The day I was attacked by a student.

Watching the chair fly through the office door, I thought to myself, “This isn’t going to be good.”

I had not come to Vice Principal’s office looking for a fight, or even an argument.  I wanted to talk about a new chart that we could use to track the daily progress of our kids who were in danger of failing their classes for the semester, and hopefully get some of them back on track.  Someone had other ideas.

I hear that it started suddenly.  Josh (not his real name) was in the office with his mom to talk about his re-entry to school after participating in a large-scale fight.  The conversation wasn’t going well and the Vice Principal had said that perhaps today was not the best day to have this meeting and that the three of them should try again tomorrow.

Josh was unhappy.  We could tell right away because he swept all of the binders off of their shelf and onto the floor, before grabbing the chair he had been sitting in and flinging it through the door and into the introduction to my story.

As he fled the office, Josh ran straight into me, his arms flailing, one fist connected with my face, the other with my shoulder.  Turning around, Josh spied the guillotine paper cutter and grabbed it off of a table.  My teacher readers know well the equipment I am writing about and their minds have probably already gone where my mind went when I saw him heave the paper cutter.  A guillotine paper cutter is a fourteen-inch blade attached to a base on one end.  The blade is sharp enough and heavy enough to cut through twenty or thirty sheets of paper in one “ker-chunk!”

In my mind’s eye, I pictured the huge gash on Josh’s hand.  The Vice Principal imagined the paper cutter hurdling through the air directly at the other two children in the room, inflicting horror-movie injuries.

While his mom screamed, “How can you be doing this?  I didn’t raise you like this!” Josh raised the cutter over his head.  I snatched it from his hands and set if behind me.  As Josh sunk into a chair, The Vice Principal and I began talking softly to him.  “It’s going to be okay, Josh,” we said over and over.  “Calm down; just breath; we can start making this better now.  You’re going to be okay.”

Security entered the room to see Josh sitting calmly in a chair, head in his hands, crying.  The Vice Principal and I were still talking calmly to Josh, thinking that the worst was over and that we were on the road to recovery.  Our attendance officer was calming mom down.  The police had been called and were on the way.

Josh calmly got up.  Reentered the inner office.  We thought he was moving to shake off some of his adrenaline, but we were wrong.   Instead, he exploded again.  He swept the coffee maker from the table, smashing it against a bookcase.  He tore the printer off of the desk and threw it to the ground.  When on of the security guards and I grabbed him, he leapt into the air and kicked the desk lamp, crushing it against the wall.

Another security officer joined the two of us in wrestling Josh to the ground.  “Let me up!” he shouted.  “No.” three of us replied.  We got a handcuff onto on wrist, turned him over, and cuffed his other hand behind his back.

“Ring!” went the bell; and I had to leave to teach my classes.

Later in the day, I found out that Josh continued his violent outbursts until the ambulance arrived.  It finally took seven adults to strap Josh onto the gurney for the ride to the hospital.  This had not been the first time he had been admitted because he posed a danger to himself and others.  “It’s been like this every time he looses his temper,” mom explained, surveying the destruction.  “My house looks just like this.”  Later, we found out that Josh had been severely beaten since early childhood.  His father is currently serving time for the abuse. 

Days later, once I finally got over the shock, I began to wonder about Josh; about his childhood; about his illness.  I wonder what his test scores are going to look like this year.  I wonder how his teachers might be evaluated if the school used Josh’s tests scores for the Value-Added Measure.  I wonder what the so-called reformers would say if they had been in the room with Josh instead of me.  Would they still claim that poverty, or living in violent neighborhoods is no “excuse” and that a great teacher could compensate for Josh’s circumstances and help Josh succeed on the high-stakes test?  Would they disagree with me when I think that Josh has bigger issues to deal with this year than the Pythagorean theorem?

I can’t help but wonder: WWRD?  What Would Rhee Do?

Of Course Money Doesn't Matter in Education

Forget the fact that:

Oakland Public Schools spend                           $4,945     per student, and
Secular Private Schools spend on average         $20,100   per student, and
California spends                                            $224,712    per child in juvenile detention.

Nothing to see here.  Move along.... move along...

(Oakland Public Schools and California Juvenile Detention numbers from Harper's Index, November 2010;  Secular Private Schools average a Washington Post article, "Per Student Spending Gaps Wider Thank Know, August 2009)

Subversive Teaching and Jewish Vampires

Teachers know their kids better than anyone else in the education system.  They know what academic strengths and needs each student has.  They know where their interest lies and how to bridge student curiosity to academic goals in order to make learning meaningful and fun.

When teachers receive guidance from above, from site or district administration or from state and federal governments, they embrace this guidance if it meets two conditions.  First, the guidance needs to be congruent with what the teachers know is in the best interest of their children.  Second, the guidance needs to allow for teachers to be flexible and creative, engaging their students in meaningful learning and igniting their passions and their sense of wonder.

“Mr. Orphal,” a fourteen-year-old freshmen began.  “What if a Jewish person turned into a vampire?  Would that vampire be afraid of a Star of David like regular vampires are afraid of a cross?”  That question launched a ten-minute conversation about the concept of vampires in legend and their use as a literary device, so popular in modern novels, television and film.   We talked about the purpose of vampires in 18^th century literature as monsters that story-heroes can fight and defeat.  We talked about the evolution of vampires into darkly sexual creatures, and eventually into social outcasts trying to fit in with everyone else.

The conversation ended with me encouraging the student to write that story.  As the author, he could decide how the non-Christian vampire would react to religious iconography.  Through his story, he could explore his thinking about religion and the nature of God.

A short story like this would be a wonderfully entertaining way to assess this boy’s current mastery of language.  What vocabulary would he choose to use?  How would he describe the setting of the story?  Who would be the protagonist?  What perspective would he use? How would he use grammar and diction to make his story compelling?  We could even look at his spelling and his editing choices.

A short story like this would also be a great way to examine his ideas and his critical thinking skills.  What choices would he make about his Jewish vampire?  Would he choose to affirm an exclusive rightness for Christianity, keeping with traditional notions of vampires and crosses?  Would the Jewish vampire cringe at a Star of David?  If the vampire did fear Jewish religious symbols, what would this mean? Would this mean that he had shifted exclusive validity from Christianity, as in many traditional vampire stories?  Alternatively, would he choose to explore an idea of morality and universal goodness where Hindu, Buddhist, or Muslim vampires would cringe at symbols from the religions of their previous cultures?  Would these vampires even try to negotiate their current undead reality in light of a religious morality the characters were trying to maintain?  Each idea becomes an intriguing path to deep and critical thought.

Unfortunately, I doubt this student’s English teacher will be more than superficially supportive of his idea.  This should not be read to cast blame and shame at his teacher.  Rather, this should be seen as an example of how teachers, especially teachers of English and mathematics, are hand-tied by the need for their students to score well on up-coming high-stakes tests.

It takes a subversive teacher to engage in such meaningful and fun learning these days.  A teacher would need the courage to forgo her district and state mandates to allow this child to explore his ideas.  A subversive teacher may be able to treat district mandates as a sort of “paper work game” as Linda Darling-Hammond describes in The Right to Learn.  In her book, she quotes one such teacher, “A lot of the goals of the school district can be taken care of by putting some words on paper and then going ahead and doing the things the way you want to.”

Current education reforms such as former DC Chancellor Michelle Rhee would tend to argue the words of the above-quoted teacher, but not the intent.  She would say that accountability guidelines are meant to give good teachers exactly the kind of flexibility I describe in this essay and reflected in the teacher’s statement.  She would say that great teachers do exactly this; they use frameworks to build rigorous, engaging learning experiences for their children.

Where her argument runs off the rails is the moment the high-stakes tests come into play.  Creative writing, deep thinking, and wonder are not assessed on any of the current testing tools, and they are unlikely to be so in the next generation of assessments currently being designed.  This is because deep thinking and creativity are really hard to test.  Instead, current exams measure low-level sub-skills that translate well to bubble-in-the-answer questions.  They look at questions where there is one right answer that can be hidden among three red herrings. 

Unfortunately, it will be the score on such a test that will be used to judge the student, teacher, and school.  The student’s score, compared to what Value-Added statisticians imagine he would have scored with an “average teacher,” will be used to label his teacher as effective or not.  If Ms. Rhee has her way, this score would then be used to decide whether or not the teacher remains in the classroom.  Under such pressure, it is hard to imagine a non-subversive teacher allowing hours to be spent exploring vampirism in non-Christian communities.

This is too bad.  I wish Ms. Rhee and other reformers would be willing to read some essays by this child from last year and then read the story of the Jewish vampire.  I can imagine these pieces of data would point to some great learning on the part of the student and some great teaching on the part of his teacher.

Until then, so-called reformers will continue to point at test numbers.  They’ll do so because test numbers are easy to point at, not because they even remotely reflect the totality of so complex a process as learning.  The story of the Jewish vampire will have to wait until after school.

The Factory Model of Education Reform

 The current education reform movement is based on the factory model.  In that model there are a few at the top of the organization who are the thinkers and the planners.  The rest of us are unskilled workers, expected to obey the mandates from on high and implement the plans from our bosses.  As Fredrick Taylro said in 1911 and quoted from Darling-Hammond’s 1997 The Right to Learn, “One type of man is needed to plan ahead and an entirely different type to execute the work.”

In the education reform movement, the one type who plans ahead are the men and women in administrative positions, far away from the students.  They are the politicians, the state and local superintendants of education, the policy wonks located in foundations and think tanks.  Teachers are treated as the uneducated workers who are expected to “execute” the reforms faithfully, unquestioningly and thoroughly.

A part of the problem in the education reform movement is the seemingly hypercritical nature of reform.  Simply put, our actions do not match our rhetoric.

We talk about how much money is spent in education in general and spent on personnel in particular.  We assume that this money is spent on classroom teachers, ignoring the reality that nearly half of school employees are not in contact with students on a daily basis.  Instead, these employees are busy filling out the accountability forms, ensuring that teachers are, in fact, doing more with less.  Current educational reformers want the public to think that public school teachers are becoming wildly rich over the course of their careers, ignoring the reality that the average public-school teacher makes only $55,000 a year.  So-called reformers have even been brazen enough to compare teacher retirement programs to the multi-million dollar golden parachutes of corporate leaders.

We talk about how they want kids to deeply understand mathematical principals, but the tests that we use to determine if this is happening cover only low-level sub skills that are easy to test.  We say that we want kids to write and to appreciate great literature, but schools are held accountable on how well students can identify the definition of a word or edit basic grammar.  We say that we want kids to explore historical trends and themes, but we test them on memorized facts.  We say we want them to experiment, but test them on memorized science facts.  We say we want them to become decent human beings, but play time and learning experiences about acceptance and conflict solution aren’t on any tests and consequently are deemed unimportant, cut first in hard economic times, and sacrificed on the alter of ever-higher test scores.

Even when it comes to our academic standards, we seem to have a split personality.  The new Common Core Standards look great on paper.  Classroom teachers who have studied these new standards are typically hopeful, seeing how their classrooms would return to exploration, experimentation and authentic learning as they meet these standards.  The problem is that the several state standards that the Common Core are replacing look good on paper as well.

The problem is the tests that we use to assess the standards and the tremendous import we place on the scores on these tests. 

Even the most pro-test educational reformer admits that the tests are flawed, assess only low-level skills, and give only a snapshot of student performance.  Despite this acknowledgement, pro-test reformers want to ascribe even more import to the scores.  They want teachers ranked based on these scores.  They want schools graded on these scores.  They want public education judged on these scores.  “They are not perfect, but they are all we have,” say some reformers, painting a picture that the test scores are near perfect rather than near catastrophic.  The analogy isn’t pouring sand on a fire for lack of water; it is more like using gasoline.

The crucial work about the Common Core Standards is happening right now.  Two consortiums of states are designing the assessments that will be used to judge student, teacher, and school success on the Common Core Standards. 

The rhetoric surrounding the next-generation assessments is hopeful.  Secretary of Education Arne Duncan says that the next generation of tests should not be fill-in-the-bubble based.  The consortiums are placing a lot of hope in emerging technologies that may be able to marry the speed and cost-effectiveness of scan-tron assessments and the need to assess essays and projects.

I am wary.  Perhaps the next-generation assessments will be significantly better than the last generation.  Perhaps, the assessments will look at skills more complex than memorization of facts and procedures.  Unfortunately, the desire to ascribe great import to the next series of test scores look to be even greater than kids are currently expecting.

I imagine that a decade from now, English teachers will decry how student essays are locked into the formula and patter that the computerized essay scorer recognizes as proficient.

Unfortunately, I am confident that classroom teachers will have very little influence over the look of the new assessment and the new curriculum that will be designed to meet the Common Core Standards.  Teachers are not the “type of man is needed to plan ahead,” but considered by so-called reformers to be the “entirely different type to execute the work.”

Some thoughts on seniority...

I recently read an AP story about a study by the University of Washington’s Center for Education Data & Research. Researchers concluded that seniority-based layoff policies were likely to have negative consequences for students.

Seniority-based systems make sense.

How many years have you been a professional? Would you not say that you are better today than you were when you began your career? Wouldn’t you say that experience and professional development have been the two major reasons why you are a better professional today than you were when you began your career? Couldn’t most of us say the same thing?

Seniority rules make sense because everyone gets better at their profession as they gain experience and wisdom.

Seniority rules are in place because, when an organization needs to reduce it’s work force, the organization should retain the most experienced professionals.

Seniority rules also came into being because of some corrupt principals.

Unprincipled principals once abused their arbitrary power to lay-off teachers. Sometimes they let go of teachers who came out of the closet, asked too many awkward questions at meetings, held contrary political opinions, or refused sexual advances.

If unchecked power to fire and lay-off teachers were returned, some principals may be sorely tempted to lay-off 15- and 20-year veterans, without a thought of their effectiveness in the classroom, knowing that they can roll the dice on a fresh-faced college grad. The new hire may be good, or s/he may be bad, but either way, s/he be half the cost of the veteran, quite an easy solution to annually shrinking budgets.

Even if the principal at a large high school were to spend EVERY DAY visiting classrooms and watching his teachers, with over 100 professionals to visit, she would not be able to spend more than a day and a half with each teacher. She could not begin to make informed judgments about the quality of each and every teacher. It is unreasonable to expect her to make informed decisions about who to lay off, if seniority rules were suddenly stripped away.

One may counter, “That’s why we need objective test scores to tell us which teachers are effective and which are not.” The problem with the test-score worshippers is their unwillingness to consider the mountains of studies and research that have been telling us for decades that standardized tests only inform us about low-level thinking and basic fact memorization and none of the skills that most folks would equate to the word “educated.” Children who do tremendously well on these tests often flounder when asked to apply their memorized facts to answer a complex question or to show multiple ways to solve a problem.

All of this said, there are some teachers who should consider moving on to other professions. Everyone has an opinion on this, and every person I know can name a teacher that she or he knows who is a “bad teacher.” Heck… some of my colleagues or former students may even think of my name as an example of a “bad teacher.”

It should be easier to remove incompetent teachers from their classroom duties. However, whatever the next generation teacher evaluation system look likes, it must be both reasonable for school districts and fair for teachers.

Until that day, I prefer to keep lay-off decisions based on seniority. That way, at least I know that when lay-offs come, our most experienced professionals will remain in the classroom serving their students.

What do you think?  Should schools continue to use seniority to decide which teachers are laid off?  Should teachers be ranked as effective based on the scores their children get on the standardized tests and lay-off determined by those rankings?

Clinical vs. Theoretical? Yes, both.

The National Council for the Accreditation of Teacher Education issued a report this week arguing that teacher preparation programs, who have been traditionally heavy on theory and lighter on in-class internships should turn this model on it's head.  The recommendation is for the majority of a pre-service teacher to spend many more hours with a mentor teacher in a public school and far less time in their university classes.

I don’t think needs to be turned on its head. I think it needs to be expanded. Part of being an educator is being a scholar. We should be scholars of our fields (history, science, language, mathematics, art, etc…) and we should be scholars of educational theory, philosophy, and pedagogy. Reducing the number of classroom hours in order to increase the number of at-school hours is misguided and will result in a further deskilling of teachers that will eventually turn us from professionals to administrators of curriculum.

At the same time, some of the most important lessons I’ve learned have been at my schools where no university experience could have prepared me. When I began teaching fifteen years ago, I frankly expected to eventually mourn the death of a student. My own high school graduating class mourned the loss of three of our fellows to drinking and driving. When I heard on the 3rd of January that Ryan was dead, I was shocked but ready to handle the grieving I expected my classes would be experiencing. When I learned that he had been gunned down in front of his girlfriend and baby daughter by another teenager who mistook him for someone else, I was too shocked to cope effectively with the day.

What I am most concerned with proposals like NCATE’s proposed reforms is that these reforms are being born at the close of the NCLB era but before the functional birth of the Common Core Standards’s era.

Perhaps NCLB’s most damaging legacy is the decade long process of redefining the concept of “good schools” into a number of a fill-in-the-blank test. As this era sunsets, we are experiencing strong efforts to redefine “good teaching” and the behaviors that teachers can do that result in high scores on fill-in-the-black tests. I sincerely hope that NCLB does not succeed in redefining “well-educated person” as a high score on a fill-in-the-blank test.

I understand how emotionally satisfying it is for most people to look at one simple number and infer from it a judgement on a very complex system. It’s easy and satisfying to see a test score going up and think “good school,” “good teachers,” “well-educated children.”

We get the same feelings from watching the Stock Market go up or the stock values of a company go up. Stock up equals successful company. Stocks down equals failing company.

I want to remind each of us that Toyota’s stocks were climbing while they were making cars that would have unintended acceleration problems that caused dozens of deaths and injuries. BP’s stocks were going up right before the Deepwater Horizon disaster. Lehman Brothers’s stock was going up right before the bubble burst.

Our very best education experts tell a similar tale for schools. Rising scores on standardized tests are actually in indication of deep problems at a school and not improvement. This is because high scores on tests like the CST and the High School Exit Exam reflect superficial memorization of facts rather than deep complex thinking.

I get worried thinking that California’s teacher preparation programs may begin training a new generation of teachers to very good at the failing practices and processes of the last century.

I may be wrong, NCATE’s recommendations may in fact be dove-tailed in with the new Common Core Standards and the new generation of authentic assessments being presently designed for use in 2014. I certainly hope it is.

Formative Teacher Evaluations

I wonder what it might look like if we had "Formative Teacher Evaluations."

It's not the evaluation itself that feels like a game of gotcha, it's the high-stakes that are attached.  When evaluations are used to make staffing decisions like retention and dismissal, then teachers become interested in "getting through" the evaluation process.  I've heard stories about how teachers would behave complete different on a day when they know that they are going to be visited than on a typical day.

Most teachers have never left the education system.  It's important to remember this.  What does this mean?  How is the education system different than the worlds of science or business?  How does this culture affect teacher evaluation and school reform?

The education system is a universe populated correct answers.  The correct answers live in the teacher's edition of the text, in the teacher's mind, or at the feedback end of an exam or product.  In the science and science and business universe, there are right answers too, but in these spaces, right answers are the tools that we use to find the answers that no one knows.

Teachers who have never left the educational universe continue to look at their work through these lenses.  First, there is an authority whose supposed to know the right answer (the administrator, the District, the State).  Currently, observations and evaluations are like tests and quizzes for the teacher.  Some teachers do habitually well on these assessments; these teachers are not worried about evaluations.  Some teachers do poorly.  

Just like in school, it's the ones who do poorly who have captured our attention.  We can see parallels between a teacher who has done poorly on an evaluation and a student who has done poorly on an exam.  

Perhaps they will see the failure as a function of their actions.  "I didn't study as well as I should have," says the student.  "I didn't plan enough material for the period, and I didn't have any systems in place to use the last 10 minutes of class effectively," says the teacher.

Perhaps they will see the failure as a function of their personalities.  "I'm just not smart.  I'm going to drop out," says the student.  "I'm not a good teacher; I need to find another profession," says the teacher.

Perhaps they will try to escape the shame of failure by shifting the blame away from them or their behavior.  "The teacher doesn't explain the subject well," says the student.  "The principal couldn't do any better; and these kids would behave if there were real consequences to their behavior," says the teacher.

What if teacher evaluations, and for that matter student assessments, formative in nature?  We have been actively looking at shifting classroom culture away from summative assessments.  We've been actively trying to deal with the student in my above examples; we try to use the assessments not as motivators or judgments of behaviors, but as feedback for the teacher and students together.  

When teachers use formative assessments in the classroom, the focus moves away from what a student did right or wrong.  Instead, the formative assessment tells the teacher and the student what each should do next.  The student failed the section on dividing fractions.  This means that the teacher needs to find some time to sit down with the students and explain this concept a different way.  It also means that the teacher may need to design a new learning experience that will help the student learn the concept.  This same formative assessment tells the student that s/he needs to find some additional time learning about dividing fractions.  It tells the student that s/he needs to be open and willing to try the new learning experience and try to learn the concept a second time.

A poor teacher observation could work the same way.  The principal walked into my class during the last 10 minutes and saw children chatting, off task, and wandering the room.  This tells the principal that I need some more training on planning lessons to take the entire class period, and/or that I need some fresh ideas for 10-minute soak activities for my subject matter that would look fun for kids while being instructional.  This same observation tells me the same information.

Teacher observations and student outcome data can and should be used to drive the professional development for departments, small learning communities, and schools.  PD time and activities can and should be focused on the current needs of teachers, with schools and districts allowing for multiple groups of teachers to be working on different types of PD in parallel; call this differentiated PD.

For pre-service and 1st - 3rd year teachers, the data of teacher formative assessment should also go back to the teacher-training program they came from to help guide the evolution of their practice.  The results of their teacher observations, student outcome data, and teacher reflections on the PD that they have gone to as a results of this data should all go back to the university, TfA, OTF, or where ever.

Turning teacher observations and student outcome data into formative assessments for teachers have positive outcomes:

1. Teachers will feel less threatened by the observations and data. 

2. It will build a culture of trust between administrators and teachers since both sides are actively trying to use these tools to help teachers get better.

3. It will inform our teacher credential programs how they can evolve and improve

Someday, down the road, we may find ourselves in a place where a teacher should be let go, because even after multiple attempts with PD and training, they are still not performing.  This is still going to be a difficult time for the teacher and the administrator.  Just like in the classroom, there might still be a time when after all of the formative assessments and interventions, the child still fails the class or still is suspended or expelled for his/her behavior.  Using formative assessments in the classroom wont make this go away.  Likewise, teacher formative assessments wont remove the problem of having to fire a teacher.