In the real world, we wouldn't judge a teacher by their students' test scores

My family has farmed for over 100 years in the Red Deer, Alberta, area. I'm the first teacher in my farming family, and I'm in my 15th year of teaching.

Here's a post I wrote about the effects of poverty on learning with a farming metaphor.

Teachers who are proud of their high scores and ashamed of their poor scores are a part of the problem. Here's my article on Telling Time with a Broken Clock: the trouble with standardized tests.

The problem with tests that are not standardized

This was written by Alfie Kohn who writes and speaks on parenting and education. Kohn tweets here and his website is here. This post was originally found here.

by Alfie Kohn

I’m baffled by the number of educators who are adamantly opposed to standardized testing yet raise no objection to other practices that share important features with such testing.

For starters, consider those lists of specific, prescriptive curriculum standards to which the tests are yoked. Here we find the same top-down control and one-size-fits-all mentality that animate standardized testing. Yet from the early days of the “accountability” movement right down to current efforts to impose the Gates-funded Common Core from coast to coast, an awful lot of people give the standards (and the whole idea of uniform standards) a pass while frowning only at the exams used to enforce them.[1]

Example #2: Elaborate rubrics used to judge students’ performance represent another form of standardized assessment that’s rarely recognized as such. The point is to break down something, such as a piece of writing, into its parts so that teachers, and sometimes the students themselves, can rate each of them, the premise being that it’s both possible and desirable for all readers to arrive at the same number for each criterion. Rubrics are borne of a demand to quantify and an impulse to simplify. One result, argues Maja Wilson, is that “the standardization of the rubric produces standardized writers.”[2] But, again, even many teachers who are outraged by standardized tests don’t blink when standardization is smuggled in through the back door. Some insist, against all evidence to the contrary, that there’s no problem as long as one uses a good rubric.

It’s my third example, though, on which I’d like to linger. When teachers test their students, the details of those tests will differ from one classroom to the next, which means these assessments by definition are not standardized and can’t be used to compare students across schools or states. But they’re still tests, and as a result they’re still limited and limiting.

As with rubrics (and grades), there’s a reflexive tendency to insist that we just need better tests, or that we ought to just modify the way they’re administered (for example, by allowing students to retake them). And, yes, it’s certainly true that some are worse than others. Multiple-choice tests are uniquely flawed as assessments for exactly the same reason that multiple-choice standardized tests are: They’re meant to trick students who understand the concepts into picking the wrong answer, and they don’t allow kids to generate, or even explain, their responses. Multiple-choice exams can be clever but, as test designer Roger Farr of Indiana University ultimately concluded, there is no way “to build a multiple choice question that allows students to show what they can do with what they know.”

We can also concede that some reasons for giving tests are more problematic than others. There’s a difference between using them to figure out who needs help — or, for more thoughtful teachers, what aspects of their own instruction may have been ineffective — and using them to compel students to pay attention and complete their assignments. In the latter case, a test is employed to pressure kids to do what they have little interest in doing. Rather than address possible deficiencies in one’s curriculum or pedagogy (say, the exclusion of students from any role in making decisions about what they’ll learn), one need only sound a warning about an upcoming test — or, in an even more blatant exercise of power, surprise students with a pop quiz — to elicit compliance.

Even allowing for variation in the design of the tests and the motives of the testers, however, the bottom line is that these instruments are typically more about measuring the number of facts that have been crammed into students’ short-term memories than they are about assessing understanding.[3] Tests, including those that involve essays, are part of a traditional model of instruction in which information is transmitted tostudents (by means of lectures and textbooks) so that it can be disgorged later on command. That’s why it’s so disconcerting to find teachers who are proud of their student-centered approach to instruction, who embrace active and interactive forms of learning, yet continue to rely on tests as the primary, or even sole, form of assessment in their classrooms.

While some of their questions may require problem-solving skills, tests, per se, are artificial pencil-and-paper exercises that measure how much students remember and how good they are at the discrete skill of taking tests. That’s how it’s possible for a student to be a talented thinker and yet score poorly. Most teachers can, without hesitation, name several such students in their classes when the exams are designed by Pearson or ETS, but may fail to see that the same thing applies in the case of performance on tests they design themselves.

Not only do tests assess the intellectual proficiencies that matter least, however — they also have the potential to alter students’ goals and the way they approach learning. The more you’re led to focus on what you’re going to have to know for a test, the less likely you are to plunge into a story or engage fully with the design of a project or experiment. And intellectual immersion can be all but smothered if those tests are given, or even talked about, frequently. Learning in order to pass a test is qualitatively different from learning for its own sake.[4]

***

Many years ago, the eminent University of Chicago educator Philip Jackson interviewed 50 teachers who had been identified as exceptional at their craft. Among his findings was a consistent lack of emphasis on testing, if not a deliberate decision to minimize the practice, on the part of these teachers.[5]

The first reason for this, I think, is that exemplary educators understand that tests are not a particularly useful form of assessment. Second, though, these teachers learned at some point that they didn’t need tests. The most impressive classrooms and curricula are designed to help the teacher know as much as possible about how students are making sense of things. When kids are engaged in meaningful, active learning — for example, designing extended, interdisciplinary projects — teachers who watch and listen as those projects are being planned and carried out have access to, and actively interpret, a continuous stream of information about what each student is able to do and where he or she requires help. It would be superfluous to give students a test after the learning is done. We might even say that the more a teacher is inclined to use a test to gauge student progress, the more that tells us something is wrong — perhaps with the extent of the teacher’s informal and informed observation, perhaps with the quality of the tasks, perhaps with the whole model of learning. If, for example, the teacher favors direct instruction, he or she probably won’t have much idea what’s going on in the students’ minds. That will lead naturally to the conclusion that a test is “necessary” to gauge how they’re doing.[6]

Assessment literally means to sit beside, and that’s just what our most thoughtful educators urge us to do. Yetta Goodman coined the compound noun “kidwatching” to describe reading with each child to gauge his or her proficiency. Marilyn Burns insists that one-on-one conversations tell us far more about students’ mathematical understanding than a test ever could — since all wrong answers aren’t alike. Of course this assumes that we’re really interested in kids’ understanding, not merely their level of phonemic awareness or ability to apply an algorithm. The less ambitious one’s educational goals, the more likely that a test will suffice — and that the wordstesting and assessing will be used interchangeably.

One can fill a bookshelf with accounts of other forms of authentic assessment: portfolios, culminating projects, performance assessments, and what the late Ted Sizer called “exhibitions of mastery”: opportunities for students to demonstrate their proficiency not by recalling facts on demand but by doing something: constructing and conducting (and explaining the results of) an experiment, creating a restaurant menu in a foreign language, turning a story into a play. In other words, when some form of evaluation is desired after, rather than during, the learning, tests stillaren’t necessary or even particularly helpful. They needn’t be used for “summative,” let alone for “formative,” assessment.

Many of us rail against standardized tests not only because of the harmful uses to which they’re put but because they’re imposed on us. It’s more unsettling to acknowledge that the tests we come up with ourselves can also be damaging. The good news is that far superior alternatives are available.

NOTES

1. See my essay “Beware of the Standards, Not Just the Tests,”Education Week, September 26, 2001. This phenomenon is even more pronounced in Canada. Its education system is completely decentralized; each province controls its own policies. Despite the considerable variation in the amount of testing from one to the next, however, all of the provinces have very specific grade-by-grade curricula that every teacher is expected to teach. Objections to this level of control, with the concomitant diminution of autonomy for teachers, are rarely heard — even in provinces where there is outspoken resistance to testing.

2. Maja Wilson, Rethinking Rubrics in Writing Assessment(Heinemann, 2006), p. 39.

3. A spate of recent studies that attracted considerable attention in the popular press argues that frequent tests (including self-tests) are more effective than other forms of studying. But the outcome measure in these studies is almost always limited to the number of facts that are correctly recalled on later tests. Rather than offering an argument in favor of conventional assessment, these experiments actually illuminate how words like “learning” and “achievement” — as used by researchers and journalists alike — often mean little more than the successful, and presumably temporary, process of memorizing facts. For a close look at one such study, see this essay.

4. I recently made this point — about how the anticipation of being tested can distract students from engaging with ideas — in a Twitter post that was retweeted more than 400 times. This degree of popularity led me to suspect I had been misunderstood. I followed up with a clarification that all tests have this effect, not just standardized tests. The retweet rate dropped off by 90 percent.


5. Philip W. Jackson, Life in Classrooms (Teachers College Press, 1968/1990).

6. Frank Smith once wrote, “A teacher who cannot tell without a test whether a student is learning should not be in the classroom.” I see what he means, but his formulation strikes me as a bit harsh. Teachers need help to learn how to assess without tests, and they need support and encouragement to eliminate a practice that is still used by most of their colleagues and widely expected by administrators, parents, and the students themselves. Moreover, the barrier to gauging how successfully students are learning often lies not with the teacher but with features of the school structure, such as classes that are too large or periods that are too short. That’s an argument for organizing to change these problematic policies, not for continuing to test.

BREAKING: America's poorest schools have the poorest children

It's telling that the Apple that is about to
be gavelled is indeed fresh and ripe. 

Good journalism is hard to come by -- finding good journalism on education is like discovering a four leaf clover on February 29 during a Venus Transit eclipse. 

Over decades, American main stream media has shifted their relationship with public education and teachers from neglectful to abusive.

Like Time Magazine's teacher bashing cover, a recent headline out of Minneapolis is indicative of how most American Media are so drunk on teacher bashing that they can't report the real news: Minneapolis' worst teachers are in the poorest schools, data show.

Too often, when American media looks at poverty, they don't see poor children, they see bad teachers. What's worse is that some education leaders (who should understand how poverty is education's kryptonite) are made to be accomplices to the teacher witch-hunt.

In Minneapolis, Superintendent Bernadeia Johnson is quoted as saying, "It's alarming that it took this to understand where teachers are. We probably knew that, but now have the hard evidence." Johnson is referring to the junk science of using standardized test scores to identify good and bad teachers.

In my article Telling Time with a Broken Clock: the trouble with standardized testing, I take a closer look at what standardized tests really tell us. Too many people assume that standardized test scores are the window into the quality of our schools and teachers when the inconvenient truth about standardized testing is that socio-economic status is responsible for the majority of the results:

Ultimately, great teachers make great schools, but great teachers can’t do it alone – they require the support of an equitable society. If we are not careful, we risk misinterpreting the scores, and instead of waging war on poverty and inequity, we end up waging war on teachers and schools.

What's alarming is that so many Americans have declared war on teachers and public education. Some people are so desperate not to address poverty that when they should see poor children, they need to see bad teachers.

Real journalism is not distracted by teacher witch-hunts. Real journalism doesn't report that there are bad teachers in poor schools -- real journalism reports America's poorest schools have the poorest children.

Carrots and sticks are wrong way to motivate teachers

This was written by Michael Fullan who is Professor Emeritus at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto. This post was originally found here.

by Michael Fullan

When education task forces are formed to address the question of improving the teaching profession it seems that they are required to take a superficiality pill. They then focus almost exclusively on human capital in order to improve (or remove) each and every teacher, one by one. The Alberta Task Force, with its 25 recommendations, is no exception. It is not that the recommendations have no merit; they just entirely miss the point.

You don’t develop a profession or an organization by focusing on sticks and carrots aimed at individuals. All high-performing entities develop the group to focus collectively and relentlessly on quality work linked to high expectations and standards. If you don’t base policies and strategies on purposeful group impact you inevitably end up with low yield results along with gross distractions.

Take the recommendation that has drawn the most press, implementing a process that would require teachers to be assessed to maintain their certification. Of course the intent is to get rid of incompetent teachers, but the action is akin to scorching the lawn to get rid of weeds. Try doing the math. There are not enough hours in the day to do all this work that has little chance of being effective anyway, and diverts principals from doing things that have much higher impact. What starts out as a reasonable goal (identify weak teachers and reward good ones) ends up becoming an overbearing, odious task. This micromanagement madness creates a massive bureaucracy that has zero chance of working, which is precisely the track record of its impact in other political systems that have tried it.

Similar developments currently underway in the U.S. are ruining the principalship, as I write in my book The Principal. There is an alternative. Focus, deliberatively and specifically, on the Professional Capital of Teachers– not just the individual human capital of bright and skilled people (that too), but especially social capital (the quality of the group, or how people effectively work together), and decisional capital (the capacity, over time, to develop and make expert decisions individually and collectively that benefit all your students).

We can take some of the ideas in the task force but we need to re-constitute them with an entirely different philosophy. The elements include:

1. High standards for teachers and school leaders which top-performing countries like Singapore, Finland and, yes, Canada, already have.

2. Transparent practice and monitoring of progress.

3. A growth oriented culture geared to the integration of professional standards and school goals.

4. Strategies for teachers to work together and for schools, and districts to learn from each other.

5. New opportunities for the more effective teachers to play leadership roles.

6. Learning partnerships between and among students and teachers aimed at deeper goals (such as the three Es in Alberta’s Inspiring Education – Engaged thinker, Ethical Citizen, Entrepreneurial spirit)

7. Alliances between the teaching profession and the community including parents, families and businesses.

8. Merging internal (within the group), and external accountability aimed at the very small number of teachers who don’t develop under the above conditions.

These elements reflect what high performing organizations embody in any sector. Do the first seven right and you’ll just be cleaning up the margins with Number 8, internal accountability. Put accountability first and you’ll undermine the other seven.

When employed, these strategies work – within short periods of time and deeply. The power of professional capital is identified in the findings of my work with colleague Andy Hargreaves:

- Talented schools improve even weak teachers. Talented teachers leave weak schools. Good collaboration reduces bad (ineffective) variation in the quality of teaching. Principals who help develop the group have the greatest impact on student learning.

- Superintendents who develop partnerships with their schools, and who foster schools in networks get the best district-wide results.

- Well-supported collaborative and transparent work (not just talk) among teachers is what gets the best results.

In short, if you know that growth and development of teachers is critical what strategy would you lead with: teacher evaluation, professional development or collaborative cultures? I know where I would put my money, and so does every other successful leader in organizations faced with challenging goals. Develop the culture and encompass evaluation and professional learning within it.

Alberta teaching reform would impede innovation

This was written by Zander Sherman who is the author of The Curiosity of School. This post was originally found here. 

by Zander Sherman

Last week, Alberta’s Task Force for Teaching Excellence submitted its much-discussed report on the measures it thinks the province needs to take to improve teaching excellence. The most striking of these would see teachers evaluated every five years; ‘Bad’ teachers would have their certificates removed; ‘good’ teachers would be given extra pay.


The Task Force was created last September by Education Minister Jeff Johnson and follows American proposals that attempt to make teachers more accountable for their students’ success. The authors of the report, who have included the word “excellence” on each of the report’s 94 commissioned pages, never explicitly state what they mean. In one baffling sentence we are told that “Teaching excellence is achieved through a system that ensures that: For every child, in every class, there is an excellent teacher.” According to this definition, an excellent teacher is one who makes teaching excellent. It’s a nonsense statement, like describing the air as “airy.”

Only once, in parenthesis, do the authors allude to a definition. “The impact of a good teacher can be huge,” they write, before going on to tell us of an American study in which economists discovered that students assigned to good teachers, “(as measured by their impact on students’ test scores),” earned more money as adults. Finally, we know what the authors mean by good or excellent teaching.

The only trouble is that this statement technically classifies the report, and each of its recommendations, as economic policy, not education reform. Saying that a good teacher is one who can make his or her students the most money is another way of saying that the point of the teaching profession is to train future employees. And if the point of teaching is training, the point of learning is to be trained. We might then conclude that if all learning is training, the only reason to go to school is to become well-certified, not well-educated.

Aside from being a radical, if not entirely unusual interpretation of the purpose of formal education, the argument represents a reductionist position that is neither desirable nor defensible. An education is supposed to be broad. The knowledge at its core represents the accumulation of information that, once digested, leads to increased awareness, sagacity, and moral aptitude. We want to learn the things that make us better people, not just smarter or richer. That’s because knowledge itself is a public good, and part of its breadth is derived from this essential altruism. When we limit knowledge to the pursuit of capital, we’re saying that it has no intrinsic worth, only extrinsic value.

By trying to reverse-engineer success, the province of Alberta would not only rob students’ worth as educated minds, but impoverish their value as educated labour. For the same reason that it takes work to make knowledge valuable, it takes knowledge to give work worth. Education leads to creativity, creativity motivates innovation, and innovation is what produces capital. Remove “educated” from the phrase “educated labour,” and our future graduates would be both ignorant and unproductive; good at following instructions, but bad at generating the ideas that fuel the creative economy.

As for the screening of teachers, that should happen at the interview stage. Then, teachers should be left alone to do what we pay them to do.

Teach.

Testsandgrades and teachers

If a child learns but isn't tested, does anyone care?

Why some schools are giving letter grades a fail

This was written by Erin Millar who is a journalist and author with a lifelong interest in education, innovation and creativity. For nearly a decade she has written for leading Canadian and international publications including Reader’s Digest International, Maclean’s, The Globe and Mail, The Walrus, The Times of London and others. This piece first appeared here.

by Erin Millar

Krista Wolfram credits an innovative new assessment program with helping catch her daughter’s difficulties in school early. When Antonio Vendramin, principal of Georges Vanier Elementary school in Surrey, B.C., announced to parents in November that the school would no longer award letter grades, Ms. Wolfram was skeptical. “Some of us were scared of change,” Ms. Wolfram, whose daughter is in Grade 2, recalls. “I grew up with As, Bs and Cs.”

Instead of reporting to parents only two or three times a year, teachers began regularly communicating using an online student portfolio system called Fresh Grade. Ms. Wolfram quickly discovered that her daughter was having difficulty with her writing. “Every day her teacher would snap a photo of her journal or a video of her writing with her phone or iPad,” Ms. Wolfram explains. “I could see exactly where she was struggling, and I could work with my daughter and her teacher to help.”

Because Ms. Wolfram was able to intervene early, her daughter was writing at her grade level by the time she received her report card just before spring break. “If we had to wait until her report card to find out, she would have failed writing,” she says. “I wouldn’t have known she was struggling.”

The Surrey Board of Education pioneered a pilot program eliminating letter grades in several elementary schools in September and now more than 40 classes at 13 elementary and six secondary schools have joined the experiment. Nine more schools are set to join soon, and the results will be reviewed this summer.

The Surrey school district is not alone. Schools around the world are experimenting with new ways to assess student achievement that do not rely solely on high-stakes reports that use numerical marks and letter grades. The movement is in part a response to calls from employers for the school system to emphasize skills such as creativity and communication, not just knowledge of traditional subjects. But even as recent research suggests that descriptive feedback better supports students in developing these soft skills than traditional grades, parents, educators, and higher education institutions are struggling to adapt. If there are no grades, how we will know whether students are prepared for jobs or further study?

The idea that traditional measures of academic achievement don’t support learning isn’t new; in 1998, the British education researchers Paul Black and Dylan Wiliam published a widely-cited article demonstrating how increasing descriptive feedback raises student academic achievement. More recently, the Nobel Prize-winning economist James Heckman has published numerous studies showing how grades and standardized tests don’t predict later life success such as employment and income level.

In response, school boards in Canada are implementing new approaches to assessment. Elementary students in Ontario no longer receive letter grades on their fall report card. Quebec has reduced the number of formal reports to parents, opting for more descriptive feedback.

In June, the Calgary Board of Education announced a plan to eliminate letter grades up to Grade 9, a measure that was hotly debated. The new report cards would have used four phrases − exemplary, evident, emerging or support required − and not included written comments from teachers. Many parents were concerned about the proposal. Cathy Ward, a spokeswoman for the Calgary Board of Education, says that while some schools have begun transitioning to new ways of assessment, the board is reviewing the plan and no firm decisions will be made until they consult further with parents and teachers.

At Fraser Heights Secondary School in Surrey, English teacher Leah Samson no longer uses numerical marks to give students feedback on assignments. She devotes considerable class time to teaching students how to assess their own learning and give effective peer feedback. She also has regular one-on-one meetings with students to discuss their goals and progress. Instead of Ms. Samson telling students how they are doing, they are expected to articulate to her what they learned in class, how it relates to their learning goals and where they’re struggling.

Ms. Samson is still required to give students a letter grade at the end of each semester, but the letters have taken on a whole new meaning to her and her students. Struggling students have a much clearer idea of how they can move from a C to a B or an A. “Once grades are removed, students are learning for themselves rather than learning for their teacher.”

The move away from grades matches a growing belief among employers that traditional assessment is not the best way to help students develop the skills they need to succeed in today’s world. In national and global surveys, employers don’t complain about applicants lacking specific knowledge or technical skills, which are easy to test and express in a letter grade; they want employees who can analyze critically, collaborate, communicate, solve problems and think creatively. A 2012 McKinsey & Co. survey of 8,000 students, educators and employers in nine countries found that there was a gap between what educators thought students needed to succeed and what employers really wanted. “Education providers will say that all skills are important, whereas employers will place much clearer prioritization on soft skills – where the likes of team work and work ethic come out quite strongly,” Mona Mourshed, director of education at McKinsey, said.

Traditional assessment largely focuses on measuring students’ ability to regurgitate information and was designed for certification and accountability purposes rather than to support student learning, argues Maria Langworthy, chief research officer with Ontario education expert Michael Fullan’s research group. “Think about working in a knowledge-based economy where the sort of end products we produce are intellectual, things like software, design, social policy,” she explains “There’s no multiple-choice test that can capture the value and complexity of those sorts of products.”

David Staples, the Wildrose and their war on teachers and learning

Here is Bruce McAllister and David Staples
 talking with Alberta teachers.

David Staples is a columnist who has an interest in education.

Bruce McAllister is a Wildrose MLA and education critic in the Alberta Legislature.

Together, they are waging war on teachers and learning by demanding that teachers teach in a way that mandates children play a passive role in school. Together, they argue there simply is not enough memorization and tests in school.

Standardized Testing

When the Wildrose and David Staples cite a real world need for annual standardized testing, I ask some questions:

1. As a columnist, can you share the standardized multiple choice test that the Edmonton Journal makes you do to keep you accountable and transparent? As a politician, would you be willing to take Alberta's Diplomas exams and have your results published for all to see?

2. As a columnist, can you share the standardized rubric that the Edmonton Journal uses to score and judge your columns? As a politician can you share the scoring guide that citizens use to score and judge your work?

4. As a columnist or a politician, can you show me the column you wrote or the bill you voted on where you are not allowed access to the Internet, fact-check or talk to anyone? 

5. As a columnist or a politician, if there were no standardized test scores, what would you know about education?

We need to stop thinking we can meet all
children's needs by pretending all children
have the same needs.

It is hypocritical for adults to demand students and teachers be held accountable in ways that they would not hold themselves to.

Standardized testing is what constitutes an amazingly contrived and unrealistic form of assessment that is used by people outside the classroom to judge and control what happens inside the classroom without ever visiting the schools.

Teachers are not afraid of accountability -- but they do oppose being held accountable for things out of their control. Teachers also know that there is nothing transparent about having children fill in bubble-tests.

The best feedback parents can receive about their children's learning is to see their children learning. The best teachers don't need tests because they make learning visible via projects and performances collected in portfolios.

This is a shift from test and punish accountability to more authentic public assurance. The Alberta Teachers' Association also outlines a vision for A Great School for All, and the Alberta Assessment Consortium offers A New Look at Public Assurance.

And here's my story about how I teach and my students learn without grades.

"Old" and "New" Math

Staples continued his war on learning with a column that featured Ken Porteous who is a retired chemical engineering professor from the University of Alberta. Porteous writes: 

The discovery approach has no place in arithmetic at the junior elementary level. There is nothing to discover.

If there was ever a need for a single statement that one could show people such that their response would predict whether they knew anything about how children learn -- this is it. 

To carry this mindset out to its (il)logical conclusion, I guess there is nothing left to discover in this world...

Teachers and other early childhood development experts who understand how children learn define their careers by children's Aha! moments. These are the moments when metaphorical lightbulbs illuminate on top of children's heads. Anyone with a clue about how children learn knows that these Aha! moments rarely, if ever, happen because kids were simply told to have them. Aha! moments are not passively absorbed or memorized -- they are actively constructed by the student with the artful guidance of a teacher.

The best teachers have teeth marks on their tongues because they know that when kids are simply told the most efficient way of getting the answer, they get in the habit of looking to adults instead of thinking things through for themselves. They understand that learning happens when the child is ready to learn, not necessarily when someone is ready to teach -- teachers call these teachable moments.

I am a huge supporter of teacher professional development where teachers learn how to be better teachers, but let's not delude ourselves into thinking that a back to basics approach that romanticizes the past will make things better for our children.

Let's not pretend that traditional math instruction didn't confuse and turn a lot of students off of math. When adults think back on their schooling, it's easy to succumb to something called Nostesia which is a hallucinogenic mixture of 50% nostalgia and 50% amnesia which distorts rational thinking.

Wishing tomorrow to be just like yesterday won't make today a better place. We aren't going to get more children to love math by pretending that school already doesn't have enough lectures, direct instruction, worksheets, textbooks, tests and memorization.

Staples and the Wildrose would like Albertans to believe that they are waging war against the government and education consultants but the truth is they are also attacking teachers who work hard to engage students in a way that has them play a more active role in constructing their own understanding with the artful guidance of their teacher.

While some teachers and parents may agree with Staples and the Wildrose, it's important to note that many teachers in Alberta feel that they are doing more harm than good. When Staples and the Wildrose mislead the public by telling teachers how they have to teach, they make it harder for great teachers to do their job.

Here's my take on the math wars, and Alfie Kohn's article answers the question: What works better than traditional math instruction?

Columnists are not Journalists and (most) Politicians are not teachers

Staples is a columnist -- which is not the same as a journalist, and I fear that too many people don't understand the difference.

He is not required to check his biases or opinions at the door -- in fact, as a columnist,  he has a better chance of selling newspapers and collecting page-views online with his biases and opinions fully intact. Staples is biased because that is his job.

Research isn't sexy and it doesn't sell unless it's accompanied by sensationalism, and when it comes to sensationalism, Staples sells the Wildrose. Making claims that teachers are no longer teaching children basic arithmetic may make for a snappy headline and a wedge issue to gain cheap political points for the next election but it couldn't be further from the truth.

As a side note, when I tried to share my math post with Bruce McAllister on his Facebook page, he deleted it and blocked me. You'd think that the opposition party would have a keen sense of appreciation for opposition, but I guess not.

"I wish a columnist and politician with no teaching experience would just
 come in and tell me how to teach," said no teacher ever.

And yet Staples isn't always wrong -- he knows just enough about education to get in trouble. His columns are filled with half-truths that are supported by cherry picked research, revisionist history and preconceived notions. He props up math PhDs, engineers, testing consultants, bureaucrats and others who have expertise in areas other than teaching young children math.

Canadians love their Olympians, but nobody confuses a hockey players' expertise for a rhythmic gymnastics coach. Similarly, a PhD in mathematics or engineering is not a PhD in early childhood development, psychology or math education.

Mathematicians are not (necessarily) Math Teachers

The best math teachers understand math and how children learn math -- these are two different skills. It is irresponsible to simply assume that someone who is good at math knows anything about how to teach it.
Just because you know how to skate or shoot a puck doesn't mean you have a clue how to properly teach young children how to skate or shoot. If you want to coach organized hockey in Canada, you are required to be educated through a certification process. One expectation is for coaches to learn the content of hockey, and another expectation is to learn how to teach children to skate and shoot.

The teaching part is so important that even if you played hockey at a high level, you would still be required to take the certification program. Knowing how to play hockey or how to do math is necessary but not sufficient for coaching or teaching -- this is why we have coaching and teaching certification programs.

Getting advice on how to teach or play hockey from someone who has never taught or played hockey is kind of like getting advice from a virgin on how to get laid. Opinion needs to be based on experience and expertise -- Staples and the Wildrose have neither.

I'm not saying that there isn't a place for columnists and politicians -- what I'm saying is that columnists and politicians need to be kept in their place, because when David Staples and the Wildrose confuse having an interest in education with being experts, they mislead people.

One of the best videos on education reform

Take less than 15 minutes and watch this video on education reform and the landscape of assessment in schools.

It's that good.

The Pitfall of PISA Envy

Whether it be business, education or life in general, it often makes sense to figure out what you want to do and what you do not want to do. It's also a good idea to figure out how you are going to assess your success.

This is good, but I would like to add one more step.

I think it's also important to decide how you will not assess what you've done. I think Maya Angelou provided us with a wonderful example of this when she said:

Life is not measured by the number of breaths you take but by the moments that take your breath away.

In one sentence, Angelou helps us to see what we should be doing (living), while simultaneously showing us how we should and should not measure the quality of our lives.

For the last decade, Finland has been the model nation for education systems around the world. Finland should be applauded for resisting the urge to invest in the Global Education Reform Movement (GERM) and instead pursuing alternative policies. Perhaps most notably, standardized tests are almost completely absent from Finnish schools.

And yet, world attention has been focused on Finland mostly because of their high scores on PISA's standardized tests. 

See the contradiction?

PISA's 2012 rankings show Finland has been replaced at the top with a handful of Asian countries (and a city). By idolizing the rankings, people might drop Finland like a hot-potato to chase after Asian countries who achieve their high scores with very different priorities and questionable means.

Recognizing people or nations for doing the right thing for the wrong reasons can be misleading and ultimately unsustainable. PISA's rankings on their own are useless. The real lessons from PISA are found from researching how each nation achieved their results and then assessing their methods via ethical criteria that is independent of their results. (Things go very wrong when we allow education policy to be driven by circular logic: define effective nations as those who raise test scores, then use test score gains to determine effective nations.)

We need to recognize Finland for doing the right things with their schools for the right reasons, but that means we need to move beyond reducing learning to standardized test scores and PISA rankings. Until then, we run the risk of chasing high performing nations that score well and rank high with methods that are less than enviable.

Assessing the quality of education by how many questions we answer correctly is kind of like judging a life by the number of breaths we take -- both are clear, simple and wrong.

Shameful infographic from StudentsFirst

Here is a shameful infographic from StudentsFirst.

This is the kind of shallow and superficial rhetoric that encourages people to focus on competitive ranking while ignoring the real lessons of PISA.

I find it sadly ironic that organizations like StudentsFirst use PISA to advance an agenda of privatizing education, high stakes testing, merit pay, union busting, closing schools and firing teachers when in fact PISA shows us that not one of these strategies is supported by evidence.

Organizations like StudentsFirst need to keep people frantically distracted with a kind of hysteria and fetishization of international test scores so they can dupe us into their cancerous education policies. Desperate people can be convinced to make desperate decisions. Infographics like this are nothing more than fear mongering that distracts people with clawing over each other so we can chant "We are number umpteenth!"

While Canada has been able to avoid some of these fruitless distractions, it's disappointing to see John Manley, CEO and president of the Canadian Council of Chief Executives, get duped into thinking the sky is falling. "This is on the scale of a national emergency,"this ridiculous response from Manley is eerily similar to some of the hysteria Americans have exhibited when they compared America's low PISA scores with the attack on Pearl Harbor.

Organizations like StudentsFirst only get away with spreading the Global Education Reform Movement (GERM) if people limit their knowledge of PISA to infographics like this. The real lessons are found from researching how each nation achieved their results. According to PISA, Finland and Asian countries are high achievers, but they became high achievers by focusing on very different priorities. While you will see StudentsFirst make their own infographics like the one above, you will never see them share PISA reports with titles like Excellence Through Equity: Giving Every Student the Chance to Succeed.

I hope we can all look past shallow and superficial infographics like this one from StudentsFirst and fear mongering from John Manley so that we can find the real lessons of PISA. I'm not saying its going to be easy, but it's going to be worth it.

Looking for the real lessons of PISA. Start with this video:

Braving the Media Storm of PISA 2012

You can't talk about education without tripping over PISA. On December 3, the 2012 PISA results will be released, and there will be a considerable amount of media attention and drooling. This was written by Tim Walker who is an American teaching in Finland. Tim has an insightful blog titled Taught by Finland. Tim tweets here. You can find this post on Tim's blog here.

By Tim Walker

There's a storm brewing. In less than 24 hours, the latest PISA results from the 2012 data will be revealed on Tuesday, December 3, 2013 at 10:00 AM (GMT).

Undoubtedly, there will be lots of must-read stories swirling around. Many tales of winners and losers. With certainty, Finland will get its fair share of heat.

On Saturday, Helsingin Sanomat, a well-respected Finnish newspaper, reported that Finland dropped from the Top 10 in math from PISA 2012, noting that Estonia’s 15-year-olds outperformed Finland’s.

Updated: 2:20 PM (GMT), Monday, December 2, 2013

Over the next few days, I will be compiling a list of recent, important articles (concerning the results of PISA 2012) on this page. I'm looking for information that helps us navigate the tricky waters of international test scores, giving us lots of food for thought. Please share other PISA-related articles as I will be regularly adding to this list in the days ahead:

“PISA’S China Problem” – The Brookings Institution

“’PISA Day’ – An Ideological and Hyperventilated Exercise” – The Economic Policy Institute

“The Fetishization of International Test Scores” – Washington Post

“Don’t Let PISA League Tables Dictate Schooling” – The Guardian

‘”Prepare Pupils in England for International Tests’” – BBC News

Rise Above the Mark - Premiere Trailer

While it is true that this video is made in America, I would strongly suggest that other countries and provinces pay close attention to the key messages. My article in Canadian Education Magazine addressed some of the issues and alternatives to standardized testing.

Help this video go viral

This video is a message from New York parents to New York's new mayor Bill de Blasio about how testing is corrupting schools and hurting children. I think Alberta needs to think carefully about how this relates to our use of standardized testing in grades 3, 6 and 9 and the Diploma exams in grade 12.

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.

Debunking the myths of school closures

Education Insanity in New York

Education reform in the United States is insane.

Don't believe me?

Watch this video and try and make sense of what has been going on in New York.



For more on how public education is being destroyed in the United States check out these posts:

Reduced to Numbers

United States: How not to reform education

New York's New Tests

What has Finland not done?

Judging Teachers via test scores

We need more principals like Carol Burris

New York's New Tests

With the recent release of standardized tests results in New York, Carol Burris wrote a post about what these lastest standardized test results really mean:

The bottom line is that there are tremendous financial interests driving the agenda about our schools — from test makers, to publishers, to data management corporations — all making tremendous profits from the chaotic change. When the scores drop, they prosper. When the tests change, they prosper. When schools scramble to buy materials to raise scores, they prosper. There are curriculum developers earning millions to created scripted lessons to turn teachers into deliverers of modules in alignment with the Common Core (or to replace teachers with computer software carefully designed for such alignment). This is all to be enforced by their principals, who must attend “calibration events” run by “network teams.”

Burris isn't alone. Other education leaders are voicing their concerns over how public education is being highjacked by profiteers -- check out this open letter from Superintendent Joseph Rella:

We've all heard the expression: "If it sounds too good to be true -- IT IS!" I believe the converse is also correct: "If it sounds too BAD to be true -- IT'S NOT!" And so it is with the test scores. They are not true. They are not connected to student learning in any way.

So what's going on here? Why are standardized test scores being used to discredit teachers and schools? Anthony Cody's post From School Grades to Common Core: Debunking the Accountability Scam is a must read:

Here is the bitter truth. Standardized tests are a political weapon and can be used to tell whatever story you want. The campaign to hold schools and teachers "accountable" for test scores is a political project designed to deflect responsibility away from people who have gotten obscenely wealthy over the past few decades. The concept of "failing schools" is a bogus one. Schools are being shut down not in the interest of the children who attend them, but in order to create opportunities for new players in the education marketplace. 

Teachers have been beaten down by the drive for "accountability" and most of our leaders have been so intimidated they will not directly take on this scam. Instead they nibble around the edges, complaining that we are "testing too much," or that tests and standards are "misaligned," as if getting everything perfectly lined up would make the system work. It won't. If we are going to reclaim our schools from those attempting to privatize them, we must confront and refute the false indictment that is used to condemn the schools and the educators who work in them.

For a closer look at the corporate interests behind the Common Core, check out this video:



The Common Core is not a grass roots movement made by teachers. In fact, it's not even a curriculum -- it's a massive data acquisition program that will place certain corporations in line to profit off of children and tax payers.

After a decade of failures with No Child Left Behind and it's standards based, test driven school reform it would appear that the United States is prepared to double down on their failures by merely making the standards and the tests tougher with the Common Core and "next generation tests":

The same heavy-handed, top-down policies that forced adoption of the standards require use of the Common Core tests to evaluate educators. This inaccurate and unreliable practice will distort the assessments before they're even in place and make Common Core implementation part of the assault on the teaching profession instead of a renewal of it. The costs of the tests, which have multiple pieces throughout the year plus the computer platforms needed to administer and score them, will be enormous and will come at the expense of more important things. The plunging scores will be used as an excuse to close more public schools and open more privatized charters and voucher schools, especially in poor communities of color. If, as proposed, the Common Core's “college and career ready” performance level becomes the standard for high school graduation, it will push more kids out of high school than it will prepare for college. 

This is not just cynical speculation. It is a reasonable projection based on the history of the NCLB decade, the dismantling of public education in the nation's urban centers, and the appalling growth of the inequality and concentrated poverty that remains the central problem in public education.

Learning is not like instant mashed potatoes; kids have not been through an industrial process of cooking, mashing and dehydrating to yield packaged convenience learning that can be reconstituted in the classroom in seconds by simply adding curriculum, standards or testing.

How does this all end? Who knows, but I would wager a bet that nothing good will come until the real professionals empower themselves to be leaders among their colleagues in a bid to finally refuse their cooperation with distant authorities and foreign bureaucrats because public education, like democracy, only exists for those who demand it exist.

The Children in the Numbers

This was written by Kurtis Hewson and Jim Parson. Hewson is currently a Faculty of Education Associate at the University of Lethbridge, Alberta and an award-winning teacher and school administrator. Parsons is a professor with the Faculty of Education at the University of Alberta with four decades of experience teaching, writing and researching at the post-secondary level. This first appeared in Education Canada Magazine here.

by Kurtis Hewson and Jim Parsons

The face that launched a thousand ships.”

“A picture is worth a thousand words.”

“The personal is political.”

Through the ages, astute observers have understood the extra motivation created by personalization. Establishing a human connection evokes emotion and is a powerful catalyst for motivation that inspires and moves us to action. The same is true in schools.

Student achievement goals are often rooted in numbers; but numbers seldom motivate humans working with humans. They hardly ever motivate teachers. In fact, numbers can hide our true goal as teachers: children’s learning. For example, consider the following “typical” learning goals established in schools in relation to improving student achievement:

“Our school is focusing on increasing the percentage of Grade 2 students achieving ‘acceptable’ on the district’s reading assessment from 72 percent to 80 percent over the next three years.”

“This year, our goal is to improve student absence rates from an average of 2.1 days absent to 1.5 days absent.”

“Over the next two years, we plan to decrease the number of suspensions related to male misbehaviour from 112 to 50.”

On the surface, there is little wrong with any of these three goal statements. Each statement meets the SMART criteria connected to effective goal development. Each is Specific, Measurable, Attainable,Relevant and Time-bound.[1] Each can be further developed with related strategies to promote attainment. The problem is that common school goals like these focus on overall averages, percentages, or totals. And that is where they can lack power. By emphasizing overall averages, percentages, or totals, two basic problems emerge: 1) numbers, rather than children, become the focus; and 2) subgroups or individual students can be hidden within the overall averages.

Focus on students

Sharratt and Fullan remind us, “We are wired to feel things for people, not for numbers.”[2] A goal like improving overall student absence rates from an average of 2.1 to 1.5 absent days may not inspire much passion or commitment. It is hard for teachers to get excited about making a difference for children when the focus is on nebulous “school averages.”

What if the issue were framed in the following way:

Last year, our overall student absence rate was 2.1 days per student from Grades 3 to 6. When examining our current student population of 300 students, actually 200 students missed less than a day all year! Another 50 students missed 2 or fewer days. However, 30 students missed 5-10 days and 20 students missed more than 10 days. We have compiled a list for each grade level of the students with 5-10 days absent, which are coloured yellow, and the students with more than 10 days, which are coloured red. Let’s start to talk about what actions we can be putting in place to specifically address these yellow- and red-coded students. Which yellow students can we reduce down to 2 or less days absent? With appropriate interventions, which red students could become yellow?

Such personalized focus shifts teachers’ conversations from general school-wide strategies to goals for specific students. Interventions can be established that focus on specific students and subgroups of heightened concern, and ongoing monitoring can be established to focus on individual student progress.

Consider this literacy example:

In previous years, the Grade 3 team used multiple measures to determine students who were reading at grade level upon entering and exiting Grade 3. Last year, we succeeded in raising students’ overall entry to exit progress from 75 percent to 82 percent, although students fell short of our goal of 85 percent overall. This year, the grade-level team will focus on individuals rather than the overall average. The team has found that 22 students entering Grade 3 are not yet reading at grade level. They posted these students’ pictures whenever they met as a Grade 3 team; and, by mid-year, they already knew that Susan, Michael, Philip, Esther, Frank, Desmond, and Cecilia were well on their way to reading at grade level. That only leaves another 15 students to place special attention and focus on for the remainder of the year.

It is easy to see that the approaches taken in the two examplespersonalize and make learning goals about children, not numbers. We are not suggesting that schools eliminate the formation of goals, and we subscribe to the power of SMART goals as foundations for sound school improvement. However, attempting to raise an overall school average by 5 percentage points likely will fail to elicit the commitment needed to succeed. By contrast, when specific students are identified and collectively targeted, the overall averages, percentages, and totals will take care of themselves. Teachers will expend tireless efforts when they see a difference being made for one child.

First steps

When starting to focus on children rather than faceless averages, consider using pictures. It is powerful when teachers see the faces of those children most in need of everyone’s support. We are not suggesting public displays that inherently ostracize children and families! But in closed staff or team meetings, sharing children’s photographs on PowerPoints or posters personalizes the goal.

We have experienced a celebratory final staff meeting where, rather than showing a bar graph of yearly school progress from 75 percent to 78 percent reading proficiency overall, photographs of students who moved from at-risk to at grade level were shared. The emotion and celebration among teachers was inspiring, and they shared success stories with each other and found it fulfilling to see for whom exactly they had made a difference. The buzz in the room also definitely motivated teachers to continue to build upon these successes. There were still students who needed help!

The importance of disaggregation

Moving from overall to individual analysis more than just inspires and creates purpose. It pulls back the veil to display children (and sub-groups of students) who can be lost when focusing upon overall averages. Consider Alan Blankstein’s observation:

Data represent all groups within a school. Overall averages can hide persistent problems that do not reveal themselves until the data are disaggregated in order to describe each group that makes up part of the student population. A school can take pride in the fact that its mean Grade 8 reading score is at the 72nd percentile, but that figure may hide evidence that although 10% of the class reads at the 99th percentile, a troubling 15% are reading below the 40th percentile. Unless this school examines disaggregated data, the needs of 15% of its students may be overlooked.”[3]

We further suggest that the “lost” 15 percent in Blankstein’s example should be individually identified, regularly monitored, and supported through specific interventions or focused strategies. In addition, sometimes successful overall scores and averages can foster or promote a degree of comfort (at best) or educational apathy (at worst) within a school. Our experience suggests that it can be difficult to create a sense of urgency for that small sub-group of students that remains at-risk when heralding the success of a superior overall average.

A school where 91 percent of students are proficient in reading has achieved an outstanding accomplishment. We should take time to celebrate this school success. Then, let’s go back to work! There remains nine percent of the population (almost one child in ten) still not achieving at grade level. Those children may be frustrated, upset, confused, hurting, and blocked from growing towards personal goals. We are still falling short of our mission to ensure success for all our students – each child.

Numbers distance; faces motivate. By remembering that a single child’s learning success is our ultimate teaching goal, schools can ensure the development of strong emotional connections between educators and their students that carry a sense of urgency. The faces of children should be the goals of our teaching – it is these young faces who will launch our ships.