Borderland

The Gates Foundation is developing national education standards and tests because the state-by-state standards have caused a “‘testing crisis in this country,’ in which tests are losing credibility among teachers, who see them as so low-quality that they are useless.” No kidding.

The truth is, that’s exactly right, but not for the right reason. They think the tests should predict college completion. But who needs a test for that? What we need are tests that require kids to solve real problems, and provide immediate feedback to both teacher and student.

The Forum for Education and Democracy held a briefing on performance assessments recently, In case you missed it, and they published a video of the event, which opens with Linda Darling-Hammond talking about how performance assessments are used in high-achieving school systems.

One of Darling-Hammond’s slides listed what she called the “changing expectations for learning”:

• ability to communicate;
• adaptability to change;
• preparedness to solve problems;
• ability to analyze and conceptualize;
• ability to reflect on and improve performance;
• ability to manage oneself;
• ability to create, innovate, and criticize;
• ability to engage in learning new things at all times;
• ability to cross specialist borders;

NONE of these expectations are addressed in any NCLB reform proposals, or its simplistic testing regime. If we’d have used an NCLB-style approach to the Apollo moon mission, President Kennedy would have simply ordered NASA to fly conventional airplanes higher and higher until they fell out of the sky, and then blamed the pilots for lacking the will and the know-how to get the job done.

Darling-Hammond and the other speakers in the forum described a performance based approach to testing that uses teacher-scored formative assessements that would influence both teaching and learning, and which is already operative in various places inside and outside the US.

They linked to a related paper by Darling-Hammond and George Wood, Assessment for the 21st Century (pdf). The bibliography of this paper contains a reference to a Kappan article, Inside the Black Box, which turns out to be highly coincidental with Tom Hoffman’s Black Box Assessment, and Claus von Zastrow’s A Test for the 21st Century posts, yesterday. Both Claus and Tom advocate for high quality assessments that offer quality feedback to teachers and students, parents, and policy makers.

It would not be easy or inexpensive. Another Kappan piece, From Formative Assessment to Assessment FOR Learning, details some of the challenges and promises that we could anticipate in moving toward system-wide formative assessment policy.

The principle behind assessment for learning is nothing new. 100 years ago, in a really fine series of Talks to Teachers, William James spoke about the Necessity of Reactions:

No reception without reaction, no impression without correlative expression,—this is the great maxim which the teacher ought never to forget.

An impression which simply flows in at the pupil’s eyes or ears, and in no way modifies his active life, is an impression gone to waste. It is physiologically incomplete. It leaves no fruits behind it in the way of capacity acquired. Even as mere impression, it fails to produce its proper effect upon the memory; for, to remain fully among the acquisitions of this latter faculty, it must be wrought into the whole cycle of our operations. Its motor consequences are what clinch it.

Classrooms at every level should be more like kindergarten.

Celebrate it.

Jason Hill (via BBC News): “He’s not gonna increase my taxes. If you read - it’s in plain black and white. It’s on the internet. You can read his plans. It’s there for you to read. He will not raise taxes on anybody that’s making less than $250,000.”

h/t Edge of the American West

With less than 72 hours left before the polls close, the election is what I’m mostly thinking about now. Michael Moore has been busy thinking about it, too. He was interviewed on Democracy Now yesterday, talking with Amy Goodman about the election. Like a lot of progressives, he’s nervous looking at optimistic poll results, and he’s warning us not to begin celebrating Obama’s lead too early.

Michael Moore: But I have no sense of optimism, as I sit here. You know, way too many times in the past, we’ve gotten far too giddy way too soon. And I am just not going to succumb to that feeling right now. I mean, I hope. I hope it all looks good on Tuesday, but for many reasons, there is a chance that McCain will win on Tuesday. And we have to operate with that attitude in mind, because—I mean, let’s face it….They’ve always been well funded. They’re very smart about it. They are committed. They are up at the crack of dawn, and they will be on Tuesday. Trust me. We have not lived under the Republicans for twenty of the last twenty-eight years by their side being a bunch of slackers.

Moore pointed out that McCain and Palin have raised the stakes by framing Obama as a socialist, and that if the Democrats win, the majority of Americans will have essentially endorsed the idea of socialism. “So I guess,” he said, “if Obama is president when we wake up on Wednesday morning, you know, we should all go dance around the May Day pole.”

Speaking of slackers, I watched Moore’s movie, Slacker Uprising, which is a documentary about a speaking tour he did at the end of the 2004 election, where he gave Ramen noodles and a change of underwear to “slackers” who’d promise to get out and vote. It’s an upbeat, angry, amusing, anti-war, anti-Bush campaign documentary, with some good music (free online to US and Canadian residents) and a sad ending, which I wrote about in one of my first posts on this blog. As I was watching the movie, I tried to imagine how it’s going to play after the election. It reminded me how much the 2004 election was about the war, and who was a patriot, while this time it’s more about the economy, and who is a socialist - or something. The McCain/Palin character assassination-by-association smear campaign won’t give the faux anti-American theme a rest.

The movie finishes with the message, THEY DON’T WIN UNTIL WE GIVE UP. But this is something that progressives need to remember no matter what happens, because politicians from both parties know this all too well.

In his interview with Goodman, Michael Moore discussed his Election Guide 2008 and some presidential decrees he suggests for Barack Obama’s first 10 days in office, to include:

• Bring back the draft, but only draft children of the rich;
• Make it a crime to make a profit off of somebody being sick;
• Ban high-fructose corn syrup;
• Americans should pay no more taxes than the French (by relieving us of expenses for things like health insurance, daycare, and college tuition - which are “hidden” taxes - and instead return something of real value in return for the taxes that people do pay);
• Make it an American mission to ensure that the entire world has clean drinking water;
• Require the rich to pay their fair share of social security (since they currently don’t pay anything into the fund);

After all, we’re voting for a socialist…

Looking past the election, Bill Moyers Journal had a great interview last week with filmmaker Mark Johnson, who put together a world music video featuring street musicians from around the world, playing the same songs, together. Playing for Change was described in this review/interview as a “…global concert film, recorded on the streets of New Orleans, Barcelona, South Africa, Tibet and elsewhere.”

BILL MOYERS: What do you hope comes from this?

MARK JOHNSON: Well, I mean, with Playing for Change, my ultimate thing would be that people understand that in a world with all this division, it’s important for us to focus on our connections.

It’s an amazing project.

This clip of Stand by Me from the film (and Moyers’ show) was posted on youtube:

“The future isn’t something hidden in a corner. The future is something we build in the present.”
–Paulo Freire

Even though John McCain declared education to be “the civil rights issue of this century,” his idea of equal opportunity has more to do with “shaking up failed school bureaucracies” and introducing market-driven competitive forces to “empower parents with choice” regardless of whether, in fact, a choice actually exists. And while he’s busy talking about shaking things up, he’s wants us to know that Bill Ayers is a menace, which has got Sol Stern worked up again about leftist teachers with social justice agendas:

America’s ideal of public schooling as a means of assimilating all children (and particularly the children of new immigrants) into a common civic and democratic culture is already under assault from the multiculturalists and their race- and gender-centered pedagogy. Mr. Ayers has tried to give the civic culture ideal a coup de grace, contemptuously dismissing it as nothing more than what the critical pedagogy theorists commonly refer to as “capitalist hegemony.”

Like me, for instance? But I’ve never needed Bill Ayers’ or anyone else’s help to understand that teachers and schools should make a difference for people. The big question appears to be, How? I’ll join Nancy Flanagan in saying that it feels like we’ve entered a parallel universe in which social justice has been “muddled up with extremism and destroying the fabric of democracy.” Social justice teaching isn’t all that big a stretch when you consider, as Stephen Colbert has pointed out, “information itself has a liberal bias.”

I’ve been reading The Watsons Go to Birmingham -1963 with my students, and we just finished the church-bombing chapter. I’ve been reading this aloud to them, only a chapter or two each week - not making very quick work of it - so it’s taken us many weeks to get through the book. There’s a first person narrator, Kenny, who has a colorful storytelling style that the kids really enjoy. It’s mostly just good fun, kid stuff, until the end when Kenny’s family travels from their home in Flint, Michigan to Grandma Sands’ house in Birmingham, where they become personally involved in the 1963 church bombing.

I read the book several years ago, but I’ve never read it with any of my students. I chose it because I wanted to discuss first person narratives, and I also wanted to take an informal look at the Civil Rights Movement in the 60’s using multicultural historical fiction as a vehicle. I am, these days, an OLD person who was around when this stuff was really happening. My students think I’m some kind of antique, with first-hand knowledge of a watershed historical moment.

The narrator takes the reader up to the doorway of the church, full of smoking rubble, with people screaming and running. We’re told little, if anything, though, about why the church was bombed. The book doesn’t reach to make a large political statement, and instead focuses on the family’s human response to this horrific trauma.

But to make sense of what happened, if that’s even possible, kids need to know what was going on in the South then. I told them a little bit about Jim Crow and segregation, which they’ve mostly heard about before. I suggested they look on the internet if they wanted to learn more, and several of them did just that. That pleased me, since it indicated an authentic interest, and those students have helped flesh out some of the background for the rest of the class. They learned that Martin Luther King wasn’t just assassinated out of nowhere. There was a lot going on that is not commonly discussed anymore.

At lunch the other day, while the kids were eating, I overheard several of them talking about the election, saying that Obama was going to be shot. Where’d you all hear that? I asked. They pointed to one of the boys. I asked, Why do you think that’s going to happen? And he said - this really got me - Because Obama’s good. I asked them to please not talk like that, and now we’ve started to discuss some of this more calmly.

I did a quick search myself, and found a collection news articles and essays about the bombing. One stand-out quote gave me chills: “Civil rights activists blamed George Wallace, the Governor of Alabama, for the killings. Only a week before the bombing he had told the New York Times that to stop integration Alabama needed a “few first-class funerals.” Given the hate talk I’ve seen lately on youtube, and all over the internet, it feels a lot like turbulent old times.

Several students are now asking the school librarian where she keeps the historical fiction.

Test-based school reform and the politics of accountability has pushed classrooms further away from discussions about social issues than at any time in the last two decades. Teachers and administrators have been all too willing to embrace the authority of test scores, standards, and “research-based” reading instruction, minimizing and forgetting the value of community, intuition, genuine motivation, and common sense. The school day has been circumscribed by concern for testing, which has pushed other very important concerns to the periphery.

Inquiring into our history, sources of power in society, current events, and discussing race and stereotyping does not preclude observing high academic standards. And there’s nothing subversive about such discussions unless you admit that the moral order has already been undermined. I’m not interested in indoctrinating anyone. My only agenda is activating some gray matter, and acknowledging the value of participating in public discourse, none of which is emphasized in any official reform agenda.

John Dewey’s, My Pedagogic Creed, begins with the assertion that “all education proceeds by the participation of the individual in the social consciousness of the race.” How can it proceed otherwise?

To that end, The Zinn Education Project offers a free download of A People’s History for the Classroom, by Bill Bigelow, and other resources that support social justice teaching. History is a Weapon has published A People’s History, by Howard Zinn, online.

Teachers who want to find multicultural children’s literature, or any other kind of children’s literature, for students at any age, can find plenty in the Database of Award Winning Children’s Literature.

It’s worth emphasizing, I think, that rising test scores are nothing to celebrate. Thank you, Alfie Kohn.

Things are so messed up. I cringe when I turn on the computer, the TV, or open the newspaper. It’s like gawking at the scene of an accident. But I can’t ignore this stuff.

The “troopergate” findings were released by the legislature on Friday, and Sarah Palin was found to have abused her power as governor.

Incredibly, she responded by saying that she appreciated being cleared of any wrongdoing. Then, even more strangely, in the same interview she said that the report was unfairly partisan:

Palin: …Well, I’m very very pleased to be cleared of any legal wrongdoing … any hint of any kind of unethical activity there. Very pleased to be cleared of any of that.

[...]

KTVA-Channel 11: … The report that came out yesterday, do you think that the end result is partisan?

Palin: Yeah, I did think it did turn into a partisan circus to tell you the truth…What this legislative investigation — quote unquote — turned into was a political circus.

Huh?

Glenn Greenwald called it “the perfect snapshot for what we’ve had the last eight years,” since the McCain campaign has taken the same illogical position, contradicting the findings, and challenging the legitimacy of the report.

My favorite response to this comes from Andrew Halcro:

Palin’s clumsy attempt to try and rebrand the three month independent investigation into allegations she abused the power of her office is reminiscent of the Seinfeld episode where George Costanza tries desperately to rebrand himself as “T-Bone” to his co-workers and ends up being branded “Koko the monkey.”

In the midst of all this noise, we’ve got some real problems here. The cost of food and fuel in the Alaskan rural villages has gone up so high that there is an exodus into the urban centers. But nobody is talking much about this.

Instead, on the local hate-radio talk shows I hear people talking about stockpiling food and ammunition. It makes you stop and think. This is what it comes down to when our democratic processes fail, and our economic infrastructure is threatened.

Sarah Palin will have some explaining to do when she gets home, but there’s little reason to expect that anything she has to say will make any sense. I’m glad there are plenty of people around here willing to call her out.

The first thing we have to maintain is a grip on what’s actually happening. After that, we need to organize at the neighborhood level and begin to take an interest in what’s happening close to home. We had a neighborhood meeting last night, with about 30 people from up and down the road in attendance, discussing local land use issues and the need for us to present an organized response to the direction our local government seems to want to take us. It felt good to be part of this gathering.

The last of my three articles for the NY Times Lesson Plans blog was posted yesterday. The deal was to write 3 or 4 pieces during September, and I managed to put three together, saying about as much as I have to say, for now at least, in that forum.

The second piece I wrote was about the value of community to the school environment. Nothing says Alaska like the people here, as most of the country may eventually figure out. Sooner, I hope, than later. I described a lesson opportunity that presented itself when our Alaska Native Ed program tutor brought a moose heart to school to show the kids.

Most of the comments were very positive, although there was some push-back on my assertion that community values are overlooked in our current accountability structures, and that community is an important dimension of any school. Someone said I was suggesting that “the demand for accountability is damaging to children,” which isn’t what I said. Alexander Russo said, “This NYT teacher blogger thinks accountability is overly “individualistic,” which also isn’t what I said. But he gets close enough to win a nod from me.

People want to make it seem like teachers oppose ALL accountability when we object to the current half-assed, test-based accountability system. My little story was about something that didn’t come out of any curriculum guide, or even a lesson plan, and was the product of what we call a “teachable moment.” If I had to plan on having a moose heart handy, I’d never teach that lesson. But that doesn’t mean I don’t know what to do with one when a moose heart suddenly appears. Every school community has it’s own potential to show the kids things that are unique to its area, that are worthwhile, and maybe even necessary for them to know. But this stuff isn’t standardized. Accountability structures, to be fair, need to be broadened to distribute responsibility and to reflect the values of local communities.

My third article was about how I use our class website to help the kids take a closer look at their experiences, and celebrate ordinary things as they learn to write for a live audience. The second commenter took issue with me for overlooking a grammatical error in a kid’s writing, and she called their work “boring and trivial.” This comment got the treatment it deserved from other commenters, which left me free to sit back and watch. The discussion devolved to more or less a rehash of the classic meaning vs. behavior question about what should be emphasized in school. This is a major problem, maybe THE major problem we have putting new technology to contructive work in public schools, after we get it there. The most striking thing to me was that my humble little classroom writing project was made to sound revolutionary in the face of the teacher-as-nitpicker model of writing instruction.

A lot of positive comments were left for the kids on their site. Some of them mentioned the Times article, so I put it up on the screen in the front of the classroom, and showed the kids what people out there in the world were saying about them - good and bad. I think they were amazed at how a bunch of adults who don’t even know them could waste so much energy arguing about what we’re doing in our classroom.

The best comment on the Lesson Plans blog, though, was posted just this evening. It’s from a person who grew up here, attended school here, and now works at Duke University Hospital. He wrote:

This article inspired both a longing to be collecting blueberries at the top of Murphy Dome, and the wish that a teacher had been able to use technology in this fashion when I was in elementary or middle school. I don’t know what I would have written about, but once the flow began I am sure the unlimited tablet at my fingertips would have been heavily used.

This emphasizes how connected we can be, if we make an effort. The kids wrote more this afternoon than they’ve written in any single hour so far this year.

I’ve learned a few things about education policy from Wall Street the past few days.

The first thing I see is that the “education establishment” has made a serious mistake in trying to defend and justify itself in the face of its many critics. When A Nation at Risk was published 25 years ago, we should have embraced its inflammatory message that, “If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war.” We’d have saved ourselves a lot of grief, and the nuisance of endless debate, if we’d been able to scare the crap out of everyone, like the finance people are doing now.

If education reform worked anything like the $700 billion Wall Street bailout plan now on the table, we’d have seen government officials immediately call for implementing a plan that, as George Bush would argue, “matches the scope of the problem.” We’d see the debt ceiling raised, with hundreds of billions of dollars committed to resolving the crisis, and no demand for accountability.

The quick willingness of the Bush administration to commit public funds to the Wall Street bailout exposes the duplicity behind objections that the Broader, Bolder proposal for education reform is too expensive. The Broader, Bolder proposal recommends paying off the education debt [pdf] that accrues throughout the lives of disadvantaged people who need to make-do with inadequate housing, employment, and health care resources. Now, with public money committed to bailing out Failing Investment Houses, maybe we can generate some sympathy for the plight of actual poor people.

But who ever really believed that public education is so critically important that we should commit real money to it, and to other social service supports? All along, the “education crisis” has been manipulated as just so much hot air, a cheap all-purpose solution to major economic problems, effectively obscuring the neglect of our public infrastructure.

On the other hand, if a Wall Street bailout worked like education reform, we’d have a long drawn-out debate about the financial sector, accountability, and what we’ll count as real indicators of economic well-being. Even though there is not much time, now, for debate, Robert Reich has a proposal for some demands we should make immediately, before we write that $700 billion dollar check. This is his list:

1. The government (i.e. taxpayers) gets an equity stake in every Wall Street financial company proportional to the amount of bad debt that company shoves onto the public.
2. Wall Street executives and directors of Wall Street firms relinquish their current stock options and this year’s other forms of compensation, and agree to future compensation linked to a rolling five-year average of firm profitability.
3. All Wall Street executives immediately cease making campaign contributions to any candidate for public office in this election cycle or next, all Wall Street PACs be closed, and Wall Street lobbyists curtail their activities unless specifically asked for information by policymakers.
4. Wall Street firms agree to comply with new regulations over disclosure, capital requirements, conflicts of interest, and market manipulation.
5. Wall Street agrees to give bankruptcy judges the authority to modify the terms of primary mortgages, so homeowners have a fighting chance to keep their homes.

We need to get something back for this. The way it plays out will tell us a lot about whose interests the US Congress is really looking after. There’s nothing like a major screw-up to highlight the hypocrisy of people in power.

No matter what happens to the economy now, I’d really like to see the rhetoric about school reform move beyond the simple-minded bankrupt slogans that have been coming from charlatans in the business community, bent on tearing down the public sector.

Hundreds of people in Anchorage turned out for an anti-Palin protest about two hours after she spoke there.

It was bound to happen. This week, during a discussion with my class about September 11, I found out that their memory of the attack on the World Trade Center is pretty vague, and that the memory of it may be as “real” to them as World War II - something that happened a LONG time ago, and that only old people care about.

I know I don’t watch as much TV as most people, so I don’t know how much 9/11 coverage there was. The only thing I’d heard at all was a Democracy Now broadcast on the truck radio that featured StoryCorps interviews with relatives and friends of people who were killed in the attack. It brought back a lot of sad memories.

One of my students asked, “Why do we have to talk about this each year?”

I was stunned.

I asked the class, “How old were you in 2001?” Nobody was quite sure, so we worked it out, and I realized they weren’t in kindergarten yet. They were four years old, too young to remember it very well. I told them that we study history in order to make sense of the world we live in today, and that we’d return to the topic later, when we had more time. There was too much to talk about, and we needed to begin Math.

Throughout the day, I kept thinking about this. How can we understand Al-Qaeda? Osama bin Laden? airport security? the war on terrorism? Afghanistan? thePatriot Act provisions, or the war in Iraq, where some of my students’ parents are now deployed, without talking about September 11, 2001?

This is the world now. It all happened during the time these kids have been in school. It’s the only world they know, and it’s a mess. We need to start connecting the here and now with what came before, but the problem is that Facts in the political universe are just irrelevant “details,” used selectively, twisted, or even just made up. Truth goes down the memory hole when the McCain campaign simply smothers it with lies, and rewrites history.

It’s easy to see it happening here in Alaska, with just about everything our governor has said to the national media about her “executive” experience. Les Gara, former assistant Alaska Attorney General, and state legislator, says that the McCain campaign has (metaphorically, at least) brought Karl Rove to Alaska to interfere in the Palin “troopergate” investigation, playing politics-as-usual:

….Then McCain’s staff of outsiders came to town. And they began to launch personal attacks on people I respect. They started proving that the same old politics that have caused dissatisfaction with Washington-insiders these past eight years are going to be the bread and butter of the McCain campaign….As an Alaskan I’m not really angry at our governor for this mess. I do blame John McCain for the ugliness he’s brought to our state this week. His folks have come to my small state to attack my friends, and people I respect, for political gain.

I don’t entirely agree. Palin is as responsible as anyone for telling the truth. Her lies are as inexcusable as McCain’s.