Cogitorium on Education

Epic Fail: The Student "Success" Act (H.R. 5)

2013-07-18T21:56:00.000-05:00

I received a call from the AFT this afternoon asking me to contact my congressman to urge him not to support H.R. 5 The Student Success Act. I declined to be connected directly to my congressman's office, but decided to take a look to see what the fuss was about.

H.R. 5 is an attempt at a reauthorization and overhaul of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 (more commonly known as the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, NCLB), which has desperately been in need of attention for years. Section 1111 of the Act outlines the plans that States have to put together in order to receive Federal funds to support improving education for disadvantaged children. In NCLB, this included stipulations about Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) and required sanctions for schools that failed to make AYP for a certain number of consequtive years. Certainly, the accountability portion of sec. 1111 is a big part of what has needed an extreme make-over, but I certainly wasn't expecting what H.R. 5 proposes.

The bill stipulates that States must come up with an accountability system "to ensure that all public school students graduate from high school prepared for postsecondary education or the workforce without the need for remediation." This accountability system must:

identify the performance of every public school based on both individual student achievement and achievement gaps between groups of students; and
include a system for school improvement for low-performing public schools that implements interventions designed to address the schools' weaknesses.

And that's about it.

No, really, that's pretty much it. In particular, there are no indications about:

how rigorous the academic standards must be (other than the vague reference to college/career readiness, and I don't think anyone has agreed on what that means);
how to identify low-performing schools;
how to determine whether low-performing schools are improving satisfactorily;
what to do with schools that are chronically failing to improve; or
anything else of substance.

Moreover (and here's the kicker!), Sec. 1111(b)(3)(C) explicitly states:

Nothing in this section shall be construed to permit the Secretary to establish any criteria that specifies, defines, or prescribes any aspect of a State's accountability system developed and implemented in accordance with this paragraph.

In other words, States would have completely free reign to do whatever they want and call it "accountability," and the Secretary of Education can't do anything about it.

I suppose the Secretary of Education could simply start rejecting State plans under some vague notion about not ensuring that schools are graduating college/career ready students, but this would hardly be desirable, since the Secretary would be prohibited from providing any guidance to States about what kinds of plans would be accepted.

The short of it is that the AFT is right on this time about the abysmal state H.R. 5 (as reported to the House) would leave educational policy in. The Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) was supposed to bring us closer to equitable educational opportunity, but decades of pumping money through its programs to States did little to shift broad educational inequities. For the first time, NCLB gave ESEA teeth to require that States demonstrate that their use of the funds was getting results. Certainly, the accountability provisions in NCLB had a number of major flaws, but what was needed was some "orthodontics" (not a massive tooth extraction) to straighten out ill advised provisions while keeping a strong stance on demonstrating results.

For more information on the shortcomings of H.R. 5, see the minority committee report, starting on p. 949 of House Report 113-150.

H.R. 5 was debated on the floor of the House this afternoon, but they only got through 20 of the 26 proposed amendments. I presume they'll continue tomorrow. The last amendment, proposed by Rep. George Miller of California, is a complete replacement of the bill (starting on p. 62 of House Report 113-158). I haven't looked at it in detail, but surely it has more reasonable accountability provisions than the current bill.

Massachusetts Education Reform: Innovation Schools

2010-01-25T07:00:00.008-06:00

Last week, I outlined turnaround plans for under-performing schools as described in Massachusetts' most recent education reform. Today, I'd like to take a look at the brand new institution of "innovation schools."

An innovation school is a "public school, operating withing a public school district, that is established for the purpose of improving school performance and student achievement through increased autonomy and flexibility," and as such fills the gap between traditional public schools (which are fully under the policies of the local school district) and charter public schools (which are fully independent of the local school district). The flexibility granted an innovation school may be related to:

curriculum,
budget,
school schedule and calendar,
staffing policies and procedures,
school district policies and procedures, and
professional development.

Innovation schools may be either existing schools or new schools, may serve students from multiple school districts, or may be virtual (online) distance-learning programs.

Nearly anyone except private and parochial schools can submit an application to form an innovation school, including parents, teachers, and non-profit organizations. The applications are reviewed by the school committee (i.e. local school board), the local teachers' union, and the district superintendent. The application must include a school prospectus that outlines:

the overall vision of the school, including how the increased flexibility will help improve school performance and student achievement;
the specific needs or challenges the school will be designed to address;
the kind of autonomy and flexibility sought;
preliminary components of the school's innovation plan, to be developed in full by a stakeholder committee upon approval of the application;
the process that will be implemented to involve the appropriate stakeholders; and
a tentative timetable for developing and establishing the school.

Once the application has been approved, the applicant must promptly form an innovation plan committee of not more than 11 people chosen largely by the applicant, provided that it includes:

the applicant,
a representative of the superintendent,
a representative of the school committee,
a parent,
a principal of the school district, and
two teachers, one of whom is nominated by the local teachers' union.

The innovation plan describes how the school expects to improve school performance and student achievement, and must address: curriculum, budget, schedule, staffing (including recruitment, employment, evaluation, and compensation), policies and procedures, and professional development. The plan must include measurable annual goals with a variety of indicators, and should be based on student outcome data, to the extent practicable. The plan may optionally be implemented by an external partner.

The local school committee must hold at least one public hearing before voting whether or not to authorize the school for not more than five years. The school will then be evaluated annually by the district superintendent, and the school committee may amend the plan as necessary if the school fails to meet the goals set out in the innovation plan. If the school fails substantially to meet the plan's goals, the school committee can terminate the school's authorization (but not before the end of the school's third year). If the school meets its goals satisfactorily, school leadership may petition to renew the authorization for another period of not more than five years after convening a stakeholder committee to discuss potential revisions to the plan.

Additionally, the law requires the state commissioner of elementary and secondary education to:

provide planning and implementation grants for innovation schools,
provide technical assistance to applicants, and
collect and publish data and research relating to innovation schools, particularly about successful programs serving limited-English proficient students and other practices in innovation schools that could be adopted by other public schools.

The motivation behind the innovation schools reform seems to be the idea that some schools are locked into policies and procedures that are not optimal for meeting the challenges they face. For these schools, measures such as new leadership, new faculty, or supplemental educational services may not be as helpful as the opportunity to relax certain current policies in favor of something more amenable to their particular circumstances. The new innovation school provisions create an opportunity for schools to benefit from just this kind of flexibility. Moreover, since parents, teachers, universities, and community organizations can submit applications for innovation schools, reform no longer has to come from the top down, but can be initiated by those most intimate with the challenges or those highly experienced in meeting them; and since innovation plans must be developed with a variety of stakeholders, innovation schools will hopefully enjoy broad support and engagement from all directions (above, within, and without).

As with turnaround plans, the eventual success or failure of innovation schools will likely depend on whether workable solutions to the particular problems local school districts face can be identified and implemented by the innovation planners and school leaders. Hopefully, the technical assistance provided by the commissioner and expertise from external partners will provide an open conduit for fresh (and tested) ideas to increase local school capacity for improvement.

In any case, innovation schools and the turnaround plan procedures seem to be a much more reasonable approach to school improvement than the reform recently passed in California (SBX5 4, 2010 Cal. Stat. ch. 3), which includes the "parent trigger" first introduced in the Los Angeles school district. According to the new law, a petition with at least 50% of the parents of a school in corrective action under the No Child Left Behind Act forces the school district to implement one of the four school intervention models described in the Race to the Top regulations (Appendix C, Federal Register, v. 75, n. 221, p. 59828-30):

replacing the principal and at least half the staff, inter alia, ("turnaround model"),
reopening the school as a charter school or with external management ("restart model"),
closing the school altogether, or
replacing the principal and instituting a series of guided reforms ("transformation model").

But, beyond the "trigger," the law makes no provision for parent participation or any other stakeholder consultation in planning the subsequent school intervention, which is developed and carried out by the local school district alone. (More discussion about the measure is available here.) In contrast, the Massachusetts reform presents a much more collaborative (and less adversarial) model for school improvement, in which:

anyone with a beneficial idea has a platform to present it;
parents and other stakeholders participate throughout the planning process;
school teachers and administrators are not presented as the enemy;
plans are flexible enough to include small, but effective interventions or sweeping changes; and
self-evaluation through measurable annual goals and reports plays a prominent role.

I look forward to hearing about the new things to come in Massachusetts schools.

Massachusetts Education Reform: Turnaround Plans

2010-01-21T15:15:00.001-06:00

Last Monday Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick signed a new set of education reforms (SB 2247) into law. The three major portions of the law (1) expand powers of school district superintendents and the state commissioner of education for improving underachieving schools, (2) modify certain charter school provisions, and (3) establish brand new provisions for "innovation schools," which are something between traditional public schools and charter schools. A detailed list of what the law includes is available here. I'd like to focus for the moment on the new powers of the commissioner vis-a-vis underachieving schools, and will outline innovation schools in a subsequent post.

Since the Education Reform Act of 1993 (69 MGL 1J), the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education has carried the responsibility to establish regulations concerning the determination of schools and districts that have failed to improve the quality of the education they provide. When a school was determined to be under-performing, the commissioner of elementary and secondary education was to appoint an independent fact-finding team to determine the causes of persistent under-performance, and the district was required to submit a remedial plan with "specific goals" for improvement, means for achieving them, and a proposed time-line. The school then had two years in which to implement the plan, with technical assistance from the commissioner. If at the end of two years, the school failed to demonstrate significant improvement, the school might receive a new principal, be allocated additional funds, dismiss teachers for good cause, or undergo "such other actions determined by the board of education, to be reasonably calculated to increase the number of students attending the school who satisfy the student performance standards."

The new reform spells out in much greater detail how plans for improving under-performing schools, dubbed "turnaround plans," will be developed, as well as what they should contain. There are also new consequences if schools fail to demonstrate long-term improvement under their turnaround plans, and new options to facilitate integrating external assistance into school management.

Once the commissioner deems a school is under-performing based on a variety of student performance indicators, the school's district superintendent, in consultation with the commissioner, has almost six months to develop a turnaround plan for the school to "maximize the rapid academic achievement of students." The development of the plan follows a series of well-defined steps, most of which can take no longer than a month and which are designed to incorporate the needs, values, and expertise of a number of different local stakeholders. This is accomplished by forming a committee of no more than 13 people who represent:

the state commissioner,
the school committee (i.e. local school board),
the teachers' union,
the school administration,
the school's teachers,
parents,
social services,
workforce development agencies,
early childhood (for primary) or higher education (for secondary schools), and
the community.

(Unfortunately, it seems they left out the most vested stakeholders of all: the students.)

The stakeholder group submits recommendations to the superintendent, who then drafts a plan, giving "due consideration to [the stakeholder group's] recommendations." The plan is sent to the stakeholder group, the school committee, and the state superintendent for comment. After making receiving further recommendations and making any necessary modifications, the superintendent sends the final plan to the commissioner. The entire process, including stakeholder group meetings, recommendations, and plan drafts, will be open to the public.

The law specifies that the turnaround plan should include:

steps to address social service and health needs of students and their families, to help students arrive and remain at school ready to learn;
steps to improve child welfare services and, as appropriate, law enforcement services in the school community, in order to promote a safe and secure learning environment;
steps to improve workforce development services provided to students and their families, to provide them with meaningful employment skills and opportunities;
steps to address achievement gaps for limited English-proficient, special education, and low-income students;
alternative English language learning programs;
a financial plan; and
an outline of measurable annual goals for improvement.

The legislation doesn't mandate any particular strategy for school improvement (since the particular strategies should be selected to suit the particular challenges the school faces), but it does provide a non-exhaustive list of potential strategies, including:

adjusting the curriculum,
reallocating or securing additional funds,
increasing salaries "to attract or retain highly-qualified administrators, or teachers or to reward administrators, or teachers who work in under-performing schools that achieve the annual goals set forth,"
expanding the school day or year,
having the entire staff re-apply for their jobs,
modifying district policies or collective bargaining agreements,
supplying greater in-service professional development for teachers or administrators,
increasing teacher planning and collaboration time, and
searching for and studying best school and instructional practices.

The superintendent can choose to appoint an "external receiver" to operate the school and implement the plan, or to assist with its implementation. (But, the school committee can appeal this decision to the commissioner.) This external receiver is "a nonprofit entity or an individual with a demonstrated record of success in improving low-performing schools or the academic performance of disadvantaged students."

The turnaround plan is authorized for no more than three years, with annual review. If the school fails to meet the planned goals, the superintendent may modify the plan, or the commissioner may appoint an external examiner to evaluate the plan's implementation. If at the end of the plan the school has not significantly improved, the plan may be renewed for no more than three more years, or the commissioner may designate the school as "chronically under-performing," in which case the procedure is followed to develop a new turnaround plan under the direction of the state commissioner (instead of the local superintendent). The commissioner may have the superintendent implement the new plan, send a targeted assistance team to help the superintendent implement the plan, or select an external receiver. If after twelve years (two three-year periods under the superintendent and two three-year periods under the commissioner) the school still has not significantly improved, then heaven help us.

The turnaround-plan reform for under-performing schools makes great strides in:

setting up a framework for developing plans for school improvement,
incorporating more voices into plan development,
increasing transparency and opportunities for public engagement,
broadening the focus of improvement plans to include consider more than instruction, and
increasing opportunity to bring in outside assistance in achieving goals.

However, the long-term success or failure of the reform will crucially depend on whether superintendents (and the commissioner) can indeed identify (and implement) effective solutions to the problems undergirding low achievement. If the strategies they select are inadequate, no plan, however beautifully constructed, will lead to sufficient improvement. Thus, the next step in complete education reform will be to study schools that are achieving significant gains and open channels for their stories to reach struggling schools, in Massachusetts and across the nation.

Delaware Comprehensive Assessment System

2010-01-19T00:24:00.002-06:00

The Delaware Department of Education announced last month agreements with the American Institutes for Research to develop a new computer-adaptive Comprehensive Assessment System, including summative assessments of reading and math in grades 3-8; end-of-course exams for English, math, and science; and formative assessments in reading and math for grades 2-10. The assessments for all grade levels will be on a common scale for longitudinal study of students' learning growth over time. The press release suggests a very rapid development time-table: AIR is to pilot test the system this spring for full operation next Fall! Developing such a large item bank, as well as all of the associated computer software (perhaps AIR already has the delivery system in place), and ensuring the technical adequacy in all schools (which is, I suppose, a bit easier given Delaware's size) seems to be a tall order for a single year. If Delaware can pull it off, DCAS will be a major step forward for state-wide student assessment that is timely, efficient, and relevant for local instructional decisions. In an informal survey I completed two years ago, only a few states were experimenting with computer-based testing, and those that had operational systems were using them mainly only for end-of-course examinations. Oregon was using a computer-adaptive test for a while, but gave it up for a reason that escapes me at the moment (it may have been pressure from the US ED). In any case, I look forward to seeing what Delaware achieves, and hope the "First State" can serve as a model for twenty-first century student assessment.

What Does Everyone Need to Learn?

2008-05-20T15:53:00.003-05:00

The characteristics of the family in which children are raised have an enormous effect on the kinds of formative experiences they enjoy, which, in turn, direct the trajectory of the remainder of their lives in dramatic ways. Children born into wealthy families have access to rich formative experiences, which lead to a greater variety of opportunities during adult life than children born into poorer families. But this hardly seems fair: Why should opportunity for success in adult life depend so much on the luck of birth, irrespective of natural ability or personal motivation? In recent decades, the international community has pushed for universal schooling as a means of equalizing, in part, the formative experiences of children in richer and poorer families. Unfortunately, many states find themselves in the unhappy position of having too few resources to provide every child with the lavish education they might desire. As a result, it has become increasingly important for states and other educational providers to seek out ways of maximizing educational benefit given limited resources, while still achieving the opportunity-equalizing function we assign to schooling.

This suggests the question: Is there some guideline curriculum planners can use to reduce the cost incurred by a given curriculum without jeopardizing the power of their schools to reduce the opportunity gap between rich and poor? Is there some minimal set of content to which everyone ought to have educational access? The international community has yet to establish a detailed answer to this question. International discussions about education have certainly underscored the great importance of educational and curricular quality, but descriptions of what counts as quality content have remained rather vague. Moreover, the common indicators used in international monitoring reports are unrelated to the quality of curricular content. Since access to schooling is nearly irrelevant if the quality of what students learn in school is insufficient, the international community needs to begin monitoring curricular content, in addition to the current indicators. This can be facilitated by an analytical device---a schema for basic education curricula---used in the evaluation and comparison of curricula in diverse contexts.

Read more in my Ed.M. thesis! I also have audio for a 10 minute overview and a 1 hour presentation with discussion under "Talks and Posters" in the Repository.

Narrowing the Curriculum

2008-05-12T23:24:00.006-05:00

From oldandrew at Scenes from the Battleground:

We don’t need to consider whether French is more important than Latin, or whether biology is better for children than history for it to be possible to identify a failure in education where large number of those leaving the system are unable to read, write or behave like civilised human beings.

Recent national education reform efforts here in the United States that require school accountability for student outcomes in reading and mathematics have received a considerable amount of push-back, some of which has taken the form of complaints about a narrowing of the curriculum, saying that students need well-rounded educational experiences and that testing only in reading and math forces schools to myopically hammer these skills to the exclusion of other important lessons. I've never found the complaint convincing: Schools that successfully get students to learn to read and do math should have no problems with their students' passing mandatory external assessments, and can go on their merry way teaching as many other subjects as they like; schools that can't even get their students to read have major problems that need to be addressed before we can even begin to consider what kind of well-rounded curriculum students should learn (since they aren't really learning anything at all at this point, after all).

What's really going on behind the outcry against trying to teach students to read and do math? I have a sinking suspicion that much of it has to do with (a) incompetent administrators who respond to national and state reforms by imposing inane requirements on teachers who are otherwise doing a fairly good job and (b) teachers and administrators in failing schools who don't particularly like the fact that there are now consequences for that failure. As for the latter, we've known for half a century that our schools are failing far too many low-income and minority students, and yet have failed to make much progress in correcting the problem. It's about time to expect that students leave school able to read, write, and behave like civilized human beings---if achieving that means teaching fewer subjects in certain schools for the time being, so be it.

A Few Notes from the History of the Massachusetts Department of Education

2008-05-04T13:42:00.003-05:00

In 1837, the Massachusetts General Court established the nation's first state Board of Education, whose statutory mandate was to

collect information of the actual conditions and efficiency of the common schools and other means of popular education; and diffuse as widely as possible throughout every part of the Commonwealth, information of the most approved and successful methods of arranging the studies and conducting the education of the young, to the end that all children in this Commonwealth, who depend upon common schools for instruction, may have the best education which those schools can be made to impart.[1]

In its first eighty years, the Board established ten teacher-training institutions, improved the leadership and organization of schools, pushed for the first compulsory school attendance law in the nation (1852), pushed for the first free textbook law in the nation (1884), and established schools for children with disabilities.[2] Thus, from its inception, the Massachusetts Board of Education acted in accordance with its mission as an educational development agency.

In the early Twentieth Century, Massachusetts executed a series of administrative reorganizations. These included merging the Board of Education with the Commission on Industrial Education in 1909 and placing them under the direction of a commissioner of education, who replaced the original office of the secretary of the Board of Education.[2] In 1919, the state again enacted a widespread consolidation of boards and commissions, which dissolved the Board of Education and replaced it with an advisory board for the new Department of Education (DOE) with divisions for elementary and secondary education, vocational education, teacher training, immigration, public libraries, and post-secondary colleges.[3] Despite the many administrative changes, the Department of Education has retained its developmental character with the mission to

provide a public education system of sufficient quality to extend to all children including a limited English proficient student ... , and also, including a school age child with a disability ... the opportunity to reach their full potential and to lead lives as participants in the political and social life of the commonwealth and as contributors to its economy.[4]

The DOE's Student Assessment Services (SAS) unit developed in response to the Public School Improvement Act of 1985, the purpose of which was to

ensure educational excellence and equity for all students in elementary and secondary schools of cities and towns, regional school districts and independent vocational schools of the commonwealth [and] increase accountability of teachers and students, provide resources for creative educational improvements at the local level and provide resources to equalize educational opportunity.[5]

SAS therefore continues in the Board of Education's original mission to "collect information of the actual conditions and efficiency of the common schools" and supports the developmental goal of improving equity of educational opportunity through increased accountability. Specifically, the Act of 1985 called for "a statewide testing program to improve curriculum and instruction and to identify those students needing assistance in mastering basic skills."[6] This testing program consisted of two parts. The first, the Massachusetts Educational Assessment Program (MEAP), provided information about the progress of educational achievement in schools and districts by means of reading, math, and science tests administered biennially in grades 3, 7, and 11. After the initial cycle, the assessment added a social studies component and shifted to grades 4, 8, and 12 in alignment with the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). MAEP also included test items from NAEP to provide a basis for national comparisons.[7] The second, the Massachusetts Basic Skills Testing Program, provided information about individual students' achievement in reading, writing, and mathematics in grades 3, 6, and 9 to identify students for additional assistance in mastering basic skills.[8]

In the wake of the federal Goals 2000: Educate America Act (P.L. 103-227), the Massachusetts General Court passed the Education Reform Act of 1993, which included provisions for the establishment of statewide curricular frameworks and an accompanying Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System for

evaluating on an annual basis the performance of both public school districts and individual public schools [with respect to] the extent to which schools and districts succeed in improving or fail to improve student performance, as defined by student acquisition of the skills, competencies and knowledge called for by the academic standards ... in the areas of mathematics, science and technology, history and social science, English, foreign languages and arts, as well as by other gauges of student learning judged by the board to be relevant and meaningful to students, parents, teachers, administrators, and taxpayers.[9]

MCAS expanded the state testing program to include standards for academic achievement, a competency determination requirement for graduation, and state-wide comparisons of the performance of schools and districts.[10]

Today, SAS manages the development, administration, and analysis of MCAS tests in English/Language Arts (grades 3-8, 10), math (grades 3-8, 10), science and technology/engineering (grades 5, 8), and history/social science (grades 5, 7) in order to provide the data necessary for tracking the improvement of school performance and student achievement in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the 2001 reauthorization of the federal Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 (ESEA, ``No Child Left Behind,'' P.L. 107-110) and in support of the DOE's primary mission to provide high-quality and equitable educational opportunities to all children.

[1] Chapter 241 of the Acts of 1837, section 2.
[2] Payson Smith, Eighty-third Annual Report of the Department of Education, Boston, 1920, at 15.
[3] Ibid. at 13.
[4] Massachusetts General Laws, chapter 69, section 1.
[5] Chapter 188 of the Acts of 1985, section 1.
[6] Ibid., section 6.
[7] Massachusetts Department of Education, The Massachusetts Educational Assessment Program: 1990 Statewide Summary, 1990, p 1.
[8] \footnote{Massachusetts Department of Education, \emph{Massachusetts Basic Skills Tests: Summary of State Results, 1989 Update.}}
[9] Chapter 71 of the Acts of 1993, section 29; Massachusetts General Laws, chapter 69, section 1I.
[10] Massachusetts Department of Education, "Education Fact Sheet," August 1997, at 20.

The Speed of School Reform

2008-04-25T16:54:00.004-05:00

There is a public evil of great magnitude in the multiplicity and diversity of elementary books. They crowd the market and infest the schools. One would suppose there might be uniformity in rudiments at least; yet the greatest variety prevails. Some books claim superiority because they make learning easy, and others, because they make it difficult. All decry their predecessors, or profess to have discovered new and better modes of teaching. By a change of books a child is often obliged to unlearn what he had laboriously acquired before. ... It would seem, beforehand, that no duty of school committees should be more acceptable to parents, than that of enforcing a uniformity of books in all the schools of a town.

Horace Mann in the First Annual Report of the [Massachusetts] Board of Education in 1838.

At the present time educational standards in Massachusetts lack definition. The schools of the various cities and towns are organized without particular reference to any general or State educational program. To say, for example, that a child is rated in the fourth grade of any school system does not at all imply that he would receive the same classification in any other school system in the State, or that he would be pursuing the same subjects or the same courses if he were attending school in another town. In a State, a large part of whose population is so constantly shifting, this lack of reasonable co-ordination brings loss to thousands of our youth, to say nothing of the confusion it creates in the minds of parents and of citizens with reference to the educational accomplishments of their children as measured by teachers and school officers. No one would argue for an absolute uniformity of education throughout the State, and no one would desire any system which would eliminate individual or local initiative. These can unquestionably be preserved at the same time that general standards can be better defined and secured.

Payson Smith in the Eighty-second Annual Report of the Board of Education, 1919.

The board shall establish a set of statewide educational goals for all public elementary and secondary schools in the commonwealth. The board shall direct the commissioner to institute a process to develop academic standards for the core subjects of mathematics, science and technology, history and social science, English, foreign languages and the arts. The standards shall cover grades kindergarten through twelve and shall clearly set forth the skills, competencies and knowledge expected to be possessed by all students at the conclusion of individual grades or clusters of grades.

Massachusetts Education Reform Act of 1993.

Decomposing Word-Problem Solving

2008-01-25T13:41:00.000-06:00

A couple of years ago, I was tutoring a sixth-grade boy in mathematics. I noticed that although my student was fairly adept at arithmetic, he had difficulty in knowing which operations to perform in sequence for multi-step computations, which was especially evident in solving word problems. One manifestation of this divide between knowing how to perform a computation and knowing what the computation signifies or how it functions in a larger context came in his stubborn refusal (conscious or otherwise) to retain terms associated with operations. For example, when multiplying mixed numbers, I attempted to remind him several times first to "convert the mixed number to an improper fraction." Each time he would look at me or the page for a moment and then say something like, "Oh, you mean 2 times 3 plus 1?" (if the mixed number was 3 1/2), frequently pointing to the numbers with his pencil as he spoke. "Blank times blank plus blank"---that is, the concrete sequence of operations contextualized in the specific problem at hand---seemed to be the extent of his understanding of what he was doing, and the rejection of proper terminology seemed to suggest that the concepts of improper fractions and converting between different representations of the same number were irrelevant to him. Now, although I love words and expressing ideas succinctly, precisely, and elegantly, I don't intend to suggest an unnecessary proliferation of terminology. However, discipline-specific terms, in moderation, facilitate communication in the discipline, particularly at a level of abstraction necessary for understanding how the various component concepts of the discipline function with respect to one another, which is vital in constructing multi-step solutions to non-trivial problems.

When teaching complex skills---that is, skills that require more than one action, simultaneously or in sequence---it's frequently necessary to break the complex task down into simpler skills, teach the simple skills independently first, and then have the student blend the simple skills together to complete the complex task. Let me refer to this intentional, metacognitive pedagogical sequence as decomposition of the complex skill, and to instruction that does not involve decomposition as holistic. Decomposition is frequently latent in math instruction sequencing: One teaches whole number addition, then multiplication, then least common multiples, before blending these component skills into addition of fractions. Unfortunately, in other areas, traditional instruction has not always achieved sufficient decomposition; and, while bright students can figure out the component skills for themselves in the process of being taught the complex skill holistically, students who struggle with complex skills could potentially benefit greatly from training first in simple skills and then (metacognitively) in blending the simple skills together to achieve a complex task. (For an example outside of mathematics, consider Why Our Children Can't Read, where Diane McGuinness claims that instruction based on phonemic awareness---a decomposition of reading---is necessary for the 30% of students that whole language and traditional phonics, both more holistic with respect to reading as a complex skill, will inevitably fail.)

Now, word problems have long been used in math classes to connect pure operations with real-life applications, develop reasoning skills, and increase student interest. Unfortunately, when many people recall their school days, they remember word problems as the bane of their math class. This, I imagine, is due in part to the fact that solving word problems is a complex skill and that traditional instruction has not sufficiently decomposed word-problem solving. Although students may master simple skills such as arithmetic operations, they may not figure out on their own how to select and blend them in the context of a word problem. From my limited exposure to recent elementary-school math textbooks, I have the impression that textbook authors are beginning to move toward decomposing word problems with periodic special pages with metacognitive tips, such as identifying unnecessary information and selecting a problem solving strategy; but, I believe more work can be done toward this end, and indeed must be done to raise achievement levels in mathematics.

I envision a sequence of graded exercises that would train students in the skills of (1) selecting the operation required for a computation, (2) identifying the information required for a computation, (3) identifying what is being asked, (4) identifying what information is given, (5) identifying extraneous information, (6) identifying missing information, (7) constructing a "knowledge chain" to fill in missing information, and (8) constructing a sequence of operations to arrive at the desired result. Each exercise would focus only on one of these skills. For example, the exercise for (2) would consist of problems of the form "You would like to purchase some oranges. What do you need to know to find out how much to pay?" (the number of oranges and the unit cost) or "You would like to put a fence around your yard. What do you need to know to find out how long the fence will be?" (the length and the width of the yard) but not "You would like to put a fence around your yard. What do you need to know to find out how much it will cost?" which is a compound problem (the unit cost and the perimeter, which comes from the length and the width) and fits under (7). The exact wording of each problem could, of course, be varied or stay the same according to the learning styles and needs of the students. As the students progress through the sequence of exercises, the teacher would also provide explicit (metacognitive) instruction in how to combine the simple skills. For example, "When you read a word problem, first determine the question, then ask yourself what information you need to know in order to answer the question like we practiced last week." To emphasize the metacognition, students should explain verbally the steps as they perform them (something akin to "I read the problem, and now I have to identify the question. In the problem, John wants to find out how much to pay. Next, I have to figure out what information is necessary for figuring out how much to pay. To figure out how much to pay, I have to know the number of hot dogs and the price of each hot dog. The problem tells me that here. Next, I have to decide what operation to use. I have to multiply the number of hot dogs and the price. Now, I can calculate the answer.")

Of course, the trick comes in finding developmentally appropriate ways of expressing and teaching each component skill, since the ability to understand abstractions comes only over time; but, I suspect that there are exercises that can facilitate even handling abstractions in the decomposition of learning about problem solving (as a skill distinct from problem solving itself). Nevertheless, the guiding principle of decomposition remains: break complex skills into component parts, practice the component parts, train students to think explicitly about how the component parts fit together, practice blending the pieces into complex skills. With this kind of simple, explicit, step-by-step, cumulative method, the most daunting of complex skills can come within students' grasp.

Information Literacy

2007-12-06T21:58:00.000-06:00

A recent letter in the Journal of the American Medical Association provides preliminary results from a brief survey of YouTube videos containing information about immunizations. About half of the videos surveyed were unsupportive of immunizations, and many of these contained inaccurate information. This recent preliminary survey is indicative of an increasing trend of amateur videos presenting health information on the internet. While these videos can be very creative and helpful in disseminating public health messages, they may also spread false or inaccurate information about health practices.

In societies where information is so easily published without the traditional (though certainly not infallible) checks or balances of editors and publishing houses, schools have a vital new responsibility to ensure students master "information literacy," that is, knowing not only how to locate information, but how to evaluate its quality and check its accuracy. Evaluating sources for bias and expertise as well as being able to triangulate information are fast becoming vital skills, not just for academics and researchers, but for anyone who has access to vast quantities of undifferentiated information. In our "digital age," facility of transfer of ideas is a great potential asset, and a great potential peril. As such, schools in internet-capable societies cannot neglect their new responsibility to acclimate their charges to capitalize this new asset and avoid its risks.

Reforming Assessment Practices: Short List

2007-12-02T21:41:00.000-06:00

Assessment can be a wonderful tool for gauging how well students are learning key material and how well teachers and schools are fostering learning. But, like any tool, assessment must be handled properly to achieve any benefit. Using a hammer to drive a screw only destroys the screw and damages the wood. The current educational policy climate in the United States has driven the growth of educational assessment, which has the potential to foster powerful cultures of data awareness in order to target interventions for the improvement of an ailing system. Unfortunately, lack of technical capacity and a touch of shortsightedness in places has led to a number of unhelpful, and even at times unintentionally damaging, policies. Below I give my short list of recommendations for purging the dross among assessment practices to allow the beneficial qualities of assessment shine through.

1) Some localities have responded to federal and state assessment requirements by entering a hyper-testing frenzy, in which even a month of instruction over the course of the year can be lost to large-scale, standardized assessment. This is overkill and hinders the primary goal of teaching. Classroom teachers certainly need to be assessing their students continually, formally and informally, in ways that they have been for years, in order to identify students' learning needs and adjust instruction. Likewise, large-scale, standardized assessments also provide a necessary external check of student learning, which can form a piece of evaluations of teacher and school effectiveness and draw out macro-patterns in the educational system as a whole. However, large-scale assessments shouldn't take the place of "light-weight" classroom assessments, nor should they displace significant portions of that which they are attempting to measure, viz instruction. Instead, states should require just a few days of testing both at the beginning and again at the end of each year, leaving the remaining time for teachers to perform their métier.

2) I have heard it claimed that some states and localities have been creating standardized assessments before establishing a strong statement of what they expect students to learn. This is utterly backwards and is largely a waste of time for everyone involved: A number resulting from a measurement of an unknown entity yields very little useful information, and asking teachers and students to perform on what purports to be an evaluation of their progress during the year without first telling them what will be expected is not only unfair, but creates an undue psychological burden on teachers and students alike that can only degrade the learning environment. Instead, any testing authority operating without a clear reference curriculum or with vague or flimsy standards should as soon as possible work out the skills and knowledge they hope students to master (ideally developing the list through a participatory process), publish the standards as widely as possible with accompanying professional development for teachers and local administrators to understand them as well as possible, and then ensure that their assessment is properly aligned with their expectations.

3) No teacher should spend more time teaching test-taking strategies than teaching content. While students do need to have some familiarity with the format of the test (so they spend their time demonstrating their skills instead of decoding the directions), teaching only test-taking skills not only does a huge disservice to the students (after all, one supposes that the students actually need to acquire the knowledge and skills being tested) but violates the spirit and intent of the measurement. For most teachers this is a no-brainer, but there are still
a few rogue teachers out there who, perhaps due to social pressures or out of fear of negative consequences, sacrifice their primary professional responsibility for a better image. These teachers need to be identified for professional development and potentially eventual dismissal if they consistently fail to demonstrate a capacity for improvement.

4) Testing authorities should endeavor to return detail-rich test results to schools and teachers as timely as possible. The primary purpose of large-scale, standardized assessments is to provide an external check on student learning to identify large-scale problems in order to target interventions in the system as a whole (or parts of the system, such as individual districts or schools or sub-populations). Nevertheless, one should not waste the opportunity to provide information that individual teachers could use to target local interventions for individual students. Assessment yields knowledge about students' learning to date--where the competencies are strong, and where they are weaker. Teachers could profit immensely from this knowledge in order to provide targeted instruction to help students improve in their weaker areas more efficiently. This information would be especially helpful if it came in the Fall--to inform instruction through the coming year--and in the late Spring--to help identify students who may need extra help during the summer before beginning the next grade.

5) In the upcoming reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (No Child Left Behind), the federal government should move away from requirements that (a) compare one cohort of students with the next, and (b) use the percentage of students achieving a passing score to determine progress. The former only adds extra variance to the scores and muddies their interpretability, and the latter yields a measure of progress that isn't comparable between groups. Percentage passing is certainly important, since passing indicates achieving one of the goals of education (namely the mastery of certain skills and knowledge deemed important for students' lives), but the percentage passing isn't suitable for gauging progress since the same level of improvement in absolute scores could yield a large increase in the percentage passing if the cohort's average score is close to the cutoff or a small increase if the cohort's average score is further away. Instead, progress should be measured in terms of growth models comparing students' abilities at the beginning and the end of the year. These models provide a wealth of information about not only student's absolute level of mastery but their rate with a given teacher in a particular school. Under a highly skilled teacher, students who are very far beyond the state's expectations can make phenomenal progress, many times faster than students who are "on track," exhibiting one and a half or more years worth of gain relative to state expectations. These students may still take several years to catch up to their on-track peers, but examining raw passing rates fails to acknowledge their fantastic progress in the interim and masks their teachers' true skill. Looking instead at growth rates within the year shows whether students are likely to make sufficient progress to reach proficiency by the end of their schooling and gives a much better basis for comparing the effectiveness of teachers and the improvement of schools.

How much is a diploma worth?

2007-06-22T14:24:00.000-05:00

Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick has recently appointed to the state Board of Education Ruth Kaplan, an advocate for special education and critic of the MCAS graduation requirement.

Kaplan said she considers the MCAS graduation requirement unfair because some districts do not yet provide students with the curriculum needed to succeed on the exams. "Testing is supposed to measure how well a school district is doing," she said. "If they aren't doing it well, why are we punishing the kids by denying them a diploma?"

Of course, Ms. Kaplan is really saying, "Instead of punishing kids by denying them a diploma, we should punish them by giving them a meaningless piece of paper that creates a false sense of accomplishment when our schools have failed to teach them basic skills."

Now, I applaud Ms. Kaplan's desire to advocate for special education, but she is working at cross purposes with herself by expending effort to remove the MCAS graduation requirement. She is incorrect in her assumption that testing is intended to measure school effectiveness: The MCAS, and standardized tests like it around the world, are intended to measure student learning in specific areas, which can be used as a proxy for school effectiveness. If a student doesn't pass the MCAS after multiple attempts, the student has not demonstrated success in learning what the state has deemed are necessary knowledge and skills for the student's adult life. To give that student a diploma--a document certifying that the student has achieved the expected learning--is to lie to the student and anyone who would evaluate the student's qualifications. This isn't to say that the failure to learn is necessarily entirely the fault of students--part (perhaps even much) of the burden certainly falls on our educational system. But, I really don't see how lying about the students' abilities will do them any favors or help them succeed in their future lives.

If our schools don't provide students with the curriculum necessary to pass the MCAS, then our schools aren't providing students with the curriculum necessary for most of them to be successful as adults. The solution isn't to get rid of the MCAS graduation requirement, but to reform the education our schools provide.

Assessment: To Measure, Not To Improve

2007-06-20T21:00:00.000-05:00

The Massachusetts Board of Higher Education recently released preliminary findings from a new study linking K-12 and post-secondary statistical information. Peter Schworm of the Boston Globe has highlighted the apparent correlation between scores on the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS) and college success indicators, specifically credits earned and GPA: Students who were rated as Advanced on the MCAS in high school received more credits with a higher GPA than those rated Proficient, who in turn performed better in college than those rated Needs Improvement.

Some said the findings were predictable and showed only that brighter, harder-working students were more likely to succeed at college, not that the tests were improving education.

While these findings should by no means be surprising, they are, however, not necessarily to be expected: If the MCAS were not a good measure of students' academic capabilities, there would be little correlation between MCAS score and college performance. Since we expect the MCAS to be a good measure of student achievement, we aren't surprised by the correlation; nevertheless, the finding (assuming its statistical significance, which wasn't presented in the preliminary report) is a testament to the success, in some degree, of the MCAS as an achievement metric.

Unfortunately, the second half of the quotation above demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of the function of assessments as metrics. A test, as a measurement--a snapshot of ability in time--simply cannot improve education. Rather, improving education depends wholly on what one does with test results.

Consider an analogy from medicine. When a new patient enters the hospital, the admitting doctor might ask for a blood sample to run a few tests. Very few people would think the doctor were doing anything useful if he simply continued to perform blood tests, hoping the results would improve. Instead, the patient would expect the doctor to interpret the test results and prescribe some form of treatment. Then, after the treatment had been applied, it would be reasonable to run a follow-up test to verify the treatment had the desired effect.

Just as a doctor would interpret blood test results to assess a patient's health before prescribing a treatment, the perceived power for academic assessments to improve education lies in schools and teachers' using test results to inform instructional decisions, to target interventions where students need them most. A test of arithmetic won't help Johnny learn mathematics, but it can reveal to his teacher that Johnny is solid in addition, but weak in multiplication. His teacher then knows that Johnny needs more practice with multiplication, and can skip the extra addition lessons. Due to tests' potential to provide more effective instruction, States ought to increase the timeliness and detail of the reports produced from their standardized assessments in order to maximize the benefit of the assessment to students and their teachers.

Since high-quality assessments measure how well students have mastered the material set forth for them in the established curriculum, it seems perfectly reasonable to expect students to pass such an assessment before granting them a certificate stating they have met the curricular requirements. Oddly, not everyone agrees:

"I don't think anyone is surprised that students who do better on the MCAS exam do better in college," said Representative Carl M. Sciortino Jr. , a Medford Democrat who has filed legislation to stop denying students diplomas based solely on MCAS scores. "That means nothing in terms of producing better-prepared graduates overall."

To return to the medical analogy, no decent doctor would give a patient a clean bill of health until blood tests revealed acceptable results. Similarly, why would our schools grant a diploma to students at the end of twelfth grade who have not demonstrated an ability to perform, for example, mathematics at an eighth-grade level? Doing so would only devalue the high school diploma and perform a disservice to students by not truly preparing them for post-graduate life.

Now, some might argue that the MCAS does not function as an accurate metric of students' mastery of the knowledge and skills of the state curricular frameworks. However, if that is indeed the case, the appropriate response is not to remove the MCAS, but to reform it. If we value the quality of our educational system, we cannot fail to measure its effectiveness in producing desired learning outcomes. Similarly, if we value the worth of our high school diplomas, students must be required to demonstrate their academic achievement with a standardized, valid, and reliable indicator of their learning.

Incentivizing Students, Incentivizing Schools

2007-06-19T21:30:00.000-05:00

New York City schools will be experimenting with a new student incentive program next year in which students could receive as much as $500 for strong performance on state examinations and good attendance. The program is part of the mayor's antipoverty initiative, which will use privately raised funds to provide similar cash incentives to reduce poverty by encouraging, for example, keeping a full-time job, obtaining health insurance, sending children to school, and attending parent-teacher conferences.

The idea has received mixed reviews. "We are in a capitalist society and people are motivated by money across race and across class, so why not?" said Darwin Davis, the president of the Urban League. On the other hand, Davis also feels the size of the cash awards is rather small:

"I wish $50 could be enough for an insurance payment, but that’s not going to be the case," he said, wondering aloud how many tests students would need to pass to buy the latest video game.

Sol Stern of the Manhattan Institute doesn't place much confidence in the power of the cash prizes to entice students into working hard, and says the program is an "insult to every hard-working parent." Other educators claim that students should love learning for its own sake, not for material rewards.

Incentives are certainly not new to education. Schools in Chelsea, MA and Dallas, TX have also offered cash to students for attendance or books read, and plenty of elementary school teachers through the years have offered their students a pizza party or the chance to delve into a "treasure chest" for good behavior. One could argue that students should pursue good behavior, just as learning, for its own sake, but the fact of the matter is that many students need an extra nudge in the right direction--and the nudge doesn't have to be all that big. If stickers can do wonders for motivating good behavior, I imagine a little cash could encourage some to work a little harder toward an upcoming test or perfect attendance.

I wonder, though, if the naysayers of the program realize that this "ploy" is precisely the same tactic the Federal government uses to encourage educational reform. Due to the tenth amendment, educational responsibility falls under the purview of the States, so the Federal government has no direct authority over any educational program. Since politicians at the Federal level would, nevertheless, like to see certain improvements in the quality of our nation's educational systems, they institute incentive programs: a small financial grant in exchange for a certain educational agenda, such as improving educational opportunity for poor students or increasing the available data about school performance. Just as $50 isn't much for a health insurance premium, the 7% of educational expenditures that the Federal government provides isn't intended to cover anything close to the bulk of the cost of education. Rather, the grants' goal is to encourage certain behaviors; and as it turns out, the carrot is just a little too big for States to give up, as we have seen, for example, in Utah's difficulty in passing legislation that would disqualify the state from certain Federal programs.

Federal incentives for schools and local incentives for students are not the end-all of educational reform, but they aren't intended to be. Rather, they must be accompanied by more-comprehensive reforms on the state and school levels to achieve true, lasting progress toward equity of educational opportunity. Since the New York incentive program won't detract from public monies for education, I support the initiative: Give it a try, monitor its effects, and if it works, expand. If not, try something else--but keep the entrepreneurial attitude, because entrepreneurship fosters the kind of creativity need to develop novel strategies that work.

The Utility of Standardized Tests

2007-06-15T22:00:00.000-05:00

How do you feel about standardized tests?

When they are well written and properly interpreted, standardized tests can be an excellent way to measure students' mastery of many kinds of content and skills (though not all). These objective tests can increase the fairness of student assessment by establishing a scoring system that does not suffer from grader subjectivity, which could potentially hide poor achievement, masking problems instead of revealing growth. The power and utility of standardized tests increases greatly when the results can be used to target future instruction to specific areas in which students have not yet mastered all of the desired concepts and skills. While students do need to have some familiarity with the test-taking system, I am not at all a fan of spending exorbitant amounts of time on test taking skills or strategies. Rather, instructional time should focus on the curriculum that the standardized test is intended to cover, and provided that the test is well constructed, students who master the content in the curriculum will very likely master the standardized test as well.

Teachers: Strict vs. Caring

2007-06-14T21:00:00.000-05:00

[As a teacher,] is it better to be strict or caring? Which are you?

Ideally a teacher should be both strict and caring: A teacher should want to hold students to high standards of behavior and achievement as a direct result of the teacher's care and concern for the well-being of his or her students. A teacher should strictly demand students behave and achieve to the best of their ability, and a teacher should mercifully know when to make occasional exceptions due to extenuating circumstances.

I feel that I am a compassionate person--I enjoy listening to people's problems, comforting them, and helping them find solutions. When I have served as a teacher, I cared for my students and wanted what's best for them, and it is precisely for this reason that I would want to be strict (though merciful in appropriate measure), because students will learn best and have the greatest chance of success in a smoothly running environment where they are pushed to strive for their best.

Limitations of Threshold-Based Assessment

2007-06-13T22:30:00.000-05:00

New York state announced significant improvement in this year's math scores, especially in New York City and schools in high-poverty areas; but Robert Tobias, former director of New York City's office of assessment, cautions that large increases in one grade that are not accompanied by similar increases in other grades may indicate significant sources of influence apart from the quality of instruction:

On this year’s reading test, for example, the proportion of state eighth graders reaching proficiency surged by 7.7 percentage points, but the proportion of proficient sixth graders increased by a more modest 2.8 points and that of seventh graders by only 1.4 points.

Indeed, state officials explained that the jump in percent of proficient eighth graders is not as significant as it first appears due to statistical factors:

David M. Abrams, the state’s assistant commissioner for standards and assessment, noted that sixth graders and eighth graders improved about the same in raw numbers--five points on a scale in which a score of 650 represents proficiency. But since a comparatively large number of sixth graders were already proficient the year before and a relatively large number of eighth graders were clustered just below the 650 threshold, the same five points qualified many more eighth graders as proficient while doing far less for the sixth-grade showing.

This example underscores two weaknesses of using the percentage of students receiving proficient scores from year to year as a measure of a school's improvement.

First, each year the test assesses a different cohort of students, and many people who have worked in schools for any significant length of time will confirm that different groups of students perform better or worse, on average, than their older or younger peers. Due to natural variations in aptitude and attitude, some cohorts simply achieve more than others, even with the same courses, teachers, and resources. As a result, any progress the school as a whole is making toward universal proficiency can be obscured by the variation in what the students bring to the academic enterprise from cohort to cohort.

Second, since percent proficient is a threshold measure, differences in portion of students proficient do not translate into the difficulty in achieving the result--that is, the effort required to accomplish the increase. If, as in the case of New York eighth graders, the previous year's scores were just below the threshold, on average, a modest gain in test performance will appear as a significant improvement. However if, as in the case of New York sixth graders, the previous year's scores were just above the threshold, on average, the same modest gain will correspond to a modest improvement in number of proficient students. This threshold measure, therefore, fails to give an accurate picture of the actual improvement in instructional quality.

If test results were reported as average sores instead of percent proficient, on the other hand, analysts could compare effect sizes, and the five point increase in New York's sixth and eighth graders would be rightly understood as roughly the same accomplishment. Moreover, value-added assessment could provide a much better indicator of how much schools and teachers themselves are contributing to students' academic progress, factoring out a number of cohort differences, and teachers could greatly benefit from being able to target instruction based on prompt results from beginning-of-the-year baseline assessments, which would indicate the specific needs of each student in the new cohort.

(Incidentally, if value-added scores were incorporated into teacher evaluations, more high-quality teachers might be inclined to work with poor students: They wouldn't have to be as concerned with negative consequences for not reaching absolute proficiency in a single year if their students are still making remarkable gains, and students who start at the bottom have more room to move up than average students.)

Of course, we can't simply ignore the brute passing rate, since we want children not merely to experience improvement, but to achieve actual proficiency in core areas of knowledge and skills. But, until we reach universal proficiency, a more-detailed view of how students are improving (or not) could help us target interventions as we attempt to improve our system of education.

Freedom and Accountability, Hand in Hand

2007-06-12T16:30:00.000-05:00

According to an interview with the Boston Globe, Matthew King, superintendent of schools in Wellesley, Massachusetts, has decided to leave public education to lead a small Jewish day school:

I would say that I’ve grown tired of the direction public education is going, with more and more controls from the state and federal government and less and less autonomy for individual schools and school systems. There’s no question I’ve had a very, very satisfying career. But right now, just the whole accountability movement, I guess you would say, has made working in schools not as satisfying as it used to be.

If public education isn't as satisfying as it used to be, autocratic, micromanaging administrators may more likely be the cause than the accountability movement. Rightly implemented, the new reporting requirements of the accountability movement, which are beginning to reveal exactly how well schools are achieving their educational mandate, should provide schools with more freedom and autonomy, since quality may be assured through the "fruits of schools' labors," as opposed to detailed regulation. As UK Education Secretary Alan Johnson has noted in response to criticisms by the independent General Testing Council, assessment data provide schools with transparency and openness: "Parents don't want to go back to a world where schools were closed institutions, no-one knew what was going on in them" (BBC). This transparency can give parents and societal leaders the confidence to allow schools to function independently without the fear that rogue administrators or teachers would be permitted to abuse school resources without detection for long.

But, giving up the regulatory control they've held for so long can be difficult for administrators in the public sector as well as the private; and yet when smaller working units are provided with less regulation in exchange for accountability for their results, workers on the ground have made wonderful progress where higher-level administrators failed. Keith Sawyer, professor of psychology at Washington University in St. Louis and author of Group Genius: The Creative Power of Collaboration, tells the story of the Brazilian manufacturer Semco that made an impressive recovery from near-bankruptcy when Ricardo Semler took over and radically altered the company's organizational structure:

Semler tossed the binders, fired most of his senior managers, and handed the reins to the company's employees. "It was like taking an improvisational jazz ensemble and ramping it up to the organizational level," Sawyer says. Small groups now run the company with near-total autonomy. Large, 300-worker factories have been split into smaller, 100-worker units. The move initially caused inefficiencies and higher costs but eventually allowed low-level innovation to flourish. Empowered factory-line workers, it turns out, really do know how to do their jobs better. Inventory backlogs have eased, product lines have expanded, and sales have jumped. "That's not a lack of structure; that's just a lack of structure imposed from above," Semler has said. After the company's reorganization, revenues climbed from $4 million to $212 million. (US News and World Report)

If empowered factory-line workers can revive a manufacturing company from bankruptcy, perhaps empowered teachers and principals can reform a failing school system. But, this empowerment can only take place if parents and administrators can see that local schools are making use of their freedom responsibly. Accountability provides the transparency to assure constituents that schools are doing their job; freedom provides schools with the room to implement successful practices and respond nimbly to local challenges. Freedom requires accountability, and accountability enables freedom. They go hand in hand.

Unifying State Standards

2007-06-11T21:27:00.000-05:00

The National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) released a report last week aligning scores state assessment scores with the National Assessment for Educational Progress (NAEP). The analysis reveals striking differences in standards from state to state:

For example, an eighth grader in Tennessee can meet that state’s standards for math proficiency with a state test score that is the equivalent of a 230 on the national test. But in Missouri, an eighth grader would need the equivalent of a 311.
And while a Mississippi fourth grader can meet the state’s reading proficiency standard with a state score that corresponds to a 161 on the national test, a Massachusetts fourth grader would need the equivalent of a 234. Such score differences represent a gap of several grade levels. (NY Times)

Since the US Constitution assigns states the responsibility of educating our children, the authors of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 (ESEA), now known as the No child Left Behind Act (NCLB), allowed states to determine curriculum and set standards of achievement, but such wide variation in the resulting expectations for what constitutes an adequate education has prompted some to question whether the current mechanisms for defining academic proficiency are sufficient to meet the challenges of the twenty-first century. Although ESEA was intended to improve the quality of education for poor and minority students, NCLB provides little incentive for states to ratchet up the stakes in terms of their definitions of academic adequacy: If many local schools are already having difficulty in getting all of their students to pass the state proficiency examinations with standards such as they are, states are not likely to increase standards and risk even more schools facing negative consequences for failing to make adequate progress toward universal proficiency.

In an attempt to entice states to increase curricular standards, the Senate passed a bill last April that would, among other things, appropriate $100 million to provide grants to states to identify the skills students would need to succeed without remediation in higher education, the work force, and the Armed Services, and to determine the necessary changes to their curriculum to equip high school graduates with these skills (S.761, sec. 3401). While the bill's intention is admirable, the law would do little to ensure that states come to similar conclusions about the rigor of these skills for success.

Another bill before congress goes slightly further toward this goal by charging the NAEP Assessment Board with creating or adopting K-12 content standards that "reflect a common core of what students in the United States should know and be able to do to compete in a global economy" (S.224, H.R.325). These national standards would then be voluntarily adopted by states who accept a grant from the federal government to that end. Grants would be awarded up to $4 million per state over four years. While this bill has the potential to make great strides in directing our educational systems toward unity in academic expectations and would likely increase standards of proficiency, the money available as a carrot for states seems rather meager: $200 million spread over 53 million students gives less than $4/student--barely a dent in what it would cost to revamp a nation's curriculum, in terms of new textbooks, assessments, and professional development. The figure seems even less appealing when compared with the non-financial costs higher standards would levy due to the needs of NCLB.

What, then, can encourage states to raise the bar, not only of 100% proficiency but of proficiency itself? In the absence of a federal takeover of education, which require no less than a constitutional amendment, local citizens will have to petition their state governments, demanding a higher-quality education for our children. NCLB has made great strides in increasing the data available to parents and community members about the performance of every school; now that the NCES has mapped state assessment scales with NAEP, NCLB could be amended in the upcoming reauthorization to requires that schools report scores in terms of both state and national scales. While this reporting by itself wouldn't improve schools, it would give communities an idea of how their schools fare in comparison with the rest of the nation, hopefully fueling grassroots efforts to implement effectual change for educational improvement.

Learning via Skype

2007-06-10T21:11:00.000-05:00

Broadband access to the Internet and the proliferation of a diverse set of free communications utilities are beginning to open new opportunities to access education. An article in this week's Economist highlights the language-instruction company Praxis, which is making use of e-mail, podcasts, and the free Voice-over-IP (VoIP) utility Skype to offer a course in Chinese. Students study lessons sent via e-mail, listen to recordings through the daily podcast, and engage in live speaking practice with one of the company's 35 native speakers in Shanghai.

These very readily available, low-cost solutions could prove useful in the public sector of formal education, as they have begun to in the private non-formal sector. Public school districts in particularly large rural regions in America, such as Montana or Alaska, have faced a certain amount of difficulty in meeting the No Child Left Behind standards for Highly Qualified Teachers. Federal regulations require that teachers have content-matter expertise in the subjects they teach--which is quite reasonable since many studies indicate that teachers with content-knowledge in their field are, in general, more effective. But, small class sizes render uneconomical the hiring of teachers in different subjects for each school, and large distances between schools inhibits teachers covering multiple schools.

With off-the-shelf technology--including a number of freely available tools--teachers in one location could serve a pool of students from several different schools. One school may have the English teacher and another the Math teacher, but the classes would learn together, connected via videoconferencing over the Internet. An on-site paraprofessional could monitor students and provide any necessary in-person support. While remote areas sometimes lack access to broadband Internet connections, installing such an infrastructure for the school may , in the end, provide a net savings compared with personnel costs, as well as an increase in the quality of instruction.

Some public schools are already experimenting with the new modes of instruction that advances in telecommunications are permitting. The Chicago Virtual Charter School just completed its first year of providing what amounts to a home-schooling environment with professional teacher support mediated through the Internet and periodic in-school sessions. The school has received a certain amount of opposition: The Chicago teachers union has filed a lawsuit that would shut down the school on the grounds that it violates the Illinois School Code's definition of charter schools as "public, nonsectarian, non-religious, non-home based" (105 ILCS 5/27A-5, emphasis added). On another front, Rep. Monique Davis introduced HB0232 in the Illinois General Assembly, which would ban any form of virtual school. After several amendments, the bill was sent to the Senate in a form that would merely establish a two-year, sixteen-member Task Force on Virtual Education.

Achievement Over Self-Esteem

2007-06-09T21:10:00.000-05:00

We would all like to raise student achievement and address the needs of each student as a "whole child." But when it comes down to it, we often have to make hard choices. If you had to choose, would you rather raise student achievement or increase self-esteem and self-worth?

If, given the hard circumstances of life, I as a teacher had the time or energy or resources to focus on only one of either student achievement or self-esteem in the classroom, I would rather emphasize student achievement.

Initially this may seem to some as calloused, reducing a student's worth to what he or she can do rather than who he or she is. However, I believe that in the end sacrificing long-term student achievement for immediate gains in self-esteem ultimately does a disservice to students, especially those who come from a disadvantaged background.

Academic achievement opens a vast array of opportunities for students to experience success--success in future academic endeavors, success in better jobs, success in greater social capital, and success in the ability to participate in a wider variety of activities as adults. By not encouraging students to achieve all they can academically, a teacher who emphasizes merely current self-esteem stunts children's potential growth and future sense of fulfillment. This stunting effect is particularly traumatic for students from disadvantaged backgrounds, because these students are much more dependent on schooling in order to be well equipped for adulthood. Moreover, students who achieve academically are much more likely to develop a positive self-esteem naturally as a result of their immediate academic successes; whereas, children who are content with themselves in their status quo are much less likely to achieve academically (and thus be better equipped for future success) without being pushed to grow.

Therefore, since academic achievement carries the most potential to bring about the student's sense of fulfillment both in the short term and the long, if I couldn't focus on both, I would choose to emphasize student achievement over self-esteem.

Elementeo: Chemistry Concepts through Play

2007-06-08T16:03:00.000-05:00

NPR reported yesterday on the new card game Elementeo created by a seventh-grader in California to make learning chemistry more approachable and fun. The battle card game works on a design similar to Magic: The Gathering and Pokémon, in which players make use of attacking and defending unit cards on a playing field, which may be enhanced or weakened by a number of modifier cards. Instead of magical creatures and spells, though, Elementeo bases play on elements and the formation of compounds, along with other chemistry concepts.

Since I'm not particularly familiar with these types of card games and the reasons their fans enjoy them, I wondered if the game was complex and interesting enough to capture the interest of a good cross-section of card gamers. Fortunately, the game was covered by Slashdot, where a fair number of gamers hang out. Unfortunately, the discussion following the game's story left much to be desired, and I was once again reminded why I usually don't bother with Slashdot discussions: Even when I read only the posts that get mod'ed up, the commentary is rife with inane statements, uninformed opinions, and hasty judgments, along with their rebuttals. Take for example this statement from "A beautiful mind":

The kid's idea is stupid anyway, sure you can roleplay very basic things with it by providing an analogy, but that analogy doesn't work consistently and does not allow for a deeper understanding of chemistry. So unless you are satisfied with the "iron card and oxigen [sic.] card equals rust card", it does not allow for a deeper understanding. Don't tell me kids are not supposed to learn more at that (around twelve) age, you're probably expecting too little of them.

"Zaguar" expressed a similar viewpoint:

As somewho [sic.] knows something about Chemistry (going to the 2007 Moscow IChO), this idea is flawed. A high school chemistry syllabus is structered [sic.] the way it is for a reason. I can think of several examples. 1. Chemistry is not all about elements, even at this basic level. For example, how will they teach acid-base chemistry? How will they teach gas laws? Even if this is just a small component of the syllabus, it is a waste.

The poster continues to explain the complexities of different types of bonding, and claims that the rudimentary concepts presented in the game don't cover bonding in enough depth, concluding with:

My take - chemistry may be boring in high school, but so are most things. It's structed [sic.] in a way that builds upon previous knowledge, and this guy is just hoping to make a quick buck off VC's with a product that is clearly not thought out.

As someone who also knows something about chemistry ("recently published in Analytical Chemstry"), as well as a little something about education, I don't think I could disagree more. It doesn't appear that Zaguar's post was clearly thought out, since I find it unlikely that most middle school students would create a game based on high school content. "Dr.Boje" agrees,

I really doubt that the intention of this game is to completely replace a chemistry class, much less a high school chemistry class; after all, this is a 13-year-old still in middle school. I think the intention of this game is to get kids interested in chemistry and teach them the basics (regardless of how basic it may be) without alienating them from the subject.

But even if we grant that the game's scope is limited to a certain subset of chemistry knowledge, what about the objection from "A beautiful mind" about the depth of the content: Are elements and simple compounds too basic for middle school students? Not according to the Massachusetts Science and Technology/Engineering Curriculum Framework, to take the example of one state. Massachusetts doesn't introduce the concepts of elements and compounds before sixth grade; and even then, the standards represent only a basic introduction:

5. Recognize that there are more than 100 elements that combine in a multitude of ways to produce compounds that make up all of the living and nonliving things that we encounter.

6. Differentiate between an atom (the smallest unit of an element that maintains the characteristics of that element) and a molecule (the smallest unit of a compound that maintains the characteristics of that compound).

7. Give basic examples of elements and compounds. (p 67)

The Core Knowledge framework proposed by E.D. Hirsch is slightly more demanding in that it introduces the concept of elements in fourth grade:[1]

Elements are the basic kinds of matter, of which there are a little more than one-hundred. There are many idfferent kinds of atoms, but an element has only one kind of atom. Familiar elements, such as gold, copper, aluminum, oxygen, iron; Most things are made up of a combination of elements. (p 105)

The idea of bonding and compounds (not the detail) comes along in grade five:

Basics of atomic strucutre: nucleus, protons (positive charge), neutrons (neutral), electrons (negative charge); ... Atoms may join together to form molecules and compounds. Common compounds and their formulas: water H2O, salt NaCl, carbon dioxide CO2.

Elements have atoms of only one kind, having the same number of protons. There are a little more than 100 different elements. ... Some well-known elements and their symbols [lists 13 elements]; Two important categories of elements: metals and non-metals (p 129)

Though these two frameworks differ in exactly when to introduce elements and compounds, the point is that upper elementary and middle school students are still only being initiated into the inner workings of the world around us. Learning is progressive, and many of the details of chemistry, or any other discipline, are rightly left until high school when students have developed a stronger foundation. A game such as Elementeo helps to lay that foundation, not by replacing traditional lessons or by being an exhaustive font of content knowledge, but by supplementing instruction with an engaging introduction to key concepts. One should not demand more.

But, enough with the naysayers. After my journey to Slashdot and back, I was still left with the question of whether this game would have the kind of appeal that, say, Magic: The Gathering has. I decided that it probably would not (note, wait for a caveat to come): In its present form, the deck has only 66 cards, unlike the hundreds or thousands available for Magic: The Gathering, and thus likely will not support the complexities of game play that make other games more attractive. The concept is perhaps also somewhat limited in just how far it can push the theme before new additions seem merely like "more of the same." (Yet, this could just reveal my unfamiliarity with the content of these kinds of card games.) On the other hand, there could possibly be some very interesting ideas one could incorporate from the very rich sub-discipline of biochemistry.

Nevertheless (here's the caveat), the potential failure of Elementeo, or a game like it, to achieve a general, wide-spread interest in the gaming community at large does not signify a failure of the game in itself. Rather, if Elementeo is enjoyed even only in the limited context of school children in a narrow segment of grades and in a specific set of formal and non-formal educational venues, the game may be considered a wild success, since its purpose is not merely to entertain, but also to enhance education. In other words, the game succeeds in its mission to make learning a little more enjoyable, even if it doesn't succeed in its non-mission to keep large groups of random people entertained for hours on end.

And so, I support the release of Elementeo; I wish Anshul Samar and his team the best in production, marketing, and distribution; and I look forward to hearing about how well the game is received by children in classrooms and after-school programs all over the nation.

[1] Core Knowledge Sequence: Content Guidelines for Grades K-8. Charlottesville, VA: Core Knowledge Foundation, 1999.

Peeling the Onion

2007-06-07T11:28:00.001-05:00

A couple of weeks ago, Margaret Spellings, U.S. Secretary of Education, appeared on The Daily Show. In the interview, Spellings gave a great snapshot of the purpose of the accountability provisions of the No Child Left Behind Act:

Here's the deal. These are local decisions. I'm not hiring teachers at the Department of Education, obviously. But, what we've done with this law is peel the onion and bring to bear information about how well are we serving every single kind. And the answer is not well enough--by far, these days. And so what we're causing is anxiety with grown-ups on behalf of kids.

NCLB is merely the 2001 reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), whose goal in 1965 was to encourage states to improve educational quality for poor and disenfranchised students by providing financial incentives for categorical programs. For years, the Federal government has required testing (mainly through NAEP) in exchange for the carrot to monitor the effectiveness of the funds and gauge progress in the improvement of education.

In the 2001 iteration, Congress went a step further in "peeling the onion" by requiring states who accept Federal funds to do their own measuring and reporting of progress, and attempted to kindle the flame after decades of smoldering educational reform by forcing action in schools that states identify as not making progress toward providing an "adequate" education for all students. Many schools have gone along for years without providing a basic education to all students--NCLB's assessment and reporting provisions attempt to expose this reality and mobilize people for change.

Options and Advantages

2007-06-06T11:16:00.000-05:00

In the NY Times article "Getting Into College: Strumming His Own Tune" (June 6, 2007), Samuel Freedman extols the easy-going attitude of one Kevin Robinson, who decided to let his own merits speak for themselves instead of stressing over and prepping for college applications.

Still, there’s no denying the reality of inequality, if you’re a middle-class mother watching people with a lot more money buy their children advantages.

“It frustrates me to know there isn’t a level playing field,” Ms. Robinson said as we talked in a coffee shop. “You have some kids with options and advantages that others don’t. And the colleges have no way of knowing. They think they’re comparing apples and apples when they’re not.”

Somehow I don't feel sorry for Kevin or his mother. I know that being a single mother is tough; but this white, middle-class, single-parent family still has, without any extra effort of their own, access to vastly more "options and advantages" than the thousands of poor, minority children who are underserved by our nation's education system.

Consider as an indicator of Kevin's advantages the free public high school he attended. This year, 88% of Central Bucks High School West achieved a proficient or higher score in reading on the Pennsylvania System of Schools Assessment, and 75% in math;[1] whereas, only 71% of white 11th graders state-wide were rated proficient in reading, and 57% in math.[2]

Ms. Robinson didn't have to buy Kevin advantages--he already had them. He grew up in a nice middle-class town home, had enough food to eat and clothes to wear, and was privileged with an excellent free public school. If we're going to talk about the lack of options and advantages, let's at least look at poor and minority students who really don't have any, when their families struggle to provide food and shelter and their schools consistently fail them.

[1] Central Buck HS West Academic Achievement Report

[2] PA 2005-2006 NCLB Report Card

Iraqi Brain Drain

2007-06-05T16:37:00.000-05:00

From "Cheated of Future, Iraqi Graduates Want to Flee" (NY Times, June 4, 2007):

Four years later, Iraq’s college graduates are ending their studies shattered and eager to leave the country. In interviews with more than 30 students from seven universities, all but four said they hoped to flee immediately after receiving their degrees. Many said they did not expect Iraq to stabilize for at least a decade.

I don't blame these students--I imagine in their place, amid rampant violence and with the means of mobility, I would want to leave, too. But, abandoning Iraq will certainly hamper the restitution of peace and prosperity to the nation. Iraq needs, now more than ever, highly educated professionals and academicians to provide strong leadership for stability and growth--leadership both in the government and in the private sector. And yet, as one student put it, "Staying here is like committing suicide."

The students represented by this article aren't the first educated people to leave Iraq--thousands of expatriated Iraqi professionals live and work in Europe and North America. Iraq needs them to come home, but why would they want to leave what is likely a comfortable life in a well-developed nation to embrace fear of violence and political instability? A viable Iraq requires professionals, but the professionals need a safe environment. The Iraq and U.S. governments must make peace and security a top priority in reconstruction, and should institute incentive programs to attract and retain indigenous professionals to flesh out the country's human infrastructure for a stable Iraq in the long term.