Tag Archives: Educational process

Article by Finland’s Pasi Sahlberg as shared by Valerie Strauss in her column “The Answer Sheet” in the Washington Post

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A huge thank you goes out to Valerie Strauss (@valeriestrauss) for sharing the article by Pasi Sahlberg (@pasi_sahlberg), in her column, “The Answer Sheet” for The Washington Post. Pasi Sahlberg is the author of Finnish Lessons: What Can the World Learn About Educational Change in Finland.

I encourage the reader to check out Sahlberg’s article “What if Finland’s great teachers taught in U.S. Schools?”

Sahlberg’s most important point is that there is no one approach or “silver bullet” that will solve the problems with education in America. What is needed is a comprehensive approach that addresses every aspect of a nation’s educational system from the way we prepare teachers for their professions, what we teach, how we teach it, and how we involve the entire community.

Our current focus on teachers as both the cause and the solution to the problems of public education in American is a prime example of how little our policy makers, our politicians, and even our business leaders understand about education as a system. We proceed as if the answer is holding teachers accountable on the basis of their students’ performance on standardized competency exams on the one hand and threatening dire sanctions against schools, including closure, if they fail to measure up on the other. Sahlberg’s reference to such a “toxic use of accountability” suggests that the approach itself is harmful to the system and to the children and communities that our schools exist to serve.

Our complementary focus on encouraging the establishment of charter schools and offering vouchers to entice motivated families to abandon their public schools suggests a presumption, on our part, that we expect our focus on accountability and testing to fail.

I share Sahlberg’s belief that teachers, while important, are only a part of the problems with education in the U.S. and, regardless of how effective they are, “schools and teachers alone cannot overcome the negative impact that poverty” and, I would add, the lack of both the motivation of students and support of parents. Sahlberg cites the need to “Elevate children out of poverty by other public policies.”

My only criticism of Sahlberg is his not uncommon assertion that poverty plays the pivotal role in the problems of education in the U.S. As he suggests, however, the data seems to show that poverty plays a bigger role in the challenges facing American children than in most other developed nations. This is a fact that should shake Americans out of our complacency but we reject it because it does not fit into our rather exalted self-image.

In my book, Reinventing Education, Hope, and the American Dream: The Challenge for Twenty-First Century America, (REHAD), I suggest that it is not poverty so much as it is the lack of hope on the part of the parents of our children that an education offers a way out of poverty. No one can deny that poverty creates tremendous disadvantages for American children but the fact is that some children find a way to excel academically, in spite of the poverty they endure.

What we need to understand is “what are the characteristics that distinguish such children from the majority of their classmates?” I suggest that the distinguishing characteristic is that the children who succeed are supported by parents who somehow, in the face of all odds, cling to the hope that an education is a portal to a better life. These parents and guardians possess a relentless commitment to the education of their children and not a day goes by that they do not communicate the importance of education to their sons and daughters.

The problem is not poverty rather it is the hopelessness and powerlessness that so typically accompany poverty. While poverty is a condition that seems to defy our best efforts, hopelessness and powerlessness are states of mind about which we can do something. We may not be able to get our hands around poverty, but we can attack hopelessness and powerlessness one family, one school, or one community at a time.

Sahlberg’s message is that we need a comprehensive approach that addresses every facet of the problems of education in America. I call this a systems-thinking approach in which we step back, sufficiently, that we can view our educational system as an integral whole. It is only from such a vantage point that we can begin to see how the system is influenced not only by external forces but also by internal forces that represent the consequence of our ineffectual tampering.

We not only need to shift our focus from teacher effectiveness to school effectiveness, as Sahlberg suggests, we need to effect a paradigm shift of our focus to the effectiveness of the system as a whole.

“Careful quality control at entry into teaching;” regarding teaching “as an esteemed profession, on par with medicine, law or engineering;” rigorous “competition to get into these teacher education programs” is where Sahlberg suggests we begin. He talks about the effectiveness of leadership within the classroom and school and the important role that parents play. He also talks about the importance of a positive school climate where teachers can “use their skills, wisdom, and shared knowledge for the good of their students’ learning.”

We need a comprehensive plan of action that addresses every aspect of our complicated educational system and process and offering a blueprint for such a plan is the essential purpose of my book, Reinventing Education, Hope, and the American Dream, (REHAD). Although I believe the solution I offer in REHAD is practical and effective it is offered as much as a catalyst to a profession-wide brainstorming process as it is a proposal for direct action.

Sahlberg closes out his article with a theoretical exchange of teachers with Finnish teachers coming to Indiana and Hoosier teachers going to Finland. He suggests that the Finnish teachers working in the context of the current American educational process would be able to deliver only marginal improvements in test scores. He suggests that, once acclimated, Hoosier teachers in Finland would begin to flourish.

Interestingly, in one of the drafts of REHAD, I posed a similar hypothetical experiment in which we would exchange teachers from model schools that exist along the fringes of the American educational system with those from our more challenged public schools. The results I envisioned as a result of such an experiment were virtually identical to those envisioned by Sahlberg.

Sahlberg strives, as do I, to challenge Americans to alter the way we think about education and expand the boundaries of conventional thinking. It is my hope that my modest contribution will help ameliorate the difficulty many Americans have in acknowledging that we can learn something from the experience of other nations.

Excerpt # 7 from Reinventing Education, Hope, and the American Dream, from the Introduction

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Poverty

The majority of experts suggest that poverty is the biggest problem in American public education. Notwithstanding that poverty creates tremendous disadvantages for students and that much must be done to put supports in place, there are many students from the poorest of backgrounds who excel academically and there are those who fail in spite of the relative affluence enjoyed by their families. We suggest that poverty and the problems with our systems of public education are symptoms of the same pathology. What seems to matter is a combination of two critical states of reality.

The first is how parents view the relationship between education and opportunity. For the relatively affluent families, it comes down to whether children are taught that opportunities must be earned, on the one hand, or are entitlements on the other. For the poor or for families that hover in the vicinity of the poverty level the issue is whether parents see an education as a way for their children to escape their disadvantage on the one hand or whether they have lost hope on the other.

It seems reasonable to conclude that the challenges of affluence are easier to overcome than the challenges poverty. We are concerned, however, about failing children on whatever end of the affluence continuum on which they can be found. The operative question is why we do not attack hopelessness, ferociously. Hope and expectations are inextricably connected. The consequences of an educational system that puts children in a position to fail can be devastating to the vulnerable and contributes greatly to this sense of hopelessness.

The second reality is the level of influence parents and family have over their children relative to the power and influence of the peer group. We suggest that parents who are ardent advocates for the importance of education and who teach their sons and daughters to swim in the currents of peer pressure rather than be swept away by it are most likely to have children who excel academically. As the strength of both the parent(s) advocacy regarding the importance of an education and their ability to help their children develop a healthy self-esteem begins to wane, academic performance seems to diminish. We suggest that the color of a family’s skin has precious little to do with the academic performance of their children. The role of affluence matters only to the extent that a family’s relative wealth contributes to or impedes its ability to sustain close relationships with its children.

Bad Teachers

Are there bad teachers in our public schools? Most certainly! Only a few, however, entered the teaching profession as bad teachers. They became bad over time, in many cases, after years of being subjected to a failure-laden system and precious little support from the parents of their students. If we were able to plot out the deterioration of the performance of such teachers it would be in almost perfect inverse proportion to the increase in their level of hopelessness with respect to successful outcomes. Many lose faith that what they are doing is making a difference.

What is remarkable is that there are so many public school teachers in urban communities all over the U.S. who somehow cling to their hope in the face of such distressing academic environments and teach to the best of their abilities. These men and women are the unsung heroes of public education and they deserve our respect and support, not the mounting criticism and indictments they are forced to endure.

Legislators are naive to think that they can make better schools available to the broad public simply through legislation that gives people more choices and also vouchers that help them pay for those choices. The problem, of course, is that only a small percentage of the total population is motivated to take advantage of such opportunities even when readily available to them. More choices and vouchers may provide lifelines to a few of the most motivated families but it is comparable to a sentence of death for the remainder.

The sad reality is that every time concerned parents jerk their children out of public schools in favor of alternatives such as suburban public, parochial, charter, or other “model” schools the abandoned urban public school is left with one less parent who cares. The teachers of these schools are now left with the most challenging and unmotivated students and least supportive parents, while enjoying none of the special luxuries that contribute to the success of their “model” counterparts and none of the hope. Projecting to all fifty states Indiana public schools’ loss of $37 million during the 2012-2013 academic year and we are talking about nearly $2 billion in revenue lost by schools systems that can least afford it.

What we are creating is a bifurcated system of education that separates the “haves” and the “have-nots.” The problem is not that we are creating alternatives for families that value an education rather it is that we are failing miserably in our efforts to fix the problems faced by the schools that are being abandoned.

The teaching profession certainly bears a portion of the responsibility for the problems with education in America and we must make every effort to improve the quality of teachers. We must challenge school administrations and teachers’ unions to find ways to work together toward this objective. In a later discussion, we will make recommendations for teachers and their unions on how to improve the accountability of teachers, thereby improving the quality of the aggregate faculty. Our top priorities, however, must be to attack the cultural forces that lead to parental apathy with respect to education and the resulting absence of motivation on the part of so many students on the one hand and to re-invent the educational process on the other.

Powerful forces are poised to rip control of education out of the hands Teachers and communities

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Yesterday’s (5/8/14) report, by Kimberly Hefling of the Associated Press, under the headline: “Nation’s students not improving: Exam finds no gains in seniors’ critical skills since ’09,” is certain to renew exclamations that our teachers are failing America’s children.

However absurd such proclamations may be, it is time for teachers, working collectively and with their communities, to take the lead in advocating substantial reforms of the educational process. If teachers permit educational reforms to remain exclusively in the hands of the government and corporate reformers, they are putting America’s children at risk and are leaving the teaching profession unprotected.

It is not sufficient to take a defensive posture and cry out against such reformers. What is needed are proactive proposals that the entire teaching profession can support with all of its political influence and might at the local, state, and federal level.

The reforms themselves must be substantial and they must literally reinvent the American educational process so that it:

• Is focused on success in real and substantive ways that allows teachers to teach children how to be successful;

• Shifts the focus back to subject mastery rather than test preparation, using the NAEP definition of “proficient” as a model where the expectation is to help students acquire the ability to apply what they learn to real-life situations;

• Puts teachers in a position to teach in an intimate environment in which they can form close, nurturing relationships with both students and parents;

• Help children experience the fun of learning under the tutelage of a “favorite teacher” rather than deal with the stress of looming annual, standardized exams;

• Integrate student assessment and teacher accountability into the instructional process, much like industry has done with quality systems, obviating the need for annual standardized examinations to demonstrate competency;

• Provides teachers with state-of-the-art technology and other tools to facilitate rather than obstruct what they do, where the technology is as seamless and productive as the smartphones most of us carry in our pockets and purses; and,

• Begins the challenging process of re-establishing the highest possible level of trust between parents and their children’s teachers.

Teachers must also use their collective might to aggressively pursue grants for creative programs that engage parents as partners in the education of their children (I encourage teachers to count the number of such programs of which they are currently aware).

I offer my book, Reinventing Education, Hope, and the American Dream, as a model for implementation at the local level in schools and communities all over the nation. It is a model that can also serve as catalyst for brainstorming or as a springboard for the development of other models.

In any case, it is time for teachers to act before their credibility is completely tainted and their social capital squandered.

Excerpt #6 from Reinventing Education, Hope, and the American Dream, The Introduction, cont.

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All educational policy makers, decision-makers, administrators, and practitioners are challenged to step back to a vantage point from which they can examine the system as an integral whole and challenge their fundamental assumptions about the educational process. We will show how this can be done, very specifically, in a later section of this work. All players in the system must be tasked to break out of their encapsulation and to think exponentially. What we need from teachers is that they acquire a willingness to try new things and be willing to leave their zones of comfort. Not everything we try will work but we will find no new solutions until we do try.

We can predict with a high level of confidence that increased student motivation and parental participation will make a difference in any educational setting. What is not so clear is whether the innovations in curriculum and instructional methodology utilized in these special schools would translate to all students across the spectrum of our diverse population of American children.

Honors programs in our mainstream public schools provide supportive evidence for this argument. In such honors programs, students have been selected on the basis of their demonstrated accomplishments. These are highly motivated students, almost all of whom are supported by committed parents who view themselves as full partners in the educational process. Within honors programs, the students, already successful academically, enjoy some of but not all of the advantages enjoyed by students in special schools. Often, principals assign their best and most experienced teachers to honors programs. In addition, the students in honors programs are sheltered from much of the negative peer pressure that pervades the classrooms, hallways, and playgrounds of most urban public schools. Honor students, for example, rarely are required to deal with the harassment of students who view education with disdain. They might have to deal with it in the corridors but not in an adjacent seat within an honors classroom.

The attributes that distinguish honor students, who are essentially self-selected for the program, from the non-honors students of their school are their motivation to learn, a demonstrated proficiency in an academic arena, and the fact that they are supported by parents who rigorously support the educational process. Our argument is further supported by the fact, to which many teachers will attest, that there are many other students who could be honors students if only they cared and if only they could be encouraged to try. Excellent teachers can and do provide such encouragement and we know that the encouragement of committed parents can be a powerful influence. The encouragement of teachers and parents working in partnership, however, creates the absolute best environment for the success of students. It is imperative that we work relentlessly to bring all American parents into this partnership. Although I have no evidence to prove my assertion, I believe that even teachers at the lower end of the performance curve do their best work with those students whose parents make an effort to show up at conferences and call or drop by to see how their children are doing.

An important difference between special schools outside of the mainstream system of education and highly successful honors classes is that while special schools are able to employ innovations in curriculum and teaching methods, honors programs must rely on the same curriculum and educational methodology found in the mainstream classrooms of their state. The only apparent difference for the honors classrooms are the motivation of students, their demonstrated accomplishments, and the rigorous support of families. This suggests to this author, that student motivation and parental responsibility are the most important components of educational success, wherever we find it. Honors students are also children for whom the traditional educational process is ideally suited. The flip side, here, poses a serious question: Could this be construed as evidence that our traditional educational processes are not a good fit for the majority of the students in our public schools?

The motivation of students and the active support and participation of parents are clearly the crucial difference makers in education, both public and private. The sooner we acknowledge this reality and begin to restructure our strategies accordingly, the sooner we will begin to see a transformation in the quality of American education for all students. Our second over-riding priority must be to challenge an educational process that seems to be both designed and focused on identifying and celebrating the accomplishments of a small percentage of elite students for whom academic success comes relatively easily, to the great disadvantage of the millions of other American children.

As we shall see when we examine the results of competency tests in the State of Indiana, thirty percent of the students throughout Indiana are unable to pass the ISTEP+ or the End of Class Assessments, which are meant to determine eligibility for graduation. Just because they passed does not mean that these students scored high on the assessments. Many passed by the slimmest of margins.

Over the coming century, the success of our nation requires a diverse range of skills. Excellence in any one venue will be as vital to our nation’s success as any other. Ron Flickinger, an educational consultant who provided feedback to me when this book was being written observed that, “The larger social system will value some skills more than others and will obviously pay more for those skills, but the culture has to find a way to communicate to its young that the guy that gets your plumbing right enhances the quality of your life just as much as the mayor of your city.”

An urgent need to completely rethink the reasons why so many children fail in our mainstream schools throughout the whole of the United States seems apparent.

Column for Fort Wayne Journal Gazette on Teacher Evaluations Results in Indiana

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Published: April 14, 2014 3:00 a.m.
Honing an imperfect tool
Teacher evaluations – crafted properly – have their place

Mel Hawkins

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Whatever one feels about the reliability of the data regarding school staff performance evaluations released by the State Department of Education and reported in the April 8 Journal Gazette, just having a system of evaluation in place and reporting results to the public is a positive step for our state’s educators.

Performance evaluations in any venue are an uncertain science, but the fact that they acknowledge a responsibility to be accountable to the public is the first step in the right direction. The results are far more credible than the offhand assertions of skeptics that the “results do not provide a true and accurate assessment.”

References to what would appear to be contradictory evidence provided by the performance of students’ on ISTEP+ tests are equally nonsensical.

It has become fashionable to blame teachers for the poor performance of their students, but this should be construed as evidence that critics of our systems of public education have an oversimplistic understanding of why so many American children are performing poorly in school.

Those who advocate the use of state competency test results to punish schools and teachers are simply out of touch with reality and demonstrate, with each shouted breath, that they are clueless as to the reasons for failure in our schools.

The reasons why children fail in school are many and they are complex and can be discussed in detail at another time and place; but, let there be no doubt that far too many of our children are failing and this is, without question, one of the most important issues on the American agenda.

It is because this issue is so critical to the future of our society that it demands thoughtful examination on the part of men and women who are more concerned about understanding the dynamics of the issue than they are about assigning blame or spouting meaningless platitudes.

Blaming teachers for the problems in public education in America is like blaming soldiers for the war they were asked to fight. Teachers are as much victims of an obsolete educational process as are the students that they teach.

It is bad enough that they are asked to perform miracles without the necessary structure, support and resources; can we at least spare them the ramblings of an uninformed public?

I am not suggesting that the teaching profession is without culpability, and it certainly must bear a significant share of the responsibility for changing the reality that is education in 21st-century America. Performance evaluations can play an important role in that process, and they can be a powerful tool in driving organizations toward their objectives and in holding employees at all levels of an organization to the highest possible expectations.

Unfortunately, the quality of performance evaluations is often a function of the caliber of management in the organization. If they are to work in an educational environment, principals must be thoroughly schooled in their use. Interestingly, this is an area where school corporations and teachers’ associations could work together toward a common purpose.

Performance evaluations are also another area where schools can learn from business. While the value and functionality of performance evaluations in a business environment span the continuum from pathetic to outstanding, many industries have been engaged for decades in the development of meaningful instrumentation.

The concept of integrated performance evaluations would be one innovation that would offer great promise in an educational environment. Integrated performance management systems are designed to provide ongoing, real-time interface between worker and supervisor and are focused upon helping workers, both professional and nonprofessional, maximize their ability to provide products and services of the highest caliber.

It seems to this observer that it would be in everyone’s best interests if teacher associations would take the lead in working with their school districts to mutually develop such capability. Nothing drives innovation like the compelling need to satisfy demanding and unhappy customers, and there are few people who are happy with the state of public education in America in this second decade of a new century. If ever a time would be right, this would seem to be it.

Excerpt #3 from the Preface of Reinventing Education, Hope, and the American Dream

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[Opposite the corporate reformers are] Advocates who support traditional, community-based public education and who oppose the forces of privatization, Common Core, reliance on standardized testing to hold schools and their teachers accountable, expansion of voucher programs and charter schools claim that while our schools are far from perfect, they are not failing. These advocates suggest that the quality of education being provided to American children is higher than it has ever been. They insist that poverty is the biggest problem in public education and that we should attack poverty and the disadvantages it creates for our children while protecting our educational traditions.

The purpose of this book is to show that both sides of this debate are terribly wrong and that both sides grossly misjudge the efficacy of education in America, both public and private. We suggest that both sides misinterpret the role of poverty and the other forces that contribute to the educational failure of an unacceptable number of Twenty-first Century American school children. It is the cultural equivalent of spending all of our resources on new and improved thermometers and fever reducers at the expense of attacking the cause of the elevated temperature. In the interim, the infection festers, unabated, while we poison the educational process with our intransigence.

How our nation responds to these challenges of the Twenty-first Century will determine the future of the American way of life, not to mention the American dream. Parents of children that we now refer to as baby boomers were fortunate to live in the world where there was great clarity with respect to core values, and at a time when the external forces that compete with the influence of parents and families were relatively insignificant. In each succeeding generation, parents have seen diminished clarity with respect to core values while the power and sophistication of external forces have grown, exponentially. Today, in this second decade of the Twenty-first Century, the external forces that compete for the attention of our children are unprecedented and of a power and magnitude that was unimaginable even a decade ago.

That these internal challenges come at a time when emerging economic powers, with laser-like focus, are working to challenge American economic and political supremacy places our future in grave jeopardy. It is vital that Americans understand that competition is a bad thing only for the player who has lost his or her ability to compete. Healthy competition brings out the best of all competitors. If we continue to slog down the same path, the health of our society and our ability to compete effectively will deteriorate at an accelerating pace.

The beauty of our situation as members of an ailing society, however, is that our educational system, both public and private, in addition to being the barometer with which we are able to identify and measure the severity of the crisis, also provides the most viable point of attack in quest of a solution. It is viable, however, only if we come together as one people, in all of our diversity, and work to restore our competitive advantage with the same sense of urgency that our competitors demonstrate. This crisis demands action and meaningful action requires that we challenge our fundamental assumptions and expand the boundaries of conventional wisdom.

Chapter 5 – Journalled review of Diane Ravitch’s Reign of Error. “The Facts about Test Scores.”

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In Chapter 5 of her monumental work, Reign of Error, Diane Ravitch offers the results of The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) assessments as compelling evidence that “students in American public schools today are studying and mastering far more difficult topics in science and mathematics than their peers forty to fifty years ago.” On the basis of this evidence she believes that “Test scores are at their highest point ever recorded” and, therefore, claims that “the educational system is broken and obsolete” are simply not true. It may be true that scores are higher than ever for the students at the elite end of the academic continuum but it ignores the stark reality that is the performance of the majority of American school children.

It is somewhat ironic that Ravitch is critical of the value of standardized testing in assessing the efficacy of public education on the one hand but cites NAEP results as evidence of the health of public education in America on the other. Her argument is that the NAEP assessment process is a different sort of testing and is far more meaningful that they typical standardized competency examinations used in states throughout the U.S. About this she is correct and we will examine the NAEP assessments and their results, shortly.

It is also important that we examine the context in which Ravitch’s arguments are made. Like most educators, Ravitch is frustrated at the savagery with which our schools and teachers are being blamed for the perceived failure of public education in America. Being attacked, even when criticisms are justified, is far more effective at putting educators on the defensive than it is as a catalyst for meaningful educational reform. When the criticisms are unfair and based upon claims that are unfounded or prejudicial, the intensity of one’s defensive posture is magnified.

As we have said throughout this “journaled review of Ravitch’s Reign of Error,” she is right to challenge the basis for such claims and also the solutions proffered by the “evil corporate reformers.” Where she is wrong is to insist that the documented improvements in the performance of our public schools, as measured by NAEP, are acceptable and that they prove that public education in America is not failing. We would suggest that the NAEP results prove rather clearly that public education is, indeed, failing.

Let us digress for a few paragraphs and take a look at the NAEP assessment process. Ravitch is correct that the NAEP assessment process is a meaningful tool and that the NAEP, which is part of the US Department of Education, and its independent governing board, the National Assessment Governing Board (NAGB) are a highly reputable, bipartisan body comprised of educators, elected officials, business people, and members of the general public.

The NAEP measures student performance in reading, math, and other subjects over time and reports results in two ways. The first is by scale scores, ranging from zero to 500 which reflect what students know and can do, without making judgments about whether the performance is good or bad. To use the vernacular, the results “are what they are.”
The second component is that Achievement Levels have been established in an attempt to put the raw results into some sort of meaningful context. It is acknowledged that these achievement levels are somewhat arbitrary and have created opportunities for over-interpretation.

On the NAEP assessments, an “advanced” level of achievement denotes “superior performance at each grade assessed.”
“Proficient” is defined, by the National Assessment Governing Board (NAGB) as “solid academic performance for each grade assessed. This is a very high level of academic achievement. Students reaching this level have demonstrated competency over challenging subject matter, including subject matter knowledge, application of such knowledge to real-world situations, and analytical skills appropriate to the subject matter.”

The NAGB defines “Basic” as “partial mastery of prerequisite knowledge and skills that are fundamental for proficient work at each grade assessed.”

The NAGB “believes, however, that all students should reach the Proficient level; the Basic level is not the desired goal, but rather represents partial mastery that is a step toward Proficient.”

“Below Basic” represents students who are unable to demonstrate even partial mastery of the work at each grade assessed.

We must maintain an awareness that these achievement levels are determined by the judgment of a panel of people on the basis of the performance of actual testers using percentiles. In effect, we are superimposing a distribution curve over the scores in order to make it more meaningful for us. As we shall see, later, the results tell us how much students know but it does not even begin to tell us where they should be performing at a given grade.

We can draw meaningful conclusions from the scores that will help us chart a course for the future, however and we will discuss this in some detail.

An important distinction with respect to NAEP results is that the scale scores of 0-500 change very little over time and actually show how students are moving up the scale, i.e. from the 4th grade assessment to the 8th grade assessment. In essence, the assessment shows how much kids know and can utilize at a given point in time. It might be helpful to think of it as a continuum along which students move as they gain increasing levels of mastery over the subject matter with no ceiling as to how far they can progress other than topping out at a score of 500.

Now, we want to compare the NAEP assessment process with state competency exams and we will use Indiana’s ISTEP+ simply because of the author’s relative level of familiarity with it.

Right out of the gate, be aware that we are going to over-simplify this process but it is the logic of the process that we want to illustrate.

On ISTEP+ for Grade 3 Math, for example, there is an expectation that a given number of areas of content will have been presented to the students by the time the ISTEP+ for that grade level is scheduled to be administered. The primary question the ISTEP+ is designed to measure is whether or not students “have learned what we expect them to know.” Specifically, what they are expected to know is defined within the context of state standards. What is not obvious from the published data are such questions as “How were passing scores determined?” In other words, how high was the bar set? For example is passing 60 percent? Eighty percent?

So, in the case of NAEP we are assessing how much a child of a given age knows and can utilize, without regard for how his or her classmates might be doing. For the ISTEP+ we seem more concerned about how a given student’s performance compares to the performance of his or her classmates.

Returning to our discussion of how NAEP results are to be interpreted, Ravitch disagrees with those who “assume that students who were not “Proficient” on the NAEP were “below grade level”.” “That is wrong” Ravitch insists and she suggests that having “76 percent” or some comparable percentage of the student population at “basic or above” is something to be touted.

I tend to agree with the NAGB that “Basic” is not our desired goal and that all students should reach the “Proficient” level of achievement, which is a point at which they have “demonstrated competency over challenging subject matter. . . .” and can apply “that knowledge to real-world situations. . . .”

Think about the difference, here. Ravitch is stating that the NAEP results in which 71 percent of eighth grade students are at “Basic or above” is validation that our schools are not in a state of crisis.

I would suggest just the opposite, and the NAEP would seem to agree, that it is clearly unacceptable that only 44 percent of eighth grade math students are “Proficient or Advanced.” Why would we ever think our job is done when any student has achieved only “partial mastery of prerequisite knowledge and skills that are fundamental. . .” to achieving proficiency rather than “Proficiency” itself? Why would we ever think it acceptable that 56 percent of eighth grade math students are not at a point where they have mastered the material sufficiently to apply that knowledge to real world problem-solving?

And, let us not forget about the 29 percent of eighth grade math students who have yet to demonstrate even partial mastery of the material. The two realities taken together spell crisis in this author’s mind in bold upper-case letters.

Other points of concern include:

The fact that we have no sense at all about whether or not the bar has been set sufficiently high;
The fact that only 6 to 8 percent are performing at an advanced level;
The fact that the variance between the 10th percentile and the 90th percentile is a cavernous 94 points (for eighth grade math students); and
The fact that the performance gaps between white students and their black and Hispanic classmates remains at an unconscionably high rate and that closing the gap from 32 points to 25 points for African-American students over a twenty plus year period is an accomplishment about which we should feel embarrassed rather than proud.

In American educational thinking, we are caught up in the idea that only 6 to 8 percent of students can be A students. In the business world, no production manager would be content to have such disparity of performance. The expectation would be that 75 percent of more of employees are working at the highest level of productivity and that those employees who are not are receiving aggressive remedial attention.

What we can say with some certainty, when talking about American public education, is that few if any students are performing at the highest level of which they are capable and the vast majority are nowhere close to achieving their potential. Helping individual students reach the highest tiers of their potential should always be the goal of our schools and teachers and we should not be squandering a single second worrying about whether Child “A” is keeping up with his or her classmates.

The NAEP Assessment tools appear to offer a high level of utility in judging the efficacy of our systems of public education. What we need to focus on is closing the gaps and raising the bar.
Let us not forget that the biggest fallacy in over-reliance on standardized testing, of any kind, as the ultimate measure of accountability for schools and teachers is that schools and teachers are only a small part of the equation for academic excellence.

To suggest that our current level of achievements provide evidence that no crisis exists in American public education is nothing short of absurd.

Response to the Column on Culture and Poverty by Eugene Robinson of the Washington Post

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Bravo for the rejection, by @eugenerobinson of the @washingtonPost, of Rep. Paul Ryan’s assertion that culture is to blame for poverty in the U.S. It is what I have been trying to say in my book, Reinventing Education, Hope, and the American Dream, but Robinson has said it better. Such proclamations do, indeed, provide an excuse for doing nothing. Such thinking also provides fodder for corporate reformers of education who want to privatize our schools and minimize the amount of influence a local community will have over the schools their children must attend.

Ironically, when traditional educators challenge such corporate reform agendas they make the same excuses by claiming that poverty is the cause of the problems with public education in America and, yes, I know this sounds counter-intuitive. Blaming poverty gives educators license to lower their expectations because “there really isn’t anything of significance we can do until our government effectively addresses the problems of poverty.”

I wish I could go back and add Robinson’s comment on culture, in the section of my book where I say that the problem with education in America is not poverty, it is the hopelessness that so often accompanies poverty. That hopelessness and powerlessness also contribute to a cultural devaluation of education on the part of a growing population of Americans; citizens who have become effectively disenfranchised and have given up hope that a quality education can create a better life for their children.

I wish I had done a better job of saying that the problems of poverty and educational failure are not the result of the many subcultures of American society; whether African-American, Hispanic-American, or other ethnic groups.

Why can we not recognize that this cultural diversity is not a weakness of American society but rather a strength that adds rich textures, flavors, sounds, and perspectives to a pluralistic democracy.

Blaming poverty for the problems in education, like blaming culture for the existence of poverty, is convoluted logic that blinds us to pragmatic solutions and is nothing more than an excuse for continuing to make the same mistakes we have been repeating for generations. Until we change this thinking our schools will continue to chew up and spit out huge numbers of American school children.

Even though this cultural devaluation is prevalent in many African-American communities in cities and poor rural communities throughout the U.S., it transcends race and exists anywhere that people have given up hope and no longer believe that they can exert control over the outcomes in their lives.

Poverty and the problems with education in America are symptoms of the same pathology as is the cancerous, cultural devaluation of education. They are all functions of hopelessness and powerlessness. The operative question becomes, “why don’t we attack hopelessness relentlessly.”

In my book, I suggest that education not only provides a barometer with which we can measure the severity of the problem, education also provides our society with the best opportunity to alter this reality. Make no mistake, if we continue to allow the spread of hopelessness it has ominous implications for the future of America. This is particularly true given the emergence of whole new economies that are challenging American supremacy in the dynamic and highly competitive world marketplace of the Twenty-first Century.

We must transform the educational process in America from a system that is focused on failure to one that acknowledges the cavernous disparity with respect to the level of motivation and preparation that young children carry with them on their first day of school. We must have a system that puts teachers in a position to help their students learn how to be successful rather than the current system that sets up huge numbers of children for failure and humiliation. And, then, we wonder why they begin to lose hope that an education provides a pathway to better opportunities.

We must urge Americans of all backgrounds and economic circumstances to believe that we are anything but powerless to change the outcomes that flow from our society’s shortcomings.

Reinventing Education, Hope, and the American Dream: The Challenge for Twenty-First Century America, offers a blueprint for change that outlines thirty-three specific action strategies for transforming American public education and also for infusing hope and faith in the American dream in the hearts and minds of every American man, woman, and child.

We Must Be Willing to Believe in the Possibilities if We Wish to have Better Outcomes

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One of the things that distinguishes positive leaders from the rest of the crowd is the belief in the possibility of things. How many times, when presented with a new idea for solving a problem have you heard the response, “That’ll never work!” “You will never convince them of that.” “Management will never go for something that grand!” “You are biting off more than you can chew!” “You will never get the funding!” “What makes you think they will be willing to listen to you?” “That’s impossible!” “You are spitting in the wind!” You’re dreaming!”

We could go on and on with similar examples of the excuses people use for not trying. Every great idea in the history of the world began in the fertile imagination of an individual human being who looked out at the world with a fresh perspective. A huge percentage of these great ideas were perceived to be impossible by the dreamer’s contemporaries, by the wisest people of their time; by those in power whether a king, emperor, general, or president; by the religious authorities of that time in history, and even by their closest friends and family.

Very often the dreamer was persecuted for his or her revolutionary ideas, ideas often branded as heresy and blasphemy.

Not uncommonly, these history changing ideas were not even spoken or written about, initially, because their proponent underestimated their own ability to make a difference in the world around them. Often, such ideas lay dormant in the deepest recesses of the proponent’s mind until something happened that compelled the individual to act, even in the face of great opposition.

Listen carefully! Whether an idea is big or small, each and every one of us has, within us, the power to ask why not. Each and every human being has far more ability to alter the world around them than they give themselves credit for.

In our case, we are talking about reinventing education in the US. Yes, it is an enormous challenge, but it is well within the scope of possibility. We can move the odds of any given idea from “possible” to “probable” just by expanding the number of people who are willing to open their minds. We can change education in America, if only we will open our hearts and minds to new ways to looking at the educational process; to new ideas.

Think about this for a moment. If we were to decide to start over, to build an educational system from scratch that would do all of the things that we want and need it to do, I can guarantee you it would look entirely different than the way the system looks today.

Begin with this question in your mind. What if there was a way to do things differently that would accomplish all that we want while preserving the integrity of the system and its professionals?

If there is a way, wouldn’t it be worth our time and energy to find out? Is not education sufficiently important to the ongoing welfare of our society that we should leave no stone unturned in our quest for a answer?

A Response to Diane Ravitch Blog Post, Poverty Matters

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Poverty Does Matter, but not the way we like to think!

Poverty is important and it does matter, very much, in fact. And no, poverty is not a state of mind; it is a tragic condition in which millions of Americans languish.

Poverty is also an excuse for throwing up our collective hands as if the outcomes are out of our control. It is an excuse for continuing to do the same things we have always done, unquestioningly, convinced we are doing the best we can for the children in our classrooms, under adverse circumstances.

We cry out: “If only Congress would raise minimum wages; change the tax structure to more equitably spread the burden; if only they would find a way to lift the horrible mantle of poverty we could really help these kids.”

And, before you rush to stereotype reformers and their pseudo-counterparts and shut down your minds, I grew up in a low-income family and attended a school that, sixty years ago, was 30 percent black and 50% impoverished. In my first job as a juvenile probation officer I sat across a rickety card table that served as the dinner table for a mother striving to rear 4 children on welfare, drinking coffee while trying to find a way to keep her sons in school and out of the juvenile detention facility.

I sent my own three children to city public schools so they would learn to feel at home in the midst of diversity and not grow up to be elitist, upper-middleclass Americans, out of touch with how so many of our fellow citizens must live.

What I have learned from my own parents and from a lifetime of experience is that it is not poverty that keeps children from succeeding in school. For generations there have been children from the poorest families who have somehow learned how to excel academically; and these were not outliers to be discounted as not relevant to our discussion. Almost without exception there is a characteristic common to all of these youngsters. These children are blessed to have a parent or guardian who somehow still clings to hope that their child can have a better life.

Let’s cling to no illusions about the difficulties these parents face or that such parents are always successful. Sadly, many do fail in spite of the heroic efforts that are made . What matters, however, is that many do not fail and, as a result, their children enjoy some level of academic success.

It is not poverty that keeps children in poverty, it is the hopelessness that so often accompanies poverty. Poverty is, indeed, a very real condition but hopelessness is very much a state of mind. The operative question is why we do not attack hopelessness, ferociously. Hope and expectations are inextricably connected.

As much as I admire and respect public school teachers our public educators, as a whole, whether policy-makers, professors in college departments of education, administrators, or teachers cling to the traditions of an early twentieth century educational process that is woefully inadequate in a twenty-first century world; totally unaware of how what they do contributes to and reinforces the hopelessness of our nation’s disadvantaged.

These educators are blind to the fact that our educational process is focused on failure and sets the most vulnerable of our nation’s children up for failure and humiliation. Is it any wonder that these youngsters grow up to spawn new generations of children with little if any motivation to learn and even less hope for a better life.

For the love of all that is precious in life, can we not abandon our outdated assumptions and biases and open our hearts and minds to a new way of thinking about education in America? If only we will relinquish our obsession with tradition and open our minds to new possibilities we will discover answers that have existed, right in front of us, just beyond the illusory horizon of intransigence.

To you, Diane Ravitch, who for so long has been one of our best and brightest advocates for excellence in education, we need you seek to understand rather than rebut. We need you to think exponentially and to provide a whole new level of leadership in a fresh paradigm.

I am not suggesting that there is a perfect solution to the challenges of education in America; there is no such thing as a perfect solution. With each stride down a new avenue of thinking, however, we will discover new and better ideas and each new answer will lead to whole new sets of questions followed by even more answers and even better ideas.

You know better than any of us that time is of the essence. We must act before those who are rushing to privatize education, place even more reliance on standardized competency examinations, and who want to separate our schools from the communities they exist to serve lead us to disaster.