Grant Wiggins responds to my take on his open letter to Diane Ravitch

This was written by Grant Wiggins and is a response to my response to Grant's open letter to Diane Ravitch. You can find Grant's open letter here and my response here. 

by Grant Wiggins

Thanks for your considered reply to my post. I am delighted that people have responded so thoughtfully to it, which was the main point: thoughtful dialogue.

The entire focus of my piece was the pressing need for school change and that it is in our control. To turn it around and say that I think poverty is not in our control is not really what I was driving at. Growing inequality is a terrible problem; poverty is a blight on society. But to say that educators should focus directly on it instead of what they can do to make schools better immediately is kicking the can down the road. It makes a nice excuse for keeping schools as they are.

The best thing we can do as educators to eliminate poverty is to improve education, as all the data show. That's where I think you are misrepresenting my ideas somewhat. I am a progressive democrat, having never voted republican in my life. But like President Obama and the New York Times - hardly conservatives - I am calling for serious reform of what is in our control: how teachers teach and how schools are run. What I greatly resent is having you or Diane or anyone else lump all of us reformers in one bunch as anti-teacher, anti-social welfare, anti-public-education. I am none of those things, and I think my record of 30 years of trying to improve public education shows it.

I think Diane is hurting, not helping, the process by such crude categorization and harsh polemics. I agree with her fears; I strongly disagree with her tactics. And I must say, I disagree with your last sentence. I don't see much of a clear, explicit, and comprehensive reform plan from Diane. Her focus is almost totally on how to save schools from greedy and mean-spirited privatizers. And if my email is any barometer a lot of people agree with me.

Thanks for the dialogue, as always.

You may print this if you wish.

Cheers, Grant

My response to Grant Wiggins and his open letter to Diane Ravitch (and like minded educators)

Grant Wiggins wrote an open letter to Diane Ravitch titled Is significant school reform needed or not?: an open letter to Diane Ravitch (and like minded educators).

Wiggins takes issue with Ravitch's stance against privatization and poverty because he thinks she is avoiding "the elephant in the room" which is "to what extent today's teachers are doing an adequate job." Wiggins goes on to make the argument that "merely undoing harmful privatization is thus nowhere near sufficient to make schools serve our students properly." Wiggins punches home the point that, "we face a complete lack of quality control in teaching in most schools, in most districts. Unlike poverty, this is in our control as educators."

Is there common ground?

Even though I am a staunch supporter of Public Education, I am very aware of the problems that plague traditional schooling. I believe that school needs to look a lot less like school.

Like Wiggins, I am very critical of traditional-formal education that makes school something done to children while they play a passive role, and compliance and obedience are the gold-standard. Like Wiggins, I object to the idea that if a child can sit quietly through a morning's worth of lecture followed up with an afternoon of filling in worksheets, then students are receiving a good education and teachers are doing their jobs.

Which kind of school do you want for your child?
Which kind of school is good enough for other
people's children?

For too many people, the game of school sounds all too familiar. It's like the learners and teachers exchange winks that say: I will pretend to teach and you will pretend to learn; it won't be all that enjoyable, but it will be easy.

While I agree that undoing privatization is not sufficient in improving our schools, it is necessary.

Where do we differ?

After I read Grant's open letter, I tweeted him:

If Wiggins believes that Ravitch's fight against privatization is distracting us from improving school, might it be said that Wiggins' fight to improve schools is blinding us from the dangers of privatization and poverty?

No where in Wiggins' open letter does he address privatization -- instead he focuses with laser like proficiency on teacher quality. (For the record, the book I co-edited on De-Testing and De-Grading Schools is strong evidence that I agree with some of what Wiggins writes about.)

I'm the first to criticize elements of traditional schooling but you don't fix public education by destroying it, abandoning it or throwing it to the free market.

Wiggins wants teachers to focus less on things he perceives as out of our control (poverty and privatization) and more on things that are in our control (teacher quality). But who benefits from encouraging teachers to see poverty and privatization as things outside of their locus of control? Do we really want one of public education's greatest advocates, teachers, to see poverty and privatization as none of their business or a distraction to be avoided?

It's important not to talk ourselves into believing that poverty and privatization are out of our control. Poverty and privatization are no more or less out of our control than teacher quality. Inequality is a choice and our social policy choices have an indelible mark on our school's successes and failures. (I consider addressing inequality and poverty more like the civil rights issue of the 60s than choice)

The good news is that we don't need to choose between addressing poverty, reversing privatization and improving our schools, and I think this is why Diane Ravitch's most recent work is so important. She's helping us understand that we must stop going in the wrong direction before we can go in the right direction.

I see Diane Ravitch as someone leading the charge on all three fronts: address poverty, reverse privatization and improve our schools.

Data-Driven Improvement and Accountability

This was written by Andy Hargreaves and Henry Braun. This is the executive summary for a new policy brief released yesterday by National Education Policy Center at the University of Colorodo at Boulder that examines the linkage between data-driven improvement and accountability in education. You can find the entire brief here. You can read about the brief on Valerie Strauss's blog The Answer Sheet here. Andy Hargreaves tweets here.

by Andy Hargreaves and Henry Braun

The drive to enhance learning outcomes has assumed increasing salience over the last three decades. These outcomes include both high levels of tested achievement for all students and eliminating gaps in achievement among different sub-populations (raising the bar and closing the gap). This policy brief examines policies and practices concerning the use of data to inform school improvement strategies and to provide information for accountability. We term this twin-pronged movement, data-driven improvement and accountability (DDIA).

Although educational accountability is meant to contribute to improvement, there are often tensions and sometimes direct conflicts between the twin purposes of improvement and accountability. These are most likely to be resolved when there is collaborative involvement in data collection and analysis, collective responsibility for improvement, and a consensus that the indicators and metrics involved in DDIA are accurate, meaningful, fair, broad and balanced. When these conditions are absent, improvement efforts and outcomes-based accountability can work at cross-purposes, resulting in distraction from core purposes, gaming of the system and even outright corruption and cheating. This is particularly the case when test-based accountability mandates punitive consequences for failing to meet numerical targets that have been determined arbitrarily and imposed hierarchically.

Data that are timely and useful in terms of providing feedback that enables teachers, schools and systems to act and intervene to raise performance or remedy problems are essential to enhancing teaching effectiveness and to addressing systemic improvement at all levels. At the same time, the demands of public accountability require transparency with respect to operations and outcomes, and this calls for data that are relevant, accurate and accessible to public interpretation. Data that are not relevant skew the focus of accountability. Data that are inaccurate undermine the credibility of accountability. And data that are incomprehensible betray the intent of public accountability. Good data and good practices of data use not only are essential to ensuring improvement in the face of accountability, but also are integral to the pursuit of constructive accountability.

Data-driven improvement and accountability can lead either to greater quality, equity and integrity, or to deterioration of services and distraction from core purposes. The question addressed by this brief is what factors and forces can lead DDIA to generate more positive and fewer negative outcomes in relation to both improvement and accountability.

The challenge of productively combining improvement and accountability is not confined to public education. It arises in many other sectors too. This brief reviews evidence and provides illustrative examples of data use in business and sports in order to compare practices in these sectors with data use in public education. The brief discusses research and findings related to DDIA in education within and beyond the United States, and makes particular reference to our own recent study of a system-wide educational reform strategy in the province of Ontario, Canada.

Drawing on these reviews of existing research and illustrative examples across sectors, the
brief then examines five key factors that influence the success or failure of DDIA systems
in public education:

1.The nature and scope of the data employed by the improvement and accountability systems, as well as the relationships and interactions among them;  

2. The types of indicators (summary statistics) used to track progress or to make comparisons among schools and districts;  

3. The interactions between the improvement and accountability systems;

4. The kinds of consequences attached to high and low performance and how those consequences are distributed;

5. The culture and context of data use -- the ways in which data are collected,
interpreted and acted upon by communities of educators, as well as by those who
direct or regulate their work. 

In general, we find that over more than two decades, through accumulating statewide initiatives in DDIA and then in the successive Federal initiatives of the No Child Left Behind Act and Race to the Top, DDIA in the U.S. has come to exert increasingly adverse effects on public education, because high-stakes and high-threat accountability, rather than improvement alone, or improvement and accountability together, have become the prime drivers of educational change. This, in turn, has exerted adverse and perverse effects on attempts to secure improvement in educational quality and equity. The result is that, in the U.S., Data-Driven Improvement and Accountability has often turned out to be Data Driven Accountability at the cost of authentic and sustainable improvement. 

Contrary to the practices of countries with high performance on international assessments, and of high performing organizations in business and sports, DDIA in the U.S. has been skewed towards accountability over improvement. Targets, indicators, and metrics have been narrow rather than broad, inaccurately defined and problematically applied. Test score data have been collected and reported over too short timescales that make them unreliable for purposes of accountability, or reported long after the student populations to which they apply have moved on, so that they have little or no direct value for improvement purposes. DDIA in the U.S. has focused on what is easily measured rather than on what is educationally valued. It holds schools and districts accountability for effective delivery of results, but without holding system leaders accountable for providing the resources and conditions that are necessary to secure those results.

In the U.S., the high-stakes, high-pressure environment of educational accountability, in which arbitrary numerical targets are hierarchically imposed, has led to extensive gaming and continuing disruptions of the system, with unacceptable consequences for the learning and achievement of the most disadvantaged students. These perverse consequences include loss of learning time by repeatedly teaching to the test; narrowing of the curriculum to that which is easily tested; concentrating undue attention on “bubble” students near the threshold target of required achievement at the expense of high-needs students whose current performance falls further below the threshold; constant rotation of principals and teachers in and out of schools where students’ lives already have high instability; and criminally culpable cheating.

Lastly, when accountability is prioritized over improvement, DDIA neither helps educators make better pedagogical judgments nor enhances educators’ knowledge of and relationships with their students. Instead of being informed by the evidence, educators become driven to distraction by narrowly defined data that compel them to analyze grids, dashboards, and spreadsheets in order to bring about short-term improvements in results. 

The brief concludes with twelve recommendations for establishing more effective systems and processes of Data-Driven or Evidence-Informed Improvement and Accountability:

1. Measure what is valued instead of valuing only what can easily be measured, so
that the educational purposes of schools do not drift or become distorted.

2. Create a balanced scorecard of metrics and indicators that captures the full range
of what the school or school system values.

3. Articulate and integrate the components of the DDIA system both internally and externally, so that improvements and accountability work together and not at cross-purposes.
4. Insist on high quality data that are valid and accurate.

5. Test prudently, not profligately, like the highest performing countries and systems,
rather than testing almost every student, on almost everything, every year.  

6. Establish improvement cultures of high expectations and high support, where
educators receive the support they need to improve student achievement, and
where enhancing professional practice is a high priority.  

7. Move from thresholds to growth, so that indicators focus on improvements that
have or have not been achieved in relation to agreed starting points or baselines.
8. Narrow the gap to raise the bar, since raising the floor of achievement through
concentrating on equity, makes it easier to reach and then lift the bar of
achievement over time.  

9. Assign shared decision-making authority, as well as responsibility for
implementation, to strong professional learning communities in which all
members share collective responsibility for all students’ achievement and bring to
bear shared knowledge of their students, as well all the relevant statistical data on
their students’ performance.  

10. Establish systems of reciprocal vertical accountability, so there is transparency in
determining whether a system has provided sufficient resources and supports to
enable educators in districts and schools to deliver what is formally expected of
them.  

11. Be the drivers, not the driven, so that statistical and other kinds of formal evidence
complement and inform educators’ knowledge and wisdom concerning their
students and their own professional practice, rather than undermining or replacing
that judgment and knowledge.  

12. Create a set of guiding and binding national standards for DDIA that encompass
content standards for accuracy, reliability, stability and validity of DDIA
instruments, especially standardized tests in relation to system learning goals;
process standards for the leadership and conduct of professional learning
communities and data teams and for the management of consequences; and context
standards regarding entitlements to adequate training, resources and time to
participate effectively in DDIA.

I'm featured in The Walrus Magazine

Illustration by Genevieve Simms

I am featured in November's issue of The Walrus Magazine. The article was written by Zander Sherman and it is titled Standard Issues: An Alberta teacher wants to liberate our schools from the educrats. 

I had the good fortune of meeting with Zander and am humbled that he chose me to be featured in this article. Zander is one hell-of-a-storyteller and I think he told my story very well. I'm particularly happy with how he was able to weave my mom into the conclusion of the article.

If you've read the article, I would love to hear your thoughts. Please consider leaving a comment. 

Jeff Johnson is confusing innovation with privatization

On Alberta Prime Time, Alberta's Education Minister Jeff Johnson was asked to respond to the Parkland Institutes recent research on for-profit Cyber Charter Schools in K-12 education:

"One of the reasons Alberta has one of the best education systems in the world is that there is a choice of different types of schools and programs in which students can enroll... I'm open to options that create excellent learning opportunities for our kids."

As a parent, teacher and Albertan, I object to Johnson's response in four ways:

1. This is not a thoughtful response at all -- this is a shrug. This is indifference towards privatizing public education. Albertans should be immensely proud of our world-class public education system -- simultaneously, Albertans should be appalled when our elected officials consider for-profit, private schools as a way of improving our education system. I've written a post here about why Cyber Charter schools are such a bad idea. It's one thing to suggest that students should be encouraged to become entrepreneurial but it is quite another to unleash entrepreneurs to profit off of children and public education. To be clear, this is not about pedagogy -- it's about privatizing public education which is ultimately wrong.

2. I am in my fourth year of teaching in a children's inpatient psychiatric assessment unit in a hospital. I work with children that present with a variety of different mental health problems -- while some do well in school, many do not. I fear that too many of these children may be seen as candidates for cyber school. Too many of the children I work with already isolate themselves and cyber schools double-down on an already failed strategy.

3. While it may seem counterintuitive to suggest that choice via privatization undermines education equity and excellence, this is precisely what the research has been showing us. The assault on public education is not just an agenda pursued by Americans; Alberta would be wise to see American education reform and privatization as a cautionary tale and a model for how not to improve our schools. Johnson's use of school choice reflects a neo-liberal agenda that confuses public education as a private interest -- when in reality it is a public good. For a brilliant take down of the hoax of the privatization movement and the danger to our public schools, check out Diane Ravitch's latest book Reign of Error where she has an entire chapter on the folly of cyber schools.

4. Being open-minded is one thing but Johnson's response is growing old and tired. Every time someone asks him about a potential idea in education, regardless of its quality, he fires back with this hollow political boilerplate. Inspiring Education is a wonderful initiative that Johnson's predecessor Dave Hancock had the foresight and wisdom to start. However, Inspiring Education is not a blank cheque for the Alberta Government to do whatever they want.  Phil McRae from the Alberta Teachers' Association may have said it best on Alberta Prime Time, "What Albertans should be concerned about when I hear [Jeff Johnson's statement] is that when the minister speaks about innovation, he is actually speaking about privatization. These corporations exist essentially to extract a profit."

Inspiring Education was never about privatizing public education, so it's time for the Alberta Education and Jeff Johnson to stop confusing innovation with privatization.

Election Day: Vote for Milt Williams

If you live in Red Deer and you are eligible to vote, I encourage you to vote for Milt Williams for Red Deer Public School Board.

Milt is fresh off of retiring from teaching just last year after teaching for 24 years in Red Deer Public. I had the pleasure of working with him for some of those years. 

If trustees are to make good decisions about schools, they need to have some experience in schools. Milt has the experience and the wisdom to be an excellent trustee. Milt tweets here and blogs here. 

I was proud to help Milt out during his election, and wish him all the best.

Please get out and vote.