Trust Teachers

In the 1940s when my mother was a teenager, my grandfather, a respected businessman in their small Kansas community, taught her to drive. When he then took her to get her license, the license clerk asked him, “Can she drive?” My grandfather affirmed that my mother could indeed drive, and so the clerk issued the license. No written test, no road test. To my knowledge, Mom never had an accident over a lifetime of driving in several U.S. states and Europe. Probably she was lucky, but she also had a good teacher who knew his student’s abilities.

For decades now, critics have been hammering at public school teachers. Current movements are gaining momentum in several states to strip away collective bargaining rights and even do away with colleges of education in our universities. Much of this undermining of the public’s confidence in teachers is part of a broader assault on public education, as the Right pursues its anti-democratic agenda to transform the United States into a corporate oligarchy.

But here are some facts to ponder. In the forty-year period between 1970 and 2010, the National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP—also called “The Nation’s Report Card”—has documented consistently rising achievement in fourth- and eighth-grade math and reading scores. During the same period the U.S. dropout rate fell from 15 percent to 7.4 percent. And yet, over those same forty years the public’s confidence in the public schools dropped from 58 percent to around 30 percent.* Exactly how were higher student achievement and lower dropout rates attained except by the effective work of good teachers in good public schools? I would argue that lack of confidence in teachers is wholly unfounded.

State-mandated mass standardized testing continues to grow, wasting valuable teaching time and vast sums of taxpayer money—more than $46 million in Indiana alone—to provide limited and misleading information about student learning. The heart of the problem is that the further assessment gets from the classroom, the less informative it becomes. It also gets more expensive.

At root, standardized achievement tests don’t tell us where a student started or how far he or she progressed in learning over a given period of time. Standardized test results, at best, tell us what a student knows within a narrow band of knowledge on a given day. Not only are such results misleading, in the sweep of a student’s education they are meaningless. Indiana State Superintendent Tony Bennett would have us believe that these test results help shape instruction. They do so only in the sense of narrowing the curriculum, rather than enriching it; focusing on failure that may, in fact, be the fault of factors beyond students’ and teachers’ control, instead of celebrating success and getting help to challenged students.

Competent, attentive teachers can use intense observation, portfolios of student work, and classroom-based assessment to ascertain more accurately what and how students are learning far better than any standardized test. Bear in mind that we make a big deal of rising SAT and ACT scores. Both the SAT and the ACT are designed to help predict whether a student will be successful in higher education—nothing more than that. But what has the research shown to be a better predictor? High school grades. The reason is simple: A course grade represents a composite evaluation of a student’s achievement based on multifaceted assessment by the student’s teacher.

The same principle applies at all levels of schooling. Teachers interact with their students every day and are far more accurate in assessing student achievement than standardized tests. The fiscal bonus is that we already pay teachers to do this work. So why send millions of taxpayer dollars to testing corporations to give us flawed information when we already get good information from the professionals we already employ? We need to trust our teachers.

* See “Restoring Faith in Public Education”

Dumber by the Test

Overuse and misuse of standardized tests are dumbing down the curriculum in our public schools.

Standardized tests are not bad per se. Some standardized tests are useful—for diagnosis, for research, and so on. But the wholesale use of mass standardized testing—essentially every student in every school—and the misuse of test results to judge individual students, teachers, schools, and entire districts is reductionist. Complex qualities such as student achievement, teacher quality, and school and district effectiveness cannot be reduced to a number or a set of numbers. No test score (or group of scores) should ever constitute more than a small fraction of the information used to evaluate a student’s learning or a teacher’s effectiveness. There are simply too many other factors that must be considered, many of them beyond the scope of the school to control or influence.

As standardized tests proliferate, teachers concentrate more time (often required by their supervisors) on direct test preparation, drilling their students on a narrow set of tested concepts and shunting aside richer learning opportunities that may, in fact, be lost forever. Researcher Qiuyun Lin comments:

Standardized tests create a system of education that reduces student learning to scores on a single test, rules out the possibility of discussing student learning in terms of cognitive and intellectual development, growth, social awareness and social conscience, and social and emotional development. (in “Beyond Standardization: Testing and Assessment in Standards-Based Reform.” Action in Teacher Education 23 (4): 43-49)

Over-testing limits students to acquiring basic knowledge at the expense of skills such as critical and creative thinking. When the goal is to determine answer A, B, C, or none of the above, there is no place left in the curriculum for students to develop higher-level thinking. So-called 21st-century skills don’t make the cut, however much they are touted by pundits and policymakers far from actual classrooms.

Bluntly stated, educators are running scared, faced with lawmakers, bureaucrats, and ideologues whose ramping up of standardized testing on a claim of “school improvement” is thin cover for a broad-scale effort to degrade public schooling and thereby validate the movement toward privatization. This takeover of public education is being orchestrated on the backs of children whose education is being impoverished, educators whose good work is under attack, and communities whose depressed education systems are graduating less well-educated students and, over time, whose schools will be seen as less attractive to potential new businesses. The health of a community’s schools and the health of a community’s business and industry run parallel. Indeed, the very fabric of our community is intimately connected to the wellbeing of our public schools.

Standardized tests do not improve education. Apart from their overuse narrowing the curriculum—dumbing down students’ learning—after getting test results education authorities at the state, and sometimes federal, level spend more time punishing schools and students that don’t do well (by taking over schools, for example), instead of spending time and money helping students and schools to improve. After all, in Indiana more than $46 million goes to testing, most of it paid to testing corporations, rather than to real school improvement. That’s a great deal of money that could be better invested in teaching than testing.

If our schools are to recover ground lost to over-testing, then mass standardized testing in the name of “school improvement” has to stop. There are better ways to use taxpayers’ money; there are more effective ways to use students’ learning time, and there are better ways to help teachers improve our schools.

Four Pillars of Learning

I have posted a link to this document elsewhere, but some readers have had difficulty accessing it. Therefore, I am including the document, which I wrote in November 2011, here in its entirety in spite of the rather long length.

The public schools of the United States were founded on a principle best articulated by an American founder, Thomas Jefferson: “If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.” Thus the central aim of public schools is learning writ large, which embodies two ideals. First, all students should have access to education that allows them to learn, to the best of their abilities, the knowledge and understandings essential to living fully. Second, all students should learn how to learn and be encouraged to be lifelong learners, for the world is ever changing and so is the knowledge needed to thrive not merely in the present but also in the future. The achievement of these aims will ensure our democratic future as a nation as well as the freedom of our students to become their best selves.

Imagine learning as the architectural pediment of education. Learning stands upon four pillars, all of which are essential supports: the community, students, parents, and educators. These are the four pillars of the public schools.

The Community

Public education is an expression of our democratic community. While students, parents, and educators compose the direct participants in schooling, members of the community who have no direct involvement in the public schools also belong to the fabric of learning. Indeed, they can be characterized as the “public” in “public education.” Thus the community must have a voice in forming the schools as learning enterprises. This understanding upholds the democratic values of our civil society. Ultimately, the public schools must be seen as permeable institutions. That is, students, parents, and even educators are transient participants in the schools, but they are permanent members of the community. Members of the community must realize their stake in promulgating successful learning institutions, regardless of whether they are not yet directly involved in public education, are no longer directly involved, or never have been or ever will be directly involved. What happens in schools affects the health of the society as well as its individual members. And, from a closer perspective, communities often are judged by the schools they provide, and thus a community’s economic wellbeing may be affected accordingly. In the interest of upholding the common good of our democracy, the community must be integral to learning.

Students

Students arrive at the schoolhouse door from backgrounds that are culturally, socially, racially, ethnically, and economically diverse. They come with needs, interests, and talents that are equally varied. But through all of this variety runs a common thread: the desire to learn. No one who has ever seen a child take his or her first steps can doubt that children possess an inborn desire to learn—to explore the world around them and within them. The challenge for our public schools is to tap this desire in order to allow and encourage learning that is both broad and deep—learning that extends beyond prescriptive curricula and tests that narrow the boundaries of learning rather than expand them. The greatest service that schools can do is to broaden the learning horizons of their students beyond so-called basics, such as reading and mathematics. Students’ interests and aptitudes, coupled with the demands of living in a culture wherein all talents are essential to our national wellbeing, argue for a broad curriculum that honors all areas of study. Not least among these areas is civic education—that is, learning how our democracy has been achieved and how to keep it healthy.

Parents

Parents, like their students, are extraordinarily varied. But whether rich or poor, single or married, gay or straight, natural or adoptive, they share a common aim: to ensure that their children have access to learning in a safe, secure setting—learning that will enable their children to achieve their goals in life, from the general to the particular, from the personal to the societal. That parents should be partners in their children’s learning must not be merely a platitude. Parenthood also is a process of learning, because no child comes with an instruction book. Thus schools can best serve all students by meaningfully involving all parents in the learning endeavor. Meaningful involvement goes beyond the annual open house; it means finding ways for engagement that span a continuum to allow for as much or as little involvement as parents desire and can manage, bearing in mind that for many working parents time is a fraught commodity.

Educators

Parents are their children’s first teachers. After parents, the adults with whom most children interact for the greatest amount of time are their teachers. Indeed, particularly during the elementary school years, a child may be with a teacher for more of the waking day than he or she is with a parent. Therefore it is essential for teachers—and, by extension, all educators, from counselors and principals to curriculum planners and superintendents—to be cognizant of children’s needs, interests, and desires and of their parents’ aspirations for them. But awareness is insufficient, for educators also must act. Such action on behalf of students and learning may require educators to stand firm against countercurrents that would balkanize schooling rather than view public education as directed toward learning fully and holistically. Educators must value all subject matter and all learners—understanding that all individuals, collectively, comprise the totality of our society and thus contribute to the common good. Neglecting any aspect of learning or any learner diminishes the whole and ill serves our democracy.

The community, students, parents, and educators are the four pillars of learning. They support the public schools equally. None may be left out, or the pediment will fall. This is not a utopian view of public education. Rather it is a realistic vantage point for understanding the nature of learning in the pursuit of preserving our democracy. It also is a vantage point for considering new approaches to schools and learning. For instance, why should disciplines prevail as a primary mode of organization if cultural and social tools might compose a more effective frame of reference for learning? Are the current uses of time—seat time, school year, daily schedule—sufficiently sensitive to learning dynamics, or are there better ways to structure learning time? These are not questions for educators alone to ponder but may benefit from thoughtful attention by all community members, including the most junior and the least involved.

Another of the American founders, John Adams, said it this way: “Liberty cannot be preserved without a general knowledge among the people, who have a right...and a desire to know.” In the architecture of learning, “the people” comprises all members of the community.

Why This Blog?

The purpose of this blog is to provide online visitors with my perspectives on teaching and learning, in particular, during the run-up to the November election, in which I am a school board candidate for District 4 in the Monroe County Community School Corporation. If elected, I plan to continue this blog as a way to share ideas with constituents and other readers.

Central to my philosophy of education is a simple equation. It appears under the blog title: Teachers + Students = Learning. It should be borne in mind that "teachers" and "students" are broad designations. Parents, of course, are their children's first and lifelong teachers. And at whatever age, I hope, we can all be students, whether in the formal sense of attending classes or merely through self-study. The result in any case is learning.

My own perspectives on learning are informed, first, by being a parent. My partner and I have a blended family of six (now adult) children and four grandchildren (to date). Several years ago we hosted a foreign student from Germany, who spent his junior year of high school studying here in Bloomington. This year we are hosting another German teenager, who is spending his junior year here.

The earliest segment of my career was spent as a classroom teacher at the junior high school level of the public schools in Sheboygan, Wisconsin. After eleven years I took a two-year leave to teach for the Department of Defense in an American high school on a U.S. Airbase in Germany. When I returned to Wisconsin, I taught at the high school level for three years before moving into the district office to coordinate the school system's language-based programs: English language arts, reading, foreign languages, English-as-a-second-language, and bilingual education.

I moved to Indiana in 1991 to accept the position of director of instructional services in the public schools of Carmel. And in 1993 I took the opportunity to move into education publishing, becoming director of publications for the international education association, Phi Delta Kappa, here in Bloomington.

Throughout my career I have been a writer and, more recently, an editor of education materials. My list of publications includes some fifteen books that I've either written or developed as anthologies for educators. I've also written articles, monographs, encyclopedia entries, and instructional materials, among other things.

I maintain a lively interest in education, am active in education-related endeavors both locally and elsewhere, for example, continuing to serve as a senior consultant for the Center on Civic Education. My independent work now centers on freelance writing and editing, mainly in education contexts. And since 2008 I have served as an assessment administrator for the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP).