives were popular with, well, just about anyone. Teachers revolted, parents (over 8,000 strong) organized on Facebook, school board members were routinely threatened with being turned out of office, and school board meetings were packed with angry and vocal parents who demanded to know why all of these changes were being made without the input of experienced teachers and principals. For a great recap of what's gone on here, see the excellent coverage provided by our local paper about the subsequent demotion of our new, and now former, Chief Academic Officer.
And for even more pointed commentary, the editorial board of the Palm Beach Post had this to say:
There are two causes of this fiasco. One is the mania for high-stakes testing. The FCAT and No Child Left Behind distort everything. The school board is the other. The board passively let (Superintendent) Dr. Johnson hire Mr. Hernandez and never made him explain what was happening. Board members didn't see the need for a community education program. Have they demanded to know how the district is going to help those underperforming students? "You can't create a void until you know how you're going to fill it," board chairman Monroe Benaim said Tuesday. "I don't think a void is going to be left."
If, in the twisted spirit of the FCAT, we were to give grades to all the participants, the parents would get a C for caring about their own students and mobilizing. Their scores aren't higher because they don't have an answer for how to help the other students. Mr. Hernandez gets a D for horrible implementation. But at least he has the right goal.
Everybody else — politicians, Dr. Johnson, school board members — gets an F. At various times, they were arrogant, clueless and, finally, cowardly. Dr. Johnson will have to explain soon how the district is going to recover from that.
The question now becomes, what to do next. As an employee of our school district I have to tread carefully in some areas, but as a parent and taxpayer I'll offer this advice to our leadership and anyone else out there who cares to listen:
Value Your Best Teachers: Much of the turmoil caused by the changes in our district came as a result of our really good teachers objecting to the new one-size-fits-all schedule and lessons. They bristled at the idea that some unknown outsider could tell them how best to reach their students, and were offended that someone else thinks they know better how to teach and motivate their own students. These teachers were not about to throw away years of successful lessons and practices that they had success with to follow the required curriculum. The district has to do a better job of acknowledging that many teachers are highly skilled and creative people who thrive in their jobs because of the freedom they have to reach their kids the best way they can.
Teachers Need to Open Their Eyes: Teachers, on the other hand, need to be more honest with themselves about what's happening in their schools. Sure, you're doing awesome work with your kids, but what about that new teacher down the hall who can't keep his class under control, or the burnout teacher who sits on their computer all day and barely interacts with her students? You know those teachers are out there, and you know that kids in those classes are not getting the instruction they should. Teachers have to find a way to work with the administration at their school and the district to address those issues. Clearly the approach we took in our district was poorly executed, but the need to serve all children in every classroom still exists.
Parents Must Continue to Speak Up: Now that our parents have their first victory, I hope that the fight will be taken to the real culprits in all of this--the politicians in our state and in Congress. Here's the deal. At it's heart, your anger and upset over all of these changes probably came down to one thing--you don't want your child treated just as some number on a spreadsheet that factors into school grades. That's a good thing! No parent wants their child to be seen as some little cog in a bureaucratic machine that is built to crank out test scores.
No one wants that, and yet that is exactly what we (and you and you and you) have been voting for during the last decade. We want "measurable results" after we've all been convinced that our government schools are failing. And while some of these laws started with the best intentions--and had laudable results in many previously neglected schools--the end result of all of this is we in the education business have done just what you asked: Built a system that measures the performance of your children.
The question for parents and voters and taxpayers is simple then. Is this what you were after? When you listen to some politician glibly telling you that schools are going to be made accountable, did you realize that the only way to achieve that kind of accountability was to have a set of benchmarks that your child would be evaluated against? Doesn't it ultimately make sense that every child get their education in the exact same way that every other child does? How else will we measure how effective our teachers are if things in each classroom are different? We need standardized tests, diagnostic tests, and methods to teach TO the test in order to meet the standards. How else do you suggest we measure accountability?
In the meantime, while voters are sorting all this out, we'll plug away at our task or educating our kids. (Did I mention that the best teachers and administrators are those who see education as a calling?)
What I'm hoping for as our district moves forward is that we can at least all agree that no child should step into a classroom that doesn't have teacher who is prepared with the tools and creative freedom they need to be effective, and full understanding of what's expected of them as professionals.
Sun May 11, 2008
If You Love What the Bush Administration Has Done in Iraq...
When overseas colleagues criticize American foreign policy, I've been known to respond, "If you like Iraq, you'll love what the Bush administration has done to public education."
That's how my favorite educational iconoclast, Gary Stager, starts his first posting at the Huffington Post. In The Surge Against First Graders, Gary takes a look at the some of the policies implemented by the current administration and draws apt parallels between the war on public education started by the Bush's and their cohorts in the publishing industries and the rhetoric that led our nation into the disastrous war in Iraq.
Luckily education policies haven't led to thousands of deaths or caused our nation to plummet into debt. But plenty of folks have gotten rich in order to follow policies based on faulty research (intelligence) and wrong-headed policies. If you think that the precepts of NCLB and the methods forced onto educators aren't part of a greater belief among the Bush's that public education is fundamentally bad and ought to be replaced by private and religious schools, then you haven't been paying attention to what they've been saying. Kudos to Gary for kicking things off with such a definitive and defiant look at what's really going on behind the curtains.
Thu Jul 19, 2007
Six Consecutive A Grades for This Failing School
A nicely written editorial in the Daytona News-Journal points out the absurdity of conflicting measurements of "student progress" and how one school, despite 6 years of receiving the highest possible grade under Florida's Comprehensive Assessment Test (FCAT), is facing restructuring because enough progress hasn't been made year to year.
The team (at Longstreet Elementary School) adjusted to the silliness of the FCAT requirements and its narrow band of basic skills to be taught. It was obvious to the team that many skills and other areas of the wider education range would now be ignored as focus would center on the FCAT. The teachers taught the pupils well. But, ironically, the pupils' scores were so high that when the federal act came into existence those scores would be Longstreet's downfall.
The Adequate Yearly Progress part of the act would make it impossible for Longstreet to pass. How do you improve an "A" grade? The federal act requires improvement! So Longstreet has failed the federal measure for years and has been under corrective actions and sanctions, has had administrator changes and is in the position of being "restructured." According to the federal act, the school could even be dismantled and its teachers farmed out to other schools or dismissed if not meeting the act's "highly qualified teacher" requirements.
There's actually some logic behind the requirement to make Adequate Yearly Progress or AYP (yeah, we've got all sorts of acronyms for assessing kids these days). The intent is to insure that in schools where most students are doing well the ones who aren't progressing don't get left behind.
But in typical bureaucratic fashion, school systems--along with their masters in the state and federal education offices--have attempted to define processes and procedures to force adequate progress on those students and the school by changing principals and teachers and applying relentless pressure to get those scores up. Education gets flipped on its head and test scores become the single driving purpose behind the school's existence.
The problem with this approach is that it presumes that the measurement systems themselves are flawless, and that improving performance is a simple metric of aligning operation A with requirements B then getting result C.
Too bad humans don't work that way.
Too bad that money that ought to go into the training and paychecks of teachers gets diverted into ever more expensive processes, manuals, software programs, remedial this and that, and other bureaucratic bright ideas and internal empire building.
Too bad that the public doesn't have an attention span capable of seeing what's happening in their schools and demand that it stop.
Wed Feb 28, 2007
Florida Teachers Say "Phhht!" to Performance-Based Pay Plan
Teachers here in my home county of Palm Beach have rejected the wacked-out performance pay plan that the state is shoving down the throats of all school districts. How come? After all, some teachers would be in line to receive a nice bonus, providing they can prove that their teaching methods directly impact student scores on our own version of the standardized tests, the FCAT. Yesterday a court-appointerd arbitrator recommended that county teachers accept the pay plan even though "The deadlines are arbitrary and unreasonable, and the financial impact on the district for failing to agree increases the likelihood of educationally unsound decisions while creating an atmosphere that is likely to damage labor-management relationships, at least in the short term.
So what's the rub? Other than the incredibly heavy-handed approach that the state took in mandating bonuses tied to FCAT scores (If your teachers approve the plan the state will pay for it. Reject the plan and the school district will have to fund bonuses out of its own operating budget. Too bad. Sucks to be you.), teachers of the many subjects that aren't evaluated on the FCAT would have to go through an elaborate process to prove that what they did improved scores.
Is this another example of the testing mentality gone mad?
You betcha.
Mon Feb 05, 2007
Global Competition: 5 Myths About U.S. Kids and Education
Paul Farhi of the Washington Post addresses the supposed gap that exists between U.S. kids and the rest of the world in an articled titled Five Myths About U.S. Kids Outclassed by the Rest of the World. (Annoying and counter-productive free registration may be required.)
Mr. Farhi makes some telling points, chief among them that the "facts" of lagging student achievement in the U.S. as presented by the hand-wringers of the current testing-ocracy that has consumed education policy are only able to present their doom and gloom predictions by cherry-picking the results that paint education and kids in the worst possible light. Meanwhile:
...over the past two decades the U.S. economy grew faster than that of any other advanced nation, and generated a third of the world's economic growth. Yet this performance followed a period in which the authors of "A Nation at Risk" were warning that a "rising tide of [educational] mediocrity . . . threatens our very future as a nation." That was in 1983. Those high-school mediocrities are now turning 40, and presumably have been playing a part in helping the U.S. economy grow "faster than any other advanced economy" over the past two decades.
A dynamic economy is much more than the sum of its test scores. It's part of a culture that rewards innovation and risk-taking, and values unconventional problem-solving. Much of this is nurtured in our schools, even if it can't be quantified on a test. (Emphasis added).
Recently, Newsweek International's Fareed Zakaria noted Singapore's success on international math and science exams, but asked Education Minister Tharman Shanmugaratnam why Singapore produced so few top-ranked scientists, entrepreneurs, inventors, business executives and academics. "We both have meritocracies," he replied. America's "is a talent meritocracy, ours is an exam meritocracy. There are some parts of the intellect that we are not able to test well -- like creativity, curiosity, a sense of adventure, ambition. Most of all, America has a culture of learning that challenges conventional wisdom, even if it means challenging authority. These are the areas where Singapore must learn from America."
Is it any wonder that educators are kicking back against the culture of constant testing? Is it any wonder that so many teachers reject the exam meritocracy that the "measurable achievement" crowd would have us institute in every school across the U.S.?
Mon Sep 11, 2006
What to Teach Abut 9/11?
When the first plane hit the World Trade Center 5 years ago I was on my way back to my classroom. In the hallway a fellow teacher tugged at my sleeve and told me that there had been a horrible plane accident in New York.
I didn't have a television in my classroom, but I did have an Internet connection and an LCD projector that displayed on a huge screen in the front of the room, so after some scrambling around--finding the regular news channels unavailable due to high demand--I was finally able to get the BBC feed. Just in time to watch as the second plane slammed into Tower 2. Later, I watched with my 8th grade students as the World Trade Center crashed to the ground, first one tower and then the other.
To say that it was as stunning event hardly does it justice, and yet my role as the teacher was to try and bring some sense to the events we were watching unfold before our eyes. I remember telling my students that the world had just become a very different place, and that they were seeing history in the making. At the moment it happened it was a bit much for them to grasp. For many of them it must have seemed more like an action-adventure movie than something that was happening to real people.
Now 5 years later, those memories are no longer as fresh in the minds of students, and educators have to turn to the task of teaching what 9/11 was all about. In an article at CNN.com--Educators divided over what to learn from 9/11--educators from different schools of thought weigh in on what they think should be the approach that teachers take.
As a former social studies teacher I have my own take on things, and while I can understand how some educators think that 9/11 should be used as a springboard to understand other cultures, I would maintain that they are flat wrong. Because what happened 5 years ago has no more to do with Islam than the Nazis have to do with Christianity. In both cases evil people took a religion and perverted it into something that is most assuredly is not. Islam doesn't teach suicide bombings anymore than Christianity teaches hatred for Jews.
So what should be teach our kids? For one, I agree that students need to know that there is evil in the world, and that some people will hate us simply because we are Americans and live in a culture that is the polar opposite to the way of life they espouse. Many of my liberal friends would disagree with me, but human history is replete with examples of pure unadulterated evil taking hold of people and leading them to commit unspeakable acts. Many times this evil has its roots in religious teachings, and so the lesson ought to be that while faith in your religion is a wonderful thing, we must constantly beware of how religion can be twisted into something that divides us and teaches us to hate those who don't believe the same way we do.
Secondly, I agree that 9/11 gives teachers an opportunity to examine just what it means to be an American. Why would the terrorists attack symbols of our culture when we don't even have a good understanding of what our own culture is? Is it a McDonalds on every corner and a Starbucks across the street? Is it Paris Hilton and trashy television? Or is it a market-driven economy and a government built on ideals of personal freedom and responsibility? What after all, does it mean to be an American, and why would the terrorists who killed thousands on 9/11 hate our culture so much that they would give up their own lives and kill innocent civilians?
Were I in the classroom, those were the questions I would be asking today. I'm not certain that either I or my students could find an answer, but as always, sometimes the questioning can be as important as finding an answer.
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