A couple of years ago Clayton Christensen, a professor at the Harvard Business School and the high priest of "disruptive innovation," was eagerly anticipating the rise of disruption in K-12 education, even suggesting that by 2019 "half of all classes for grades K-12 will be taught online." A more modest new white paper from Christensen's institute scales back these ambitious predictions, suggesting instead that what's coming is "hybrid" or "blended" innovation, in which novel methods will combine with elements of the old regime.
Perhaps it's a good thing that the Christensen institute is realizing that traditional schools have more staying power than previously suspected. Still, the new paper is an occasion to reconsider the whole idea of "disruptive innovation." After looking into it a bit, I think that if Christensen's first idea was a bit extreme, his basic idea is partly right: we are getting disruption in our schools--but in a bad way, not a good way.
What is "disruptive innovation"?
The basic idea behind "disruptive innovation" is that the status quo is upended by doing something (making cars or steel, providing music or movies, etc.) somewhat more shoddily but also dramatically more cheaply or conveniently. Clayton Christensen has made a career out of describing and glorifying this process, and it may be a useful way to think about a lot of things: the rise of the Japanese car-makers, for example, or of Netflix's streaming video business. Christensen, and many others, have predicted that the education status quo will soon be upended by disruptive innovation, usually imagined as some form of online learning. This may eventually happen, but there are some significant barriers to it, especially at the K-12 level.
Why disruptive innovation won't come naturally to K-12 education
Every year my alma mater's alumni magazine, which fancies itself a major force in journalism, publishes a list of 50 "disruptive companies"; this year, for the first time, an education company made the list. Predictably, the company was Coursera, which provides free online college courses, and not a company involved in K-12 education, which is particularly resistant to change.
Disruptive innovation typically requires one or both of the following: (1) low-end consumers; (2) new producers who are doing things differently. First, there has to be a market for the crappier product. Often the untapped market is in a niche where the crappier product is more convenient, like cell-phone cameras, or where the old product was exclusively expensive, as when personal computers displaced mainframes. In education, it is very clear that colleges and universities are ripe for disruptive innovation, since colleges are getting so expensive (to be sure, some of this is happening because states are defunding their own public universities). As for the second requirement, producers who are doing things differently, higher ed. has always had a fair amount of "churn," or Schumpeterian creative destruction, and there are naturally, then, lots of groups working on doing things differently: Coursera, EdX, etc. But K-12 education is fairly different from higher ed, and is less naturally open to disruptive innovation. K-12 education has not seen the same skyrocketing prices, it has a stable and in some sense captive consumer base, and doesn't have a significant sector of alternative producers to serve the (non-existent) low-end market.
It's interesting that K-12 education costs have been fairly stable. Despite Baumol's cost disease, which is supposed to lead things (like teachers) that are not amenable to technology improvements to become more expensive over time, teacher salaries have been pretty much flat since the early seventies; moreover, the cost of K-12 education has not, unlike that of higher ed or health care, increased as a share of GDP. So the low-end market that is required for disruptive education is nonexistent; to create it will require political action. Another thing that would be required is a significant sector of producers who are doing things differently. And in K-12 education, the only producers who are doing things differently are private operations (open schools like Sudbury Valley, homeschool operations like Calvert, etc.). In the traditional system, these private schools do not have access to the low-end market, which has been limited to public schools.
It's possible, then, to see Ed reform as a movement that is attempting to create the conditions for disruptive innovation by (1) creating a low-end market and (2) encouraging a new education sector that is, in Christensen's words, "remote from the mainstream." Ed Reform is creating a low-end market by starving districts of funding, partly by channeling funds to charters; and this heavy support of charter schools and vouchers, etc., it aims both to increase the number of education providers who are doing things differently and to allow them access to the low-end market.
In other words, in education disruptive innovation may mean a race to the bottom for our poorest kids, even as the rich go to ever-more artisanal schools
The reformers want to open up the education market to low-cost producers. This is a strategy that has not worked in any other country, and if the history of the free market in other products is any guide, even at its best we will end up with the poorest and most vulnerable children in our society being almost completely cut out.
The rich and powerful, on the other hand, will probably not send their kids to disruptively innovative schools. Because when it comes to services and human experiences (food, coaching, nature experiences, opera, education, etc.), the rich and powerful very rarely use the products of disruptive innovation. Rich people don't get take-out via their smartphones; they hire a personal chef. For rich people, the trend is not toward disruptive innovation, but toward artisanal non-innovation, and the same will probably be continue to be true of schools for the rich. More on that in another post.
Showing posts with label Corporatization of Education. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Corporatization of Education. Show all posts
Friday, June 7, 2013
Friday, May 31, 2013
Reading instruction without reading...
...is like growing up without eating. Much of the reading instruction discussed in yesterday's New York Times article sounded like what I'm afraid a lot of the English curriculum is like in a lot of schools: classroom activities that mimic a test. Trying to raise scores leads to even more test-mimicking curriculum. In the Times article, there was only one extended description of a classroom activity. It went like this:
"...the teacher, guided the students in a close reading of a few paragraphs. But when she asked them to select which of two descriptions fit Terabithia, the magic kingdom created by the two main characters, the class stumbled to draw inferences from the text."
This is at what sounds like a successful school, with a thoughtful teacher. But notice the two important things that are not happening here:
a) The students are not reading very much. "A few paragraphs" is not much. Now, of course it's possible that the kids are reading a lot at other times. But none of the many teachers and experts quoted in the article ever mentions actually reading, so I think it's possible these kids may manage to do what a third of my ninth grade class did in middle school, and get through years without completing a single book.
b) The students are not themselves describing Terabitihia; they are asked to "select" from two possible descriptions. In other words, the students are answering multiple choice questions, not open-ended questions.
This is not reading; it is taking a test. Taking a test can be educational--I always urge my Juniors to take the AP English test, because I think one day focused on a high-quality test can be a learning experience--but this is not what you need day in and day out. It's as if, trying to get malnourished children to grow taller, we carefully measured their height every day, without ever letting them eat.
"...the teacher, guided the students in a close reading of a few paragraphs. But when she asked them to select which of two descriptions fit Terabithia, the magic kingdom created by the two main characters, the class stumbled to draw inferences from the text."
This is at what sounds like a successful school, with a thoughtful teacher. But notice the two important things that are not happening here:
a) The students are not reading very much. "A few paragraphs" is not much. Now, of course it's possible that the kids are reading a lot at other times. But none of the many teachers and experts quoted in the article ever mentions actually reading, so I think it's possible these kids may manage to do what a third of my ninth grade class did in middle school, and get through years without completing a single book.
b) The students are not themselves describing Terabitihia; they are asked to "select" from two possible descriptions. In other words, the students are answering multiple choice questions, not open-ended questions.
This is not reading; it is taking a test. Taking a test can be educational--I always urge my Juniors to take the AP English test, because I think one day focused on a high-quality test can be a learning experience--but this is not what you need day in and day out. It's as if, trying to get malnourished children to grow taller, we carefully measured their height every day, without ever letting them eat.
Friday, April 5, 2013
Teachers, per-pupil spending and student achievement
[Update: Many thanks to Louis F. Caruso for pointing out in a comment on this post that student achievement, whether flat or not, is all about shifting demographics. I should have known that student achievement was largely about students, not schools! Caruso mentions increasing ELL and SE students; after a quick look into the matter, it seems like other demographic shifts may be significant as well. In any case, the supposedly "flat" student achievement is, while understandable for the reasons I discuss below, also not as flat as it may seem on the surface.]
American schools have spent more per pupil since the 1970s without seeing a proportionate improvement in student achievement. Many proponents of "education reform" cite this fact as evidence that (A) our schools are failing, and that (B) we need to destroy teachers' unions. This doesn't make sense; here's why:
Yes, we have been spending more per student and seeing few achievement gains:
Below is a graph used by Bill Gates a couple of years ago. This graph is pretty similar to other graphs used by other Ed Reform types (see graph #3 here); it shows per pupil expenditure doubling since the 1970s, and NAEP scores not changing much.
This is a somewhat dubious graph, since it looks like there might be SOME improvement in the test scores, and the Y-axis scales are not necessarily comparable. But let's grant that okay, we have spent more money without getting much improvement. Now why would this be? The answer Gates has generally given, and that Ed Reformers give, is that bad teachers and obstructive teachers' unions are getting in the way of improvement. This strikes me as wrong for three reasons:
1. Teachers and kids are not getting better from century to century and decade to decade (there is no Moore's Law for teachers and children)
2. Even though teachers should be making more money, to share in the national wealth, in fact they are not--salaries have been flat since the seventies!
3. Therefore, the increase in per pupil spending has been in other areas--but what?
No wonder students and teachers haven't improved much: people are not like microchips
Teaching, like parenting or art, takes just as much time as it always took, and is not necessarily better now than a generation ago. It takes many fewer people-hours to make a computer than it did in 1975, and the computers we make are of dramatically better quality, but the art that we make, or the children that we raise, are not so dramatically better. Maybe they're a little better, but they're not dramatically better.
Some things have gotten better:
But some things have not gotten better:
People are not computers. To ask Brad Marchant to be a better hockey player than Bobby Orr, or a better sportsman, is absurd; to ask today's poets to be better than Larkin or Ashbery is absurd; and to ask today's teachers to be better than, say, my mom, is equally absurd.
Our national income has gone up, so teachers' incomes should have gone up, too...
Over the thirty-plus years that Gates's graph covers, America has gotten much, much richer. One way to measure how rich we are is GDP; in order to adjust for an increase in population and for ups and downs in how many hours people work, we can use GDP per hour worked. By this measure, America nearly twice as rich now as in 1975.
If the national income has gone up a lot, then you might imagine that teachers, like hockey players, might get paid a bit more, even if we aren't much better than our 1975 counterparts.
...but, amazingly enough, teachers' salaries have NOT gone up!
According to the National Center for Education Statistics, a high school teacher in 1973 made, in 2007 dollars, $51,961 In 2007, the average high school teacher made $52,367. Teacher salaries have been flat for over 30 years, despite the remarkable GDP growth we've seen.
Teachers are not alone. Wages in America, except for the top 10% or so, have been flat for decades. The country has gotten much richer, but the overwhelming majority of workers have not shared in this prosperity. Here's a graph showing growth in GDP/hour worked ("productivity") and in hourly compensation for non-supervisory workers; you can see the divergence between GDP and wages, starting in the early 70s:
So even though teachers SHOULD be making more money, we're not. This certainly begs the question of what that extra money has been spent on. I'm not a school finance expert, but you'd think people like Bill Gates might be able to figure it out. If he hasn't, this is another pretty good argument for his not being in good faith. He sends his kids to their fancy private school, which no doubt has the same exact dynamic going on (rising per-pupil costs, flat student achievement numbers and flat teacher salaries), but it never occurs to him that maybe his attacks on teachers are fundamentally wrong? (It's nice to see him, in his 4/3 WaPo piece, trying to be more diplomatic, but he has no credibility.)
Update: On second thought, I shouldn't have said that the WaPo piece was nice. Anthony Cody is right; that Gates is pompously criticizing an over-reliance on test scores is outrageously hypocritical, given that Gates has arguably the largest individual responsibility for our current testing mania. But then, this is a guy who without a glimmer of irony has a Gatsby quote about failing to reach your dreams engraved in the library of his Gatsby-esque mansion.
American schools have spent more per pupil since the 1970s without seeing a proportionate improvement in student achievement. Many proponents of "education reform" cite this fact as evidence that (A) our schools are failing, and that (B) we need to destroy teachers' unions. This doesn't make sense; here's why:
Yes, we have been spending more per student and seeing few achievement gains:
Below is a graph used by Bill Gates a couple of years ago. This graph is pretty similar to other graphs used by other Ed Reform types (see graph #3 here); it shows per pupil expenditure doubling since the 1970s, and NAEP scores not changing much.
This is a somewhat dubious graph, since it looks like there might be SOME improvement in the test scores, and the Y-axis scales are not necessarily comparable. But let's grant that okay, we have spent more money without getting much improvement. Now why would this be? The answer Gates has generally given, and that Ed Reformers give, is that bad teachers and obstructive teachers' unions are getting in the way of improvement. This strikes me as wrong for three reasons:
1. Teachers and kids are not getting better from century to century and decade to decade (there is no Moore's Law for teachers and children)
2. Even though teachers should be making more money, to share in the national wealth, in fact they are not--salaries have been flat since the seventies!
3. Therefore, the increase in per pupil spending has been in other areas--but what?
No wonder students and teachers haven't improved much: people are not like microchips
Teaching, like parenting or art, takes just as much time as it always took, and is not necessarily better now than a generation ago. It takes many fewer people-hours to make a computer than it did in 1975, and the computers we make are of dramatically better quality, but the art that we make, or the children that we raise, are not so dramatically better. Maybe they're a little better, but they're not dramatically better.
Some things have gotten better:
 |
| Standard 1970s computer |
| Standard computer today |
But some things have not gotten better:
| Bobby Orr |
| Brad Marchant |
People are not computers. To ask Brad Marchant to be a better hockey player than Bobby Orr, or a better sportsman, is absurd; to ask today's poets to be better than Larkin or Ashbery is absurd; and to ask today's teachers to be better than, say, my mom, is equally absurd.
Our national income has gone up, so teachers' incomes should have gone up, too...
Over the thirty-plus years that Gates's graph covers, America has gotten much, much richer. One way to measure how rich we are is GDP; in order to adjust for an increase in population and for ups and downs in how many hours people work, we can use GDP per hour worked. By this measure, America nearly twice as rich now as in 1975.
If the national income has gone up a lot, then you might imagine that teachers, like hockey players, might get paid a bit more, even if we aren't much better than our 1975 counterparts.
...but, amazingly enough, teachers' salaries have NOT gone up!
According to the National Center for Education Statistics, a high school teacher in 1973 made, in 2007 dollars, $51,961 In 2007, the average high school teacher made $52,367. Teacher salaries have been flat for over 30 years, despite the remarkable GDP growth we've seen.
Teachers are not alone. Wages in America, except for the top 10% or so, have been flat for decades. The country has gotten much richer, but the overwhelming majority of workers have not shared in this prosperity. Here's a graph showing growth in GDP/hour worked ("productivity") and in hourly compensation for non-supervisory workers; you can see the divergence between GDP and wages, starting in the early 70s:
So even though teachers SHOULD be making more money, we're not. This certainly begs the question of what that extra money has been spent on. I'm not a school finance expert, but you'd think people like Bill Gates might be able to figure it out. If he hasn't, this is another pretty good argument for his not being in good faith. He sends his kids to their fancy private school, which no doubt has the same exact dynamic going on (rising per-pupil costs, flat student achievement numbers and flat teacher salaries), but it never occurs to him that maybe his attacks on teachers are fundamentally wrong? (It's nice to see him, in his 4/3 WaPo piece, trying to be more diplomatic, but he has no credibility.)
Update: On second thought, I shouldn't have said that the WaPo piece was nice. Anthony Cody is right; that Gates is pompously criticizing an over-reliance on test scores is outrageously hypocritical, given that Gates has arguably the largest individual responsibility for our current testing mania. But then, this is a guy who without a glimmer of irony has a Gatsby quote about failing to reach your dreams engraved in the library of his Gatsby-esque mansion.
Saturday, March 30, 2013
Should We Indict Bush, Boehner, Obama and Duncan?
Today's indictment of the former Atlanta schools superintendent is an amazing turn of events, but why stop with her? The indictment offers no evidence that ex-superintendent Beverly Hall had ever directly instructed any teachers to cheat on state tests, but bases its case on the "no excuses" culture of "constant pressure" for higher test scores. According to the District Attorney, Dr. Hall "is a full participant in the conspiracy. Without her, this conspiracy could not have taken place, particularly in the degree it took place." This makes sense to me, but it is worth noting that by this logic we should also be indicting a lot of other people: the Secretary of Education, a couple of Presidents, sundry Congressmen.
There has never, as far as I know, been even a single school that managed to get very poor kids to test as well as rich kids. The basic premise of the No Child Left Behind Act was flawed and cynical in its essence. I hope we're starting to realize that, and I hope that what has happened in Atlanta will be seen as an indictment, not only of Dr. Hall, but of our whole misguided system of high-stakes testing and gross inequality.
There has never, as far as I know, been even a single school that managed to get very poor kids to test as well as rich kids. The basic premise of the No Child Left Behind Act was flawed and cynical in its essence. I hope we're starting to realize that, and I hope that what has happened in Atlanta will be seen as an indictment, not only of Dr. Hall, but of our whole misguided system of high-stakes testing and gross inequality.
Friday, March 22, 2013
The Common Core is not "research-based" and its "efficacy" is unproven
In poking around looking at PARCC (the new testing associated with the Common Core) I stumbled onto an interesting document: the
"publishers' criteria" set out by the two lead authors (Coleman and Pimentel) of the ELA
Common Core "State" Standards. These criteria are intended to guide
publishers in their development of curricular materials for teaching under the
Common Core regime. (Although I don't actually know any teachers who use a publisher's curriculum
materials, many must do so, since producing these materials seems to be a
huge industry.)
Here's the conclusion--again, this is Coleman and Pimentel telling publishers how to create materials for teaching to the Common Core standards:
CONCLUSION: EFFICACY OF ALIGNED MATERIALS
Curriculum materials must have a clear and documented research base. The most important evidence is that the curriculum accelerates student progress toward career and college readiness. It can be surprising which questions, tasks, and instructions provoke the most productive engagement with text, accelerate student growth, and deepen instructor facility with the materials. A great deal of the material designed for the standards will by necessity be new, but as much as possible the work should be based on research and developed and refined through actual testing in classrooms. Publishers should provide a clear research plan for how the efficacy of their materials will be assessed and improved over time. Revisions should be based on evidence of actual use and results with a wide range of students, including English language learners.
This paragraph may seem fairly reasonable on its face; nevertheless, I have two thoughts about it.
I. The Common Core does not, itself, "have a clear and documented research base"
My first thought is that what Coleman and Pimentel say about publishers' Common Core-aligned materials seems quite relevant for the Common Core itself. It is as if Coleman and Pimentel had realized all the things that should have been done, but that they didn't do, in writing up educational standards for the entire country.
The Common Core is hardly "research-based"; the research base on which it rests is incredibly flimsy. The authors of the Common Core make their case, such as it is, in an appendix purporting to offer, among other things, "research supporting key elements of the standards." The relevant section of this appendix is only three pages long and offers "research" worthy of an undergraduate paper or a blog post, not of a major national endeavor. Its three pages make roughly the following case:
1) College performance correlates with the ability to read and understand difficult texts, and especially expository texts. (This is probably true.)
2) Complexity of texts assigned in high school has declined over the last 50 years, and high school students read relatively little expository text. (This may be true.)
3) Therefore, students need to be assigned more difficult texts, and more of those texts should be expository. (This third part neither follows logically nor is supported by empirical data.)
As I noted, the first part of this argument seems very likely, and the second is plausible, but the third part is very problematic, neither seeming logical nor being supported by the historical record or empirical research. The gap in logic is obvious: just because kids who are better at reading complex expository texts do better in college does not mean that most of the reading kids do in high school should be of complex expository texts, and just because the complexity of texts assigned in high school has declined somewhat over the past several decades does not mean that assigning more complex texts is the right remedy. For these conclusions to be valid, there would have to be empirical support either of the historical or experimental variety. There is neither.
First, the historical fallacy. Robert Hass tells us that all poetry is about loss. The same is true of the stories Ed reformers tell—we have lost the good old days when teachers taught more rigorously and even poor students could achieve like the rich kids. The problem with this story is that it is by no means clear that students were more college-ready 50 years ago. The only historical evidence the Common Core authors cite is what they call a "statistically significant" decline in adult reading proficiency. What is the actual decline? From 15% in 1992 to 13% in 2007. This hardly seems precipitous, it covers fifteen years, not fifty, and is belied by (slightly) rising reading scores on the NAEP. The historical record does not provide a clear argument for making students read more difficult texts or having more of those texts be expository--and Ed reformers, unlike poets, don't have the excuse of poetic license. (For a longer analysis of this historical fallacy in the stories Ed reformers tell, see here.)
Second, there is a shocking lack of experimental data. As usual in writing about education, the discussion in this Common Core appendix is a mish-mash of much unfounded assertion and some offhand citations of actual empirical research; also as usual, even when there are references, the articles cited often fail to support the assertion. I'll discuss just one example--the first specific citation I looked at--but they are almost all equally embarrassing.
References that don't support what they are cited to support
I am skeptical of the idea that students need to read a lot of specifically expository text; my suspicion, based on my own and others' experience, is that the key thing is to simply to read a lot, and that a high volume of reading even of trashy airport thrillers will lead, with only a bit of specific practice, to skillful reading of expository text. The Common Core document states that "students need sustained exposure to expository text to develop important reading strategies." Now, I doubt this very much, but while I only have anecdotal evidence (me, Malcolm Gladwell, and everyone else of our generation, who learned to read before reading strategy instruction was current) to support my skepticism, the Common Core folks seem to have more: they cite several articles to support their statement. I looked at the first citation (Afflerbach, Pearson and Paris, 2008), a 2008 overview from "The Reading Teacher" about the difference between strategies and skills (unsurprisingly, the article suggests that skills are unconscious, strategies are conscious, and you need both; I agree, but I'm skeptical that these things can be explicitly taught or usefully assessed)--the article does not support the assertion it is cited to support.
I have now read the article three times looking for evidence that "students need sustained exposure to expository text to develop important reading strategies," and I have so far failed to find any evidence at all. Thinking maybe I'd missed it, I searched for "expository," for "exposure" and for "sustained". None of those words appears in the text. Neither does "non-fiction." Looking through again, the closest I could come to anything supporting the claim that you need to read a lot of expository text in order to develop reading strategies is the following very general assertion about practicing strategies, which is completely untethered to any actual data:
"The scope and complexity of these strategies are large, and there is ample variety of text difficulty and genre variety to practice so that the skills become automatic. The general rule is, teach children many strategies, teach them early, reteach them often, and connect assessment with reteaching."
First of all, we should note that this "general rule" is, like most general rules in writing about education, totally unproven and highly dubious. Many people, like me, like Ben Franklin, like Frederick Douglass, received virtually no formal instruction, and absolutely no assessment, in reading strategies, and yet learned to be highly skilled readers and writers. Second, this brief, unfounded passage bears little relation to the Common Core's assertion that you need to read a lot of expository text in order to get better at it. If this-- "there is ample ... genre variety to practice so that the skills become automatic"--is supposed to mean this--"students need sustained exposure to expository text to develop important reading strategies"-- then either I am a bad reader, David Coleman is a bad reader, or he simply has no idea what a "clear and documented research base" would mean in a field that was, unlike education, actually scientific.
Again, the first citation offered by Coleman and Pimentel to support one of their central claims provides absolutely no support; far from reporting research or empirical data, the article never even mentions the matter at hand. This is still amazing to me, despite my having found this to be the case with so many other supposedly "research-based" recommendations to teachers.
II. Books and (maybe) a teacher are all students really need
The other thing to notice about the Common Core’s recommendation to publishers is although the authors say that most of the materials "will by necessity be new", this is probably untrue. In fact, developing new materials may be unnecessary, since books alone would seem to fit most of their requirements. Books support student "readiness for college." Books have "a clear and documented research base." Books have a long history of "actual use" with a "wide range of students."
The best ELA program for infants is simply a lot of natural adult talking and reading aloud, and the best college ELA curriculum is simply good books and an engaging professor, but somehow schools have fallen into a muddy puddle of "instruction" and "curriculum materials." Also, one of the major stated purposes of the whole Common Core/PARCC effort is to make sure young people are prepared for college. I wonder why, then, the best private high schools and the best private colleges aren't using publisher-created curriculum. Is it possible that Andover and Harvard are delivering a sub-par product. Perhaps--but far more likely is that either their curriculum is better or that the curriculum really doesn't matter all that much.
The Common Core anticipates that the questions, tasks and instructions used with readings will be created by publishing companies. This begs the question of what role, if any, we teachers are supposed to play. I suppose eventually we will be replaced by computer programs. That might be okay...
Conclusion
Except that it's not okay. Children need human connection, and the best thing that we do every day is provide that connection. If scholars and bureaucrats with zero teaching experience can tell us what we can do that will help us connect better, great! But all too often--that is, almost all the time--their recommendations are shockingly unfounded on any empirical data.
On the one hand, many of the CC's specific recommendations—like the suggestion that students focus on close reading, or the observation that “it can be surprising which questions, tasks, and instructions provoke the most productive engagement with text”—seem reasonable, but the hypocrisy and hubris of the whole enterprise give off a very questionable smell.
Here's the conclusion--again, this is Coleman and Pimentel telling publishers how to create materials for teaching to the Common Core standards:
CONCLUSION: EFFICACY OF ALIGNED MATERIALS
Curriculum materials must have a clear and documented research base. The most important evidence is that the curriculum accelerates student progress toward career and college readiness. It can be surprising which questions, tasks, and instructions provoke the most productive engagement with text, accelerate student growth, and deepen instructor facility with the materials. A great deal of the material designed for the standards will by necessity be new, but as much as possible the work should be based on research and developed and refined through actual testing in classrooms. Publishers should provide a clear research plan for how the efficacy of their materials will be assessed and improved over time. Revisions should be based on evidence of actual use and results with a wide range of students, including English language learners.
This paragraph may seem fairly reasonable on its face; nevertheless, I have two thoughts about it.
I. The Common Core does not, itself, "have a clear and documented research base"
My first thought is that what Coleman and Pimentel say about publishers' Common Core-aligned materials seems quite relevant for the Common Core itself. It is as if Coleman and Pimentel had realized all the things that should have been done, but that they didn't do, in writing up educational standards for the entire country.
The Common Core is hardly "research-based"; the research base on which it rests is incredibly flimsy. The authors of the Common Core make their case, such as it is, in an appendix purporting to offer, among other things, "research supporting key elements of the standards." The relevant section of this appendix is only three pages long and offers "research" worthy of an undergraduate paper or a blog post, not of a major national endeavor. Its three pages make roughly the following case:
1) College performance correlates with the ability to read and understand difficult texts, and especially expository texts. (This is probably true.)
2) Complexity of texts assigned in high school has declined over the last 50 years, and high school students read relatively little expository text. (This may be true.)
3) Therefore, students need to be assigned more difficult texts, and more of those texts should be expository. (This third part neither follows logically nor is supported by empirical data.)
As I noted, the first part of this argument seems very likely, and the second is plausible, but the third part is very problematic, neither seeming logical nor being supported by the historical record or empirical research. The gap in logic is obvious: just because kids who are better at reading complex expository texts do better in college does not mean that most of the reading kids do in high school should be of complex expository texts, and just because the complexity of texts assigned in high school has declined somewhat over the past several decades does not mean that assigning more complex texts is the right remedy. For these conclusions to be valid, there would have to be empirical support either of the historical or experimental variety. There is neither.
First, the historical fallacy. Robert Hass tells us that all poetry is about loss. The same is true of the stories Ed reformers tell—we have lost the good old days when teachers taught more rigorously and even poor students could achieve like the rich kids. The problem with this story is that it is by no means clear that students were more college-ready 50 years ago. The only historical evidence the Common Core authors cite is what they call a "statistically significant" decline in adult reading proficiency. What is the actual decline? From 15% in 1992 to 13% in 2007. This hardly seems precipitous, it covers fifteen years, not fifty, and is belied by (slightly) rising reading scores on the NAEP. The historical record does not provide a clear argument for making students read more difficult texts or having more of those texts be expository--and Ed reformers, unlike poets, don't have the excuse of poetic license. (For a longer analysis of this historical fallacy in the stories Ed reformers tell, see here.)
Second, there is a shocking lack of experimental data. As usual in writing about education, the discussion in this Common Core appendix is a mish-mash of much unfounded assertion and some offhand citations of actual empirical research; also as usual, even when there are references, the articles cited often fail to support the assertion. I'll discuss just one example--the first specific citation I looked at--but they are almost all equally embarrassing.
References that don't support what they are cited to support
I am skeptical of the idea that students need to read a lot of specifically expository text; my suspicion, based on my own and others' experience, is that the key thing is to simply to read a lot, and that a high volume of reading even of trashy airport thrillers will lead, with only a bit of specific practice, to skillful reading of expository text. The Common Core document states that "students need sustained exposure to expository text to develop important reading strategies." Now, I doubt this very much, but while I only have anecdotal evidence (me, Malcolm Gladwell, and everyone else of our generation, who learned to read before reading strategy instruction was current) to support my skepticism, the Common Core folks seem to have more: they cite several articles to support their statement. I looked at the first citation (Afflerbach, Pearson and Paris, 2008), a 2008 overview from "The Reading Teacher" about the difference between strategies and skills (unsurprisingly, the article suggests that skills are unconscious, strategies are conscious, and you need both; I agree, but I'm skeptical that these things can be explicitly taught or usefully assessed)--the article does not support the assertion it is cited to support.
I have now read the article three times looking for evidence that "students need sustained exposure to expository text to develop important reading strategies," and I have so far failed to find any evidence at all. Thinking maybe I'd missed it, I searched for "expository," for "exposure" and for "sustained". None of those words appears in the text. Neither does "non-fiction." Looking through again, the closest I could come to anything supporting the claim that you need to read a lot of expository text in order to develop reading strategies is the following very general assertion about practicing strategies, which is completely untethered to any actual data:
"The scope and complexity of these strategies are large, and there is ample variety of text difficulty and genre variety to practice so that the skills become automatic. The general rule is, teach children many strategies, teach them early, reteach them often, and connect assessment with reteaching."
First of all, we should note that this "general rule" is, like most general rules in writing about education, totally unproven and highly dubious. Many people, like me, like Ben Franklin, like Frederick Douglass, received virtually no formal instruction, and absolutely no assessment, in reading strategies, and yet learned to be highly skilled readers and writers. Second, this brief, unfounded passage bears little relation to the Common Core's assertion that you need to read a lot of expository text in order to get better at it. If this-- "there is ample ... genre variety to practice so that the skills become automatic"--is supposed to mean this--"students need sustained exposure to expository text to develop important reading strategies"-- then either I am a bad reader, David Coleman is a bad reader, or he simply has no idea what a "clear and documented research base" would mean in a field that was, unlike education, actually scientific.
Again, the first citation offered by Coleman and Pimentel to support one of their central claims provides absolutely no support; far from reporting research or empirical data, the article never even mentions the matter at hand. This is still amazing to me, despite my having found this to be the case with so many other supposedly "research-based" recommendations to teachers.
II. Books and (maybe) a teacher are all students really need
The other thing to notice about the Common Core’s recommendation to publishers is although the authors say that most of the materials "will by necessity be new", this is probably untrue. In fact, developing new materials may be unnecessary, since books alone would seem to fit most of their requirements. Books support student "readiness for college." Books have "a clear and documented research base." Books have a long history of "actual use" with a "wide range of students."
The best ELA program for infants is simply a lot of natural adult talking and reading aloud, and the best college ELA curriculum is simply good books and an engaging professor, but somehow schools have fallen into a muddy puddle of "instruction" and "curriculum materials." Also, one of the major stated purposes of the whole Common Core/PARCC effort is to make sure young people are prepared for college. I wonder why, then, the best private high schools and the best private colleges aren't using publisher-created curriculum. Is it possible that Andover and Harvard are delivering a sub-par product. Perhaps--but far more likely is that either their curriculum is better or that the curriculum really doesn't matter all that much.
The Common Core anticipates that the questions, tasks and instructions used with readings will be created by publishing companies. This begs the question of what role, if any, we teachers are supposed to play. I suppose eventually we will be replaced by computer programs. That might be okay...
Conclusion
Except that it's not okay. Children need human connection, and the best thing that we do every day is provide that connection. If scholars and bureaucrats with zero teaching experience can tell us what we can do that will help us connect better, great! But all too often--that is, almost all the time--their recommendations are shockingly unfounded on any empirical data.
On the one hand, many of the CC's specific recommendations—like the suggestion that students focus on close reading, or the observation that “it can be surprising which questions, tasks, and instructions provoke the most productive engagement with text”—seem reasonable, but the hypocrisy and hubris of the whole enterprise give off a very questionable smell.
Monday, December 10, 2012
"Visible Learning," School Reform, and In-school Reading
(I wrote this really quickly; I apologize for typos. I wanted to get it written while it was still fresh in my mind, but I have too much schoolwork to take a long time and write it well.)
In-school reading makes parents uncomfortable
At my son's middle school, and indeed throughout the district in the city my family lives in (slightly less leafstrewn than Leafstrewn, but graced with the Perfect University and the Institute of Machine Perfection), English teachers are having their students do a lot of in-class reading. On Parents' Night, I told my son's teacher I was thrilled about this. Last week, at a pot luck dinner for my daughter's class, a mom who also has a seventh grader told me she had wondered about what I said. "You said, 'I think in-class reading is a great idea,'" she said. "I couldn't tell if you were serious, or being sarcastic."
It turns out that she, and many other parents, see reading in class as a strange idea. That same week, on a parent email forum, a couple of parents raised the issue: why, they said, does school have them doing silent reading, an activity that they could easily do at home?
I wrote a response in which I made the obvious arguments: that reading is (as even such a champion of whole-class direct instruction as Doug Lemov argues) always a productive use of class time; that it is, in fact (as Lemov says), the (very high) baseline against which any other use of class time should be measured; that many kids don't read at home and indeed hardly read at all; that in-class reading allows the teacher to do more one-on-one instruction, which is the best kind; and so on.
Of the parents who responded, most backed me up. Some parents, however, were still not convinced. Most of these parents were willing to admit that reading in class might be good for other people's children--the implication I think was that good parents would have kids who read--but not for their own children, because their own children didn't need it. At the pot luck dinner I talked to a couple of parents whose kids read a lot at home; they were confused as to why their kids would spend time in school reading when they could be doing something else.
What the Research Says
I spent several hours over the weekend immersed in John Hattie's magisterial 2009 overview, Visible Learning. I've also spent some time looking back at Marzano's interesting 2000 monograph, A New Era of School Reform, which is, while less impressively encyclopedic, very much along the line that Hattie takes. Hattie and Marzano stress very clear and well-defined "learning objectives," very clear teacher control over where the lesson is going, and lots of "feedback" going both ways between teacher and student. Most education reformers over the past twenty years or so have justified their efforts by pointing to research like that which Hattie and Marzano synthesize. For a different perspective, I also looked back at Stephen Krashen's summary of studies of in-class reading, The Power of Reading. I've learned a lot, but I come away with more questions than clear answers.
Hattie and Marzano are very clear on what does work. Hattie calls it "visible learning"--he says that it's very important that both teachers and students be able to see what is working and what is not working. That requires very clear learning objectives, something Marzano stresses that seems to be taken to heart by all of today's reformers. It also requires a lot of feedback, from teachers to students, but also, and according to Hattie even more importantly, from students to teachers. Teachers need to know what their students are "getting" and what they are not getting. Teachers should be "activators" and not "facilitators." Hattie argues strongly and explicitly against the classic "constructivist" conception of teaching, in which the teacher facilitates "authentic" learning that is open-ended, "student-centered," and aimed at "discovery"--that is, learning whose end points or goals neither the teacher nor the student know beforehand. According to Hattie, this kind of "hands-off" teaching and "intrinsically motivated" learning is "almost directly opposite" to the kind of learning that the experimental data says is most successful.
Hattie and Marzano back up their arguments with vast amounts of experimental data. Hattie's book is particularly sweeping: his book is a meta-meta-analysis--that is, a meta-analysis of over 800 meta-analyses, each of which included several individual studies. Hattie's book synthesizes research on over a hundred million students, and with this vast body of evidence, a logical organization, a thoughtful, placid style but a forceful argument, it is certainly the most impressive analysis of educational data I've ever seen. That said, I came away not fully convinced.
Two Ways to Critique Hattie: theoretically and empirically
There are two kinds of potential problems with the "recipe" that Hattie (along with Marzano and all the other proponents of "clear learning objectives") is selling.
One kind of problem is theoretical: it seems possible that this kind of learning is potentially dry, uninspiring, and limited--and perhaps especially boring to students who get the idea quickly; also, it's not clear to me that, in the case of reading, the "learning goals" can be, to use Hattie's words, "challenging, specific and visible" (25).
A second class of problems, that I'll deal with in a post later this week, have to do with the empirical evidence Hattie is using: (a) the evidence for this recipe's efficacy seems to be quite thin in the case of reading; (b) the evidence for this recipe's efficacy seems to be mostly short-term, not long-term; (c) Hattie's evidence is mostly from controlled experiments, not from natural experiments; (d) Hattie and especially Marzano argue loudly that their evidence shows that poverty can be overcome by good schools and good teaching, but as far as I know this has never actually been done by an actual school in the real world--or at least not in the United States--despite the fact that thousands of schools across the country are trying to put this kind of "visible learning" into practice.
A theoretical critique: Is "Visible Learning" possible in English class--and if so, is it doomed to be dry and boring?
Today I wrote the following on the board in my "Honors" American Lit. class: "Learning Targets: (1) I will be able to write a good question about a sophisticated text and find a specific passage through which I can explore the question; (2) I will be able to discuss coherently the relationship between Hawthorne and Transcendentalism."
The cluster of A students who sit near the front of the room noticed what I had written and hooted derisively. One of them asked, "Is that a joke?" Another said, "No teacher in my entire school career has ever written learning targets on the board." Another one said it reminded him of a description of a typical day at a Fall River charter school that was posted a few days ago on Edushyster, an anti-corporate Ed reform blog. This led to a spirited discussion for a minute or so, before I shut it down so that we could get to our learning targets.
One student said that she liked the idea of learning targets, even in English class, but the most common knee-jerk response from the kids was that putting up a "learning target" every day in English class was laughable and ridiculous. Again, we didn't spend much time on this, but I believe their reaction was based on two ideas that I've written about before: (1) that, on the micro level, the skills we work on in English class are very complex and interdependent, so that isolating one of them each day is either absurd (today we're learning about commas in Hemingway) or obvious (the one I put up), while on the macro level the skills are (2) daily learning goals promote short-term thinking, while English-class skills are gained over the very long term--learned through repeated practice over years.
What are the learning goals in the case of upper-grade reading?
It is worth asking, then, what people who support "visible learning" would say should be our learning goals. The obvious place to look for these learning goals is in the Common Core.
The Common Core has two reading strands for grades 6-12, one covering "Literature" and one covering "Informational Text." I looked at the Literature strand. The Common Core specifies 9 standards for literature in the ninth and tenth grade. Three of them are below:
CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RL.9-10.2 Determine a theme or central idea of a text and analyze in detail its development over the course of the text, including how it emerges and is shaped and refined by specific details; provide an objective summary of the text.
CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RL.9-10.4 Determine the meaning of words and phrases as they are used in the text, including figurative and connotative meanings; analyze the cumulative impact of specific word choices on meaning and tone (e.g., how the language evokes a sense of time and place; how it sets a formal or informal tone).
These standards seem fairly unhelpful. They are essentially the same as standards from earlier grades (1). That would be fine in itself; as I've written, English class is a matter of practicing the same skills over and over. The problem is that these standards don't tell us anything we don't already know. We know that every English student in the world will be required to "determine the meaning of words and phrases as they are used in the text." This is quite a low-level goal.
In the end, I don't think putting a "learning target" up on the board is a particularly bad idea. I don't think it's necessary, but in the hands of a decent teacher it won't necessarily hurt. The danger with the practice is that it may lead to reductive, simplistic, boring teaching, in which kids are taught a lesson completely focusing on the simple structure of Hemingway's sentences. On the other hand, the danger with the opposite approach, the let's-just-read--and-talk-about-it approach, is that it may lead to a class that is way too loose. Either way is dangerous, but it seems unlikely that telling kids specifically what they are going to learn in every lesson is going to lead to more learning overall. Learning in English class is, as the Common Core standards admit both implicitly and (sometimes) explicitly, cumulative and long-term. To pretend that students are going to be noticeably better at "determining the meaning of words and phrases as they are used in the text" after a day-long lesson, or even after a month-long unit, is silly. Determining the meaning of words and phrases is a life-long task--and it is one at which the learning curve becomes flatter and flatter. I am probably better in some ways at this now than I was when I was twenty-five; but I'm not sure anyone would notice the improvement. Does this mean that reading a new author (as when I discovered Edward St. Aubyn last year) is useless? No, of course not. But it would be silly to set targets for that learning ("I will be able to describe Patrick Melrose's family dysfunction...").
That may mean that more advanced students will be the more dismissive of "visible learning"; perhaps, but I think it's not necessarily great for any students, and I'll talk more about that in a post on the empirical critique of Hattie's work later this week.
********************************************************************************
Footnote:
(1)
The fourth grade standards include the following:
CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RL.4.2 Determine a theme of a story, drama, or poem from details in the text; summarize the text.
CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RL.4.4 Determine the meaning of words and phrases as they are used in a text, including those that allude to significant characters found in mythology (e.g., Herculean).
In-school reading makes parents uncomfortable
At my son's middle school, and indeed throughout the district in the city my family lives in (slightly less leafstrewn than Leafstrewn, but graced with the Perfect University and the Institute of Machine Perfection), English teachers are having their students do a lot of in-class reading. On Parents' Night, I told my son's teacher I was thrilled about this. Last week, at a pot luck dinner for my daughter's class, a mom who also has a seventh grader told me she had wondered about what I said. "You said, 'I think in-class reading is a great idea,'" she said. "I couldn't tell if you were serious, or being sarcastic."
It turns out that she, and many other parents, see reading in class as a strange idea. That same week, on a parent email forum, a couple of parents raised the issue: why, they said, does school have them doing silent reading, an activity that they could easily do at home?
I wrote a response in which I made the obvious arguments: that reading is (as even such a champion of whole-class direct instruction as Doug Lemov argues) always a productive use of class time; that it is, in fact (as Lemov says), the (very high) baseline against which any other use of class time should be measured; that many kids don't read at home and indeed hardly read at all; that in-class reading allows the teacher to do more one-on-one instruction, which is the best kind; and so on.
Of the parents who responded, most backed me up. Some parents, however, were still not convinced. Most of these parents were willing to admit that reading in class might be good for other people's children--the implication I think was that good parents would have kids who read--but not for their own children, because their own children didn't need it. At the pot luck dinner I talked to a couple of parents whose kids read a lot at home; they were confused as to why their kids would spend time in school reading when they could be doing something else.
What the Research Says
I spent several hours over the weekend immersed in John Hattie's magisterial 2009 overview, Visible Learning. I've also spent some time looking back at Marzano's interesting 2000 monograph, A New Era of School Reform, which is, while less impressively encyclopedic, very much along the line that Hattie takes. Hattie and Marzano stress very clear and well-defined "learning objectives," very clear teacher control over where the lesson is going, and lots of "feedback" going both ways between teacher and student. Most education reformers over the past twenty years or so have justified their efforts by pointing to research like that which Hattie and Marzano synthesize. For a different perspective, I also looked back at Stephen Krashen's summary of studies of in-class reading, The Power of Reading. I've learned a lot, but I come away with more questions than clear answers.
Hattie and Marzano are very clear on what does work. Hattie calls it "visible learning"--he says that it's very important that both teachers and students be able to see what is working and what is not working. That requires very clear learning objectives, something Marzano stresses that seems to be taken to heart by all of today's reformers. It also requires a lot of feedback, from teachers to students, but also, and according to Hattie even more importantly, from students to teachers. Teachers need to know what their students are "getting" and what they are not getting. Teachers should be "activators" and not "facilitators." Hattie argues strongly and explicitly against the classic "constructivist" conception of teaching, in which the teacher facilitates "authentic" learning that is open-ended, "student-centered," and aimed at "discovery"--that is, learning whose end points or goals neither the teacher nor the student know beforehand. According to Hattie, this kind of "hands-off" teaching and "intrinsically motivated" learning is "almost directly opposite" to the kind of learning that the experimental data says is most successful.
Hattie and Marzano back up their arguments with vast amounts of experimental data. Hattie's book is particularly sweeping: his book is a meta-meta-analysis--that is, a meta-analysis of over 800 meta-analyses, each of which included several individual studies. Hattie's book synthesizes research on over a hundred million students, and with this vast body of evidence, a logical organization, a thoughtful, placid style but a forceful argument, it is certainly the most impressive analysis of educational data I've ever seen. That said, I came away not fully convinced.
Two Ways to Critique Hattie: theoretically and empirically
There are two kinds of potential problems with the "recipe" that Hattie (along with Marzano and all the other proponents of "clear learning objectives") is selling.
One kind of problem is theoretical: it seems possible that this kind of learning is potentially dry, uninspiring, and limited--and perhaps especially boring to students who get the idea quickly; also, it's not clear to me that, in the case of reading, the "learning goals" can be, to use Hattie's words, "challenging, specific and visible" (25).
A second class of problems, that I'll deal with in a post later this week, have to do with the empirical evidence Hattie is using: (a) the evidence for this recipe's efficacy seems to be quite thin in the case of reading; (b) the evidence for this recipe's efficacy seems to be mostly short-term, not long-term; (c) Hattie's evidence is mostly from controlled experiments, not from natural experiments; (d) Hattie and especially Marzano argue loudly that their evidence shows that poverty can be overcome by good schools and good teaching, but as far as I know this has never actually been done by an actual school in the real world--or at least not in the United States--despite the fact that thousands of schools across the country are trying to put this kind of "visible learning" into practice.
A theoretical critique: Is "Visible Learning" possible in English class--and if so, is it doomed to be dry and boring?
Today I wrote the following on the board in my "Honors" American Lit. class: "Learning Targets: (1) I will be able to write a good question about a sophisticated text and find a specific passage through which I can explore the question; (2) I will be able to discuss coherently the relationship between Hawthorne and Transcendentalism."
The cluster of A students who sit near the front of the room noticed what I had written and hooted derisively. One of them asked, "Is that a joke?" Another said, "No teacher in my entire school career has ever written learning targets on the board." Another one said it reminded him of a description of a typical day at a Fall River charter school that was posted a few days ago on Edushyster, an anti-corporate Ed reform blog. This led to a spirited discussion for a minute or so, before I shut it down so that we could get to our learning targets.
One student said that she liked the idea of learning targets, even in English class, but the most common knee-jerk response from the kids was that putting up a "learning target" every day in English class was laughable and ridiculous. Again, we didn't spend much time on this, but I believe their reaction was based on two ideas that I've written about before: (1) that, on the micro level, the skills we work on in English class are very complex and interdependent, so that isolating one of them each day is either absurd (today we're learning about commas in Hemingway) or obvious (the one I put up), while on the macro level the skills are (2) daily learning goals promote short-term thinking, while English-class skills are gained over the very long term--learned through repeated practice over years.
What are the learning goals in the case of upper-grade reading?
It is worth asking, then, what people who support "visible learning" would say should be our learning goals. The obvious place to look for these learning goals is in the Common Core.
The Common Core has two reading strands for grades 6-12, one covering "Literature" and one covering "Informational Text." I looked at the Literature strand. The Common Core specifies 9 standards for literature in the ninth and tenth grade. Three of them are below:
CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RL.9-10.2 Determine a theme or central idea of a text and analyze in detail its development over the course of the text, including how it emerges and is shaped and refined by specific details; provide an objective summary of the text.
CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RL.9-10.4 Determine the meaning of words and phrases as they are used in the text, including figurative and connotative meanings; analyze the cumulative impact of specific word choices on meaning and tone (e.g., how the language evokes a sense of time and place; how it sets a formal or informal tone).
These standards seem fairly unhelpful. They are essentially the same as standards from earlier grades (1). That would be fine in itself; as I've written, English class is a matter of practicing the same skills over and over. The problem is that these standards don't tell us anything we don't already know. We know that every English student in the world will be required to "determine the meaning of words and phrases as they are used in the text." This is quite a low-level goal.
In the end, I don't think putting a "learning target" up on the board is a particularly bad idea. I don't think it's necessary, but in the hands of a decent teacher it won't necessarily hurt. The danger with the practice is that it may lead to reductive, simplistic, boring teaching, in which kids are taught a lesson completely focusing on the simple structure of Hemingway's sentences. On the other hand, the danger with the opposite approach, the let's-just-read--and-talk-about-it approach, is that it may lead to a class that is way too loose. Either way is dangerous, but it seems unlikely that telling kids specifically what they are going to learn in every lesson is going to lead to more learning overall. Learning in English class is, as the Common Core standards admit both implicitly and (sometimes) explicitly, cumulative and long-term. To pretend that students are going to be noticeably better at "determining the meaning of words and phrases as they are used in the text" after a day-long lesson, or even after a month-long unit, is silly. Determining the meaning of words and phrases is a life-long task--and it is one at which the learning curve becomes flatter and flatter. I am probably better in some ways at this now than I was when I was twenty-five; but I'm not sure anyone would notice the improvement. Does this mean that reading a new author (as when I discovered Edward St. Aubyn last year) is useless? No, of course not. But it would be silly to set targets for that learning ("I will be able to describe Patrick Melrose's family dysfunction...").
That may mean that more advanced students will be the more dismissive of "visible learning"; perhaps, but I think it's not necessarily great for any students, and I'll talk more about that in a post on the empirical critique of Hattie's work later this week.
********************************************************************************
Footnote:
(1)
The fourth grade standards include the following:
CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RL.4.2 Determine a theme of a story, drama, or poem from details in the text; summarize the text.
CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RL.4.4 Determine the meaning of words and phrases as they are used in a text, including those that allude to significant characters found in mythology (e.g., Herculean).
Tuesday, October 16, 2012
Arne Duncan's life of privilege seems to have limited his imagination
From an article in today's NYT, here's Arne Duncan: “When everyone is treated the same, I can’t think of a more demeaning
way of treating people."
Hm. I can think of some more demeaning ways.
Hm. I can think of some more demeaning ways.
Sunday, October 14, 2012
More on the non-golden age of the 50s...
This is not directly literacy-related, but it supports and confirms what I was talking about in my last post, so I'll just mention it quickly. Richard Rothstein, who has for years and years been doing a great job of patiently and repeatedly dismantling the idea that schools and teachers are the best way to overcome poverty, has a wonderful, entertaining and painful article in The American Prospect. I'll give the basic story here, but it's worth reading the whole thing.
I. Joel Klein's non-evidence-based BS
Joel Klein--who represents better perhaps than anyone else (see footnote) the idea that if only we put billionaires in charge of our schools and gave them a free hand to hire, fire and generally wreak havoc, then public education will be able to cure all of our country's social ills (which are now largely the result of incompetent, undisciplined teachers who have read too much Paulo Freire)--Joel Klein is always citing his own life story to show that all you need are good teachers to lift you out of inner-city poverty and public housing. According to Klein, he himself grew up poor and in public housing, in a family that offered him no support for reading or other cultural activities, but his public school teachers held him to high standards, and he went to Columbia and on to a successful career, so therefore poverty is not an insurmountable impediment, and his story shows that "you'll never fix poverty in America until you fix education."
The most obvious problem with this story is that one anecdote does not prove much of anything. A larger problem is that the nation's schools were not, by any objective measure, any better overall in the 50s or 60s than they are now. But the biggest problem with the story is one you wouldn't know unless you did what Richard Rothstein did and actually looked into it: Klein's account of his own childhood is essentially untrue in every particular.
Klein was not in fact poor: his postal-worker father and bookkeeper mother probably made significantly more than the national median household income.
Klein's family did offer him culture and literacy. In fact, Klein was inspired to become a lawyer because his father would take him to the federal courthouse in Manhattan to watch cases, and if his family was like many other middle-class Jewish New York families of his era, education was probably valued as much as life itself.
Klein did grow up in public housing, but it was in no way like public housing as we have become accustomed to think of it. The words "public housing" for most evoke notions of crime-ridden wastelands, subsidized permanently by the government, inhabited by single parents and terrified children who are mostly people of color. The public housing Klein grew up in, by contrast, was not rent-subsidized, and in fact could be seen as a bastion of white middle-class privilege: the application process excluded single-parents, anyone with a criminal record, anyone with an out-of-wedlock birth, anyone with a history of drug addiction or mental illness, and most people of color (there was essentially a quota system intended to keep the neighborhood balance the same as it was before). In other words, the social problems, as Rothstein puts it, were "weeded out by the Housing Authority." This is not what most people think of when they hear "public housing."
So Joel Klein's biography does not actually provide any evidence that a poor kid growing up in a dangerous and unhealthy neighborhood with little family support can be saved by a good teacher. Instead, it reinforces the obvious truth that a middle-class kid growing up in a safe and healthy neighborhood with significant family support will do well in school and will appreciate a good teacher when he gets one--as Klein appreciated his high school physics teacher.
II. Parallel Childhoods
One of the strengths of Richard Rothstein's article exposing Klein's BS is that Rothstein and Klein turn out to have had parallel childhoods. Like Klein, Rothstein grew up in a middle class neighborhood in New York with a postal worker father and a bookkeeper mother, went to public school and went on to an Ivy League college. The two men even had the same physics teacher. But while Klein complains about not having a Mitt-Romney-like childhood and pretends that schools in the fifties were so great as to make up for his deprivation, Rothstein is aware that it was his family support that made the difference. Rothstein even tells us that when he wanted to apply to Harvard, his high school refused to process the application (because "boys from here don't go to Harvard") until Rothstein's father took the day off from work to come in and talk to the Principal. So much, as Rothstein says, for the golden age of the 50s.
For most people, as for Rothstein and probably Klein, education in the 1950s was no better than it is now. Then, as now, there are lots of kids from middle-class homes and parents without college degrees who are pushed and supported by their families and go on to great academic success. My father and stepfather are both examples of this: both grew up in stable middle-class homes, with parents who hadn't been to college; both were pushed and supported by their parents. My father, who went to a small rural high school in the midwest, was one of two kids in his high school class to go to college, but he ended up at MIT. My stepfather grew up in a Mitchell-Lama building in Washington Heights, with parents who hadn't gone to college, and he went on to be valedictorian at Bronx Science; he also went on to MIT.
Neither my father nor my stepfather would ever say that their 50s and 60s public schools were responsible for their success. Their schools were OK, but most students in those schools did not achieve such dramatic success. Instead, what allowed my father and stepfather to excel so remarkably was the support and encouragement of their middle-class parents, the fact that they were not surrounded by miserable poverty, and probably the fact that they themselves were pretty gifted.
III. Rothstein's concluding peroration
Again, it's worth reading the whole article, but here are a couple of paragraphs from the end of it:
"It would be obscene for me to claim I overcame severe hardship and was rescued from deprivation by schoolteachers. It is more obscene for Klein to do so, because his claim supports attacks on contemporary teachers and a refusal to acknowledge impediments teachers face because of their students’ social and economic deprivation. It’s a deprivation that he never suffered but that many children from public housing do today.
"A few superhuman teachers may lift a handful of children who come to school from barely literate homes, hungry, in poor health, and otherwise unprepared for academic instruction. But even the best teachers face impossible tasks when confronted with classrooms filled with truly disadvantaged students who are not in tracked special-progress classes and don’t arrive each morning from families as academically supportive as mine. Instead, they may come from segregated communities where concentrated and entrenched poverty, unemployment, and social alienation over many generations have been ravaging."
IV. My own conclusion: the subtext of Klein's and others' master narrative
(I don't have time to write this in an articulate way, since I have to enter interim progress reports, but I'll take ten minutes and make an attempt.)
Klein's story is obscene, but its obscenity is not unique to Joel Klein; in fact, it is part of a larger cultural phenomenon, the anxious attempts by our ruling classes to assert that they deserve their own extraordinary privileges, and I think we need to understand the current emphasis, by these ruling classes, on education and education reform as a part of this larger cultural phenomenon.
This need to deny one's own cultural advantages can be seen not only in Klein's absurd story, but in the absurd assertions by successful aristocrats like Mitt Romney that they are self-made men ("I inherited nothing"). Our society is in many ways less a meritocracy than it was 50 years ago, but the ruling classes want to pretend that it is. (This is, I believe, the thesis of a book I haven't read, The Twilight of the Elites: America After Meritocracy, by the estimable Christopher Hayes.) The ruling elites know they are smart and have worked hard, and they want, perhaps understandably, to pretend that their success is due to their own efforts. The elites' emphasis on education has to be seen in the light of this pretense.
Every time a politician pays lip service, as Obama did in his disastrous debate, to the idea that education is the best way to rebuild our economy and create jobs, we should remember that this is a self-serving argument, and one that implicitly blames the poor for their own condition. When we see articles that say that even high-priced colleges are a great investment, we should consider that college, for many students in a country whose top college major is "Business", may be as much a matter of what I think Jane Jacobs calls "credentialing" and what I always think of as analogous to a guild system; that is, a college degree functions as a class marker, and the four years of hard work or debauchery at an expensive campus is less about education than about your parents trying to ensure that you remain in the upper middle class.
What we are living in is less meritocracy than plutocracy, and saying that our educational system is failing is a way of displacing blame for the increasing inequality whose effects are all around us, if we only have eyes to see. (This is not to say that education doesn't matter, nor to say that individual teachers can make a difference--and in fact I am trying my best, but we teachers can't do it all by ourselves.)
********************************************************
Footnote: Joel Klein's career
Hired in 1998 by billionaire Mayor Bloomberg, Joel Klein was for years the Chancellor of the largest public school system in the country despite having no prior experience in education (he was counsel for a huge corporation); after resigning in 2010, Klein now works for two other billionaires Rupert Murdoch (Klein is trying to sell media to public schools) and for Eli Broad (Klein is in charge of Broad's massive effort to put "reform"-minded (anti-union, pro-privatization) superintendents in place across the country).
I. Joel Klein's non-evidence-based BS
Joel Klein--who represents better perhaps than anyone else (see footnote) the idea that if only we put billionaires in charge of our schools and gave them a free hand to hire, fire and generally wreak havoc, then public education will be able to cure all of our country's social ills (which are now largely the result of incompetent, undisciplined teachers who have read too much Paulo Freire)--Joel Klein is always citing his own life story to show that all you need are good teachers to lift you out of inner-city poverty and public housing. According to Klein, he himself grew up poor and in public housing, in a family that offered him no support for reading or other cultural activities, but his public school teachers held him to high standards, and he went to Columbia and on to a successful career, so therefore poverty is not an insurmountable impediment, and his story shows that "you'll never fix poverty in America until you fix education."
The most obvious problem with this story is that one anecdote does not prove much of anything. A larger problem is that the nation's schools were not, by any objective measure, any better overall in the 50s or 60s than they are now. But the biggest problem with the story is one you wouldn't know unless you did what Richard Rothstein did and actually looked into it: Klein's account of his own childhood is essentially untrue in every particular.
Klein was not in fact poor: his postal-worker father and bookkeeper mother probably made significantly more than the national median household income.
Klein's family did offer him culture and literacy. In fact, Klein was inspired to become a lawyer because his father would take him to the federal courthouse in Manhattan to watch cases, and if his family was like many other middle-class Jewish New York families of his era, education was probably valued as much as life itself.
Klein did grow up in public housing, but it was in no way like public housing as we have become accustomed to think of it. The words "public housing" for most evoke notions of crime-ridden wastelands, subsidized permanently by the government, inhabited by single parents and terrified children who are mostly people of color. The public housing Klein grew up in, by contrast, was not rent-subsidized, and in fact could be seen as a bastion of white middle-class privilege: the application process excluded single-parents, anyone with a criminal record, anyone with an out-of-wedlock birth, anyone with a history of drug addiction or mental illness, and most people of color (there was essentially a quota system intended to keep the neighborhood balance the same as it was before). In other words, the social problems, as Rothstein puts it, were "weeded out by the Housing Authority." This is not what most people think of when they hear "public housing."
So Joel Klein's biography does not actually provide any evidence that a poor kid growing up in a dangerous and unhealthy neighborhood with little family support can be saved by a good teacher. Instead, it reinforces the obvious truth that a middle-class kid growing up in a safe and healthy neighborhood with significant family support will do well in school and will appreciate a good teacher when he gets one--as Klein appreciated his high school physics teacher.
II. Parallel Childhoods
One of the strengths of Richard Rothstein's article exposing Klein's BS is that Rothstein and Klein turn out to have had parallel childhoods. Like Klein, Rothstein grew up in a middle class neighborhood in New York with a postal worker father and a bookkeeper mother, went to public school and went on to an Ivy League college. The two men even had the same physics teacher. But while Klein complains about not having a Mitt-Romney-like childhood and pretends that schools in the fifties were so great as to make up for his deprivation, Rothstein is aware that it was his family support that made the difference. Rothstein even tells us that when he wanted to apply to Harvard, his high school refused to process the application (because "boys from here don't go to Harvard") until Rothstein's father took the day off from work to come in and talk to the Principal. So much, as Rothstein says, for the golden age of the 50s.
For most people, as for Rothstein and probably Klein, education in the 1950s was no better than it is now. Then, as now, there are lots of kids from middle-class homes and parents without college degrees who are pushed and supported by their families and go on to great academic success. My father and stepfather are both examples of this: both grew up in stable middle-class homes, with parents who hadn't been to college; both were pushed and supported by their parents. My father, who went to a small rural high school in the midwest, was one of two kids in his high school class to go to college, but he ended up at MIT. My stepfather grew up in a Mitchell-Lama building in Washington Heights, with parents who hadn't gone to college, and he went on to be valedictorian at Bronx Science; he also went on to MIT.
Neither my father nor my stepfather would ever say that their 50s and 60s public schools were responsible for their success. Their schools were OK, but most students in those schools did not achieve such dramatic success. Instead, what allowed my father and stepfather to excel so remarkably was the support and encouragement of their middle-class parents, the fact that they were not surrounded by miserable poverty, and probably the fact that they themselves were pretty gifted.
III. Rothstein's concluding peroration
Again, it's worth reading the whole article, but here are a couple of paragraphs from the end of it:
"It would be obscene for me to claim I overcame severe hardship and was rescued from deprivation by schoolteachers. It is more obscene for Klein to do so, because his claim supports attacks on contemporary teachers and a refusal to acknowledge impediments teachers face because of their students’ social and economic deprivation. It’s a deprivation that he never suffered but that many children from public housing do today.
"A few superhuman teachers may lift a handful of children who come to school from barely literate homes, hungry, in poor health, and otherwise unprepared for academic instruction. But even the best teachers face impossible tasks when confronted with classrooms filled with truly disadvantaged students who are not in tracked special-progress classes and don’t arrive each morning from families as academically supportive as mine. Instead, they may come from segregated communities where concentrated and entrenched poverty, unemployment, and social alienation over many generations have been ravaging."
IV. My own conclusion: the subtext of Klein's and others' master narrative
(I don't have time to write this in an articulate way, since I have to enter interim progress reports, but I'll take ten minutes and make an attempt.)
Klein's story is obscene, but its obscenity is not unique to Joel Klein; in fact, it is part of a larger cultural phenomenon, the anxious attempts by our ruling classes to assert that they deserve their own extraordinary privileges, and I think we need to understand the current emphasis, by these ruling classes, on education and education reform as a part of this larger cultural phenomenon.
This need to deny one's own cultural advantages can be seen not only in Klein's absurd story, but in the absurd assertions by successful aristocrats like Mitt Romney that they are self-made men ("I inherited nothing"). Our society is in many ways less a meritocracy than it was 50 years ago, but the ruling classes want to pretend that it is. (This is, I believe, the thesis of a book I haven't read, The Twilight of the Elites: America After Meritocracy, by the estimable Christopher Hayes.) The ruling elites know they are smart and have worked hard, and they want, perhaps understandably, to pretend that their success is due to their own efforts. The elites' emphasis on education has to be seen in the light of this pretense.
Every time a politician pays lip service, as Obama did in his disastrous debate, to the idea that education is the best way to rebuild our economy and create jobs, we should remember that this is a self-serving argument, and one that implicitly blames the poor for their own condition. When we see articles that say that even high-priced colleges are a great investment, we should consider that college, for many students in a country whose top college major is "Business", may be as much a matter of what I think Jane Jacobs calls "credentialing" and what I always think of as analogous to a guild system; that is, a college degree functions as a class marker, and the four years of hard work or debauchery at an expensive campus is less about education than about your parents trying to ensure that you remain in the upper middle class.
What we are living in is less meritocracy than plutocracy, and saying that our educational system is failing is a way of displacing blame for the increasing inequality whose effects are all around us, if we only have eyes to see. (This is not to say that education doesn't matter, nor to say that individual teachers can make a difference--and in fact I am trying my best, but we teachers can't do it all by ourselves.)
********************************************************
Footnote: Joel Klein's career
Hired in 1998 by billionaire Mayor Bloomberg, Joel Klein was for years the Chancellor of the largest public school system in the country despite having no prior experience in education (he was counsel for a huge corporation); after resigning in 2010, Klein now works for two other billionaires Rupert Murdoch (Klein is trying to sell media to public schools) and for Eli Broad (Klein is in charge of Broad's massive effort to put "reform"-minded (anti-union, pro-privatization) superintendents in place across the country).
Friday, July 6, 2012
Two curricula: one for the elite, another for the masses
The elite are "nurtured"and "inspired" toward a "love" for reading
Like Barack Obama and Arne Duncan, Bill Gates did not go to a public high school. Instead, Gates, a scion of an elite Seattle family, went to a fancy prep school called Lakeside. Lakeside's English curriculum is quite different from the Common Core Standards that Gates paid millions to have created and is spending millions now to promote, and that Obama and Duncan are pushing as well, through their "Race to the Top" (sic) program. The Common Core standards suggest long and detailed classroom analyses of extremely difficult texts, and offer absolutely nothing in the way of requiring extensive reading or encouraging a love of reading. This curriculum is dramatically different from the ones offered at Lakeside, where Bill Gates's kids now go, but I wouldn't expect Lakeside to change its ways anytime soon.
Here are the mission statements for Lakeside's English programs at the middle school and high school levels:
"The Middle School English Department is dedicated to nurturing a lifelong love of reading
and writing. We strive to create a community of readers and writers that inspires students to
experiment with a variety of written forms."
"Lakeside’s [High School] English Department’s highest goals are to inspire in students a
love of literature and to help students become great writers."
Both the middle school and high school statements use the word "love" and emphasize writing in an "authentic voice" and "artistically." The curriculum is notably literary and cultural, and not narrowly designed to ready students for the business or political world.
It's also notable that these English departments aren't afraid to talk about encouraging a love of reading. Encouraging a love for reading might seem like an obvious goal of English class, but in the Orwellian world of the Education-Industrial-Complex that goal is controversial.
The masses are given "instruction" aimed at "proficiency"
This Orwellian madness surfaced in 2006, when the new President of the International Reading Association came out against encouraging a love for reading. Professor Tim Shanahan, one of the biggest names int he reading world, had already made clear that he was against natural reading: he was a prominent member of the "National Reading Panel" (2000) that after a cockeyed look at the evidence, argued at length for explicit instruction and dishonestly claimed that there was no evidence that independent silent reading was effective. In 2006, he became President of the International Reading Association, which has as one of its three stated purposes, in addition to improving reading instruction and promote reading proficiency, to "encourage reading and an interest in reading" (Reading Today, June 2006). Shanahan's first move as President of the Association was to say that while he could support improved instruction and promoting proficiency, he was not in favor of "encouraging reading and an interest in reading." Although Shanahan can be eloquent and passionate about why reading is important, he apparently thinks it's inappropriate and dangerous to encourage interest in it.
For this, Shanahan was not laughed out of the profession; he remains one of the big shots of the reading world. This past week, the thoughtful, intelligent instructor of my PD workshop referred to Shanahan in glowing terms and gave us a couple of his articles. How could this be? How could the President of the International Reading Association argue against teachers' trying to encourage "an interest in reading"?! Bill Gates's kids have teachers that nurture a lifelong love of reading, but the rest of us can't even encourage an interest in reading? Are there different rules for private and public schools? Well, yes--according to Shanahan.
Interest in reading and "freedom of choice"
For, although his central (if insane) argument is that encouraging an interest in reading is somehow inimical to effective teaching, and that we should be "jealous of instructional time" which would apparently be wasted by encouraging student interest in our subject, Shanahan also argues at length that it is beyond a public school teacher's mandate to encourage interest in his subject. In order to make this argument, Shanahan shifts the terms of the debate from the words "interest" to "pleasure" and then to "desire" and then to "love", and argues suggests that as "institutional beings," teachers have no right to try to instill love or desire in anyone. A teacher's "public responsibility," according to Shanahan, does not include "encouraging reading," which is, he says, a "personal goal" that might carry "danger." What danger? Apparently encouraging reading would limit "freedom of choice."
That encouraging an interest in reading could be considered as limiting to freedom of choice is obviously Orwellian. As Bill Gates found when he went from public school to private school, and as Shanahan should know, given his explanation of why he is passionate about teaching reading, encouraging an interest in reading actually promotes freedom of choice, while merely teaching it dispassionately as a useful skill is usually a good way to limit freedom. For Shanahan public schools, although obligated to impose explicit instruction of the kind Bill Gates found so tedious when he went to public elementary school, are not allowed to offer students encouragement and nurturing of the very practices that will allow freedom.
Conclusion: We need to create a culture of reading, even in public schools
Why is Shanahan so uncomfortable with the notion of encouraging interest in reading, even though he acknowledges that reading is important? Why does Gates spend his billions to promote increased class size and increased testing, even though he sends his kids to a school that brags about its average class size of 16 and that manages to have 40% of its Seniors be National Merit Scholarship Finalists without having done any of the kind of high stakes testing Gates is working to impose on the rest of us? The obvious answer for Shanahan is that he has spent his career promoting explicit skill instruction, and for Shanahan to admit that it's important to teach reading as an organic, pleasurable experience, or to admit that reading is largely a socially mediated activity, might seem to him to call into question his life's work.
As for Gates, perhaps he doesn't know how to address the social and cultural aspects of learning, or perhaps he thinks the changes he's pushing will lead indirectly to an improved cultural and social environment in the classroom. My guess is that Gates sees public school as properly different from what he offers his own children. When Gates himself switched from public school to private school, he noticed a dramatic cultural shift. As he recalls, "it was a change at first. And the idea of just being kind of a goof-off wasn't the sort of high reward position like it had been in public schools." It seems possible that, partly based on this experience, Gates doesn't think it possible to change that culture.
But he should think so, for in the same interview I quoted before, he offers an excellent example of a public institution that encourages reading. Gates remembers that when he was a kid, the library would give you a gold star if you read ten books over the summer, and two stars if you read twenty. According to Gates, he and "five or six girls" would compete to see who could read the most books. For reading is a solitary activity, but reading is also a social activity, and it can be encouraged.
The first job of every high school English class should be creating a culture of reading. This is difficult to do when many of our expert authorities don't believe that interest matters, and think that human beings are mechanisms that have only to be properly programmed for "proficiency." The best way make sure that our public schools are not like the one Bill Gates went to, where "being a goof-off was more socially rewarding," is to replace the interest in goofing off with an interest in reading and thinking, and that can only happen if we encourage that interest. We must make sure that our public schools do "encourage reading"--even inspire a love for it. If reading is, and has always been, strongly linked to social class, we don't have to accept the social class divisions that we are given.
Like Barack Obama and Arne Duncan, Bill Gates did not go to a public high school. Instead, Gates, a scion of an elite Seattle family, went to a fancy prep school called Lakeside. Lakeside's English curriculum is quite different from the Common Core Standards that Gates paid millions to have created and is spending millions now to promote, and that Obama and Duncan are pushing as well, through their "Race to the Top" (sic) program. The Common Core standards suggest long and detailed classroom analyses of extremely difficult texts, and offer absolutely nothing in the way of requiring extensive reading or encouraging a love of reading. This curriculum is dramatically different from the ones offered at Lakeside, where Bill Gates's kids now go, but I wouldn't expect Lakeside to change its ways anytime soon.
Here are the mission statements for Lakeside's English programs at the middle school and high school levels:
"The Middle School English Department is dedicated to nurturing a lifelong love of reading
and writing. We strive to create a community of readers and writers that inspires students to
experiment with a variety of written forms."
"Lakeside’s [High School] English Department’s highest goals are to inspire in students a
love of literature and to help students become great writers."
Both the middle school and high school statements use the word "love" and emphasize writing in an "authentic voice" and "artistically." The curriculum is notably literary and cultural, and not narrowly designed to ready students for the business or political world.
It's also notable that these English departments aren't afraid to talk about encouraging a love of reading. Encouraging a love for reading might seem like an obvious goal of English class, but in the Orwellian world of the Education-Industrial-Complex that goal is controversial.
The masses are given "instruction" aimed at "proficiency"
This Orwellian madness surfaced in 2006, when the new President of the International Reading Association came out against encouraging a love for reading. Professor Tim Shanahan, one of the biggest names int he reading world, had already made clear that he was against natural reading: he was a prominent member of the "National Reading Panel" (2000) that after a cockeyed look at the evidence, argued at length for explicit instruction and dishonestly claimed that there was no evidence that independent silent reading was effective. In 2006, he became President of the International Reading Association, which has as one of its three stated purposes, in addition to improving reading instruction and promote reading proficiency, to "encourage reading and an interest in reading" (Reading Today, June 2006). Shanahan's first move as President of the Association was to say that while he could support improved instruction and promoting proficiency, he was not in favor of "encouraging reading and an interest in reading." Although Shanahan can be eloquent and passionate about why reading is important, he apparently thinks it's inappropriate and dangerous to encourage interest in it.
For this, Shanahan was not laughed out of the profession; he remains one of the big shots of the reading world. This past week, the thoughtful, intelligent instructor of my PD workshop referred to Shanahan in glowing terms and gave us a couple of his articles. How could this be? How could the President of the International Reading Association argue against teachers' trying to encourage "an interest in reading"?! Bill Gates's kids have teachers that nurture a lifelong love of reading, but the rest of us can't even encourage an interest in reading? Are there different rules for private and public schools? Well, yes--according to Shanahan.
Interest in reading and "freedom of choice"
For, although his central (if insane) argument is that encouraging an interest in reading is somehow inimical to effective teaching, and that we should be "jealous of instructional time" which would apparently be wasted by encouraging student interest in our subject, Shanahan also argues at length that it is beyond a public school teacher's mandate to encourage interest in his subject. In order to make this argument, Shanahan shifts the terms of the debate from the words "interest" to "pleasure" and then to "desire" and then to "love", and argues suggests that as "institutional beings," teachers have no right to try to instill love or desire in anyone. A teacher's "public responsibility," according to Shanahan, does not include "encouraging reading," which is, he says, a "personal goal" that might carry "danger." What danger? Apparently encouraging reading would limit "freedom of choice."
That encouraging an interest in reading could be considered as limiting to freedom of choice is obviously Orwellian. As Bill Gates found when he went from public school to private school, and as Shanahan should know, given his explanation of why he is passionate about teaching reading, encouraging an interest in reading actually promotes freedom of choice, while merely teaching it dispassionately as a useful skill is usually a good way to limit freedom. For Shanahan public schools, although obligated to impose explicit instruction of the kind Bill Gates found so tedious when he went to public elementary school, are not allowed to offer students encouragement and nurturing of the very practices that will allow freedom.
Conclusion: We need to create a culture of reading, even in public schools
Why is Shanahan so uncomfortable with the notion of encouraging interest in reading, even though he acknowledges that reading is important? Why does Gates spend his billions to promote increased class size and increased testing, even though he sends his kids to a school that brags about its average class size of 16 and that manages to have 40% of its Seniors be National Merit Scholarship Finalists without having done any of the kind of high stakes testing Gates is working to impose on the rest of us? The obvious answer for Shanahan is that he has spent his career promoting explicit skill instruction, and for Shanahan to admit that it's important to teach reading as an organic, pleasurable experience, or to admit that reading is largely a socially mediated activity, might seem to him to call into question his life's work.
As for Gates, perhaps he doesn't know how to address the social and cultural aspects of learning, or perhaps he thinks the changes he's pushing will lead indirectly to an improved cultural and social environment in the classroom. My guess is that Gates sees public school as properly different from what he offers his own children. When Gates himself switched from public school to private school, he noticed a dramatic cultural shift. As he recalls, "it was a change at first. And the idea of just being kind of a goof-off wasn't the sort of high reward position like it had been in public schools." It seems possible that, partly based on this experience, Gates doesn't think it possible to change that culture.
But he should think so, for in the same interview I quoted before, he offers an excellent example of a public institution that encourages reading. Gates remembers that when he was a kid, the library would give you a gold star if you read ten books over the summer, and two stars if you read twenty. According to Gates, he and "five or six girls" would compete to see who could read the most books. For reading is a solitary activity, but reading is also a social activity, and it can be encouraged.
The first job of every high school English class should be creating a culture of reading. This is difficult to do when many of our expert authorities don't believe that interest matters, and think that human beings are mechanisms that have only to be properly programmed for "proficiency." The best way make sure that our public schools are not like the one Bill Gates went to, where "being a goof-off was more socially rewarding," is to replace the interest in goofing off with an interest in reading and thinking, and that can only happen if we encourage that interest. We must make sure that our public schools do "encourage reading"--even inspire a love for it. If reading is, and has always been, strongly linked to social class, we don't have to accept the social class divisions that we are given.
Friday, May 18, 2012
David Coleman and Reading
This week the College Board named its new President: David Coleman, who is best known for being the architect and the public face of the Common Core Standards.
The choice of Coleman makes sense, since the SATs and AP tests, like the Common Core Standards, are basically measuring two things, aside from innate ability: 1) the cultural capital students have gotten from their parents; 2) the amount of reading students have done. The announcement made me look closer at Coleman and his standards, and I was disturbed, if not surprised, by what I saw.
I glanced at the Common Core Standards themselves, and found them to be the usual bland description of what students should be able to do (read increasingly complex texts, understand them, and write interpretively about them), with slight variations according to grade level. I wasn't making much headway with the Standards themselves. So I did what my students do: I went to the video.
To see what Coleman himself was like, and how he sees the standards as differing from current practice, I watched a video of one of his talks. Given many millions of dollars by Bill Gates to promote and publicize the common core standards (which Gates paid to have written in the first place), Coleman has been traveling the country giving presentations, teaching sample lessons, and making films of many of his appearances. The 2 hour presentation I watched was the one Coleman made to the NY State Department of Education in April of 2011.
That speech is notorious among Common Core foes for a line Coleman tossed off as part of his argument against having students do personal writing in the older grades. According to Coleman, "As you grow up in this world you realize people really don’t give a shit about what you feel or what you think." Coleman went on to explain that in the business world no one was going to say, "Johnson, I need a market analysis by Friday but before that I need a compelling account of your childhood."
That Coleman could say this to a group of educators is shocking, and it deserved all the opprobrium it got. Our children's liberal arts education should not be defined and limited by what might be required of them in some future career in corporate marketing.
For the purposes of this blog and post I want to concentrate on another aspect of his speech: how Coleman's proposals would affect students' reading. What I was really worried about, as usual, was reading volume, so I was interested in Coleman's response to audience members who raised exactly that issue. One of the first questions was about how to, in the questioner's words, "allow the kids at their own levels to be able to grow as learners and readers." Coleman's response was disturbing: first he acknowledged that of course students should be doing a lot of independent recreational reading (though he didn't acknowledge that his own standards say nothing about this practice or how to encourage it); then he uttered the following words:
"I must tell you an alarming thing for those who overly bank on that independent recreational reading. We talked to the leading provider of such tools for children. Do you know what grade level student choice of text levels out at? Overwhelmingly, 90% of the selections stop at this level--5th grade. So while we must encourage that work, we must not overly rely on it..."
This is circular reasoning at its most simplistic and blind: kids choose low-level books to read, so reading books they choose will not help them get better at reading. What Coleman ignores is the possibility that kids are essentially unable to read books above that level. (Also striking is that nauseating phrase: "the leading provider of such tools for children." What "tools" is he talking about? Those things that most of us call "books"? And could a "provider of such tools for children" be that entity that most of us would call a "children's book publisher"? I am not sure which would be worse, that Coleman refers to Scholastic, Inc. in such a way, or that Coleman is referring to some other "tools" that some corporation has developed for use in "independent recreational reading." Either way, I am sure that anyone who is capable of saying, "the leading provider of such tools for children," should not be in charge of directing our country's literacy education.)
Coleman is the kind of guy who talks tough about where we "must" get to, but has no idea how to get there, the kind of guy who fifty years ago would have been cheerleading us into war in Vietnam. Coleman, who has never been a teacher himself, is a classic armchair warrior, like the chicken hawks in the Bush administration; he has never been on the front lines himself, but wants to tell the rest of us where we are supposed to go.
I also want to look at the standards themselves: what do they mean for teaching English in America?
According to Coleman himself, the common core standards make six important shifts away from current practice. Since my basic position is that the most important thing for kids' academic success is for them to read more, I think it's useful to evaluate any ELA program or proposal in terms of what effect it would likely have on reading volume. I'd like to consider each of the Common Core's "shifts" in the light of my own preoccupation with how much kids are reading.
1) The Common Core Standards would reduce the amount of fiction that students read and increase the amount of "informational text." This is supposed to increase kids' knowledge about the world, thereby increasing their ability to learn other stuff and their ability to read more complex texts. The problem with this shift is that most students don't, won't, and often can't read the kinds of more complex "informational text" that Coleman wishes they would. My seven-year-old daughter loves so many books, and none of them are non-fiction. She is and will be a great reader, no thanks to David Coleman.
2) The second shift Coleman highlights is the increased emphasis on literacy in the non-ELA subjects: essentially, Reading Across the Curriculum. Here he seems again to have little idea of how to get there; he just thinks kids should be able to read a complex science textbook. Great; I think so too. But I don't think you get there by just wishing for it.
3) The Common Core Standards call for schools to use more complex texts. Based on my experience with Leafstrewn students, this is just more wishful thinking, and will decrease the amount of text that students are actually reading. Many of our students can't handle the complexity of the textbooks we are giving them now, and giving them more complexity is going to make it even less likely that they will actually read the texts. Coleman attributes the need for remediation in college to the low-level texts used in high school, while it seems to me that the remediation is needed for the same reason the low-level texts are needed--because students aren't very good readers. Poor readers will get better by reading more, and giving poor readers difficult textbooks is hardly going to get them to read more.
4) The Common Core Standards call for more text-dependent questions. This is perhaps the only shift that I actually agree with. Yes, we should be making our kids pay close attention to the text. Okay!
5) The fifth shift is away from personal writing and toward writing that focuses on making an argument with evidence. This strikes me as something that has already happened at Leafstrewn, and I am very skeptical that we need even as much of it as we already have. I increasingly want to go back to the era I grew up in, when people were championing things like "writing as discovery". In any case, I am against any curriculum shift that is defended by saying that in ten years our students will be called upon to write market analyses, and I think our students give a shit how they feel, so their teachers should care, too.
6) The sixth shift the Coleman says the Common Core Standards make is toward more explicit vocabulary instruction. I have spent some time trying to discern the value of explicit vocabulary instruction, and I'm going to devote a long post to it one of these weeks, but I am sure that spending a lot of class time on vocabulary will do nothing to increase the volume of our students' actual reading. If anything, explicit vocabulary instruction takes time in class when kids could be reading.
This is a longer post than I had intended. The long and short of it is: thumbs down to Coleman and the Common Core. For Leafstrewn, probably nothing will change, but for the country as a whole, this man's ascendance is just another depressing aspect of the corporatization of public education.
The choice of Coleman makes sense, since the SATs and AP tests, like the Common Core Standards, are basically measuring two things, aside from innate ability: 1) the cultural capital students have gotten from their parents; 2) the amount of reading students have done. The announcement made me look closer at Coleman and his standards, and I was disturbed, if not surprised, by what I saw.
I glanced at the Common Core Standards themselves, and found them to be the usual bland description of what students should be able to do (read increasingly complex texts, understand them, and write interpretively about them), with slight variations according to grade level. I wasn't making much headway with the Standards themselves. So I did what my students do: I went to the video.
To see what Coleman himself was like, and how he sees the standards as differing from current practice, I watched a video of one of his talks. Given many millions of dollars by Bill Gates to promote and publicize the common core standards (which Gates paid to have written in the first place), Coleman has been traveling the country giving presentations, teaching sample lessons, and making films of many of his appearances. The 2 hour presentation I watched was the one Coleman made to the NY State Department of Education in April of 2011.
That speech is notorious among Common Core foes for a line Coleman tossed off as part of his argument against having students do personal writing in the older grades. According to Coleman, "As you grow up in this world you realize people really don’t give a shit about what you feel or what you think." Coleman went on to explain that in the business world no one was going to say, "Johnson, I need a market analysis by Friday but before that I need a compelling account of your childhood."
That Coleman could say this to a group of educators is shocking, and it deserved all the opprobrium it got. Our children's liberal arts education should not be defined and limited by what might be required of them in some future career in corporate marketing.
For the purposes of this blog and post I want to concentrate on another aspect of his speech: how Coleman's proposals would affect students' reading. What I was really worried about, as usual, was reading volume, so I was interested in Coleman's response to audience members who raised exactly that issue. One of the first questions was about how to, in the questioner's words, "allow the kids at their own levels to be able to grow as learners and readers." Coleman's response was disturbing: first he acknowledged that of course students should be doing a lot of independent recreational reading (though he didn't acknowledge that his own standards say nothing about this practice or how to encourage it); then he uttered the following words:
"I must tell you an alarming thing for those who overly bank on that independent recreational reading. We talked to the leading provider of such tools for children. Do you know what grade level student choice of text levels out at? Overwhelmingly, 90% of the selections stop at this level--5th grade. So while we must encourage that work, we must not overly rely on it..."
This is circular reasoning at its most simplistic and blind: kids choose low-level books to read, so reading books they choose will not help them get better at reading. What Coleman ignores is the possibility that kids are essentially unable to read books above that level. (Also striking is that nauseating phrase: "the leading provider of such tools for children." What "tools" is he talking about? Those things that most of us call "books"? And could a "provider of such tools for children" be that entity that most of us would call a "children's book publisher"? I am not sure which would be worse, that Coleman refers to Scholastic, Inc. in such a way, or that Coleman is referring to some other "tools" that some corporation has developed for use in "independent recreational reading." Either way, I am sure that anyone who is capable of saying, "the leading provider of such tools for children," should not be in charge of directing our country's literacy education.)
Coleman is the kind of guy who talks tough about where we "must" get to, but has no idea how to get there, the kind of guy who fifty years ago would have been cheerleading us into war in Vietnam. Coleman, who has never been a teacher himself, is a classic armchair warrior, like the chicken hawks in the Bush administration; he has never been on the front lines himself, but wants to tell the rest of us where we are supposed to go.
I also want to look at the standards themselves: what do they mean for teaching English in America?
According to Coleman himself, the common core standards make six important shifts away from current practice. Since my basic position is that the most important thing for kids' academic success is for them to read more, I think it's useful to evaluate any ELA program or proposal in terms of what effect it would likely have on reading volume. I'd like to consider each of the Common Core's "shifts" in the light of my own preoccupation with how much kids are reading.
1) The Common Core Standards would reduce the amount of fiction that students read and increase the amount of "informational text." This is supposed to increase kids' knowledge about the world, thereby increasing their ability to learn other stuff and their ability to read more complex texts. The problem with this shift is that most students don't, won't, and often can't read the kinds of more complex "informational text" that Coleman wishes they would. My seven-year-old daughter loves so many books, and none of them are non-fiction. She is and will be a great reader, no thanks to David Coleman.
2) The second shift Coleman highlights is the increased emphasis on literacy in the non-ELA subjects: essentially, Reading Across the Curriculum. Here he seems again to have little idea of how to get there; he just thinks kids should be able to read a complex science textbook. Great; I think so too. But I don't think you get there by just wishing for it.
3) The Common Core Standards call for schools to use more complex texts. Based on my experience with Leafstrewn students, this is just more wishful thinking, and will decrease the amount of text that students are actually reading. Many of our students can't handle the complexity of the textbooks we are giving them now, and giving them more complexity is going to make it even less likely that they will actually read the texts. Coleman attributes the need for remediation in college to the low-level texts used in high school, while it seems to me that the remediation is needed for the same reason the low-level texts are needed--because students aren't very good readers. Poor readers will get better by reading more, and giving poor readers difficult textbooks is hardly going to get them to read more.
4) The Common Core Standards call for more text-dependent questions. This is perhaps the only shift that I actually agree with. Yes, we should be making our kids pay close attention to the text. Okay!
5) The fifth shift is away from personal writing and toward writing that focuses on making an argument with evidence. This strikes me as something that has already happened at Leafstrewn, and I am very skeptical that we need even as much of it as we already have. I increasingly want to go back to the era I grew up in, when people were championing things like "writing as discovery". In any case, I am against any curriculum shift that is defended by saying that in ten years our students will be called upon to write market analyses, and I think our students give a shit how they feel, so their teachers should care, too.
6) The sixth shift the Coleman says the Common Core Standards make is toward more explicit vocabulary instruction. I have spent some time trying to discern the value of explicit vocabulary instruction, and I'm going to devote a long post to it one of these weeks, but I am sure that spending a lot of class time on vocabulary will do nothing to increase the volume of our students' actual reading. If anything, explicit vocabulary instruction takes time in class when kids could be reading.
This is a longer post than I had intended. The long and short of it is: thumbs down to Coleman and the Common Core. For Leafstrewn, probably nothing will change, but for the country as a whole, this man's ascendance is just another depressing aspect of the corporatization of public education.
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