Electives aren’t Elective for Artists and Diplomats

As funding gets tighter and tighter, more and more schools are inclined to cut funding for music, the arts, foreign languages and a whole host of other courses that are “nice” but “not necessary.  It makes practical sense, the argument goes.  Kids surely need to measure a triangle or identify adverbs before they learn another language or how to paint, right?  As you may have guessed, I believe that this reflects a value judgment more than a universal truth. 

As standardized testing increases and only makes schools accountable for Reading and Math scores, everything else (including science, history, shop, gym, and other more traditional “staple” courses) goes out the window.   But what about things you can’t test? What about kids with a special aptitude that we are not fostering that are instead written off as failures because they don’t know the Pythagorean theorem?  What about the classes that reinforce or deepen core skills? What about the classes that teach practical skill over theory?  It’s not all fluff, and the treatment of electives as superfluous should be of grave concern.  This post will look at (but not exhaustively) some benefits from these elective courses, look at how they might be incorporated into other courses when budget shortfalls and shortsighted policymakers combine forces to cut these courses, and will hopefully start a conversation about how to rethink how we approach electives for the sake of our kids.

Electives Reap Large Reawards

The most obvious benefits of electives are for people who are not entering a field directly tied to math or reading, and these are not all starving artist careers.  If your child wants to be a diplomat, foreign language should be a centerpiece of their education (sorry Madeline Albright).  If your child wants to be a physicist, well, a good start would probably be a physics class.  If your child wants to be a product designer, architect, medical researcher, lab technician, etc., they’d benefit from science classes in a lab or drafting classes in a studio.  If your child wants to be a chef or baker, perhaps home economics classes would shine at the forefront.  If your child wants to be a carpenter, mechanic, plumber, electrician, furniture maker or construction worker, shop classes would be key (right along side some science and geometry).  If your child wants to be the next Yo Yo Ma, a healthy dose of musical instruction will be key.  

That said, the benefits of elective courses goes above and beyond the obvious exceptions to students that don’t fit the school-college-knowledge worker path.  All students can benefit from elective courses. Here’s how:

Studying a Foreign Language

·      Carolyn Taylor-Ward’s Ph. D. dissertation found that students who had learned a foreign language in the third grade consistently outperformed their peers who had not on standardized tests, including on the English reading/writing portion. 

·      A Stanford University study found that high schools with a higher proportion of students enrolled in foreign language classes tended to have higher levels of annual performance (except in the case of schools with the highest incidence of poverty or English-language learners).

·      A Canadian study noted that students of foreign language tend to acquire and remember all information faster than their peers and tend to perform better in tasks requiring critical thinking. This holds true even for kids with cognitive disabilities.

·      Given the need to reach a global audience (or a more diverse American audience), when competing for a job, a candidate with a foreign language will—all other skills equal—be more likely to get the job and to help a company or agency reach a broader array of stakeholders.

Studying Art and Music

·      The American Youth Policy Forum just completed two studies that found that students, particularly poor students, that study the arts tend to do better on standardized tests.  Further, they found that 80% of students in schools with arts programs get all As and Bs while this is only true of about 65% of students with no arts education. 

·      Students of the arts may be more likely to go to a good college because as the amount of time a child studies art in high school increases so do BOTH their SAT Mat hand Verbal Scores. 

·      A Georgetown University Masters thesis found that children who take arts classes stay in school longer and are less likely to drop out of school.

·      Children in Tucson schools have proven far more engaged and focused when taking music and dance classes, and they also are using their whole bodies, which is of critical importance as diabetes and childhood obesity burgeon across the U.S.

Studying Shop and Home Economics

·      A recent Education.com article highlights several benefits of shop classes, which teach kids to focus, to carry out a project, to develop a concrete skill that can be directly used as a job, and to work in teams.  Additionally, these classes reinforce “STEM” (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) course content.

·      Retooled shop classes like those mentioned above in Tucson have actually involved 21^st century processes and provide direct training for a high-tech manufacturing sector that is expected to add some 110,000 jobs in the next five years.

This is just a sampling of some of the electives we are watching go out the window, but their potential to improve the critical thinking, career prospects, practical skills, and EVEN standardized test performance, grades, student retention, and college readiness of our children should give you pause before allowing such classes to be cut.  That many are directly tied to greater improvements for the poorest students is of critical importance to closing the so-called “achievement gap” between white and minority students.

Electivizing the Core: Solutions in a Budget-Scarce Scenario (Act on it!)

The benefits above suggest that schools rich in these elective programs create students that master other subjects better, are more job-ready, are better able to think creatively and work in teams, and have a stronger love of learning.  I think the best solution is to do what Tucson did and directly increase the use of such programs from the top down and from the bottom up.  That said, for schools or districts that find increasing funding to such programs politically or economically impossible, there are some possible solutions that increase use of electives without touching the core curriculum:

1.     Use foreign languages to teach all subjects.  Children will learn English at home or around their town, so if they are taught every subject except possibly English or another foreign language in say Spanish or Arabic from a young age, that child will be much more likely to be bilingual and to master their course content at the same time.

2.     Use public-private partnerships to have companies sponsor high-tech shop programs.  These programs could occur afterschool or during holidays and could be tied to internships that more directly bridge the gap between the education system and job market and that need not be “remedial” or “fluff” courses.

3.     Encourage and support teachers in using elective-based lesson plans:

a.     A colleague of mine had her understanding of Africa’s changing map and history awakened when her father made her draw maps of Africa annually and she SAW the geopolitical changes that were occurring and was inspired to understand why what she was drawing had changed.

b.     Use shop, drafting or art lessons to illustrate principles of geometry.

c.      My Sophomore British Literature teacher had us act out scenes from literature or make newspapers or songs to illustrate a particular work or concept.

d.     My 1^st Grade teacher taught geography by asking us to learn key phrases in the languages of different countries, preparing or sampling food from those countries, dancing or celebrating holidays in those countries, etc. through a unit called “Tommy’s Travels.” Our mythical peer Tommy traveled around the world, and we’d reenact what he might have encountered.

4.     Use volunteer organizations like Habitat for Humanity or KaBOOM! to build these kinds of hard skills in students while improving their community and strengthening their ability to carry out a project, 

5.     Invite programs like Junior Achievement or Future Problem Solvers (both of which I did and found incredibly rewarding and helpful for engaging in teamwork and creative thinking) into Social science, science, or English courses.

Speak out!

Can you share a personal experience from a “non-core” or “elective” class that shaped your life?

What kinds of lessons have you used, experienced or heard of that creatively integrate arts, language, shop, problem-solving or other alternative classes into other subjects or parts of the school day in a creative way?

Why Empowering Parents May Often Fail

Last week, certain segments of the education policy community celebrated what was dubbed “National School Choice Week.”  The core underlying theory of the school choice movement is in theory quite noble and good: create more choices for parents as to where they send their children to use the power of the free market to eliminate bad schools and thus improve the entire education system.  To achieve this end, several policies that have limited effectiveness (and that I have lambasted in this blog) are employed:  increase teacher accountability through merit pay, measure school progress transparently using standardized test scores, allow private individuals to develop charter schools to compete with failing public schools, and fund vouchers to parents to choose where to send their children instead of wasting large per pupil expenditures in the public system.   The name of the game is to empower parents, which is good.

My problem with the push for parental choice is that the movement leaves its fundamental assumptions unquestioned:

1.     Parents need empowerment.

2.     Parents, once empowered, will act on their newfound ability to choose.

3.     Parents are able to make good choices about education.

4.     That a child has parents that actively make choices related to their education.

5.     That the locus of blame for poor educational outcomes is the school.

6.     That the locus of blame for poor educational outcomes is unrelated to the parent.

It is my personal belief (a belief supported by many facts) that all of these assumptions sometimes (or often) prove false.  The purpose of this post is not, as you may expect, to say that parent choice needs to be abolished (although I think compelling arguments could be made for this argument).  Rather, I will seek to show that you need to understand the role of parental and family factors to understand which segments of the population parental choice can benefit.  From there, I think it is easier to understand some of the qualms one might have about making parental choice the guiding framework of our education policy.

The Parental Rainbow

The fundamental issue I have with empowering parents is that not all parents are the same, not all need empowerment, and not all those who are empowered will react in the best interests of their children as students (sometimes intentionally, sometimes not).   To better illustrate what I mean, I identify various types of parents and organize them by whether parental choice might benefit their kids:

Students whose parents have the following characteristics will not do better than they do now as a result of parental choice:

·      Enough money to send their kids to a private school

·      Work too many hours to be involved in decisions related to their child’s education

·      Not involved in their child’s life (dead, incarcerated, abandoned their child, etc.)

·      Not aware or unsure how to become aware about the school choices available for their kids.

·      Do not see the value of education and do not support their children’s education

·      Unable to evaluate different options presented and choose the best option for their child.

·      Bad at parenting or simply do not care about their children

·      Afraid/Unwilling to send children outside of neighborhood school

Students whose parents have the following characteristics might do better as a result of parental choice: 

·      Cannot afford private school for their kids

·      Value education for their kids

·      Can on their own or with help make informed decisions about where to send their child

·      Have or make time to make decisions related to their child’s education

·      Are open to and able to provide a means for their child to transit to a new school, if necessary.

·      Are alive and involved in raising their children

Parental wealth, knowledge, and involvement are the three main factors that determine whether parental choice can potentially improve children’s outcomes.  Unfortunately, as you can see above, some of the children who are worst off are most likely to remain unaffected by parental choice: those who have one or fewer parents, those whose parents work too much to be involved (this is not bad parenting, as you need a child to have a home or to eat before they can be educated, right?), those whose parents don’t care or are not involved in their lives.  To put it in plain language, low- to middle-income parents who value education, can be involved in decisions related to their child’s education, and who are willing to send their child to a different school that may be far away are the only group that could potentially benefit from parental choice.

Outside factors that might further limit any benefits of parental choice

Because children spend some 70% of their waking hours outside of school, the parental choice movement’s willingness to discount or ignore factors outside of school that affect learning outcomes is perhaps the largest weakness of the movement.  [update: The Washington Examiner, DC's conservative paper, published an article on January 30, 2012, that there is an even distribution of "effective" or "highly effective" teachers across good and failing schools, which could show the failure of the rating system or could just as easily show that a teacher's ability to make a difference is severely limited by some of the outside factors I list below.]

·      Family Income – One of the strongest predictors of student achievement is their family’s income.  Poor kids tend to perform poorly in school (which makes sense for a variety of reasons: parent is likely to be working and less able to be involved, student may arrive malnourished, student may live in or travel through a violent or difficult neighborhood to get to school, etc.).

·      Parent’s Education Level  - Parents who have had more schooling tend to produce children who do better and are more educated.  This is usually related to a parent understanding the value of education, being better able to make decisions related to their child’s education or help their child make educational decisions, and their having higher incomes to support a child’s education outside of school.

·      Child’s Previous Track Record – A child’s previous educational success or failure is another huge factor in their future success.  Because “tracking,” or assigning kids to different levels (regular, honors, advanced placement/IB, etc.) based on their “intelligence,” is quite common place, many kids who are on a lower track will stay there regardless of their school.  That’s to say, children who were already shafted by the schooling they received have a much lower likelihood of being helped even if their parent is involved and values education.

·       Student motivation – It is hard to place a lot of blame on kids for not getting the right education and parents play a big role in this regard.  If a kid is not guided and supported in making sound choices to do well in school, they will likely do worse even in a great school with great teachers.

·      Impractical or Bad Parental Choice Options – As many pro-charter/voucher movies have shown, there are not enough slots for most kids, so they are subject to a lottery to get into a great new charter.  Competition severely excludes kids with fewer parents with less motivation, so the worst off are still unlikely to be helped at all.  Further, as the Stanford CREDO study showed, many parents believe that charters are better than public schools when in 80% of the cases they are at the same level or worse in terms of student achievement.  That is to say, parents perceive bad options to be good (which belies the assumption that empowering parents leads to better outcomes because they make good choices).  Finally, many vouchers do not cover the full cost of enrollment for kids, so even the most involved and educated parents might not be able to afford the best choice.

·      Extracurricular Learning – The ability and willingness of parents to provide stimulating, educative activities after-school, on weekends, and during vacations is key.  Kids who reinforce learning during gaps in schooling are more likely to succeed.  You’ll recall that children without summer programs lose about 3 months worth of previous learning over the summer compared to those whose parents keep their kids engaged.  This has to do with both parental income and motivation in many instances.

·      Learning Disabilities – It is somewhat unrealistic to expect teachers with students that have learning disabilities and much greater needs to get all their students to the same level as students that lack such challenges and the need for support.

There are indeed some school factors that impact student achievement that parental choice could (but may not) improve, such as teacher quality.  There are other school factors that do not impact kid’s learning much like class size or materials that I don’t include for that very reason.  That said, the willingness to place ALL of the blame for student’s not doing well on teachers or schools without any consideration of the disadvantages children bring into the classroom is quite unfair.  It is also potentially dangerous and could deepen inequality in this country.

The Sinister Implications of Parental Choice

There is an unaddressed tension in the parental choice movement between the belief that teacher quality is the key to all students succeeding and punishing teachers/schools that have low performing students:  poorer students tend to be clustered in undesirable schools.  As the best students from these schools with the most motivated parents are siphoned off by charters, the worst students are left ghettoized in these schools.  This makes the school more of a failure (I mean, come on: take the good students from a bad school and it will “get worse” even if the quality level hasn’t changed).  Further, it makes the school less desirable to teach at, which means that the worst students are not getting access to the best teachers (which is probably necessary, and hence the tension).  These children then get shuffled around and ignored.   Worse, these students are losing the potential peer pressure effect to do well because their peers are doing well, as their successful peers will have gone.

Additionally, it could have sinister implications on teaching quality.  Parental choice policies hinge on standardized tests to measure and rank students.  Students in these environments, however, have no real connection to the facts on these exams.  Further, these students most need the ability to think critically and make tough decisions (as they have much more inertia impeding their success), which they don’t get as teachers are forced by legislation like No Child Left Behind to teach to a test or be potentially fired and see their school closed.  Many states have lowered their standards to comply with the provision that all students be at level on reading and math by 2013: where student achievement has seemed to go up, it actually was the result of state’s lowering the standards they held children to.  That is not progress.

Worst of all, this policy shifts the blame from policy makers and parents to teachers.  It is no longer society’s fault that we have such great social inequality perpetuated by our school system.  It is all in the hands of parents and students whether they sink or swim, even if they start off drowning without a raft.  Further, it makes teachers the scapegoats for social inequality: suddenly teachers are at fault if their students are too poor and hungry to focus or if they come in from the summer 3 months behind their wealthier peers.  LET ME BE CLEAR, there is no excuse for poor children to be written off (I was one!).  That said, the blame lies sometimes with their parents, sometimes with their government, sometimes with society, sometimes with themselves, and sometimes with their teacher and/or school.  To misdirect all blame to one of those is not just and will not empower the vast majority of those kids who could benefit from a great educational experience. 

In short, policies should not center around making kids successful at taking tests, ghettoizing the lowest performers, and punishing teachers for a child’s background.  Improving teaching quality is key, but unless these policy makers will do something that also addresses socioeconomic disadvantages, they will never improve the system. 

Act on it!

So long as parental choice is ascendant, we need to make sure that the poorest parents can make the right choices.  We also need to support those kids whose parents don’t care, are too busy to be involved, or who simply aren’t present. Here’s how:

1.     Serve as a local school council liaison for overwhelmed parents in your community and fight for their kids (their success may save you taxpayer dollars, so you even have an incentive beyond altruism).  Particularly, fight the temptation to segregate students by “intelligence” or test scores, as a child put on a low track is likely one to end up there.  Support school feeding programs three times a day so that kids are fully nourished and ready to learn.

2.     Provide guidance to a working parent you know to help them truly understand the choices they have to advance their child and encourage them to do as well as possible in school.

3.     Serve as a mentor to the poorest or least supported kids in your community so that they don’t get lost in the parental choice struggle for lack of a parent.

4.     Help afterschool or on weekends or in the summer at a school to provide all kids a chance to continue learning during those large hours when they are not receiving instruction in a classroom.

5.     Help register low-income parents and get them to the polls so that they can vote for politicians that support policies that improve public schools rather than letting them atrophy.

6.     Create or support third spaces (libraries, tutoring centers, safe parks, etc.) that allow kids to remain engaged outside of the classroom.

Speak out!

What other categories do you think impact a parent’s ability to be empowered by choice programs and improve their child’s educational achievement?

What policies or volunteer opportunities might help students to succeed if they are not able to benefit from policies like those promoted by the parental choice movement?

Should Teachers Be Paid for Performance?

Paying teachers for performance should be a great idea, right?  In the corporate world, paying based on merit seems a great way to incentivize someone to do a better job.  For some reason, however, most teachers are against so-called “merit pay.”  I have to say, I was very surprised by this reaction.  My thoughts were similar to many critics, “Well, if you are doing a great job, you should have no worries and should welcome the recognition of your work.  So, it seems like the worst teachers would be the biggest critics, not being able to perform or having to work harder.”  I started to realize that a lot of teachers were quite against merit pay.  Not only that, but unions, who traditionally fight hard for increases in teacher pay, were also against it.  In this post, I hope to identify the arguments for and against merit pay to better understand whether it is a way to improve student achievement and teacher retention, among other things.

The Arguments for Merit Pay

Teachers are often severely underpaid and underappreciated, and the position is not attractive to people with large student debt.  There are some very compelling reasons why merit pay could strengthen public education:

1. After Michelle Rhee implemented bonuses for teachers being rated “highly effective” for two years or more, one such highly effective teacher who was considering leaving the District to teach elsewhere decided to stay. 
2. Paying good teachers more should make the profession more attractive to more highly educated individuals.
3. The private sector has, for years, used merit pay to improve efficiency and allow people to advance for performance rather than simply for working a long time or taking shallow credentialing.
4. Merit pay can be adjusted to reflect the goals we want to elicit out of the system: you can design the weight that standardized tests have in determining performance; what kinds of training or activities are deemed best practices, etc.
5. The way teachers are currently rewarded (premiums for having an advanced degree) has not been shown to correlate with gains in student achievement.
6. Being paid for performance has the potential to encourage teachers to be more creative in how they teach, trying to improve outcomes to earn these incentives.

The Arguments against Merit Pay

While rewarding and retaining quality teachers seem like pretty strong arguments, I have to give pause to some of the incredibly strong arguments against merit pay:

1. What if merit pay doesn’t work? According to a Harvard study of a New York City merit pay program, merit pay did not affect teacher behaviors, student achievement (in the areas measured: English and Math tests) actually declined, and made only negligible improvements in other measures like student attendance, behavioral problems, graduation exam scores, and graduation rates.  Fryer, the economist who conducted the study and was initially supportive of merit pay, noted that the literature was mixed on the effects in other countries, but that NYC’s $75 million investment was not worth it.  Research on performance pay continues to show that it does not work, not even for CEOs in the private sector.
2. How do you measure merit? In a letter to the editor of St. Louis Today, it was noted that measuring merit is usually largely determined by test scores.  As I noted in my post on standardized testing, this is not a measure of real learning or of good teaching, but of shallow learning and uninspired teaching.  The more test scores are used to determine pay, the more we are incentivizing mediocre instruction.  
3. Is merit consistent across all teachers? The St. Louis Today letter also noted that just because a dermatologist performs better than an oncologist in terms of number of deaths, you would still not want the dermatologist to treat every illness.  Likewise, a kindergarten and Junior Math teacher need two very different skill sets in terms of subject matter expertise and classroom management skills. 
4. Are the student’s entering competency and personal challenges accounted for? Just as it is more likely for someone treating cancer to have more patients die than a podiatrist, it is more likely for a teacher in a poor district to have lower test scores because students enter with lower test scores.  It is unreasonable to expect a teacher in a rich, suburban district to end up at the same place as someone from a poor, urban or rural district.
5. Are teachers (good or bad) offered the assistance needed to improve? The Washington teachers’ union criticized merit pay (the IMPACT program) in DC because it is used more as a stick (to fire bad teachers or simply offer a cash bonus to teachers who do well) rather than to provide tools to facilitate a teacher’s improvement.
6. Do teachers want merit pay? According to a survey of American Federation of Teachers members, there is limited support for merit pay based on improvements in portfolios of students’ work, but virtually no support for merit pay based on test scores.  Teachers were far more inclined to think that experience or taking on additional responsibilities are better reasons to extend a bonus to a teacher.
7. Is it redundant? Studies show that more experience tends to make teachers more effective in the first five years of teaching, so wouldn’t the natural increase in teacher’s salary for tenure that is in place already reward improved performance? Further, most teachers I know aren’t really in it for the money, so there is the question of whether it would elicit more performance or dedication from someone who took such a grueling job that pays so little in the first place.
8. Is bad teaching is the root of all problems in the American education system? As I noted in my post on some rather bombastic solutions for how poor kids can help themselves succeed, there are many problems that go beyond the ability of a good teacher.
9. Does merit pay serve as a self-fulfilling prophecy?  Psychology shows us that people respond more to positive feedback than to extrinsic rewards, and this article in the Washington Post raises good concerns about whether merit pay undermines the intrinsic value teachers have for their craft and if the pressures of constant focus on testing improving might make a good teacher perform worse.

Different Ways of Structuring Merit Pay

To be honest, I was surprised in writing this post to have my opinion changed so fully.  Merit pay seems like a brilliant way to infuse the system with new creativity, to get rid of those bad apples, and to reward actual work.  That said, the most salient point for me was that it simply hasn’t worked all that much, even in the private sector.

That said, I think teachers who do have a proven track record do deserve recognition.  I would urge that some of the following points be considered in structuring merit pay programs:

1.     Merit pay should be designed on improvement during the time the teacher is with the student. It is unfair to say “your students still read below grade level” if they entered two or three grade-levels below average in the first place. 

2.     As a corollary, teachers should be rewarded for taking on the most challenging classrooms, as that is where gains really need to be made.  If you just base merit pay on testing, teachers are incentivized to work in the classrooms where kids already start at or above level, which effectively entrenches or worsens the problem of teaching quality in the most struggle student populations.

3.     Merit pay should compare apples to apples.  Comparing an art teacher to a math teacher or a 1^st and 11^th grade teacher is not fair, as the positions require different skills to be successful.

4.     Merit pay should not be informed greatly by standardized tests.  We already have seen the deleterious effects of tests in my last post, and to reward teachers for producing bubble-filling automatons that have not learned any significant skills is an awful idea.

5.     Merit pay should be linked to programs to help teachers improve and work together.  An interesting model was one that rewarded a whole school’s teachers for improved performance, thus creating a sense of teamwork to improve all kids’ education.  Nobody thinks bad teachers should be in the classroom, but if the system offers only back-handed financial rewards and creates competition, it is not creating a healthy environment for students.  Further, students spending 6-8 years in a school will need all their teachers, not some of them, to be good, so creating whole schools with great teaching is key.

6.     Merit pay can include experience for the first five years to incentivize teaching retention, but this factor should lose weight after 5 years, as most studies agree that there are no benefits to experience after that point.  

7.     Merit pay should not be viewed as a panacea, as teachers—particularly in the poorest environments—are not going to be able to overcome the gaps in basic needs like proper nourishment and parental support that many kids bring to the classroom.

Speak out!

What are your thoughts on merit pay? Do you have an experience with merit pay (in teaching or elsewhere) you can share? In your opinion, what are the limits of merit pay?

What ideas do you have for how to structure merit pay in an effective manner for teachers so that quality teaching is rewarded and students are given access to the best quality teachers possible?

Because Every Parent Wants a Standardized Child

Testing can be a very useful tool to help students cement learning and help teachers to better design their lessons. Testing, in its ideal form, is a form of reinforcement, which is a critical component of learning something. When I posted on teaching foreign languages, I noted that tests are a great way for students to have to use the skills they have been recently taught, apply them, and commit them to memory.

Just like using a screwdriver to hammer in a nail, however, tests can also be misused and have deleterious effects. Tests can be used only to gauge and not to reinforce learning. Tests can be poorly designed to cover what students have learned. Tests can be designed so that the student doesn’t need to know the material to do well, but merely needs to know test-taking strategies. Tests can be timed in a way that does not reinforce learning. Tests can be designed to trick, rather than to teach. Tests can be designed in ways that disadvantage certain segments of society (while many debate whether there is an ethnic bias of tests and there are certainly exogenous factors, it is worth noting that Asians consistently do better on SAT math, whites consistently do better on reading/writing, and those with an A- or higher high school GPA do better on tests in general, suggesting some kind of bias). When a test is standardized and administered from afar at an arbitrary time, the likelihood is that the more negative side of testing emerges.

This is a real shame because under President Bush’s signature education bill “No Child Left Behind” (NCLB), standardized testing became a mandatory component of our education system. Now, this is not just problematic because it increases the likelihood of the dark side of testing. It is worse because it appears that the bill is largely a boon to giant multinational corporations that make a fortune, but have very little accountability for the tests that determine whether your son or daughter—or your child’s school—is a failure. According to a very comprehensive article by Barbara Miner at the onset of NCLB, required testing could cost $2-6 billion a year in direct costs and up to 15 times that amount if you factor in wasted class time and test preparation. Worse yet, not all the NCLB-required testing was funded by the federal government. Because all multiple choice tests cost about $1 to grade while those including essays can go up to about $7, State and District Departments of Education may have an incentive to administer the least useful kinds of tests when they are strapped for cash (as they have been for quite some time).

When you hear the names of the companies that administer these tests, your blood should run cold: McGraw-Hill, Pearson, Riverside and Harcourt. Now, it is slightly odd that something that is “standardized” is administered by several competitors nationwide and that the type of test can vary from all multiple choice to a heavier focus on short answers and essays. Aside from having very deep connections to the Bush family and to Presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s Bain Capital, these companies also may sound familiar to anyone who has ever used a textbook or taken a college entrance exam. Why does this make my blood run cold? A multinational company with insider political clout could decide what materials are taught in your child’s class, what metric their worth as a student is evaluated along, and what college they get into. If your child isn’t a good test taker or isn’t a strong English speaker (but is otherwise quite brilliant), your child could be doomed from the get-go, as no part of their career is untouched by a major testing company or its parent corporation.

Diane Ravitch, a former Assistant Secretary of Education and prominent voice in the Education Sector, went from supporting to opposing NCLB as she saw the increased testing used not to improve faltering schools, but to simply shut them down. The majority of schools shut down were in low-income, minority, and non-English speaking communities. Rather than accept that poverty and achievement are deeply connected, these policies further entrench the achievement gap between wealthier and poorer children. Further, they close schools in these neighborhoods, reducing the sense of community that was once present and the connections between parent, child, teacher, and school. And while I noted the link between two Republicans—Bush and Romney—to these testing conglomerates, Ravitch makes the very good point of noting that Obama’s “Race to the Top” program very much continues in the same pro-privatization and –testing vein as Bush’s policies (and to be fair, Obama does have a responsibility to enforce NCLB until it is revamped by Congress).

As I mentioned in my post on charters, unions are often the scapegoat for failing schools. The logic goes that intransigent teachers who are lazy and inept band together to keep failing their students while extracting higher and higher pay and benefits. In my home state, Illinois, for example, the majority of education costs are now flowing into paying pensions. This simplistic line of reasoning that selfish, unionized teachers are failing our kids and taxing the system ties everything into a nice neat bow and makes you just want to move all children into non-unionized charters with their non-union Teach for America staff, right? WRONG. Turns out, the state with the highest test scores is Massachusetts which is 100% unionized. The country with the highest test scores is Finland, which is also 100% unionized and administers only one standardized test towards the end of high school with a random sampling taking the internationally administered PISA test. (And the reason why pensions are such a large part of education spending in IL is largely because corrupt politicians have not been paying into pension funds for years, compounding the debt to rather poorly paid teachers.)

Washington Post Education Blogger Valerie Strauss notes that there are some unfortunately misguided assumptions behind standardized testing in theory:

• A sample of material that arbitrarily ends up on a 45-question test (especially multiple choice) can assess the quality and amount of what a child is learning.
• High test scores of students at any particular school prove that there is high student achievement and quality teaching at the institution.
• Teachers are motivated to improve by punishments or rewards based on test scores.
• Test scores better reflect student learning than any other form of assessment.
• High enough stakes to a test motivate people to worker harder to meet the challenge.

Unfortunately, as Daniel Koretz notes, test scores “usually do not provide a direct and complete measure of educational achievement.” Further, Gerald Bracey has made a pretty compelling list of things that a standardized test cannot measure and that a teacher that teaches to a test may never instill in his or her students, which includes “creativity, critical thinking, resilience, motivation, persistence, curiosity, endurance, reliability, enthusiasm, empathy, self-awareness, self-discipline, leadership, civic-mindedness, courage, compassion, resourcefulness, sense of beauty, sense of wonder, honesty, integrity. “ I find that I use most of these characteristics far more at work, on this blog, and in life than I do my ability to define an archaic word or to select a poor approximation of the “main idea” of a boring short story.

On a more personal and anecdotal level, I would note a few things about my standardized testing abilities:

• As I got older and learned to think more critically, I went from being amazing at Standardized Tests to being above average, but not particularly stellar. At the same time, I had learned how to speak five languages.
• I retook my SAT and got a 150 point boost by using testing preparation booklets to learn strategies, rather than actual knowledge. Now, how can a test score vary by so much in a couple of months and be considered reliable as an assessment of what I know?
  
• My teachers and I never received any meaningful feedback from a standardized test that allowed us to improve my learning or better identify how I learn.
• I took my GRE after spending 9 months in three different countries speaking Italian, then Spanish, then Arabic and did way better in math than in reading/writing, even though I am not a big fan of math and have much more experience and instruction in reading and writing related courses. My grades were always much stronger in English and Social Studies than in Math or Science.
• As someone who is rather fidgety, every day-long test I took was maddening and made me want to jump out of my skin.

Beyond my personal experiences with tests, an Education Week article written by Alfie Kohn and published in September 2000 (pre-Bush, pre-NCLB) warned of the rise of testing with some rather disconcerting facts:

1. About 89 percent of differences in state testing scores were statistically found to be tied to parents’ educational background, number of parents living at home, type of community, and poverty), which have nothing to do with instruction and everything to do with the need to address systemic inequalities that affect students before they enter the education system and when they leave school each and every day.
2. Standardized tests measure superficial thinking.
3. Most standardized tests were designed not to test learning, but to rank students and separate them, with some tests containing as many as half of their questions designed so that most people couldn’t answer correctly.
4. Time spent to prepare students for and then administer tests comes from other instruction (and I’d add that as testing rises, our system is stagnating and doing worse, so let’s think for a moment).
5. Many good teachers, seeing this negative trajectory, are leaving a system that they find increasingly poisonous and harmful to children.
   
6. Most specialists even in 2000 agreed that children should not be tested at too young an age.
7. Our children are being tested more than any other time in history and more than anywhere else in the world.

Some of these concerns will prompt California Governor Jerry Brown to make a laudable call for less class time wasted on standardized testing today, according to the Sacramento Bee. Brown also noted that testing tends to cause instructors and schools to shift their focus to what is being tested, which is usually limited to Math and English, but little else. Even if good teachers manage to avoid "teaching to the test," most students, taught to be validated by grades and scores and eager to do well, will take the hint and shift the focus of their studies. Even as a smart kid who loved to learn, I would take to heart the words "you won't be tested on this."

We need to eliminate nearly all of these tests. We need to ensure accountability for the ones that we keep. We need to ensure that the tests are used to reinforce learning and support struggling schools, not to rank children, punish teachers for teaching the most underprivileged, and close schools in ways that disproportionately affect minority and low-income communities. And we need to decide as a society that we are not going to accept poverty as an excuse for failure but that we are actually going to make meaningful changes that mitigate the effects of poverty rather than bullying teachers into being responsible for a child’s background and upbringing.

At the end of the day, real life rarely has one clear, obvious answer…so should our kids be molded and assessed by an instrument that does?

Act on it!

1. Teach kids some of the greater values of empathy, critical thinking, and creativity at any chance you get, be it through parenting or volunteering to mentor a child to supplement for the decreasing amount of classtime dedicated to such values.
2. Write your Congressmen (federal and state) and tell them what you feel about standardized tests, what you think can be done to improve student assessment, and demanding that testing companies be more accountable and student-oriented.

Speak out!

What is your experience with standardized testing? What are the pros and cons that you see with the use of testing nowadays?

What are some better ways to assess children’s learning and teachers’ or schools’ performance? Should these be jointly assessed?

Stop Bothering Society, Poor Kid: Help Yourself!

People who know me, know that I am a firm believer in systemic inequalities. Our country has done a lot to reduce the legal barriers that inhibited certain races from realizing their full potential (though much still remains). That said, in a country that was built on slavery and did not fully protect the rights of Blacks in law until the Civil Rights Act of 1964, you have to imagine that the way the country operates is still favorable to Whites. Even if you full equalized everyone in law and you enforced those laws properly, all American institutions and measures of success are largely based upon White measures of success. Specifically, the White middle and upper class. This article may make you uncomfortable if you are squeamish about talking about race and class (or dislike sarcasm), but my philosophy is that you cannot fix a problem by ignoring it and political correctness is the quickest path to inertia.

An article recently published in Forbes Magazine, entitled “If I Were a Poor Black Kid” recently caught my attention. I responded to the article and then to the author’s response in forceful (and recognizable) terms My intent here is not to rehash my response, but to outline the problem with this author’s overly simplistic assessment and to go one step further by showing the math that debunks his “solution.”

Hey Black Kids, Follow the Binary Road!

Anytime someone who has never been poor or Black and who is not a kid decides to write a treatise on what poor, Black children should do…you should be apprehensive. In the article, a man who is a middle class (and always was middle class) technology expert gives advice to poor black children on how they themselves can and should lift themselves out of poverty. This advice includes:

• Getting good grades
• Using all the free sites on the web like Ted Talks, Cliff’s Notes (a real resource for understanding literature), Google Scholar and Project Gutenberg to do well.
• Finding study partners and using Skype to hone your intellect
• Making sure you get into an elite charter school or get a full ride to a private school
• Sucking up to the guidance counselor so that they help you find jobs, college, and other opportunities
• Learning software programming or computers or another "skill."

All of this advice builds to the conclusion that “Technology can help these kids. But only if the kids want to be helped. Yes, there is much inequality. But the opportunity is still there in this country for those that are smart enough to go for it.” (so, you see, poor, Black people are not smart because they aren't trying to not be poor...that is what you are saying, right sir?)

Wait, There Are Holes in This Guy’s Logic!?

Technology was good for this author: rather than giving him a healthy dose of my backhand, he only had to face my comments. As someone who grew up poor in a big city and who ended up going to Stanford, I actually have a lot of relevant experience to comment on this article (which he denied because poor kids, even after going to Stanford, are not smarter than he). A big part of his solution involves poor kids using computers, and he suggests that in the “unlikely event” that they don’t have one, they can just go to one of their wonderful public libraries.

The problem with libraries

As a child, I DID that. I went to the library, and I almost never touched a computer because poor kids (of all races) are competing with retired, unemployed, homeless people and others. Many computers also have a time restriction (in Chicago it was 30 minutes if someone is waiting, which they always were). Further, some of the things he mentions (google scholar, TED) can probably be accessed from a library computer. That said, most do not have the software or hardware for using Skype or for learning how to code. Further, if you don’t live near a library or it is in a sketchy area, the journey there could be dangerous.

Finally, I did a little calculation using Philadelphia to demonstrate the absurdity of his proposal:

According to the most recent census data, approximately 36,000 children in Philadelphia would be considered “poor, Black kids.” (I calculated this by multiplying Philly’s population by the percentage under age 18, multiplied by the percentage of people who are black, multiplied by the percentage of people who are “in poverty,” which probably understates the amount of people who might benefit from his “solutions.”) According to the Philadelphia Public Library Website, there are 68 public libraries. Not all libraries are open right now, no libraries appear to be open on Sundays, so I am again overstating the library’s ability to absorb people. Libraries are open from 9am to 8pm generally 5 days a week and 9 am until 5 pm on Saturdays (not all, but I’ll be generous). That means each library is open 3,285 hours a year. With 68 libraries, the whole system is open 223,380 hours a year. Let’s assume that each has an average of 20 computers (unlikely, but what the heck, we are white and middle class!). Then the system has just under 4.5 million computer hours to offer to poor black kids. That means, each of our 36,000 poor, black kids gets 125 hours with a computer per year if most skipped school for their allotment and if all other library patrons were banned from the computers. This also assumes perfect mobility and that all kids in poor neighborhoods have equal access to equally capacious libraries, which is a stretch.

Now, with about 1,200 of those library hours occurring during school time (40, five-day weeks lasting from 9am until 3pm), each library can realistically only offer 2,085 hours per year, reducing the system’s capacity to 142,000 non-school hours per year, and with 20 computers assumed per library about 2.8 million computer hours. This amounts to 78 hours per “poor, black kid.” How many skills have you mastered by dedicating 78 hours per year? Now if you assume that a kid needs about 30 minutes of homework help for the 200 days that school is in session, that leaves the kid with -22 hours for learning how to code. How many skills have you learned in -22 hours?

As I noted in my article on teachers correcting for systemic inequality, Chicago just moved to close most of its libraries on Mondays. With many cities facing budget shortfalls, the likelihood that public libraries can serve our nation’s poor as much as is needed to escape poverty is decreasing by the day.

Non-logistical problems with the article

Now, aside from the absurd idea that every kid can get the computer access they need to be able to use technology to solve all of their problems, there are many more problems with the author’s arguments:

1. Think back to high school…how was your guidance counselor? I lucked the heck out and I had a great one who helped me apply to colleges, but with a parent that had not gone to college and being in one of the worst public school systems in the nation, the likelihood that this is a sure path is very low.

2. When you are in a single-parent home or have no parents or your parents are working so much that they cannot help you with homework, how do you get good grades? How do you find out about all of these tech resources? How do you know to read interesting middle class guys on Forbes.com to save you from your poverty?

3. The Harvard Business Review recently wrote several articles that note that most people fail to achieve their goals because they are contingent upon things outside of themselves (for example, if I set the goal "get more hits on my blog," that is outside of myself, because you choose to come here, I can't force you...better goals might be: write more posts, leave the link to my blog in other fora, and use social media to attract people to my blog, all of which I can control). Getting good grades depends a lot a teacher’s subjective assessment, having enough food to be able to concentrate on studying/homework, having utilities to be able to see or not shiver to do your homework (or to go online if you are one of the many poor black kids with computers!), or having access to homework help.

4. I noted that the system is probably rigged in subtle ways to favor its creators: higher income whites. Kids are actually quite receptive to this, and kids have to have a lot of willpower to overcome the stigma that being studious often comes with. Many poor black kids get teased or bullied if they try to be studious, often for “acting white.” An educated child also experiences a lot of distance with their less educated family, which can make it tough to keep fighting an uphill battle.

5. The article ignores entirely the severe disadvantages with which most poor kids enter the public school system. The lack of preschool or structured afterschool programming sets them up to be disadvantaged going in. Further, given the amount of tracking (assigning kids to a regular or more accelerated class which usually determines their future trajectory), many kids may already be routed into the “slow lane" of public education.

6. If kids need to fight to get into good schools, then you are admitting that the public school system is failing them in a disproportionate way, which is antithetical to the point of PUBLIC education, as I noted in my article on charters. As the propaganda film “Waiting for Superman” clearly shows, there is not enough supply of charter /private school seats for poor pupils.

7. It is really hard to fight for 78 hours of public library time after school while also getting a job or internship care of your amazing guidance counselor. Further, what if you are an older sibling caring for your younger siblings?

8. Did you skip childhood? Do you know how hard and counterintuitive it is for a child to be that self-disciplined? Part of the advantage that all higher-income kids have is that they are embedded in a web of discipline that is geared toward doing well in school.

9. This article is incredibly paternalistic (I won’t go so far as to say that the author is racist, because I think he believes his ignorant, ill-informed ideas and thinks that they really are a way to help poor kids.). One, it assumes knowledge of something that the author has never experienced. Two, it assumes that poor, black people should work themselves into the ground to be qualified to serve people like him and his business needs.

10. The article completely removes all culpability from the system or from wealthier people. It is rather unfair that his kids, which he notes “have it a lot easier” and not inherently smarter than their lower-income counterparts, do not have to bootstrap their way to the top. I can’t help but wonder if the author were writing in 1840 if the article would blame slaves for not working hard to cozy up to their masters, save up, and buy their freedom. Life is unfair, but let’s not pretend like this is good for our country. We need to attract and keep good teachers. We need for kids to have proper nutrition. We need for kids to have more equal opportunities to succeed or take advantage of an extra-curricular program/job (within the bounds of child labor laws, please!). We need excellent guidance counselors and capacious libraries. We need safe streets. We need to enable working parents to better participate in their kid’s education and put food on the table.

If I Were an Ignorant, Middle-Class Dude

This is my challenge to Gene Marks, the author of this article: put your money where your mouth is. You, as a high-tech employer are probably suffering from a dearth of high-quality talent, so you benefit from having more people to choose from. Further, as a father, it should concern you when kids are unable to escape poverty and realize their full potential. As a taxpayer, you subsidize all the kids’ education that gets wasted when they drop out, their higher incidence of crime (prison is costly!), their higher likelihood to have a teenage pregnancy, and their lower wages that may push them onto the dole. You have a vested interest as a businessman, father, and taxpayer to help poor kids succeed.

I therefore challenge you to go to North and West Philly and take a handful of poor children under your wing. Find them consistent, regular access to a computer and help orient them to all the tools out there. Give them internships. Help them to learn a skill. Give them strategies and structure to help them navigate their school, extracurriculars, and college effectively. Then report back to everyone on all the challenges your article didn’t account for. Report on the amount of resources that it took for you to succeed.

Mr. Marks, my issue with your article was not that the solutions themselves are bad. I used several of them to succeed: I worked my ass off to get good grades and get into magnet schools, I befriended my high school counselor, I went to the library most days of the week, and I taught myself one (and then several) foreign languages. My concern is that it is impractical to expect a kid without any guidance to even think to do all these things, especially when they are logistically improbable. So help some kids to think of these solutions and to carry them out. I want more kids to succeed like me, but I know that my success and theirs is tied to the amount of people who are willing to offer extra guidance and to the ability of the school system and libraries to support and reinforce these kids’ successes.

Act on it!

• Write Mr. Marks or comment on the Forbes article and encourage him to accept my challenge. Write other businessmen and encourage them to offer guidance and cultivate a generation of leaders from the lower-rungs of the socioeconomic ladder of society.
• Take a kid under your wing and offer them access to some of the great tools that Mr. Marks suggests. Consider Big Brothers and Sisters of America or the scores of other organizations working to help kids overcome poverty.
• Fight to keep your local library system open more, give it more resources, and help kids to use them for success.

Speak out!

What other problems do you see with the solutions that Mr. Marks offers? Which of his solutions do you find salient or salvageable?

What do you think it takes for a poor person or someone who suffers from institutional inequality to make it if the system is unable to help them?

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For those who are curious, here is what I wrote to the author:

“Sir, as a white kid who grew up on welfare in a single-parent home and went on to graduate from Stanford, you might think that I would support you. Instead, I am so incredibly disappointed in your ignorant “recipe” for success. I got into a magnet school that my mom found out about by sheer accident. I went to the library and read a lot because it was the only place with adequate heat and electricity. The problem? I got evicted more times than I can count. Our utilities got shut off so often. I did not, contrary to your “teacher friends’” assessment, have a computer at home. Had I known about any of these tools (likelihood is that I would not have and that my mother would have been even less likely to as a waitress working 15 hours a day 6 days a week), I still wouldn’t have been able to use them. What library system could accommodate all the poor kids (of any race) to help them to realize this goal? Where would I find the time to use these resources when I started to work at age 15? Where would I get my stamina to study “coding” when we didn’t have enough food to eat dinner that day? It is articles like these that perpetuate the systemic ignorance of the role class and race play on success and prevent us from real solutions. You clearly do not understand what it is like to be poor, and your blindness is a danger because this article will only reach those who are well enough to-do to have an impact on policies that directly affect your mythical “poor black kid.” And those policy makers will make terrible choices that entrench systemic racism and class division even further in our country. Shame on you.”

Here is his response:

“Thanks for your comment. I still stick to what I wrote, and believe that the opportunity is there for everyone if they study hard and get good grades, use technology to help them get good grades, apply to the best schools they can, get help from their guidance counselor, and make sure to learn a good skill.”

You be the judge. Don’t accept inequality of opportunity. Don’t blame the victims. When one person succeeds, we all benefit in concrete ways. Our country’s future depends on everyone being proactive, not washing their hands of blame.