Things that make you go hmmmm.
It wasn’t so long ago in our history that kids were expected to go to work at a young age to help support their families. It has been considered a hallmark of an enlightened and progressive culture that we provide schooling as a time for childhood.
Is it no longer okay to just be a kid?
As a traveling educational consultant, I plan learning sessions for adults who (for the most part) I’ve never met and develop learning goals for teams based on (for the most part) a phone conversation or two. It’s challenging and results in frequent surprises when I actually meet groups face-to-face.
I recently worked with teams in a large county-wide district where the charge was to work with K-6 curriculum developers on the UbD process of identifying learning goals and developing transfer tasks. This is a group that has received significant PD on Understanding by Design and have already spent months identifying priority standards and considering next steps.
A departing administrator decided at the last minute to include a group of secondary folks who had zero PD on the process and little information about why they were sitting in on the elementary work sessions. After Day 1, I quickly realized the need for a re-design to provide a purpose for their attendance (as well as accomplish the original goal for the elementary team). The sessions became a modified fishbowl so that the newcomers could learn from the working teams.
The original sessions were structured for learning and working — and fortunately, this enabled a quick redesign. In the end, feedback from the secondary folks indicated that there was, indeed, high value in their sitting in with the elementary teams:
To quote Eisenhower: Plans are useless, but planning is essential.
In Evaluating America’s Teachers, W. James Popham writes:
Formative teacher evaluation describes evaluation activities directed toward the improvement of the teacher’s ongoing instruction … summative teacher evaluation refers to the appraisal of a teacher …
… a teacher who needs to improve must honestly identify those personal deficit areas that need improvement. Weaknesses can’t be remedied until they’ve been identified, and who knows better what teachers’ shortcomings are than those teachers themselves? But if the teacher is interacting with an evaluator whose mission, even partially, may be to excise that teacher from the teacher’s job, do you really think most teachers are going to candidly identify their own perceived shortcomings for such an evaluator? Not a chance!
Suggesting a major overhaul to the way we are doing things.
Richard Elmore says:
…the weight of politics and public policy upon the institutions of schooling is making schools less and less likely to be the privileged place where learning occurs in the future.
and then …
While learning has largely escaped the boundaries of institutionalized schooling, educational reformers have for the past thirty years or so deliberately and systematically engaged in public policy choices that make schools less and less capable of responding to the movement of learning into society at large.
Standards and expectations have become more and more literal and highly prescriptive in an age where human beings will be exercising more and more choice over what and how they will learn.
Testing and assessment practices have become more and more conventional and narrow as the range of competencies required to negotiate digital culture has become more complex and highly variegated.
Teacher preparation, hiring, induction, and evaluation practices have become more and more rigid and hierarchical in an age where the teaching function is migrating out into a more individualized and tailored set of learning environments.
and finally …
…it would be hard to imagine an institutional structure for learning that is less suited for the future than the heavily institutionalized, hierarchical world that education reformers have constructed.
The entire post is here and well worth your time.
Nathaniel Calhoun writes:
If I have the attention of a classroom of young, poorly educated, low-income citizens of the world for three hours a week over the next six months, what is the absolute most important thing that I can teach them?
I’m a pragmatist, so I might rephrase that question: Is there anything I could teach this class of students that will actually confer an advantage upon them, which helps them to become more secure and better able to meet their needs and those of their families?
I think there is. But it isn’t trying to anticipate what professional skills will be in demand four years later.
This is an interesting and cogent argument against the “coding for all” movement. In the end, I believe it’s most important to teach problem identification and solution skills using content that resonates with the learner. If that’s learning to code, fine. But it might not be …
Full article here.
Thanks @yonkeltron!
Calling upon the School District of Philadelphia and the School Reform Commission to analyze the financial and human impact of standardized testing, to identify strategies to minimize its use, and to request a waiver of the Keystone Exams from the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania in order to adopt assessments that better serve local needs and priorities.
Read the resolution on the City of Philadelphia City Council website.
In the NY Times:
“This is the proverbial perfect storm of testing that has hit not only Florida but all the states,” said Alberto M. Carvalho, the influential superintendent of Miami-Dade County Schools, the fourth-largest district in the country, who was named the 2014 national superintendent of the year. “This is too much, too far, too fast, and it threatens the fabric of real accountability.”
…the Council of Chief State School Officers and the Council of the Great City Schools, announced the initial results of an attempt to quantify the current state of testing in America.
Their survey of large districts showed students taking an average of 113 standardized tests between pre-K and grade 12, with 11th grade the most tested.
Another recent study by the Center for American Progress looked at 14 school districts. It found that students in grades 3-8 take an average of 10, up to a high of 20, standardized assessments per year. That doesn’t count tests required of smaller groups of students, like English-language learners.
What may be a little trickier is defining just which tests qualify as “unnecessary.” The CCSSO survey describes testing requirements that have seemingly multiplied on their own without human intervention, like hangers piling up in a closet.
They found at least 23 distinct purposes for tests, including: state and federal accountability, grade promotions, English proficiency, program evaluation, teacher evaluation, diagnostics, end-of-year predictions, or to fulfill the requirements of specific grants.
They also found a lot of overlap, with some of these tests collecting nearly the same information.
Read the entire post here.
From NPR Ed, A Botched Study Raises Bigger Questions:
Both student growth measures and value-added models are being adopted in most states. Education secretary Arne Duncan is a fan. He wrote on his blog in September, “No school or teacher should look bad because they took on kids with greater challenges. Growth is what matters.” Joanne Weiss, Duncan’s former chief of staff, told me last month, “If you focus on growth you can see which schools are improving rapidly and shouldn’t be categorized as failures.”
But there’s a problem. The math behind value-added modeling is very, very tricky. The American Statistical Association, earlier this year, issued a public statement urging caution in the use of value-added models, especially in high-stakes conditions. Among the objections:
• Value-added models are complex. They require “high-level statistical expertise” to do correctly;
• They are based only on standardized test scores, which are a limited source of information about everything that happens in a school;
• They measure correlation, not causation. So they don’t necessarily tell you if a student’s improvement or decline is due to a school or teacher or to some other unknown factor;
• They are “unstable.” Small changes to the tests or the assumptions used in the models can produce widely varying rankings.
Read the entire article here.