Pioneers, Settlers & CAVE people

A few years ago I had the pleasure of talking with Ruth Sutton - a saucy English woman who was contracted by my school district to develop sustainable change.

During my visit with her, I expressed my frustration with how long change was taking at my school, and so she sat me down and shared a story with me.

She explained that there are three kinds of people in this world:

First, there are the pioneers. They are the people who are willing to give anything a go. They're willing to go out into the wilderness and explore the new world. They're comfortable with the risks that come with such adventures.

Second, there are settlers. They are willing to go out and about but not before they know what is waiting for them. They need to see a map that outlines the path that will be taken and the blue prints that shows there is infrastructure awaiting them.

And then there are CAVE people.

This is an acronym for Citizens Against Virtually Everything. For these people, 'no' is the default for anything and everything.

In the end, we need pioneers so that we are always improving. Change is always and pioneers help us to ensure the settlers don't become overly complacent.

We also need settlers who are appropriately hesitant when working with pioneers - sometimes pioneers want to go places that we shouldn't go, and the settlers provide that sober second thought.

Unfortunately for CAVE people, we just don't need you. So you'll either be shamed into coming along or risk being left behind.

After Ruth was done sharing her anecdote with me, I realized that she was right. Even though I am an impatient pioneer, I know that without the diligent work of the settlers, the CAVE people might sabotage the hasty work of us pioneers and then claim that change was attempted and
proven to be a failure - thus making change that happens too fast quite counter-productive.

And so I have become far more patient when it comes to change, because I'm not willing to trade sustainability for expediency.

Standardized Testing is Dumbing Down our Schools

Provincial Achievement Tests are inherently flawed in many ways. These tests measure only a small portion of what teachers are required to teach and what students are expected to learn. For example, did you know that of the 200 leaner outcomes in grade 9 science, only 63 (32%) can be assessed? Because these exams are almost exclusively multiple-choice, their scope is severely limited.

A major limitation with the Alberta government’s accountability system is the narrow focus on a few academic subjects. And within those few academic subjects, such as math and language arts, the standardized tests measure an equally narrow number of outcomes. Alberta has come to believe that a good education system can be made better by simply testing more. The budget of the Learner Assessment Branch that administers Provincial Achievement Tests has tripled from $4 million to $12 million since the mid 1980s. Over the same period the budget of the Curriculum Branch, which designs and implements the entire Alberta K–12 ¬curriculum, has remained static at $4 ¬million. Alberta leads all other Canadian provinces in the frequency and intensity of government testing programs. Yet despite the millions of dollars pumped into its data collection, there is no evidence that these efforts actually help students. And so the millions of dollars used to develop, mark and report the tests is money that would be better spent on student learning in classrooms.

Using Provincial Achievement Test scores to judge a school’s quality equates to a kind of educational malpractice. Research has shown that up to 70% of the variation in student learning is not attributable to school factors but to student, family and community characteristics. This means that too many tests are reporting on what children bring to school and not necessarily what they learn at school.

Many people aren’t aware how standardized test questions are chosen. If every teacher could get every student to answer a question correctly, that question would be removed from next year’s exam. It would be replaced with a question that test-makers would hope roughly half would get right and half would get wrong. The better job teachers do to teach their students those important skills and knowledge, the less likely there will be a question on the exam to measure that skill or knowledge.

It is important to have diagnostic tools to assess our schools; however, using Provincial Achievement Tests to diagnose the learning in our schools is like using a tablespoon to measure someone’s temperature.

Attitude

The word attitude gets thrown around a lot. Parents and teachers alike use this word on kids all the time. A teacher might include attitude as a component for their report card or a parent might inform their son or daughter to lose the attitude.

But if we were to ask each other to define attitude, we would be hard pressed to find a consensus.

I've heard some define attitude as a kind of pseudo respect that really equates to a kind of 'do-as-your-told compliance'. Or some may define it as a kind of work ethic.

This is scary - seeing as we tend to place so much importance on attitude and yet the adults can't even figure out what it means. How the heck are the kids suppose to get it if we don't?

I can't remember where I read this but here is my favorite definition of attitude:

The most important attitude that can be formed is that of a desire to go on learning.

It's amazing how distracted we can become. We forget the whole reason for sending our kids to school.

No matter what we do as parents and teachers, we must never sabotage our efforts to teach children to learn for the love of learning.

High Stake Testing's Kryptonite

The effects of high-stakes testing should not come as a surprise to us. That some very good teachers feel the pressure to cheat for their students in a kind of Robin Hood act to save their children and their school from undue harm should make sense. With the proper pressure, even very good people can be forced into doing 'bad' things.


A well-known (but not well-known enough) social-science law called Campbell's Law helps to explain why high-stakes testing will NEVER work the way it was intended. David Berliner and Sharon Nichols explain Campbell's Law in their book Collateral Damage: How High Stakes Testing Corrupts America's Schools.

Campbell's law stipulates that "the more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it was intended to monitor. Campbell warned us of the inevitable problems associated with undue eight and emphasis on a single indicator for monitoring complex social phenomena. In effect, he warned us about the high-stakes testing program that is part and parcel of No Child Left Behind.

Campbell's Law should disturb anyone who uses data to make decisions. If the stakeholders responsible for caring through with the day to day doing that the data measures feel like their work is attached to a high stakes indicator, they will work to corrupt the validity and reliability of the measurement.

Berliner and Nichols summarize:

Apparently, you can have (a) higher stakes and less certainty about the validity of assessment or (b) lower stakes and greater certainty about validity. But you are not likely to have both high stakes and high validity. Uncertainty about the meaning of test scores increases as the stakes attached to them become more severe.

The high stakes reward-punishment nature of today's testing regime has contributed to its own demise. Everytime someone places more emphasis on testing, the more likely the results gathered will be comprimised - making the data less valid and any decisions based on that data less reliable.

This is a complicated idea with huge implications for policy makers. We can't afford to ignore this law anymore.

No matter how valid or reliable we think certain data is, if high-stakes reward-punishment consequences are to follow the data, then that data becomes more and more invalid and unreliable.

Controlling Teachers

How did you interpret the title of this blog post?

Did you see it as teachers who are controlling or that someone is controlling teachers? or both?

As a teacher, I truly value my autonomy. I am fortunate to not have anyone standing over me saying that I have to do the exact same lessons as someone else. I don't have anyone knocking on my door if my test scores are low, and I don't have someone prescribing for me standardized tests that I must use to measure my students' learning.

Some of this is possible because I teach a grade level that happens to not have a Provincial Achievement Test at the end of the year, but some of my autonomy is becoming endangered. There is currently a movement in my district where common exams are being enforced.

If I appreciate my autonomy, don't I have to appreciate the importance of students' autonomy? But how many teachers prove to be hypocrits on this issue? How many teachers demand their own autonomy and expect to be trusted to do their job well, but turn around and teach in a controlling way that provides students with little to no autonomy. I'm talking about sitting in desks that are in rows, facing the front while reading the textbook and completing teacher dictated assignments. I'm talking about curriculums that provide teachers and students with little to no time to learn about things of their choosing and force students to show their learning on tests that they had no input on producing.

Controlling will gain compliance while autonomy will produce engagement. Teachers and students alike need autonomy to learn.

Economics of poor education

The Education Equality Project's Fast Facts reports that the class of 2008 high school dropouts will cost the United States almost $319 billion in lost wages over their lifetimes.

Whether you lobby for progressive educational change for financial or philosophical reasons is a moot point because either way, there is sufficient information to prove that we are suffering under our current high-stakes testing accountability regime.

Stop the testing. Stop the punitive damages. Stop the standards. Stop the suffering.

Museum of Education

When museum curators of the future assemble an exhibit on American schooling in the twentieth century, they'll have many artifacts to choose from - chunky textbooks, dusty blackboards, one-piece injection-moldied desks with waraparound writing surfaces. But one item deserves special consideration. I recommend that in the center of the exhibition, enclosed in a sparkling glass case, the curators display a well sharpened No.2 pencil.

When Dan Pink wrote this in his book A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future, I enjoyed the thought of what parts of school will become (if they haven't already) become obsolete and archaic.

My addition to this Museum would be:

GRADES

Here are some reasons why grades should be abolished. Each is a different article by Alfie Kohn:

• grades can only really be experienced as a reward or a punishment
• grades provide little to no information for students to use in order to actually improve
• grades distract everyone from our true objective: learning
• grades encourage competition rather than collaboration
• grades encourage students to regard learning as a chore
• grades discourage risk-taking
• grades encourage students to think less deeply
• grades encourage students to fall apart when they fail
• grades encourage students to focus on their ability rather than their effort
• grades encourage students to cheat
• grades encourage teachers to cheat
• grades are a poor predictor of the future
• grades encourage ranking and sorting rather than instruction and improvement

In 1976, Paul Dressel wrote a brilliant summary of what a grade actually means:

A mark or grade is an inadequate report of an inaccurate judgment by a biased and variable judge of the extent to which a student has attained an indefinite amount of material.

In my classroom, students only ever recieve a grade on the report card. For the rest of the year, my students only ever receive formative feedback that is either written or spoken.

When I share this with people, I inevitably get asked the question "If you don't give grades, how do you come up with a report card grade?"

For this I have three answers.

• My students collect the evidence of their learning in their paper an electronic portfolios. The paper one is nothing fancy - just a file folder and the electronic one takes the form of a discussion forum that I created using www.freeforums.org, or a class Ning at www.ning.com or class wiki at www.wikispaces.com.

• I am a professional. I spend 2 hours a day (or more) with each of my students for 10 months of the year. I get to know them quite well, so my professional judgement and intuitive thinking count for a lot - and have proven to be quite accurate (there is a wealth of evidence to support that teachers assessment of their students may be the most accurate form of assessment we can depend on)

• I ask the students to self-assess. It is amazing how close they come to picking the same grade that I would pick. Interestingly enough, when there is disagreement between me and them, they are usually too hard on themselves - and the odd time a kid over-inflates their grade, I either to decide to let it go or have I have a conversation with the student and make the adjustment.

For more on the abolishment of grades take a look at some of Alfie Kohn's books:

The Schools Our Children Deserve

Punshed by Rewards

For more on abolishing grading, check out this page.

To learn more about teachers who have or are abolishing grading, see the Grading Moratorium.

Bastardized Accountability

This is an excerpt from Collateral Damage: How Hight Stakes Testing Corrupts America's Schools by Sharon Nichols and David Berliner

A dedicated eigth-grade math teacher we know told us that in one year he went from being a celebrated, successful teacher, to being required to attend "remedial" teaching workshops. We asked, "What happened?" In the first year, he said, he taught students who were relatively motivated and interested in the subject. Although these students struggled throughtout the year to grasp the mathematics he was teaching, their motivation and his teaching efforts resulted in significant learning, as reflected in his students' "acceptable" test score performance. The teacher was asked to lead workshops to share his techniques with less successful colleagues. The very next year, however, he saw an influx of students with speacial learning needs or for whom English was a second language. Still, he went to work doing everything he knew how to do - employing the same tactics that made him a "success" the previous year. He made more home visits than he ever had before and stayed after school to tutor as many students as possible - all without extra support. In the end, all that mattered were the test scores. The principal, seeing practice test scores that were consistently low throughout the fall and early spring terms, actually asked the teacher to attend the same workshops he once taught so he could "improve" his teaching.

"How can we recognize good teaching and work to improve it," the teacher asked us, "in an atmosphere of such confusion?"

When I hear politicans who are not directly involved in the education of our children speak about accountabiliy, I think of stories like this.

More times than not, this is the kind of crap that is a result of today's top-down, high-stake, reward and punish brand of accountability.

Standards and Standardization

I had the good fortune of listening to Sir Ken Robinson speak in Calgary, Alberta. He said many many inspiring things that evening including something to this effect:

"There is nothing wrong with having high standards, but who said that having high standards means everyone has to do the same thing. Having high standards and standardization are not the same."

So if we don't have to standardize in an effort to provide high standards for our children's education, then why is there so much standardization? Alfie Kohn writes about cui bono in his book Punished by Rewards. Cui bono meaning: who benefits?

Standardization rarely is in the best interest of student learning. Instead, standardization most benefits those who wish to collect data that can be analyzed and compared - allowing teachers, students and schools to be 'properly' ranked and sorted.

It's about ranking rather than rating.

I propose that we liberate our children's learning from their standardized prison cells. Personally, the best thing I ever did in order to liberate my students was to abolish grades. Without grades, I no longer felt like every student had to do the same assignment or same test. I didn't need 'data' that was quantifiable nor did I need to compare one student to another.