If you went to school, you might (not) be an expert...

Have you noticed that when people talk about changing and improving school, everyone thinks they are an expert?

Sometimes I think this is as predictable as it is unfortunate. We all went to school, so we all think we are experts.

But this makes as much sense as saying that because I use the toilet, I'm an expert on plumbing.

Or I spend money so I'm an expert on the economy.

Granted, we went to school for more than a decade so we might feel like the intensity and duration of this experience was our internship to becoming a teacher or an expert on schooling. Some of us liked it, some of us endured it and too many of us hated it.

Either way, we need to resist the temptation of engaging in what Jamie Vollmer calls Nostesia which describes people who are suffering from a debilitating mental condition that consists of a hallucinogenic mixture of 50% nostalgia and 50% amnesia that distorts rational thinking.

Falsely romanticizing our schooling past can lead to demands that schools just get back to basics. Ironically, sometimes people who hated school come to the same conclusion -- it's as if they are saying, "school was bad enough for me, it's bad enough for my kids."

Where does all this lead? When things are at their worst, all this means more control for people outside the classroom over those who are inside the classroom.

And if you don't believe me, show the picture above to a teacher and listen to their reaction -- you'll get an ear full.

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.

A critical truce in the war between traditionalists and progressives

This was written by Paul Thomas who is Associate Professor of Education (Furman University). He taught high school English in rural South Carolina and co-edited (with me)De-Testing and De-Grading Schools. Follow him on twitter here and read his blog here. This post was originally found here.

by Paul Thomas

Harry Webb has launched A War of Words: “The war is between traditionalists and progressives and it is an old war.”

Yes, this is an old war, and what is most frustrating about this battle for me is that, once again, critical perspectives are left out entirely. So let me offer here a brief critical truce to this war between traditionalists and progressives.

First, Webb’s post highlights some of the essential problems with the war itself.

Since the mid-1900s, progressive educators and progressive pedagogy have been demonized (and usually misrepresented) as key sources of educational failures, but traditional practices have historically dominated and currently dominate what happens in real classrooms daily.

We have ample anecdotal (I have been in education for 31 years) and research-based evidence that even though, as Webb notes, colleges of education and education professors disproportionately claim to be progressive, that once teachers enter the classroom, they tend to shut the door and practice relatively traditional pedagogy—often teaching as they have been taught or defaulting to traditional practices since they are more efficient and more easily managed in the challenging environments of mixed-ability and overcrowded classrooms.

I invite everyone to read Alfie Kohn’s examination of this in Progressive Education: Why It’s Hard to Beat, But Also Hard to Find. Kohn offers not only a solid discussion of how rare progressive practices are, but also details how progressive practices are misrepresented along with what he considers to be genuine progressive pedagogy.

Another problem I have with this war, however, is that I am not a progressive and am not offering here an apology for progressivism.

I am noting that when I wear my history of education hat (I am the Council Historian for NCTE and wrote a biography for my doctoral work), I recognize a demonizing and marginalizing of progressives that is misleading. As a critical educator, I must add, I believe that progressives have failed and do fail in many ways similar to the failures I associate with traditional practices.

I will confess that it is likely we have failed progressivism, but that point is pretty academic.

Along with Kohn’s discussion of progressivism, I also invite you to examine what I believe is an accurate model of what progressivism is by exploring the work of Lou LaBrant, the focus of my educational biography. Her work disproves the stereotypes of progressives as “touchy-feely” educators who have no grounding in empirical evidence. LaBrant practiced classroom-based research and considered herself a scientific teacher throughout her career from 1906 to 1971. She also fiercely defended the progressivism of John Dewey (something, again, that almost no one represents accurately and then almost no one practices—even those education professors who claim to be progressives).

Another problem with the war is that once traditionalists have mischaracterized progressives in order to attack those mischaracterizations and progressives have mischaracterized the traditionalists in order to attack those mischaracterizations, little value comes from the war, and as is typical of wars, we have only collateral damage.

So let me pause on one comment from Webb: “Yet, their argument is weak and not supported by evidence,” he claims about progressives.

I must call a foul here. Education has a century of research, a research base that has been ignored by policymakers and often discredited by those with narrow definitions of what counts a research (action research by teachers doesn’t count, they say, effectively silencing teachers and indirectly the voices of women in their own profession). Thus when Webb proclaims, “There is an imbalance of power here,” there is an unintended irony since that imbalance is exactly what I am highlighting.

Just as one example, Zemelman, Daniels, and Hyde have offered for many years an examination of just what the body of evidence shows regarding effective pedagogy. This work calls into question two claims by Webb: first, it shows there is a robust research base, and second, the practices that are likely most effective are fairly characterized as progressive (the sorts of practices that reflect an accurate use of the term).

However, what is most important to note about Zemelman, Daniels, and Hyde’s work is that what we know about best practice includes that no pedagogy is rejected and no pedagogy is demanded; in other words, best practice is implementing the instructional practices that best meet the needs of the students and match the learning goals.

For example, the evidence on teaching writing since at least the 1930s and 1940s has shown that isolated grammar instruction does not transfer to original student compositions; in the mid-1990s, George Hillocks showed that isolated grammar instruction actually inhibits writing quality. So the most effective way to teach students to write, including the most effective way for students to learn standard grammar, is through actual writing—something most people would call a progressive perspective.

However, that same research base shows that evidence-based (the evidence being found in actual writing samples from students) direct instruction (what many would call a traditional practice) is vital, and that some students (although a minority) can benefit from targeted isolated grammar instruction.

In other words, the research base emphasizes both the effectiveness of pedagogy most would call progressive, but it certainly doesn’t discount that ultimately what works best is what each student needs. As Webb noted, lecturing can be highly effective, and it can be abysmal—but that has more to do with its delivery and appropriateness than to some default judgment on the practice itself.

When traditionalists say that all students must learn standard English, they likely have a point, but their goal often falls apart when they insist on instructional practices that the evidence has shown are ineffective. “I shall prove my pedagogy is king!” is a shallow thing against seeking ways to teach each student effectively and with compassion and patience.

When progressives say that student must be engaged in authentic activities, they also have a point (although as Webb notes, and I agree, the jargon of education offers no proof that what is claimed is what is taking place), but that goal often falls apart when they fail to recognize that having students participating in a workshop demands a teacher who also provides a great deal of structure and manages purposeful direct instruction as student work reveals the need.

In my experience, traditionalists and progressives tend to become trapped in their pedagogy and fail to see their students or the evidence of their own ineffectiveness.

If you demand all children read The Scarlet Letter, lecture on it brilliantly for two weeks, prepare a detailed study guide, and then have a class score wonderfully on the test at the end of the unit, what have you gained if most of those students never actually read the book and the entire experience taught them to hate reading?

If you invite your students to participate in writing workshop, offer no structure, fail to provide expert feedback, have no process for students to revise and improve their essays, and then bundle a portfolio of all that work with a nice decorated folder cover, what have you gained if that workshop involved more time meandering and decorating, resulting in students writing no better at the end than the beginning? (See LaBrant’s brilliant critique of failed efforts at the project method in ELA classes, a sharp unmasking of failed progressive claims.)

So, where’s the truce? Because a reasonable person could read this so far and say that I have embedded in the discussion a sneaky endorsement of progressivism (do I associate more with progressives than traditionalists? Sure. But I find they fail just as often as traditionalists, and thus, my disappointment with progressives is much more intense).

Here’s my truce.

I bet that someone as thoughtful and purposeful as Harry Webb appears in his blogs is a stellar and effective teacher, despite our differences about pedagogy.

I have seen brilliant traditionalists teachers and lousy self-proclaimed progressives. More than anything, I have seen too many teachers bound to their practices, ignoring their students and the evidence of their ineffectiveness.

Thus, my truce is that the key (the olive branch?) to this war is whether or not a teacher has a critical lens.

Let me end with a couple invitations:

I have posted before a chart that I use to introduce students to the traditionalist v. progressive divide juxtaposed with the often ignored critical alternative; please see it here.

Also consider a longer post in which I explore this dynamic in detail, Education Done To, For, or With Students?

Maybe, as Webb suggests, there is no hope for ending this war, but I would prefer a different approach, one that requires that we all step away from our commitments (as Webb critiques well, our words, labels, and jargon), take an honest assessment of the impact our commitments have on students (because the only real things that matters are ifstudents learn and that we never sacrifice their dignity and humanity in the process), and then begin again, determined to do better the next time.

Peace?

New GERM outbreak in Scotland

This was written by Niall MacKinnon who is a Scottish school principal Niall MacKinnon highlights the need for rigorous GERM infection control measures in education reform programs. You can read Niall MacKinnon's extended version on this article here.

By Niall MacKinnon

In his speech to the Scottish Learning Festival this September, cabinet secretary Michael Russell claimed that GERM is not for Scotland. The Global Education Reform Movement is a concept of Finnish educationalist Pasi Sahlberg, presented in his recent book Finnish Lessons. The features of GERM are standardizing teaching and learning, a focus on literacy and numeracy, teaching a prescribed curriculum, management models from the corporate world and test-based accountability and control.

Scotland’s recent tightly controlled educational landscape of attainment targets, performance indicators and inspection judgements was an example of GERM. But Curriculum for Excellence (CfE) opened up a different pathway in the central “four capacities” concept, emphasizing and integrating wider focuses of linkage and personal development in revisioning pedagogy. CfE showed close affinity with the Finnish Way, outlined by Sahlberg as the antidote to GERM.  Finland encouraged risk-taking, learning from the past, owning innovations, shared responsibility and trust through professional dialogue. A central feature of decluttering for CfE was to focus on innovative approaches, emphasizing practice innovation and local professionalism, termed ‘building the curriculum’.

But just as this was coming together, linking proactive innovation, evaluation, and school systems to CfE, it fell apart. This was because of layers of prescription to different performance criteria in new multiple audit schedules, inspection templates and standards and quality reporting, to non-CfE criteria. The main emphasis was not exploring pedagogy, but micro-specification to serve the needs of external control and standardized calibration of schools. Then came hundreds of  “Es and Os” (experiences and outcomes) as a curriculum specification ‘painting by numbers’ kit. CfE was further lashed down to seven “required characteristics of successful implementation” framed in a product model of curriculum, delivery model of schooling and behaviorist model of audit. Self-evaluation split two ways, one as evaluation taking the concepts, principles and purposes, applying them evidentially yet discursively – GERM-free. The other, calibrating audit prescription to fixed, outdated notions and applying these in absolutist terms – GERM. This set up a huge conflict within CfE in Scotland, one which Sahlberg took from me in the chapter defining GERM in Finnish Lessons:

“Niall MacKinnon, who teaches at Plockton Primary School, makes a compelling appeal for “locally owned questions and purposes in realising practice within the broader national policy and practice frameworks.” He gets right to the point of how GERM affects teachers and schools: “There is the real practical danger that without an understanding of rationale and theoretical bases for school development, practitioners may be judged by auditors on differing underlying assumptions to their own developmental pathways, and the universalistic grading schemas come to be applied as a mask or front giving pseudoscientific veneer to imposed critical judgments which are nothing more than expressions of different views and models of education. Through the mechanism of inspection, a difference of conceptual viewpoint, which could prompt debate and dialogue in consideration of practice, is eliminated in judgmental and differential power relations. One view supplants another. Command and control replaces mutuality, dialogue and conceptual exploration matched to practice development. Those who suffer are those innovating and bringing in new ideas.” ” (p 104)

The paragraph came from my 2011 paper ‘The Urgent Needs for New Approaches in School Evaluation to enable Scotland’s Curriculum for Excellence’ in the international journal Educational Assessment, Evaluation and Accountability. My argument there was that specifications, grading and judgementalism destroy conceptual innovation and local practice professionalism, thereby negating CfE. Torridon Primary School and its headteacher Anne Macrae was my inspiration for that paragraph, now the case exemplar of GERM worldwide in Finnish Lessons.

Sahlberg shows how Finnish education placed central focus on professional dialogue, enabling pedagogy to link modern innovations to a long history of educational ideas. The central conceptual genius of CfE was the “four capacities” concept. It is not a slogan but a clarion call to get to know our pupils, and construct learning pathways by reaching out and revealing the dispositions latent in their potentials. These extend in so many ways out beyond conventional notions of learning, set in terms of delivery, targets and specifications.

We need to unpack learning, garner systemic understanding and enable formative development progression, for pupils, educators and institutions working together, not a “clear plan from A to B” as the Scottish schools’ inspectorate currently mandates. Scotland is now in the midst of GERM warfare between specifications compliance and pedagogic innovation, fought out over the morale and professionalism of Scotland’s teachers. As Dr Sahlberg said of GERM on his blog (30 June) “As a consequence, schools get ill, teachers don’t feel well, and kids learn less”.

Sadly GERM is for Scotland, and the case study of GERM is Scotland. But it could so readily not be, once this is ‘seen’ and something done about it, or rather undone, simply by removing the specificatory shroud and control freakery of judgmental absolutism to outdated notions. Let us ‘build the curriculum’ as intended and envisaged.

The central lesson from Finnish Lessons is not what Finland did, but rather what Finland did NOT do to its education system. “Transformational” change in the nature of curriculum and its realization in school education, which Scotland “says” it is undertaking, is not going to come about without similarly transformational change in the means of getting there.

The Far Side of Educational Reform

This was written by Andy Hargreaves and Dennis Shirley from Lynch School Education at Boston College and authors of The Fourth Way: The Inspiring Future for Educational Change. This was the introduction to a report commissioned by the Canadian Teachers' Federation called The Far Side of Education Reform.

By Andy Hargreaves and Dennis Shirley

Teachers are at the far end of educational reform. Apart from students and parents, they are often the very last to be consulted about and connected to agendas of what changes are needed in education, and of how those changes should be managed. Educational change is something that government departments, venture philanthropists, performance-driven economists and election-minded legislators increasingly arrogate to themselves. Even when these policy-setting and policy-transporting bodies speak on behalf of teachers, teachers often have little or no voice. Teachers are rarely asked to speak on their own account.

When international delegations visit high performing jurisdictions, including those in Canada, it is not teachers they typically get to meet but rather ministers, administrators and advisors – those who command and commandeer a view from the top, along with an official version of what everyone else is supposed to see. This is not only a bias of judgment, but it leads to a bias of evidence and perception. Diane Wood’s research (2007) has shown that professional learning communities, like many reforms, are often viewed more favourably by people at the top than by those at the bottom. Quantitative survey research on leadership and trust, reveals that “site and district administrators view themselves…and each other…as exhibiting trust behaviors consistently higher on every trust factor when compared with teacher respondents. Moreover, the gap between teachers and administrators is the greatest in regard to trust factors” (Daly & Chrispeels, 2008, p. 44; also Daly 2009). To put it more directly, administrators at the top tend to see themselves as more full of trust and to put a more positive spin on their reforms than their teachers do. Teachers are the end-point of educational reform – the last to hear, the last to know, the last to speak. They are mainly the objects of reform, not its participants.

Not surprisingly, therefore, teachers are also often at the far end with educational reform. They are at the end of their tether. Targets and testing, capricious and contradictory changes, political climates that feed on failure and foment professional fear, insecurity and instability, cut-throat competition and rampant privatization – these are the enemies of teaching that erode confidence and betray trust throughout the teaching profession, although they are more prominent south of the border than within Canada itself. However, less obvious adversaries in Canada and elsewhere can still make teachers feel at their wits end today. Hackneyed harangues against whole-class teaching that equate it with factory-style schooling; excessive exaltation of technologically-driven instruction; reduction of deep personalization to slick customization; data warehouses that drive teachers to distraction; and exploitation of international performance comparisons to the domestic disadvantage of public school teachers in almost every developed country – these are the gimmicky Goliaths of educational change today. They are the surreal Far Side of school reform.

If it is indeed the case, as is now commonly claimed, that the teacher is the most important within-school influence on a child’s educational achievement, then it is time to stop insulting teachers, excluding teachers and inflicting change after change upon them. It is time to bring teachers back in: to make them part of the solution and not just part of the problem.

Alfie Kohn on the state of education reform

I was listening to a panel discussion featuring Stephen Downes, Howard Gardner, Alfie Kohn and Gary Stager on Reforming Education Reform.

Here is a portion of what Alfie Kohn had to say about the state of public discourse around education reform:

The discussion that we have about education is only as good as the way that discussion is framed by the people who have ready access to the means of communication. So if public officials and corporate officials and corporate media have framed the conversation in a particular way, then it's likely that we will ask some questions and studiously avoid others. The default assumptions -- the things we take for granted because we've never been invited to reflect on them turns out to be the limits, the barriers, the boundaries to anything we talk about. So for example, if no one invites most people to rethink whether education could be more than just transmitting a set of facts or skills to passive receptacles, then nobody is likely to look around at schools and say, "how come they are still characterized by worksheets, lectures, quizzes, tests, grades and homework just as they were twenty years ago and fifty years ago." Because we think that is how school has to be. 

And if nobody has said standardized tests tend to measure what matters least and there are more meaningful and less destructive ways to assess individual students as well as whole schools then the public discussion will just be based on a sort of monosyllabic  grunting of "test scores go up that's good", and if the larger public conversation assumes that government is always a bad thing and the free market delivers results then we will be inherently suspicious about the great democratic institution of education in this country and we will look for ways to undermine its public status or be receptive to people who attempt to do that. Which is exactly what we are seeing now in the name of choice. 

Paradoxes of the Finland Phenomenon

Have you noticed there's a lot of hullabaloo about Finland's education system lately? I've been paying attention to what the Finns have been doing for a couple years now,  but it is only after reading an essay by Sam Abrams and hearing him subsequently elaborate in a talk in Banff that I've thought to pay attention to Finland's neighbour Norway.

Norway and Finland have some similarities. They are neighbouring countries that each take up about 350 000 square kilometres with populations around 5 million and about 10 percent foreign born in Norway and 4 percent in Finland. A notable difference, however, is that Norway has a significantly higher Gross Domestic Product.

Norway has oil. Finland has trees. 

Since the 1970s, Norway has focused intensely on developing their oil and gas resources which have risen to 45% of their total exports and 20% of their GDP. These efforts have provided Norway with bragging rights over being the fifth largest oil exporter and third largest gas exporter in the world.

Meanwhile, Finland in 1971 realized that their natural resources, largely timber, weren't going to cut it. They needed to modernize their economy and to do it they were going to have to improve their schools. In other words, they were going to have to focus intensely on developing their children's brains.

To do this, Finland focused on reducing class size, improving formative assessment practices, increasing teacher pay & notoriety, and requiring all teachers to complete a master's program. Finnish teachers use a relatively concise national curriculum to guide them in creating curriculum and assessment at the local level, and very little time, effort and resources are wasted with standardized testing; in fact, the only time a Finnish student would ever be required to write a standardized exam is if a high school senior planned on attending university (National Matriculation Examination). Finland has worked worked meticulously to ensure equity and opportunity thus reducing the number of Finnish children who live in poverty to 1 in 25 (1 in 5 for US and 1 in 10 for Alberta, Canada) .

Today, Finland's education system is considered to be one of the best in the world.

Conversely, despite Norway's similar demographics, their education reforms have followed a very different path than Finland's:

• Their class sizes tend to be larger
• They struggle to find enough qualified teachers
• Rather than focusing on better trained teachers, Norway has thrown millions of dollars at a teacher preparation program similar to Teach for America called Teach First Norway where teachers get mere weeks of training.
• They implemented a national standardized testing system of accountability
• They have placed more time, effort and resources on summative assessment such as testsandgrades.
• Based on PISA scores, Norway's education system falls somewhere around mediocre.

So why is comparing and contrasting Finland and Norway important?

Upon hearing about the progress Finland has had with their education system, many policy-makers in other countries may be inclined to point towards the Finns smaller, more homogenous population as the primary reason for their successes in the classroom. That Norway and Finland can share such similarities in population and yet differ with their education systems may be enough proof that policy choices, rather than demographics, can play a potentially larger role in a nation's educational success.

In Alberta, Canada, we have dedicated a considerable amount of time, effort and resources on becoming the world's second largest exporter and fourth largest producer of natural gas while simultaneously helping Canada become the seventh largest producer of oil, just three spots ahead of Norway. While debating whether this is something Alberta or Norway should be proud of or not may make for an interesting discussion, such a dialogue is not the purpose of this post.

Instead, I wish to look forward with this:

The Stone Age did not end for lack of stone, and the Oil Age will end long before the world runs out of oil.

Before you slough off the quote above as some green peace propaganda, keep in mind that the author of these words were Sheikh Zaki Yamani who served as Saudi Arabia's second Oil Minister from 1962-1986.

The ultimate point here is not to debate environmentalism, but to acknowledge that the world is changing and so must our education system in order to prepare our children for a future we can not predict.

This is not up for debate.

Regions like Norway and Alberta run the risk of being blinded by what some have coined a "resource curse" or a paradox of plenty. A dependency on oil and gas can leave us grossly susceptible to excessive revenue volatility -- things are glorious in the booms but down-right scary in the busts. It's not unheard of to hear during these busts calls to balance the budget on the back of cutting spending on education, which ends up being the equivalent to a farmer selling the top-soil to pay the bills.

While regions like Alberta and Norway can afford to pay less time, effort and resources on their education systems, Finland's lack of resources has forced them to invest "laser-like" attention on nurturing theirs. The good news is that if Finland can do this with less, the abundance of wealth in regions like Norway and Alberta can be used to do the same.

So if Finland's successes in the classroom are less about their inherent Finnish characteristics and more about their policies, then it might be advantageous to identify how the Finnish differ from conventional education reforms.

Pasi Sahlberg is a leading educator from Finland and former senior adviser in Finland's Ministry of Education who writes and speaks about what the world can learn from Finland. The chart below contrasts what Sahlberg coins as The Global Education Reform Movement (GERM) with alternative policies that Finland has successfully enrolled:

In his post On a Road to nowhere, Sahlberg explains:

Pasi Sahlberg 

English education policies rely on more choice, tougher competition, intensified standardised testing and stronger school accountability. These are the key elements of the policies that were dominant in the United States, New Zealand, Japan and parts of Canada and Australia a decade or so ago. Available PISA data reveals the impact of these education policies on students’ learning between 2000 and 2009. The overall learning trend in all these countries is consistently declining. That is a road to nowhere. 

Many governments are taking note of the 2009 PISA results, but they are rather selective in reporting of the education systems that are doing well in PISA. Finland has been one of the few consistently high performing systems in PISA’s 10-year history. Significantly, Finland has not employed any of the market-based educational reform ideas in the ways that they have been incorporated into the education policies of many other nations, including the United States and England.

Finland's successful pursuit of policies driven by diversity, trust, respect, professionalism, equity, responsibility and collaboration refute every aspect of reforms that focus on choice, competition, accountability and testing that are being expanded in countries around the world.

In short, it's time to put ideology aside and focus intensely on the paradoxes of the Finland phenomenon.

** Corrections: An important citation to Sam Abrams was added in the first paragraph and Finland's foreign born rate was corrected from reading 10% to 4%.

Educational Transformation in Alberta via Collaboration

On September 22, I had the pleasure of representing Red Deer Public Local #60 teachers at Alberta's Fall Education Transformation meetings. This meeting hosted three parties who play an intricate part of public education in Alberta: Alberta Teacher's Association, Alberta School Boards Association and Alberta Education.

I spent the day at Barnett House in Edmonton, the home of the Alberta Teachers' Association, sitting with my school district's superintendent, two school board trustees, two members from Alberta Education and two other teacher representatives from my local.

The day was spent discussing these three focus areas:

 FOCUS AREA #1: SHARED UNDERSTANDING/SHARED OPPORTUNITY
OUTCOME: SUPPORT FOR THE IDEA OF TRANSFORMATION AS A SHARED PROCESS

• What's the most important characteristic of education transformation for you?
• If transformation is about moving from one reality to another, what does this entail (e.g., is this about learning outcomes being different, is it about the classroom, is it about how education is governed?)
• Discuss the relationship enhancements that articulate a new way of working together -- what do we have to change about how we relate to one another?

FOCUS AREA #2: MOVING FORWARD TOGETHER: WHO DOES WHAT?

OUTCOME: SHARED COMMITMENT TO PRIORITY ITEMS / ROLES AND RESPONSIBILITIES

• If we are to collaborate on transformation, what's most important to work together on?
• How do we define our respective roles and responsibilities in taking on these topics?
• How do we hold one another accountable for our mutual success?

FOCUS AREA #3: NEXT STEPS

OUTCOME: SUPPORT FOR MOVING FORWARD TOGETHER

• What are some ways Alberta Teachers' Association, Alberta School Board Association and Alberta Education can start taking action for transformation?
• Is a plan required to guide the process? If so, what types of plans/planning are needed and who should lead their development?
• How, when and at what levels (local/provincial) do we involve other stakeholders in the process?

-----------

I walked away from this event thoroughly impressed with the level of commitment each of the three organizations (teachers, school boards and government) showed for rethinking how we can work together. There was no finger pointing or blaming. 

Not once did we discuss test scores. 

Not once.

I can only imagine the legacy of hard feelings and grudges that have developed in Alberta between teachers, school boards and government, however, in spite of any potential desire to accuse, blame and criticize each other, there seemed to be a real commitment in the room to move forward together.

So what's next?

On November 4 & 5, The Alberta Teachers' Association and Alberta Education are hosting a Combined Professional Development Area Conference and Invitational Curriculum Symposium. This is remarkably cool because the government and the teachers together will collaborate on rethinking curriculum in Alberta schools. Essentially this event will provide the teachers and government an opportunity to work together to rethink curriculum with a focus on our partnership with Finland.

Perhaps the only hesitation I have with this opportunity is to ask what role the Alberta School Board Association will play in this rethinking curriculum process? Seeing as how they aren't invited.

Pedro Noguera Lecture

Here is a profoundly insightful talk given by Pedro Noguera. If you are someone who needs to be in the know about education reform, I urge you to take some time and listen to this.

Some highlights:

• We have the know-how for educating all kinds of children - even those who have the hardest time learning
• After 10 years of No Child Left Behind, the US still has drop out rates as high as 50%.
• The Obama administration is simply continuing the same policies of the Bush administration: improve schools by using high stakes testing, and high standards to punish and embarrass schools.
• We focus on symptoms of failure without addressing underlying causes. If you only deal with symptoms, you might actually make things worse.
• We know we have failure in our schools - but we  don't know why, and we don't know what to do about that?
• If we fire principals and teachers, are their ready and capable professionals to replace those fired?
• We should divide up our schools into three categories: 1) Affluent schools are doing great 2) Mediocre schools 3) Poorest schools that are serving the truly disadvantaged
• There is a distinct connection between poverty and academic performance.
• We've had a lot of school reform and very little change.
• Many schools are plagued with a culture of failure where failure is normalized and predictable, and over time the adults come to blame the kids and their families. When this is the prevailing logic in a school that school will never improve.
• Poverty is not a learning disability. Under the right conditions, poor children can learn and succeed.
• 1966 Colman Report told us that over half of students' achievements in the classroom are affected by factors outside of the classroom (poverty, opportunity, health, family, etc)

If you are not familiar with Pedro Noguera's work, I think you should be.

Gapwash

Here is a guest post by Iamcompucomp who is the creator of some very cool YouTube videos based on today's test and punish accountability policies and the drive to privatize public education.

By Iamcompucomp

The idea of working to close the so-called “achievement gap” in education is very similar to the concept of “greenwash” in environmentalism.

Greenwash is the term used to refer to propaganda deliberately used by polluters to cover up what they are really doing. A typical example would be the plant-a-tree days that are funded by big oil and auto companies. Obviously, no amount of tree planting will ever undo their damage, yet the public relations people know that greenwash is a great way to protect their profits from costly calls for more government regulation: it distracts people from real causes. It encourages people to “take personal responsibility” rather than blame corporations who are made to look like leaders of environmentalism.

Similarly, when we look at education, we find that its new mission around the globe has, ever since NCLB, become “closing the achievement gap,” that is, leaving no child left behind. I call this “gapwash” because it covers up the real problem of the ever-widening gap between the rich and poor, a gap which was caused by globalization and technology which together have dealt a death blow to the “decent jobs” of yesteryear’s working class and given rise a new super-class of billionaires. “Closing the gap” gives educators a feel-good mission of raising test scores and graduation rates as it preserves the illusion that they are actually doing something to raise children out of poverty. Because, as many scientific studies have conclusively demonstrated, poverty will always be the single greatest cause of failure at school (and wealth not surprisingly predicts success), there is never any danger of the gap actually being closed. It is the perfect War on Terror for education. If it were actually possible to close some kind of achievement gap (and the sheer range in incomes and intelligences guarantees that it is not), the fact that it could never bring back the jobs that were exported to places that lack labour rights would become all too obvious.

Just as with greenwash, the real cause can never be addressed, but moreover, the “wash” distracts and diverts all energy into the busywork of what should be called “Stupid Goals” (referred to in today’s highly commercialized education lingo as “Smart Goals”): raising math and literacy scores or pass rates with the aid of all manner of commercial pedagogy (e.g. test strategy enhancement and/or systematic cheating as seen in recently in Atlanta), creative grade accounting (such as the various forms of “credit recovery”), and political manipulation (as seen most notably in New York under billionaire mayor Bloomberg).

Until this century the teacher’s job had been to educate and to provide equal opportunity, but the “closing the gap” agenda welded student “outcomes” to the fates of individual teachers, schools and districts. Education is now the perfect scapegoat for both child poverty and a seemingly chronic shortage of “human capital” needed in virtually every OECD member country to “make us competitive in the global marketplace.” The underlying mantra is always the same: “If we could only be more like Finland (currently number #1 on testing) then we’d all rich.” In reality, Finland’s gap is very largely attributed to the smaller economic gap between rich and poor. Yet, the corporate media, driven by barons like Rupert Murdoch, even scapegoats education for the 2008 Wall Street meltdown:

Society also gains when its citizens achieve. According to one study by McKinsey, if we had closed the gap in educational performance between ourselves and nations such as Finland and Korea, America’s GDP would have been as much as $2.3 trillion higher in 2008. That would be a 16% gain. Imagine that kind of gain compounded over time, and you begin to appreciate why other nations are putting such a premium on their school systems.

Not surprisingly, Murdoch wants to close down the what he and his ilk like to call “failure factories” in the poorer areas and replace them with charters.

Indeed the fact that “closing the gap” has become the mission of billionaires such as Murdoch, Gates, Broad, and the Waltons (of Walmart) ought to make us just a little suspicious. It is interesting how deeply caring they all appear to be when it comes to closing the gap IN SCHOOLS but how they oppose closing the gap outside school through progressive taxation or the provision of other social services, such as health care, welfare, or improvements to minimum wages. They encourage “right to work” legislation to allow for scab labor, but they oppose the right to job opportunity, which might limit the freedom of corporations to pull up roots and move to where the pickings are cheaper. Think-tanks and foundations which front for wealthy donors have a similar fixation with equalizing outcomes when it comes to school, but no conscience whatsoever for the poverty itself.

What is their motivation for putting the screws to public education? In simplest terms those with vested interests and a religious commitment to the ideal of schools as businesses in a free marketplace, want to privatize education. In a press release printed as news in the Calgary Herald, brimming with NCLB-style gapwash, the Fraser Institute’s Peter Cowley spells out the basic game plan. Suitably titled “Children should all have a chance to succeed”, the article demands "…bold action on the part of the provincial government. Instead of letting kids attend chronically low-performing schools, let's demand that Alberta Education open the province to school operators from around the world who have found ways of successfully meeting the challenges of children with personal and family characteristics not unlike those in Alberta's lowest performing schools. Let's encourage these more successful school operators--some of whom are already profiled on schoolchains.org to establish themselves here in Alberta so that they can duplicate their success with those same kids that the current Alberta system is now failing.

The same “if-they-can’t-close-the-gap” justification for privatizing can be found in the literature of all libertarian and neo-conservative think tanks. It is also the hallmark of Obama’s Race to the Top program, which encourages replacement of the low performing schools with charters. Similarly Gates demands the bottom ten per cent of teachers (as defined by test score production) be fired. There are emphatically NO EXCUSES allowed in this game. The truth about poverty is strictly off limits.

Most teachers now see the evil of NCLB in the US and that is why tens of thousands are marching to “Save Our Schools” this summer. What many teachers, and sadly their unions, have failed to recognize even now is that the achievement gap is not a legitimate goal in the first place. It creates accountability for something which is impossible. This is done as a means of putting a spotlight on the supposed failures of public education. It becomes little more than a ritual of humiliation in which fresh sacrifices are constantly demanded by sadistic reformers in the name of "saving the children". .

The irrelevance of the achievement gap in relation to the real economic gap cannot be overstated. For example, in the U.S.(and several other countries) boys’ literacy is presented as a gap which must urgently be closed. But while girls consistently outperform boys on literacy tests, the average incomes of women are well below those of men, and there are considerably more women living in poverty. This is just about as absurd as it would be for us to say that we now need to close the gap for the rich or people with lighter skin. What it really shows of course is that the closing the gap agenda, has, like Hal, in 2001, taken on a power-tripping life of its own, one that benefits the "innovators" who constantly dream up new needs, accountabilities and inadequacies that can only be resolved through private sector "solutions."

Indeed, such accountability as is imposed for closing poverty, race, ethnicity or gender gaps in terms of “outcomes” is nothing but a strategy for undermining public schools, replacing them with charters, voucher schools and a huge arsenal of for-profit delivery systems such as e-learning, tutoring, data warehousing and turnaround consulting. It is a formula for turning a broad, knowledge-based education with an emphasis on democratic participation into mere skill training for jobs and test score competition, a formula which allows the big education corporations and investors on Wall Street to take over, to replace expensive, unionized teachers with cheaper “practitioners” or “facilitators”, scripted lessons, and computer software. And, above all, using the gap to keep schools in a permanent crisis of underperformance is a formula for profit.

Howard Gardner & Edutopia

If you get a chance, you should take a look at this piece on Howard Garder from Edutopia.

Here's the video and an excerpt from Gardner:



On the need for a new approach to assessment in schools.

Let's get real. Let's look at the kinds of things that we really value in the world. Let's be as explicit as we can. Let's provide feedback to kids from as early as possible and then let them internalize the feedback so they themselves can say what's going well, what's not going so well.

I'm a writer and initially I had to have a lot of feedback from editors, including a lot of rejections, but over time I learned what was important. I learned to edit myself and now the feedback from editors is much less necessary. And I think anybody as an adult knows that as you get to be more expert in things you don't have to do so much external critiquing, you can do what we call self-assessment. And in school, assessment shouldn't be something that's done to you, it should be something where you are the most active agent.

Diane Ravitch: Be careful Canada

I know many Canadian educators who are rightfully sceptical of the debacle that is American Education Reform.

We should not be too quick to dismiss the idea that the lunacy of high stakes standardized testing, vilification of teachers, merit pay and other corporate reforms can come to Canada.

The 49th parallel does not offer some kind of inherent insulator to this madness.

Arne Duncan spoke in Toronto last year by invitation of Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty, and Bill Gates recently appeared at the Toronto Film Festival to promote Waiting for Superman.

Diane Ravitch was recently asked if she thought that the same kinds of corporate reforms can spread to Canada and other parts of the world?

Yes, it is happening already. I have gotten urgent e-mail messages from teachers in Australia, the U.K., and elsewhere in Europe. They are worried that the corporate reforms are coming their way, heavily promoted as “the answer” to the ills of education. Bear in mind that the ultimate goal is privatization and deprofessionalization, treating schools as businesses that can be opened and closed with ease as their “profits” (test scores) rise or fall.

Teaching without wanting to

An educated person has the ability and inclination to use judgement and imagination in solving the problems that confront them at work and at home, and to participate in the maintenance of democracy.

-David Berliner

David Berliner presented this quote in a keynote speech here. He goes on to mention that the quote above was influenced by Deborah Meier - who was likely influenced by John Dewey.

Berliner notes that it's not just the acquisition of skills but the inclination to use them that's important. Berliner states:

It does us no good to get kids to learn to read and have them not want to.

You learn to read by reading, but we are turning kids off, and we are seeing the demise of reading as a hobby. 

Berliner's reasoning works as well for teachers as it does for children.

When education reform sees teachers as nothing more than a tool to be used by bureaucrats to implement policy, we engage in an activity Alfie Kohn calls Operation Discourage Bright People from Wanting to Teach. 

It does us no good to get teachers to teach and have them not want to.

The power of mutual knowledge

I understand why many teachers feel the need to shut their classroom doors and teach as if they were on an island. For some of these teachers, they do this out of necessity. It's sadly ironic that in order for some teachers to be innovative and creative, they need to isolate themselves from the shackles of the system's unreasonable standards and accountability regimes.

These teachers engage in a kind of professional subversion.

These teachers become what Barry Schwartz calls system dodgers.

While system dodging can be fueled with good intentions, it simply is not sustainable; educators need to move from being mere system dodgers, who the system is glad to pick off one at a time in isolation, and graduate to being system changers.

However, if educators ever wish to move beyond having to bend the system's rules in order to do right by kids, we need to assemble in the metaphorical public square where everyone will see everyone else. Once educators assemble where everyone can see everyone else, everyone knows that everyone else knows that everyone else knows that the hyper-prescribed, content-bloated curriculums and high stakes test and punish testing bureaucracies are loathed.

It is through this mutual knowledge that educators will gain the collective power to challenge the idea that those outside of the classroom have more control over those who are inside the classroom.

Branding Education

I once had an educational leader ask me what I thought was the mandate for a specific school district. 

I replied, "to educate children." 

They responded, "yeah, but how would that be any different from any other district?" 

I said, "why should it be different?"

They awkwardly changed the subject.

These kinds of interactions lead me to believe that for some, education reform is simply about branding their school district - which has little to nothing to do with the children's best interests.

School was bad enough for me, so it's bad enough for my kids

I have two objections when people say "school was good enough for me, so it's good enough for my kids."

Firstly, I fear that what we really mean is "school was bad enough for me, so it's bad enough for my kids." Often it is hard to look back upon the way we were parented or the way we were taught and admit that we were perhaps provided with a learning environment that was less than ideal. We are apt to romanticize the past in an effort to justify what our parents or teachers did to us, so that we can rationalize perpetuating the past through our own teaching or parenting.

Which leads me to my second objection: even if our parents or teachers did an exemplary job educating us, wouldn't we still want to improve on their successes?

Think about it this way: As good of a parent you might be today, wouldn't you want your son or daughter to grow up and do an even better job than you did?

If not, what's the alternative? 

Pedagogical Blank Cheques

I know too many teachers who simply won't even engage in a conversation. There are a lot of topics that are simply off-side.

Teaching is a sensitive topic.

We own our teaching, and so it is easy to personalize it all. And if our teaching is that personal, it's not easy to admit that we are less than perfect - especially if we've done it for more than 10 years.

If you've taught for 10 plus years, and if you haven't figured things out, what have you been doing?

And yet, deep down we all know that time and experience shouldn't solidify a false confidence; rather, the best teachers teach year after year because they know they'll never really stop learning. They'll never stop improving because there is no finish line.

If the kids change year after year, and they do, then there is no one way of doing things. Standardization was just as wrong in 1910 as it is in 2010.

But does that mean anything goes?

Is there such thing as bad teaching?

Are teachers given a pedagogical blank cheque?

While it is true there is more than one way to skin a cat, it's also true that cats don't really have a say in how their skinned, while kids should have a say in how they are educated.

In other words, the inconvenient conversations we educators shy away from the most are the very discussions we need to have the most. And if our educational leaders prefer to avoid these conversations, real reform is a long way off.

What was school like 80 years ago?

I listened to John Merrow's podcast with Alfie Kohn with my wife's 93 year old grandfather.

The moment it was over, he said, "you know, we never said a word in school. We sat there in our desks and the teacher talked."

"Did you ever raise your hand," I asked.

He laughed, "oh God no. Almost never. I wouldn't dare. You know Shannon (another one of his grand-daughters who teaches grade three) teaches and she says her kids are always talking and discussing and working together."

Bennie then said, "You know, I left school with a lot of questions."

I could see this last comment was said with a sad, regretful tone.

"I was kind of bashful, and I felt like I just shouldn't interrupt the teacher. But you know, years later, I was talking to a Wildlife Officer and he was giving a seminar on some such topic and he told us not to be afraid to ask questions - after all, there's probably a 160 other guys waiting to ask the same question."

I could tell that Bennie took great relief in knowing that his questions were falling on a safe crowd.


"You know, to me grade 9 was a chore, but grade 10, 11 were more enjoyable."

So I asked him, "What was the difference?"

"In 1935, I was in grade 9 and, I had a coal oil lamp. It gave off a kind of red light - not bright at all. But then for grade 10 and 11 we went to a gas lamp - it gave off far better light.

"After grade 10, my old man said he couldn't afford to send me to school, but mom said go ahead and register and he'll have to pay the five dollars a month."

"Was 5 dollars too much money?"

"Well, when you didn't have much, anything is too much, but no - we could afford it. Dad just wanted me to stay home and help him on the farm."

Bennie then asked me, "what grades did you like?"

"Well, I really liked learning about the World Wars. I like the tanks and the aeroplanes. I then got interested in the politics as I learned about Hitler, Churchill, Stalin and Roosevelt. But you got to remember that I was interested in learning about this at home on the Internet."

"Oh, well I learned everything from the radio."

I explained, "when you listened to the radio, you had to listen to whatever they decided to tell you. Imagine if you could have told the radio to share with you what you wanted to hear about - that's the Internet."

He shook his head with disbelief, "oh, wow. That would have been something else."

He's right.

I really enjoyed my chat with Bennie.

Got Tenure?

Tenure is a tricky thing.

On one hand we might ask how the hell can anything get done if everyone is so secure in their job that they have no real reason to to be innovative, progressive and motivated.

On the other hand we might ask how the hell can anything get done if everyone is so scared for their own jobs that they can't find it with in themselves to risk being innovative, progressive and motivated.

This is quite a conondrum...

To settle this paradox, we must sort out who we trust...

And who we don't trust...

If we don't trust teachers then we need to abolish tenure... and lay our faith in policy makers, politicians and administration.

If we don't trust policy makers, politicians and administration then we need to enable tenure... and lay faith in teachers.

So which is it?

Let's get one thing clear, the cynic who chooses to trust no one is dibilitating and offers nothing of any value. So we can toss them aside.

In all likely hood the real answer probably requires a balance. It's probably a bad idea to give any one a blank cheque, but I'll go a step further and say that if we don't trust teachers, then why the hell do we send our children to school?

Are there bad teachers out there? You bet there are, but like any profession there is likely no more bad teachers out there than there are bad doctors, carpenters or accountants. Deborah Meier reminds us that, "every time we respond to our distrust by wiping out institutions close to ordinary citizens in favor of more distant authorities, we strengthen cynicism and weaken democracy itself."

Countries like Finland understand that trust is an essential part of any reform policies. Without trust, we fall into a never-ending pit of control based accountability where top-down policies turn teachers into nothing more than instruments controlled from afar.

One key element to education reform is in teacher preparation. Rather than placing our time and effort into catching the bad teachers, we need to do a better job of making good teachers and then trust them.

John Merrow explains:

We don't have a teacher shortage problem. We treat them so badly, they leave. We have a teacher leakage problem.

If we continue to teacher-proof education by promoting a "paint by numbers" pedagogy with a premium on compliance, what kind of person will wait in line to become a teacher?

We have to trust teachers because we can't afford not to.

Tenure is entirely necessary but not wholly sufficient in providing teachers with a working environment where they can show a tolerance for risk and a bias for action.

Got tenure?

I hope so.

Dan Pink on Merit Pay

I subscribe to Dan Pink's free newsletter. I just received his take on merit pay.

Here's Dan Pink:

Q: Dan, there's been a lot of talk lately about "merit pay" for schoolteachers - that is, tying teacher salaries to student performance, especially on standardized tests. What do you think of this approach?


A: A few years ago, I thought this was a great idea. Incentivize teachers and the pay the outstanding one more? What coud be wrong with that? It's logical, straightforward, and fair. However, after looking at 50 years of research on human motivation for DRIVE, I've changed my mind. I think that this approach, despite is surface appeal, has more flaws than strengths - and that there's a simpler, more effective alternative.

Here's my reasoning:

For starters, most proposals for "merit pay" (sorry, I can't use the term without quotation marks) tie teacher compensation to student scores on standardized tests. That's a disaster. It focuses teachers almost single-mindedly on training their students to pencil in correct answers on multiple choice tests - and turns classrooms into test prep academies. (What's more, it can encourage cheating, as Georgia's experience shows.) So let's knock out this approach to merit pay.

A second option is for school principals to decide who gets performance bonuses. Again, there's a certain theoretical appeal to this method. But I've yet to meet a teacher who considers it fair, let alone motivating. Teachers worry that principals don't have sufficient information to make such decisions and that "merit pay" would be based too heavily on who's best at playing politics and currying favor. So let's kibosh this method, too.

A third approach is to use a variety metrics to determine who gets a bonus. You could measure teacher performance using: standardized scores for that teacher's students; evaluations of the teacher's peers, students, parents, and principal; a teacher's contribution to overall school performance; time devoted to professional development; how much the teachers' students improved over the previous year; and so on. This isn't necessarily a bad idea. But it has a huge downside: It would force resource-strapped schools to spend enormous amounts of time, talent, and brainpower measuring teachers rather than educating students. Schools have enough to do already. And the costs of establishing and maintaining elaborate measurement systems would likely outweigh the benefits.

In short, I can't see a way to construct a merit pay scheme that is both simple and fair. What's more, it strikes me as slightly delusional to think that people who've intentionally chosen to pursue a career for public-spirited, rather than economic, reasons will suddenly work harder because they're offered a few hundred extra dollars. Truth be told, most teachers work pretty damn hard already.

Fortunately, I think there's an easier and more elegant solution - one that's also supported by the science of human motivation.

First, we should raise the base pay of teachers. Too many talented people opt out of this career because they're concerned about supporting their families. For prospective teachers, raising base salaries would remove an obstacle to entering the profession. For existing teachers, it's a way to recognize the importance of their jobs without resorting to behavior-distorting carrots and sticks. The science reveals a paradox about money and motivation: In most cases, the best use of money as a motivator is to pay people enough to take the issue of money off the table. Raising base salaries would help take the issue of money off the table. Instead fretting about paying their bills on an insufficient salary or scheming to get a small bonus, teachers could focus on the work they love.

At the same time, we have to make it easier to get rid of bad teachers. Teaching, like any profession, has its share of duds. Showing these folks the door, which now is quite difficult, is the right thing to do. It's better for students, of course. But it's also better for the teachers who remain. Just as it's very motivating to have great colleagues, it's incredibly de-motivating to have lazy or incompetent ones.

So . . . if I could wave a magic wand, I'd dispense with elaborate and complicated "merit pay" schemes for teachers. Instead, I'd raise teachers' base pay and make it easier to get rid of bad teachers. That solution is simpler, fairer, and much more consistent with what truly motivates high performance.

Thanks again for reading.

Cheers,

Dan Pink

P.S. Hope you'll also check out the Pink Blog if you get a moment. Our two most popular posts last month explored whether purpose is really an effective motivator and examined the differences between failure and mediocrity.
DanPink.com is my website on business, motivation and creativity. You can also follow me on Twitter @danielpink.