Ask the Blogger: Should every skill taught in public education be coded with an employment skill to verify its validity?

Should every skill taught in public education be coded with an employment skill to verify its validity? 

No.

Why not? 

Well, here are some reasons why not: 

1. School is not training for a job. School is about teaching all the things that *every* job and life moment has in common, and then allowing students to expand that in certain directions. I'm going to insist that you learn certain math ideas that may only be interesting because they're beautiful, or useful in part in your job or future.
2. Some skills might not be applicable to employment but rather be foundational to some other, more complex, skill taught in school. Those skills are needed even if they can't be tied to "accounting" or "car mechanic".
3. “Validity” is a really curious word to apply here because what you think is a valid skill for your employment might be useless to me. My artist friends use proportions - no algebra, ever. How does a teacher know what job you'll be doing and thus what "skill" you'll need? Do I just assume that all boys need math and none of the girls will?
4. The question “When am I ever gonna have to use this?” is a tired ploy used by lazy teenagers. The answer is always and never. Could be never, could be every day, could be at work, could be your hobby, could be you completely changing your career because of a pandemic or some other unforeseen upheaval.

Skills are an odd thing to focus on because neither I nor the student have the slightest clue what the student will need since none of us has any idea what we’ll be doing, nor do we know what skills we’ll need. 

When I was in HS, the mainframe computer had a whopping 5MB of storage. My first program was holes representing letters punched line by line into cards using Fortran. Many of the skills I learned then have been made obsolete by the supercomputer in my pocket. 

The first job I thought I would be doing for the rest of my life no longer exists. 

If I go by what I see on the internet, spelling and grammar are no longer important, and neither is logic, critical thinking, empathy or sympathy, number sense, morals. Just because *you* don't use it doesn't mean it's useless; it should still be taught even if you can't determine its "validity" to employment. QAnon is a perfect example of a lack of critical thinking.

Some of the most successful people on the planet are utter bastards, their primary skill being a lack of empathy, a total disdain for anyone, and the willingness to screw over anyone and everyone. I have no desire to teach those “valid” skills. 

The incredible tediousness of linking every skill to *every possible application for that skill*, even if you could define exactly when a particular student would need to add or subtract integers. 

Bottom line? I’m teaching and you’re not. I’ve seen lots of “reform” that worked and lots that didn’t, but even more that wasted our time, mponey, and effort while having no noticeable benefit whatsoever.

I’ve seen the long-term effects of curriculum gaps and I’ve seen when what we do is exactly right. As a long-time teacher, I have a very clear sense of “what’s important” and I’ll fight for it. 

I don’t frankly care about uninformed ideas about “what ought to be done” because I’ve seen the aftermath of those bright ideas that weren’t so bright and weren’t original. 

 I do care about the bright ideas that haven’t failed yet. Those I’ll try. 

The problem with your question? We’ve tried it several times and it’s failed to produce any of it's stated benefits every single time.

Beginning teachers need to learn to teach.

Teaching's a profession. Like all professions, it takes training ... and practice. This practice can't be found in a Wheaties Box and it's can't be found on Twitter.

To be a teacher, you need to be an intern, an apprentice, a beginning teacher. In the beginning you need to get help and guidance from experienced teachers. You may be smart and may have gotten good grades in college/high school, but that doesn't mean you can teach.

1. Your "digital native" status is not even worth the paper it isn't printed on.
2. Your youth is worth nothing (and for a while, you'll be paid accordingly).
3. Your opinions about how to teach are worth pretty close to nothing.

You'll have to learn from the older teachers. They didn't learn math using a MacBook nor do they Tweet every random thought, but that doesn't mean that those older teachers don't have a lot to offer. Some of us are hidebound, curmudgeonly old bastards, but you must learn to look past that and filter out the years of accumulated irritation at Professional Development.

Six weeks in summer camp can't replace six months of teaching actual teenagers under the supervision of an experienced teacher, nor will those six weeks ever prepare you in any meaningful way. On the other hand, there are plenty of people in TFA who MIGHT make good teachers someday.

Vilification is just as silly as beatification. The problem I have with TFA is the tendency to assume sainthood of someone who is treating two years in public school as temporary thing, as if some court sentenced them to 2 years of community service for the crime of not acquiring a 6-figure income job.

Now that you're a teacher ...

This profession is unbelievably screwed up in many ways and we're going to need you to keep it together long enough to pick up on the difference between stupid shit that sounds good (a "deepity") and good ideas that sound stupid at first.

You'll see both kinds.

From whence, "Deepity"?

We (and by this, I mean people who make decisions and influence school boards) listen to the opinions of people who haven't ever been teachers. We take seriously the suggestions and complaints from CEOs and computer wizards who couldn't be bothered to finish their own education. We listen to Andre Agassi's opinions about the ideal school and take him seriously when he says he wants to start a school and he knows what works with kids and how teachers should teach ... except that he quit school in the ninth grade and turned tennis pro at the age of 16. His father was supposed drive the kids to school but took them to local tennis courts to practice instead. How is this supposed to instill confidence in his opinions about how schools should be run for the majority?


Here's a talking head:

“Both sides ignore this fact: The classroom performance of beginning Teach For America instructors is about the same as that of education school graduates just starting out. On average, both do poorly. More supervision and support would help both groups. How does aggravating the feud make that happen?”

Let's set aside the idea that more Supervision would help because Supervision never helps a first-year teacher. Help and support from other teachers would help.  Supervision does nothing.

What scares me is the idea that this starting incompetence is the norm, that the classroom performance of TFA teachers equals that of "education school graduates" ... if that isn't an insult to the TFA, then someone's not paying attention.  TFA are supposedly the best and brightest of the Ivy Leagues and the top-notch colleges. Shouldn't we be striving for a level of competence higher than that of the people who failed out of every other program in college, that of those who were so bad at everything they settled for an education degree?

Scott MacLeod, in MindDump, quoted this guy, who said, in part,

re: “Let’s-find-and-fire-the-bad-teachers”
The problem with the approach that Friedman and others advocate is that it assumes we have all these wonderful, high-quality teachers just waiting in the wings to take over the jobs of the bad teachers we fire. In reality, there is no such supply, even in a bad economy with high unemployment. We have a shortage, not a surplus, of great teachers—and so it’s naïve or shortsighted (or both) to think we can somehow fire our way to a great educational system.

This is true. If you fire someone in the middle of the school year, there aren't all that many applicants that are worth even as much as  John Garner's assessment of the Vice-Presidency. Your ad on SchoolSpring will get a lot of response because it's really easy to push that button, but the candidates' qualifications will be dubious at best.

There are almost four million K-12 teachers in the United States, which is more than twice the number of lawyers and doctors combined. Teaching is America’s largest profession. And so we need teaching to be a job that an average person can do reasonably well, which means we probably need to rethink how the job is structured. ( Justin Snider )

Holy mackerel.

"Change teaching so that the average person can do it well." Why not improve it, instead? Why do we care what some economists have found and what some random blogger says about it?

"If the teachers can't measure up, then we must measure down."


I can't accept that.  We need more teachers than lawyers and doctors because those two professions aren't needed by a third of the population for 7 hours a day for ten months of the year.

Where do you come in, newbie?

You come in right here. You read things. If you've read this far, you'll probably make a great teacher.

Flexible Pathways are not that well understood

For the nerds out there:
The text of ACT 77.
State DOE Introduction to the Law.
State DOE's Flexible Pathways webpage.

What the law says, in essence, is that schools must accept (acknowledge) and give high school credit to learning that takes place in a non-traditional setting. For example, a passage from the introduction lays out some of the possibilities for this outside-the-box learning:

Act 77 explicitly references several types of experiences that may become components in a PLP. These include: “applied or work-based learning opportunities, including career and technical education and internships; virtual learning and blended learning; dual enrollment opportunities ...; and early college programs ...” While there is an expectation that each of these categories of learning experiences will become more readily available to more students, this should not be seen as placing a limit on the possibilities that may be included in a student’s flexible pathway to graduation. (emphasis mine).

These internships, or college courses, or dual-enrollment opportunities are all at the course level and this is where the confusion comes in.

The way so many people are misinterpreting this law is in thinking it requires or even suggests that teachers must allow for different assessments for each student within a course. A fellow teacher was speaking to me (working through his own thinking, really; I was merely a sounding board) about a student who flat-out refused to take a history test -- he didn't like the course format of typed papers (Google docs), and tests with hand-written short answer and multiple choice questions. He wanted to make a video or a Powerpoint, I can't really recall which.

If you listen to my admin and others, the PLP aspect of the law would require my colleague to accede to the request. I've been told on several occasions that (paraphrased) "Flexible pathways requires that we give students the opportunity to prove proficiency in many different ways in your course.

That's flatly not the case.

Personalization is also manifested through the expectation that students will be able to engage in “flexible pathways to graduation,” defined as “any combination of high-quality academic and experiential components leading to secondary school completion and post-secondary readiness.” This concept is not to be confused with the idea that students choose from a limited menu of pathways that are pre-designed by educators. Rather, the emphasis is on “any combination of high-quality academic and experiential components.”

The drafters of the legislation chose their words carefully, always referring to  "high-quality academic and experiential components" and reiterating that the components would include "Work-Based Learning, Career and Technical Education, Virtual/Blended Learning, Dual Enrollment, and Early College." They intended to allow for non-traditional "courses," not to allow student to veto any assignment they didn't like and switch it out for something else.

In fact, they come right out and say it in the bill:

(d) An individual entitlement or private right of action shall not arise from creation of a personalized learning plan.

Individual districts may change the intent of the law to include in-class variations and treating children differently whenever they throw a temper tantrum, or get their parents to tell the school that home Internet service is "cancelled because the Internet is making children stupid" and demanding that there be no online components to a math class (true story). If the district decides that, I'm going to follow that ruling, but not because the law said so.

No Bells - part two. Focus

I ran across an article: School Bells Interfere With Learning but unfortunately it has some points backwards. It misinterprets much of the what and why of bells and classes. Let me explain.

"... because we partition students into neat packages called subjects, they are implicitly taught that learning is something we do in compartments."

Actually, this is called focus (or uni-tasking) and we aren't partitioning the students at all. We're separating the subjects for three reasons: so the students can concentrate on one thing at a time, so that the most competent teachers for each subject can teach them and so the students don't have to have the exact same schedule of learning - each is able to specialize in his or her own way.

It's a NEW IDEA called differentiating.

Since students aren't going through the day in lockstep with all of their classmates, we must keep to a schedule so that everyone's time and preparation can be utilized most effectively.

If you try and introduce a little bit of another subject in your subject, students object, saying "This isn't English, Mr. Wees. Teach us Mathematics." (I've actually had students tell me that). Where in the real world is learning sectioned off like this?

Frankly, everywhere. Learning is always focused on one topic. When was the last time you attended a college class called "College Algebra and British Lit as used in Cobol programming?" Teaching at the elementary grades is cross-curricular by nature. The higher you rise, the more likely you're going to specialize. Not only is each student's course mix different but the levels are, too. One freshman may take Honors Algebra2, Spanish 3 and H.English but the other takes CP English, CPAlgebra1 and Spanish1.

Then, there's competence. I can teach Physics and any level of math, but I'd be fooling myself if I thought I could do Biology, History or Latin. I hate it when some other teachers try to teach math because they invariably screw up and I'm sure the English teachers would complain about my writing style. Even within a certification area, teachers have strengths and weaknesses. Some teachers are great with Geometry and others aren't.  Calculus is beyond many and some don't have the patience for pre-algebra or consumer math.

"Mathematics do English (and other languages) when they explain their discoveries to other people. Biologists use geography to decide where to start their research. All of what we learn is interconnected, and more of these connections need to made obvious to the students. This is not easy to do in a school with nine 45 minute separate blocks."

Ignoring the grammatical weirdness, this is the crux of his problem. Just because we are dealing with a vast interconnected world doesn't mean that the best way to learn is by studying the whole thing all at once. The connections cannot be made clear to students until the students understand the two (or more) things that are being connected.

There is also a huge difference between "learn" and "use." I use English to explain my thoughts on math but that doesn't mean I can teach English and it doesn't mean that mixing math and English will improve the learning of either. (Educational pundits went to school but that doesn't mean they know how to fix it, either, but I digress.)

The argument that connections can't be made in 45 minute blocks is precisely the reason many schools went to 90 blocks. Not that it helped anything.

"Maybe we should even rethink how we schedule kids, and consider other instructional models. There are schools where there are no bells, no classes like what you would see in a traditional school, just kids (and adults) learning."

I want a school with no classes.

Cliche alert! 

When will otherwise well-meaning people realize that the vast bulk of their students are not "natural students" who, "unlike themselves", have greater interest outside of the classroom than in?

There's a reason that these schools are few ... they don't work for most kids.

The "no bells, no classes" scenario ... there's also no learning. These schools are filled with the spoiled rotten children of money. In return for the kid's chance to pretend to learn, the schools pretend to give them an education, whitewashing over the fact that the kids have little interest in anything and school is below "nothing" on their lists.

The teachers think they're being "cutting edge" and "understanding" and the school is "so 21st century" that your head might burst from the fuzzy good feelings. I've seen this kind of school go straight into the tank. Fortunately for the kids, their parents have plenty of money because that education isn't cutting the mustard.

Those kids who can do the "unschooling" kind of thing are the ones who could pick up a "Perl for Dummies" book and teach themselves programming over the weekend. They also tend to have parents who take the place of the school.

Those aren't your kids. Or my students.

Problems

Arthur Camins says:

The biggest problem with education is the U.S. is not test scores. Rather, three central problems plague public education in the United States. The most dramatic is inequity. There are vast inequities in educational resources and in the conditions of students’ lives, resulting in persistent race- and class-based disparities in educational outcomes.
Second, we are far too focused on a narrow range of outcomes – reading and math test scores – and not enough on a broader range of subject matter or essential domains, such as critical thinking, creativity and collaborative skills. Third, we gravitate toward partial quick solutions, rather than thinking systemically and having the patience to allow strategies time to develop, take hold, and be refined.

Which is great ... but what do we do about it?

A Strike Against Charter Schools

This argument is one that I've made several times and I'm glad that it's resonating in some places, though I certainly couldn't claim any credit.

"The Washington State Supreme Court has ruled that charter schools are unconstitutional, reported the Seattle Times. Conservatives push charter schools as part of their mission to dismantle public education.

It's not just conservatives, but it does seem to be dominated by that point of view.More specifically, it seems to be dominated by a desire to filter out "the bad students", a desire that at first seems like it might be reasonable but that falls apart when examined logically.  It also, strangely, seems to come flavored with class and socio-economic discrimination.

Late on Friday, the state Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that charter schools are unconstitutional because they aren’t “common schools” in that their boards are appointed, rather than elected, said Washington Chief Justice Barbara Madsen. Charter schools are publicly-funded but privately-owned.

This fact is key, in my mind ... how can it be justifiable to allow a private school to be paid out of public funds when the public is paying for a local school already? 

The ruling stems from a 2013 lawsuit in which a pro-public education coalition claimed that charter schools “improperly divert public school funds to private organizations that are not subject to local voter control.” Kim Mead of the Washington Education Association praised the court’s ruling. “The Supreme Court has affirmed what we’ve said all along — charter schools steal money from our existing classrooms, and voters have no say in how these charter schools spend taxpayer money,” said Mead.

Right. I can run for the local school board (and have served on it), I can ask to see their budgets and accounts (and have), I can know about and criticize their hiring practices and salaries and policies. I can't do any of that for the local Catholic school, or any of the local private schools. If taxpayer money is being REQUIRED of me for tuition payment, then I have the right to have a say in how it's spent. Charter schools do not have to tell me any of that.

The ruling is a great victory in the fight against conservative privatization and the attack against public education. Private companies should not be allowed to use taxpayer money to run private, issued based, schools in a pursuit of profit.

The only thing a charter school can offer that public schools don't is the removal of all weak students from nearby classrooms.

source.

The only voucher system I have ever supported is one in which students are allowed to choose a different PUBLIC SCHOOL than the one in their neighborhood. Public money should stay in the public schools.

Just as important, charter schools don't actually offer anything that the local public school doesn't.  The pro-charter reformers always tout low test scores as a reason to allow the best students to go somewhere else, but that's a straw-man argument.

Those top students aren't being forced to take remedial classes, or being ignored and forced into doing poorly because other kids in that same school are doing poorly. Those top kids are taking challenging classes in the public school. They're taking AP courses, college level courses (and receiving college credits from the University of Vermont system), and online courses through UVM and VHS. They're doing well on the SAT, ACT, and others. They're going to Dartmouth and the Ivies, state colleges and Universities. They're not being held back by their peers.

The only thing a charter school can offer that we can't is the removal of all weak students from other classrooms. That's not appropriate for a public school system.

• Charters don't offer anything better than we do. 
• Charters don't improve students; they improve averages. 
• Charters don't improve school offerings; they remove the very students that allow us to offer AP calculus.
• Charters don't help students; they offer the exact same courses to the same kids that I would.
• Charters don't have better teachers, either. They have younger teachers, or those who weren't good enough to get a job in the public school, or those who weren't certified to teach in public school (and that's a pretty low hurdle), or those who want to work many more hours for less pay.

Working in Isolation vs Collaboration

from Dangerously Irrelevant:

Joe Bower said:
I would never ask students to complete anything that is worth doing in complete isolation from their peers, parents, books, or the Internet. I’ve worked hard to encourage my students to see collaboration as a critical characteristic of learning.

I would never lock my students in a closet, forcing them to do meaningless work for years and letting them eat only a small bowl of thin porridge each day. That's the way that reductive capitalism works: a sweatshop producing clothing for Walmart, not the education that we desire in this country. 

Joe is, unfortunately, making the same mistake that almost all "Collaboration Uber Alles" proponents make. There are three stages to learning in my view; true collaboration is appropriate and achievable in only one of them.

First, a definition: Collaboration is working with others to do a task and to achieve shared goals. Good enough to begin with.

The First Stage

First Stage Learning.

• The first stage of education is learning the basics, learning the foundation work upon which the understanding can be built. If we are examining A-SSE.2, multiplication of polynomials is required before we can possibly recognize and utilize structure in expressions. You need to have done this first part before being able to recognize that x² - y² is equivalent to (x+y)(x-y). 
• This is strictly solo work in that the student must be doing the learning. The teacher and classmates can explain, describe, tutor, re-explain ... but acquiring this preliminary knowledge is the job of the individual. No one else can master it for him, they can only master it for themselves. 
• Collaboration does not exist at this stage, only parallel learning. Peer coaching is not collaboration, but a "multiple-teacher" scenario. This is where formative assessment is appropriate because we absolutely do NOT want any misunderstandings to be introduced or practiced or internalized — errors must be fixed here before they are ingrained.
• The Internet, their peers, parents, books, are useful in that they are teachers with varying degrees of understanding ranging from competent to utterly and absolutely wrong. The "wrong" can be misguided, such as the videos put up by well-meaning folks who say that the order of operations is "multiply first, then divide", thinking 30 ÷ 2 * 3 equals 5 instead of 45. The "wrong" can also be peers playing a joke, such as the "friend" who says that 26 ÷ 65 equals 2/5 because you can cancel the sixes. Of course, the "wrong" can be malicious or deluded, such as the folks who claim that the Earth is 6000 years old.

Andrew Old:

"If you want to learn how to cooperate effectively with others, then the last place you’d start is in a group of teenagers being made to do school work. This is like saying the best way to learn how to make pork sausages is by being imprisoned in a pig farm with a half-dozen rabbis. Putting together people who are neither experienced at doing something, or particularly inclined to want to do it, is not how you learn to do that something."

The Second Stage 

• The second stage is the time when we take that basic knowledge and develop it, building the deeper understandings that are our goal. Some collaboration happens at this stage, but mostly the individual is exploring, researching, expanding the understandings that are the point of this whole thing.
• Again, the peer-to-peer work that is happening here is less "learning" and more taking turns questioning, extending the idea (does x⁴ - y⁴ behave in a similar fashion?) Where else can we go with this? 
• The Internet, peers, parents, etc., are still not collaboration, but they do contribute to the student's learning. In fact, this is the ideal time for students to see other points of view, watch different explanations and determine the correlations and reconcile the differences. I encourage watching Khan at this point with the question, "What do you think of his explanation?"

At the end of Stage Two is the usual spot for summative assessment, the dreaded chapter test. Why "dreaded"? Because the students have JUST internalized it but rarely are comfortable with it yet. Done properly, though, the chapter test is often the fusion of all of the disparate details, the time when the students have to put everything together. I often hear students say that "Now I understand."

It's also why I allow retakes, because I feel that understanding on a deadline is less important than being able to say at the end of the course "You know Algebra 2".  I suppose this is the essence of Proficiency-Based Learning, but I have never liked re-labeling what we do in order to pretend that we are reforming.

The Third Stage

Re-purposed wrecking ball.

• The third stage of learning is the time when students get comfortable with their understandings, where they extend an idea, test it, and revise it themselves, where they produce a product, something new — to themselves at least, if not to the teacher or the world, but there are certainly cases in which the work was completely new, an invention or discovery.
• This is the only place where collaboration is actually realistic. Since I define "collaboration" as "multiple students working on the same project, contributing to each phase of the work and trusting each other to complete their respective parts", I cannot see collaboration as the time when you are learning the material, but as the time when you take that learning and produce something.

We must discuss Alfie Kohn:

“I want to see what you can do, not what your neighbor can do” is really just code for “I want to see what you can do artificially deprived of the skills and help of the people around you. Rather than seeing how much more you can accomplish in a well-functioning team that’s more authentic like real life.”

If we are discussing education, then I absolutely DO want to know what you can do, what you have learned and internalized. How else am I to re-teach, help, differentiate?

Joe Bower, again:

"In the real world, there simply aren’t that many times you are expected to solve a problem or perform a task in complete isolation – and even if you were, it would be awfully archaic to refuse you the opportunity to reach out for the help you needed to get the task done.

In the RealWorld that I've been a part of, there is not a single company that didn't expect a baseline level of knowledge and understanding. They have no interest in an employee who can't work alone, or who can't do his part of a collaborative task. They don't want someone who needs to consult other resources constantly, in order to do the simplest of tasks. They want to know how good a resource you will be when someone has to ask you for help.

Bottom line:

• Collaboration is students each working from knowledge and understanding to produce something together, sharing the work or parceling out pieces for each to work on simultaneously.
• Collaboration is not a pathway to learning and often is detrimental to the learning process since many students leave the thinking and learning to the quickest in the group ... "He answered so I don't have to think about the question." or "I'll just repeat what she said."
• Collaboration before all of the partners are proficient is counter-productive. If all participants aren't at the proficient point, there will be one who winds up doing most of the work in frustration, worried that her grades will slip because the quality of the product is below her standards.
• Collaboration is not a substitute for teaching.

Thanks for reading. I've got to get back to work.

Jeb Bush's Florida Miracle

Here are two quotes from that WashPost article that I found informative:

In his first term, most of Jeb Bush’s efforts in education came in three areas: test-based accountability, private-school vouchers, and support for improved reading instruction. In 1999, Bush signed legislation that required annual testing of all children in grades 3-10, tied test scores to annual “A” through “F” labels assigned to local public and charter schools, and required retention of children in third grade if they did not meet critical scores in the state reading test or provide other evidence of reading skill. In the same year, the Florida legislature created two voucher programs, one tied to the state labeling of local public schools and the other available to children with disabilities. Bush also created the Florida Center for Reading Research in 1999, which used both state and federal funding to support classroom teachers and reading coaches.

 and this one:

Governor Bush and his allies generally point to fourth-grade reading as the most important story, and that is where one can see large increases in average scale scores, not only across cohorts of fourth-grade students but in comparison with the national sample of fourth-grade students. Between 1998 and 2013, Florida’s fourth graders rose from being quite a bit below the national average on the NAEP testing program to being well above the national average. You can quibble with testing samples and comparison issues, but this is an unambiguous good.

To which I say, "Really?"

Let me pull out one phrase from that first paragraph. "and required retention of children in third grade if they did not meet critical scores in the state reading test".

I sure can quibble with testing samples, especially when you throw a whopper of a lipstick-covered pig out there and pretend it's a gold-plated truffle.

I am not surprised that his fourth-grade scores rose after he retained kids in third grade if they weren't up to snuff. Every kid at that age will do better with one more year of reading training (and that FCRR was definitely a good idea) and one more year of maturity. Remember that, too, many of these retained kids were probably on the young side of the cut-off to enter first grade.

Later in the article, the researcher, Sherman Dorn, admits, "NAEP reading scores for Florida eighth graders slowly converged to the national average, with large bounces up and down across the years."

What bothers me is this line:

"The bottom line: Bush is correct that Florida’s children benefited from his time in office if children graduated high school at the end of fourth grade, and only evidence of general reading skills mattered. For most other independent test-score measures, the picture is less impressive."

 "Benefited from his time in office." And yet he immediately qualified it. Then there was this Q & A:

Q) So what was responsible for the fourth-grade rise in reading?
A) The most likely explanation is a combination of reading coaches hired in the boom years in Florida and the creation of the Florida Center for Reading Research (FCRR)."

To me, the evidence points to retention as a much larger factor. To the credit of the article author, she does add an important caveat in the last paragraph:

An important caveat: Looking at achievement gaps in NAEP and changes in those gaps is harder than you might think because some category definitions change, the demographics of children change (a higher proportion of children are eligible for free and reduced lunches than in the late 1990s), and once you look at differences in scores (gaps) and changes in those differences, the standard errors of those measures expand from the standard errors in the mean scale scores. The numbers above are far less precise than one might assume; for example, while the changes in achievement gaps by lunch-program eligibility and disability status are meaningful, take the specific numbers with more than a few grains of salt.

Especially when the demographics change by "force", eliminating all of those below a 3rd grade cut-off point.

Here are a couple of graphs from the article:

Here you see the immediate effect of retention policies and the long-term effect of the FCRR.

Math scores, grade 8

After all is said and done, the change in teacher-training and the change in retention rules ... 12th graders (18year-olds) are pretty much the same as they ever were.

How did that slip in there?

Testing Paradigm Needs to Change

Testing in the United States is a sick, diseased system. It is a malignant tumor that must be excised if we are to ever use testing results to improve students, teachers, schools,

Testing in the USA is NOT intended to help teachers or their students. It is only done to give a number that can be used or not, at the whim of the reader. Since most testing is for evaluative purposes, testing provides numbers to punish people with.

As a teacher, I get absolutely no useful information from standardized testing.


None.

On our "Local Common Assessment", I get to know a RIT range and a corresponding percentile, and breakdowns in "Algebraic Thinking, Real&Complex Number Systems, Geometry, Statistics and Probability."

Then, consider that we have our kids taking a test and one of the categories is Real & Complex Number systems - Really? These are 9th graders in algebra 1 ... is the score range of 233-245 based on their less-than-complete knowledge of real numbers combined with no questions on complex numbers or is that 75%-ile based on questions that they would have no reasonable knowledge of?

Okay ... I'm ready to adjust my teaching for Algebra 1 ... What changes should I make?

I see none of the questions, none of the individual responses. I have no idea what kinds of things the test-makers considered to be "Algebraic Thinking" nor do I have any sense of what my students might have replied or understood or didn't, except for the kids who told me they just clicked at random just to be finished more quickly.

Okay ... I'm ready to adjust my teaching for Algebra 1 ... What changes are appropriate? Does the kid who scored "LO" really not understand or is she just lazy?

Yeah, that's the breakdown measurement: LO, AV, HI. Useful? No.

And this is a Pre-Algebra class with some 9th and some 10th graders. I would hardly expect them to get anything other than LO. If they could, they wouldn't be in the class.

Okay ... I'm ready to adjust my teaching ... What changes to my pre-algebra curriculum are appropriate here?

But at least I got those few bits of data within a week, because it was a local assessment.

When it comes to SBAC and PARCC, the problems seem to be the same as for NECAP, and before that, the NSRE.  Too few questions, coupled with long wait times for the scores (test in October, scores in April) and very dodgy scoring of the results for the constructed response questions ...

and we're still not allowed to see the questions, see the scoring, see the individual results ... 
And there was no way you could trust those scores because of the manipulation of the raw score conversion tables for "continuity reasons."

Can't have a big improvement year to year because reasons. The first year of every test has to have similar results as the final year of the test we threw away, so yr1 NSRE was first 58% passing, but was re-scored so we only had 30% passing.

If we're getting rid of a test because it isn't working appropriately, why do we insist that the new test's scores match up with the old test's scores?

And about those scores ... I have never understood how the entire public school populations of five New England states can show results in the way they did:

Highly Proficient: 3%
Proficient: 30%
Below Proficient: 40%
No Evidence of Proficiency: 27%

Really? 33% "passed" a test and you're looking at the teachers, not the test? Of all the kids in all the classrooms with all of the teachers (in VT, NH, ME, RI, and somewhere else that's escaping me right now), how is it possible that only 33% of the students passed a test?


At least the SAT is open ... maybe we should use it instead of paying Pearson far more for less information.

If you can so blithely manipulate scores so as to get a result that your statisticians declare appropriate, maybe the problem isn't in your teachers or your students ... your system needs to change.

If you can so blithely assume that the teachers are the only ones who are responsible for scores but shouldn't be allowed to see any of the test papers or any of the questions ... your system needs to change.

If you can so blithely assume that the students are always "participating fully" and that the results on this worthless and pointless (to them) test, then your system definitely needs to change.

Embedded Content and the Foreign Language Paradox

Bumped to the top from August of 2010:


Joanne Jacobs: Kids Don't Know Grammar. Although neither of those quoted (perhaps misquoted) can spell "embedding," their point is good. Embedded curriculum doesn't work.

Less than 10 percent of Robert Archer’s 10th graders know grammar. A 14-year veteran teacher in Spokane, Archer doesn’t blame middle-school teachers. He blames curriculum developers for “imbedding” grammar in the curriculum.

"in my experience, the term “imbedded” is nothing more than educationalese for “not ever specifically taught.” Somehow, this grammar-is-imbedded movement is supposed to help students naturally take in what proper grammar is (i.e., grammar by osmosis). It’s very much a hyper-constructivist approach to education; the students are supposed to “discover” proper grammar on their own as they read good pieces."

He's right. They don't pick up on the proper forms of grammar, nor do they pick up much of anything that isn't specifically presented and what is, doesn't last.

Maybe I'm an old-school fart but it seems to me that if the students really could do this type of learning by assimilation, they would be miles ahead of where they are now. I do SAT prep classes and the grammar skills are terrible -- except for the kids in Spanish or French III or IV.

I call this the "Foreign Language Paradox." When learning English in an English class, grammar and basic forms are not supposed to be explicitly taught. Literature reigns supreme and some limited essay forms are required. Grammar and proper sentence structure are supposedly understood as 5th graders. Then we are all surprised that no one seems to know them.

In any foreign language class on the other hand, noun and verb declensions, grammar and sentence structure are specifically taught; then drill, drill, drill. Every student learns through actual work and walks out with an understanding of the language and a better understanding of English, too. "I never understood the subjunctive mood until Señor told us." "Past, imperfect, pluperfect - wow! Then, a couple of present tenses and more than one future tense? Damn."

It's not just Latin that builds English skills, although Latin does have power in its rigid simplicity and endless lists and mnemonics. It's specifically teaching grammar to students when they are finally sophisticated enough to really understand and appreciate it in all its nuanced glory.

Hello? Is my curriculum coordinator listening?

Apparently not.

Joanne chimed in with her own anecdote:

On Back to School Night, my daughter’s eighth-grade English teacher told parents she was going to go off curriculum for two weeks to teach grammar and punctuation. She got a standing ovation.

It's not just English, but math as well. Bunches of my students go off to the tech center for a one or two year program and then return. They have me for algebra I and then go to forestry or woodworking or something. Invariably, I hear about the embedded math credit. They are then placed in the next class and have no clue about the missed material. What's worse is that they are in my class for the eleventh grade and thus on my roster for the NECAP tests in November. I think of myself as a good teacher, but that's just not fair to either of us.

Bottom line: No matter how smart, no matter how motivated, all kids need some instruction. Unless you are specifically making things clear, you are allowing kids to construct any old thing, and it's usually flawed.

I'm tired of Twitter and Mindless Slogans.

For me, the basic problem with Twitter is the all-too-common resort to pithy statements that fit the character count but don't make for a coherent conversation.  I don't really care what's been said about the Seattle-San Francisco game; that's not important enough that sound-bites and sloganeering detracts from the conversation.

I'm talking about education reform ... and that is a big problem when discussed on Twitter. Changes to standards-based grading is a big discussion currently, as is standardized testing. These broadsides are fired without really discussing nuance, and for me, nuance is necessary.

You can't standardize learning nor will a standardized test ever be able to report it #abed #edchat #bced #mathchat #onted #ableg
— D Martin (@d_martin05) January 20, 2014

Here's the thing ... that's not an argument. It's a statement unbounded by fact or reason.

There are plenty of situations in which standardized tests are important, mostly in those situations where you have a need to compare against a national standard such as SAT, ACT, AP, IB, A-levels, GRE, Bar Exam, Civil Service, Driver's License, et.al.

DMartin agreed with my sarcastic comment to eliminate all of the above testing with "Yeah all mc parts. I agree!! Great idea!!"

So now we've gone from being anti-testing to being anti-MC, as if MC is somehow flawed.  Again. I have to ask, what leads anyone to think that MC can never be useful?

Why is this such a necessary part of my online life?  (The answer: it isn't.) What part of reasoned and thoughtful commentary includes these random unproven factoids and false dichotomies?

I'll leave with another ...

No cell phones in class b/c they cause distractions well let's remove pencils they cause spelling mistakes 

Instead of Mindless Dichotomy, how about just removing or eliminating the distraction part of the cellphone?

Obsolete in Education - part One

Four years ago, teachpaperless.blogspot.com predicted some things that were going obsolete. I think she's experiencing some edu-psychosis brought on by wishful thinking. As an intellectual exercise and conceit, I figured I'd give updates and responses.

1. Desks
The 21st century does not fit neatly into rows. Neither should your students. Allow the network-based concepts of flow, collaboration, and dynamism help you rearrange your room for authentic 21st century learning.

Yup, desks in rows are the first thing on the list ... I suppose the "factory model" bugaboo has to surface immediately because the students don't need any structure or organization, and the teacher is going to be differentiating the hell out of that room anyway. Putting the desks on wheels so the "teacher doesn't know where to stand" will certainly do something. I'm not sure that it'll be something good, though.

2. Language Labs
Foreign language acquisition is only a smartphone away. Get rid of those clunky desktops and monitors and do something fun with that room.

That's right. Siri will solve your translation problems for you. There's no need for you to learn a new language, kids, the disembodied voice will do all your thinking and learning for you, do all your math for you, remember all your Biology facts for you, read your Shakespeare to you and perform your science experiments. 

3. Computers
Ok, so this is a trick answer. More precisely this one should read: 'Our concept of what a computer is'. Because computing is going mobile and over the next decade we're going to see the full fury of individualized computing via handhelds come to the fore. Can't wait.

Computers may be morphing into tablets and smartphones but that doesn't mean the desktop is going away any time soon. The screen size and keyboard comfort will insure that. Those people who change their primary device for a smartphone weren't using their computer for anything other than a communication device anyway. Those people who gravitate to a Kindle or tablet weren't reading on the computer anyway. Those people who needed a computer for content creation will still need the size and convenience anyway.

4. Homework
The 21st century is a 24/7 environment. And the next decade is going to see the traditional temporal boundaries between home and school disappear. And despite whatever Secretary Duncan might say, we don't need kids to 'go to school' more; we need them to 'learn' more. And this will be done 24/7 and on the move (see #3).

This is an utter crock. The human mind can't actively learn for extended periods of time. Homework (or something that replaces it) is a necessary intermediate learning situation in the full learning process: Listen and see, learn, practice, reinforce, twist, re-use, re-formulate and then master. Students won't suddenly develop the self-motivation to do this if it wasn't present already.

Secondly, I see pushback from the 24/7 model in many things. The cellphone gave us instant connection at all times and people are starting to realize that isn't the best idea - more often "the battery must have died" is the excuse given to cover up the desire to be left alone. Even my teenagers are starting to get the exasperated look when Mother calls in the middle of class - I know, I've looked at the number before they answer. Anyone who uses email knows how it can overwhelm any attempt to get things done. Having a set time and place for learning allows the students to focus on that learning and allow the brain to make the connections necessary. (Assuming that students will learn chemistry at the skatepark is so laughable that I must have misread the bullet point.) Once outside of that place, the brain can have time to process while the student relaxes, plays sports, or simply does something enjoyable or works a job.

There's a time and place for everything, you know.

5. The Role of Standardized Tests in College Admissions
The AP Exam is on its last legs. The SAT isn't far behind. Over the next ten years, we will see Digital Portfolios replace test scores as the #1 factor in college admissions.

Those last legs are looking pretty strong. The reality is that more and more kids are being exploited as guinea pigs: experimental schools and pedagogy, block vs traditional schedules, open classroom vs walls, disciplinarian vs laissez-faire systems, integrated math vs alg-geom-alg-trig, homeschooling and unschooling. The details are enormously different.

Those tests, as annoying and predictable as they might be, do give the colleges a baseline context for the rest of the application. Digital portfolios are not catching on as the sole record of achievement simply because there isn't much to show that the student actually created all of that work without help.

6. Differentiated Instruction as the Sign of a Distinguished Teacher
The 21st century is customizable. In ten years, the teacher who hasn't yet figured out how to use tech to personalize learning will be the teacher out of a job. Differentiation won't make you 'distinguished'; it'll just be a natural part of your work.

I could have sworn that the title of the piece was "Things that were going obsolete". I'm assuming that she wants all students to be in differentiated learning, whether it's appropriate or not. The group classroom isn't going away. Some kids like to feel that everything is specialized for them and they don't mind instantly moving forward to the next topic, but I'll counter with the idea that immediate advancement to the next topic may be the reason some kids have so much trouble. Waiting for the other kid to get it, or helping a friend get it, is valuable. Listening to other kids ask the same question is also valuable.

7. Fear of Wikipedia
Wikipedia is the greatest democratizing force in the world right now. If you are afraid of letting your students peruse it, it's time you get over yourself.

No, Wikipedia has all of the limitations it always had. Crowd-sourcing is only as good as the loudest voices in that crowd.  I would note that the only truly good articles are those written by experts and, for most people, the expert can be defined as "someone who agrees with me". The 19yo kid who happens to be the uber-administrator for a particular page isn't much better than a GeoCities author was.

Copying random paragraphs from Wikipedia is akin to copying the article from the Brittanica, but requiring less of a lazy effort than in the olden days. Teachers don't object to the truth in Wikipedia, they object to the way their students use it.

Why I'm going slow with tech in the classroom.

I'm having trouble with tech in the classroom. It's similar to the complaint expressed a few days ago on DogHouse Diaries about the vast array of digital storage options and the call for simplification. Expand the graphic to see what I mean.

I've found that I have an incredibly diverse set of tools that I can use daily, that the "reformocrats" would like me to be "expert" at using.

• For writing and other communications: blogs and forums, Twitter, Facebook, Edmodo, Google+, Reader, TypeWithMe, and other web stuff,  Word, OpenOffice.
• An ability to make websites: Google Sites is a minimum, but really, I'm supposed to be able to build one from scratch using wordpad or notepad. 
• I've had to become proficient at administering Moodle because the school IT's refuses to set one up. Another teacher and I paid for the site from our dept budgets. We set it up, maintain, enroll students, create classes, train teachers in creating and using.
• I need a Google account so I can make good use of maps, images, drive, gmail and all of the sharing capabilities. Google Drive and all of its quirks and annoyances needs to balance with the harddrive and network folder at school and the computer at home, not to mention the USB stick that I carry. Version control, anyone?
• For worksheets and practice: MS Word 2000 and 2007 (different formats). Text files, HTML pages, Latex.
• For quizzes: MS Word 2000 and 2007 (different formats), Moodle quizzes which need either Latex or some equation editor or equations as images, Google docs which doesn't import equations real well from Word, Socrative, the book's test generator.
• For presentations: Powerpoint, Google Docs, Prezi, SlideRocket.
• Other media: Photoshop, Word Drawing tools, TurboCAD, Audacity, Five different movie editing tools as my OS changed, VideoLan and WMedia and Apple QuickTime.
• Tools such as Excel and other spreadsheets, databases ranging from Access to MySQL, Fathom and other specialized statistics software, not to mention familiarity with WolframAlpha and the formatting language behind it and Mathematica or Maple. Don't forget MatLab and the TI-83/4 and Inspire graphing calculators.
• While we're at it, I should be able to code: Javascript, .php, MySQL, .html, etc. All of the other languages I've learned are obsolete: Basic, Fortran, .asp, TruBasic. 
• The grading software. It was FinalGradePro, then GradeQuick, then Gradequick with Edline, and now it will be Powerschool.
• The SmartBoard.
• I need to be able to train the faculty at my school in most of these technologies because IT doesn't do this. Fortunately, I have several fellow teachers who are as good as I am - we work with each other and then spread out to train. 
• Chromebooks will be handed out to students at some point and we'd better make use of them or the Powers That Be will be pissed at the expense. Did I mention that the only group doing training is that same core group of faculty?
• Did I mention that many of these are programs that my school doesn't install on the faculty computer? I can make CAD drawings at home but have to convert them to show at school, or print at school.  Some of these have been eliminated (Google Reader, delicious, etc.) and others have not had their license renewed (OpenOffice replacing Office for fiscal reasons) or made major format changes.
• Books: I have hardcopy, Kindle format, text files, Google Books, pdf.
• Jeez ... forgot about flipped classes, video, audio, YouTube and TeacherTube and computer support.
  
  
• Oh yeah, I also teach math. I'll have five preps next year, including an online Geometry course that I've never seen before - something the state cooperative bought from Florida Online. 

And that is just scratching at the surface. I'm sure that everyone of you reading this said to yourself at least once, "He forgot about ____. That is so useful."
Remind me again what I'm being paid to do?

I know most of this tech already, but the students don't (with the exception of Facebook and their smartphones) and most of the other teachers are pretty new at everything, too.

My co-teacher falls into this trap a lot: he's real excited about every tool. "You can all use powerpoint but it's not the best. Google presentation isn't very good either. You should use SlideRocket." Other teachers are using Powerpoint with them because the kids all learned that in 7th grade and still others are excited about Prezi because it "engages the students more." That's four different presentation methods - so each student has to learn four different environments ... and that's just for making a presentation. And it assumes that the tool you learn this year will still be around next year and that the para-educators know all four and can help the kids with each one (not for $11/hour).

There are so many options, the whole thing grinds to a halt.

There are so many tools that won't play nicely together.

With "new" comes "Training" and mistakes. Unfortunately, mistakes in education tend to involve confidential data and are usually a big problem. There is so much data being put into Powerschool that doesn't belong in a single-access system. The people setting things up are dumping everything into it with little concern for who "needs" to see which piece of information. All it will take is for a single teacher to be careless with a single password and a whole host of information will be out there in the student body. 

Most importantly, if you want people to learn and explore and experiment, you have to be willing for things to not go well and all we've heard about is how bad our schools are and how much reform is needed. Most of the push for reform involves more and more diverse technology tools that no one can use well in the first place. "If only you all used ____, our scores would go up."

I used to hate Microsoft for its dominance and attitude until I realized that the standardization it fostered made education manageable. You could teach kids how to use a tool quickly and then get on with using the tool to learn.

So, before we ask that teachers be good at everything ... is there a chance that we could standardize this list a bit? Put together a list of the must-haves and hold off on the rest?

Innovative to the Point of Stupid.

Not completely obvious, though.

Innovation is a good thing. It is a constant desire for improvement and change, but it must be tempered with reality. You cannot change for change's sake and you absolutely cannot change if the end result is worse than the current practice.


This would seem obvious.


The problem is that too many people who should know better but are pressured by time and publishing deadlines, fall into the trap and wind up looking stupid. Case in point is this bit (via Red Lines and Highlights) from Lisa Nielson, who calls herself the Innovative Educator, about Teaching Writing:

The unspoken truth about teaching writing in schools is that few people doing so are published writers themselves.

And, we just jumped the shark.

I have said many times that I feel teachers should know what they are teaching, should major in their subject and should be years ahead of their students. I have not said, however, that being a practicing mathematician is essential to being a math teacher, or that only research physicists should be teaching physics.

You need to know your craft, but the craft in question is Teaching.

In fact, most professionals are the last people you want teaching in high school. Sure, Kurt Vonnegut and others have made great college professors, and there are a few who can publish and teach at the same time, but insisting that ALL high school English teachers be published writers is "Perfect getting in the way of Good Enough."

What we need are teachers. Good ones.

What's worse, the message that students get is that in school they don't focus on writing for real. Let's be honest, how often do you read a book in the real world and think, "Oh! I want to write a book report!" How often do we take two texts to analyze and write a paper that we hand into someone. How often do we research something, then write up a research paper for no one?

How often indeed? Well, in order to write that blog post, the innovative educator researched several texts (i.e., read a couple articles), incorporated some other knowledge and put together a short essay. In order to write this, I did as well. I handed it in ... or rather "published it."

It's not a book report - that would be a critical review, and if I look at Amazon.com, I can see thousands of them. Sure, the ones you do in fifth grade are horrible, but that's not the fault of the format. It's because you're dealing with fifth graders and a book they hated.

Professionals in other fields are not professionals in this one; it takes a lot more than skill in a related field to be a teacher.

Why aren't schools helping students write for real? Why aren't those who teach writing, publishing their work and helping their students to write for real audiences?

They are, but The Innovative Educator can't see beyond her smartphone.

"Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it." Education moves pretty fast, too, Ferris. It would be good if everyone paid attention to it.

The problem with boys in school is harder to fix than identify.

Joanne Jacobs has this article on boys' behavior and learning:

Many teachers and school administrators think “boys are too fidgety, too hyperactive, too disruptive, derailing the educational process for everyone while sabotaging their own intellectual development,” Lahey writes.

"Peek into most American classrooms and you will see desks in rows, teachers pleading with students to stay in their seats and refrain from talking to their neighbors. Marks for good behavior are rewarded to the students who are proficient at sitting still for long periods of time. Many boys do not have this skill."

Actually, if you peek into most American K-8 classrooms, what you'll see is a woman ... in our district the female to male ratio for teachers is about 8:1, nearly 15:1 if you include administration, paras and staff. That is skewed by the middle school which happens to be close to 50:50. In the high school, female:male ratio in my building is closer to 6:5. The district-wide faculty assembly at the beginning of the year is when you'll see this most clearly. The room is filled with women, most of whom are identical in their approach.

For another example, try Image Googling "Teacher". What do you get? Lots of elementary schoolteachers - all women. The only men are shown doing more complicated work - probably high school.

Is this a problem? I think so.

If all you ever get is variations on that teacher above, that really sucks. You need some variety, liberal and conservative, old and young, smart and meh, etc. You need someone who will talk you out of the corner and a teacher who will let you keep your own counsel.

I am not in this picture.
I was on a different part of the battlefield.

We all take different approaches to discipline, teaching, classroom bearing. I'm ex-military, 6'2", and I do medieval martial arts and historical arts and sciences for fun, but I'll bring cryptic crosswords and UVM math problems to do at night in the pavilion. I can play nearly every sport we offer at school and have coached many of them. I am dramatically different from many other teachers, male and female, but there are plenty like me ... again, both male and female.

This variety is good. Kids need to see that everything isn't sweetness and light, sit quietly and don't talk. Sometimes, they need some honest truth.

• I don't give points for good behavior, participation, or having a pencil. 
• I don't give a rat's behind about the notebook. 
• I HATE collaborative grades and won't ever, ever, never, absolutely won't drop your grade because your "team member" didn't do his part.
• You must know fractions. The calculator is for work you can't do with a pencil in 60 seconds or less. I don't care. Now is a great time to learn.
• It's 70% tests and quizzes in a pseudo-SBG setup and 30% homework - but I don't grade homework, just count if attempted. For calculus and pre-calc, the ratio skews toward 90:10.
• Challenge me and I'll prove my point or I'll accept that you've proven yours.
• I don't give permission to go to the bathroom. You're 16/17 years old; take the pass and go quietly. One at a time. (Even if you're just getting out of your seat for a walk - that's going to be more of a problem for you than me when the test comes along.)

Sound like anyone you've had as a teacher? Certainly not for all of your teachers.

Some students can't stand how I run things - that's okay, I won't take it personally. Many more switch to my classes if they can, so I'm not in any danger for my job! The point is that it takes both kinds of teacher to adequately do this K-12 education thing and I'm not sure that my type exists in many elementary and middle schools.

Bureaucratic Nonsense impedes Reform

The guide has to know first.

How can you possibly expect improvement if you feel that the following is the proper way to find that person and that the requirements listed will truly be the characteristics and endorsements of someone who is ready to properly and completely look at all possibilities impassionately to discover the best path for the school to follow?

We need to stop looking at bureaucratic wonks.

We need to stop looking at one person to fill 14 different jobs in one small district containing 500 students spread across three elementary schools, a middle school and a high school.  Rather, one person should be found to do the one or three related jobs for several districts at the high school level, another at the elementary level. 

It's time to stop expecting that one person can be qualified to fill all these positions ... because I've never seen one person who could.

Methinks this will get an administrator with no practical knowledge and a lot of flimsy paperwork, but I repeat myself:

The Montpelier Board of School Commissioners is seeking a Director of Curriculum, Instruction, Assessment, and Technology. Qualified candidates will provide evidence of successful teaching and leadership experience with grades PreK-12. Candidates must demonstrate extensive knowledge of best and next practices in the areas of curriculum development and Common Core alignment, standards-based instruction and assessment, data analysis and reporting, and district leadership in effective use of technology integration as well as the development of a 1:1 computing environment.

Additional responsibilities include oversight of the Consolidated Federal Grant, district-wide professional development, integration of Service Learning, pre-school programs, ELL, teacher mentoring, the district leadership team, and provide supervision and evaluation support when needed.

The Director of Curriculum, Instruction, Assessment, and Technology will be accountable to the Superintendent of Schools. Candidates must be endorsed, or eligible for endorsement as a Principal in the State of Vermont.

The Daily Schedule again

The bastard.

Let's ask some rhetorical questions about the nature of school ... and jump to an amazingly random solution. Actually, I'll let someone else do it.

Shawn Cornally thinks we should get rid of class schedules and let the kids figure it all out. After achieving some success with SBG and assuming that he's got all the answers, Cornally takes the mental leap: maybe the reason kids are cheating, lying, "clamoring for meaningless grades and inflated As" is because the school day is scheduled. Throw in "herd mentality" and "cryptically planned lesson", ask a bunch of rhetorical questions masquerading as reasonable thoughts, and suddenly you've got a blog post.

I'll start with grades. Read more of Cornally's work (ThinkThankThunk -Dealing with the fear of being a boring teacher) and you see that he has a much better argument for SBG as a cure for grade-grubbing and for improving learning. I personally think it's more about how you grade and interact with your students than what form the grades take, but that's not what we're dealing with here.

Here we're discussing whether the daily schedule itself is the cause.

Now, I've been around a long time and I've attended and taught at both public and private, small and large, 8x40minute or 4x90 minute, strict or relaxed (not quite Ode to Billy Jack  but close) and I've dealt with students from all walks of academic life from hippy home-schooled and unschooled to public schools to the private-schooled ultra-rich.

The schedule isn't the problem and it's not what causes angsty students. I've seen too many schools in which this no-schedule proposal has been tried and has badly failed the students in the long run.

"How can we expect them to connect Hemingway, vectors, pottery, cells, and ancient Greece every day? It’s a disjointed nightmare—to which you might say, "deal with it, that’s school." But what I see in my students is that "dealing with it" results in a lot of material crammed for a test and then forgotten."

"They need to see that you can't always get the right answers from the back of a book. How many times were you allowed to mess up a chemistry lab in high school? Most likely you were graded on how well you reproduced a set of instructions the first time you tried it. That’s not how anyone really learns. Students need to know that things go wrong, and they need to be comfortable—dare I say happy—with failing and retrying."

Interesting strawman argument. Fallacious, but interesting. How can he expect me to connect having a schedule with test cramming? What causal link exists here? Further, the balancing of "learning to follow instructions" and "allowing students to mess up" has what possible link other than coincidental with the fact that you have those students for 90 minutes a day?

Cornally then asks a few questions that I'd like to answer:

What if we removed the passive course-to-course drudgery of the school day? What if there was no schedule? What if students were left with a list of coyly worded benchmarks targeted at creating quality humans, and we just waited to see what they could do? What if teachers were seen as mentors for projects designed to help students meet those benchmarks? What if the students initiated these projects and the teachers spent their time recording TED-style talks that would serve as inspiration and help students generate benchmark-related ideas?

What if, indeed. Well, the school would quickly grind to a halt for one thing. What reformers forget is that students, by and large, are not focused on education in the way education "experts" are. What works for a small subset of the population will not work for the greater portion. Additionally, if you let the students choose from too big a list, you'll give them too many choices and they mentally freeze, doing nothing. Students need structure. Not a prison but not a free-for-all either. Where you draw the lines depends on their age/maturity level.

I've made my choice for today.

"Passive course-to-course drudgery" is his interpretation.  As a math teacher, I would love to focus on one thing for an entire day, but few of my students will nor is it optimal as the basis for learning new things.

"A change of work is the best rest."

Students  have other interests, too; math is important and interesting and satisfying (and therefore fun) but not in large doses. If you eliminate the different courses, you and they will quickly run out of energy.

Leaving a list of "coyly worded benchmarks targeted at creating quality humans" would insult any students who thought about it, irritate the hell out of the rest. Students are smart enough to know when they are being patronized. They'll rebel out of irritation.

What if students "initiated these projects and ... teachers were seen as mentors ... serve as inspiration and help students generate ideas"? This pie-in-the-sky mental diarrhea is the worst of the bunch. First, only a few will initiate anything. The rest won't or will tag along hanging to the coat-tails of others at best, or actively sabotage at worst. Students, by definition, are at the stage in their lives where they are making some good choices and many bad ones. It's why they can't drink, smoke, drive without an adult, rent, get married, have sex with a thirty-year-old, join the military.  Some things they can do only with parental permission or supervision. So many forbidden or limited things ... why? Because they are not adults yet, partially because their parents and society doesn't want to let go yet. If a teacher wants to let the students decide everything, then he needs to switch out of public schools and into a private school that specifically allows for it and whose parents specifically asked (and paid) for it .. and even then, there are limits and limitations on what that education really accomplishes.

TED - Inspirational and Truthy
Not Always at the Same Time.

My favorite, though, is "What if the teachers spent their time recording TED-style talks that would serve as inspiration and help students generate benchmark-related ideas?" I love it. First, most teachers are paid to teach. Separating me from the classroom and putting me in a Khan Academy closet to make videos isn't going to make me a TED-quality superstar, isn't going to make the parents, administration or the school board particularly happy, and isn't going to do much for my students. Second, the average teacher is, well, average; hardly inspiring and certainly doesn't have all that much to say beyond the next chapter in the book.  Third, what happens the next year when those videos are already finished? Do I get to sit back and let the previous year's videos do the inspiring while I drink coffee and read omg.com?

Most important, the whole "online video will solve the educational crisis and restore Peace, Love, Justice, and the American Way by inspiring students to do everything we want them to do instead of by forcing them" ignores the obstinate fact that students only tolerate online education when a real class isn't available ... and making a bunch of videos to replace your lectures isn't really all that interesting to your students. If that were the best way to go, YouTube would have already taught them everything they needed by age 13. There are thousands of better videos than mine out there. Thousands are better than Cornally's, too.

Instead, I will go back to my classroom tomorrow, where my students are slated for yet another period of biology. Once a day for 90 days—evidently that’s the prescription for understanding biology. How can we possibly know that’s enough for them to learn biology or any other subject? I’ll be trying a few experiments aimed at giving my students the curriculum and the freedom to generate projects that are asynchronous but productive.

And that, frankly, is what Cornally should do. He should go back to class and do his best. He should avoid giving meaningless, boring assignments to students, refuse to give credit for "organizing her binder in government class", make it possible for them to get inspired by a TED-style video or participate in a blended classroom. By all means, he should use whatever grading system makes the most sense for him, build his course along "authentic" projects (as opposed to what so many of us apparently do ... "fake" or "imitation" projects) and promote project-based learning if that works for him.

How do we know that's enough for them to learn Biology? I've talked about that. (In response to another Cornally post, no less.) The simple answer is that the course filled the time available rather than the other way around. When the science teachers in a neighboring school found they couldn't teach enough of what they thought Physical Science should be, they simply made two courses out of it. At another friend's school, the math department found that they didn't have time for everything they wanted in Pre-Calculus, they separated trig out to a half-credit course.

But as long as we keep the current way classes are scheduled, we will continue claiming that we just don’t have time for learning.

You can claim that.  I certainly won't.