I’m still sick, so this will be short.

The National Center on Education and the Economy is one of those purportedly “non-partisan” groups that weighs in every now and then on what we’re doing wrong in our schools. This last week, they trumpeted their New Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce’s report: Tough Choices or Tough Times.

Newspaper and online articles breathlessly conveyed the meat of the matter: we have to totally revamp the way we’re teaching our kids, or the U.S. will fall behind in the economic race. Our students have to become team workers, globally aware, and creative. Bare bones testing is killing our schools and our nation. Report to be released Thursday.

Well, okay, I think, about time someone sees the light. I’ll withhold judgment until I see the report, but this could be good.

So on Thursday I track down their site to read the report, or to download it and read it if it’s not all online.

Go ahead, go take a look at the report. I’ll wait for you here.

Continue reading “A brief rant (Day 138/365)” →

Those of you who have been with me for a while may recall a post I wrote on educational research, in which I stated my overall disdain for most research. One set of data beloved of our current administration’s education minions is the NAEP, the National Assessement of Educational Progress, the “only test administered across the nation in all the states.” In fact, it bills itself as “The Nation’s Report Card.” That’s how important it is.

Well.

Back when I first became aware of the NAEP, I thought, well, at least it’s consistent, right? Only sort of no: after I thought about it, I realized that my school was not taking this test every year, and in fact I didn’t remember it ever taking the test. So where is this report card coming from?

The way it works is that schools are randomly selected from across the country each year to be the data sources. Well, that’s okay, sort of, because you can get a “scientific sample” to give good data.

Only sort of no: within each randomly selected school, a small number of students is chosen to take the test. It’s not even random, because selected students and their parents must agree to be the guinea pigs. This small number of students then takes the test, which lasts less than an hour, and it’s from this set of data that we get our Report Card.

That’s right: when you read about how “scores are up” or “down” or our children are the stupidest of all civilized nations, this is the test they’re talking about. A 50-minute test administered to a not-quite-random sample of students scattered across the nation.

It gets worse. I often wondered at the drop off in scores between elementary and high school. You’ve read about that, how our 4th graders are up there with the rest of the world, but somehow they all get stupid by 8th grade (which makes sense, if you know middle school), but then get even stupider in high school. How does this happen?

As a principal of my acquaintance told me, when she was in charge of the test at the high school, the only students who would agree to the test were the losers who simply didn’t want to be in class. Not one of our best and brightest were included. The AP kids, the gifted kids, didn’t want to miss class.

At least at the elementary level, they work their little hearts out on the test. We tell them it’s important, and they believe us. The scabs at the high school don’t care whether it’s important or not. They just slough their way through it and kick back, enjoying their hour of freedom before sauntering back to “Life Skills Math.”

Nor does the NAEP gather any data about what might produce a school’s scores. Funding? Nope. Funding for the media center? Nope. What reading series do K-3 classrooms use? Nada. They scope out the kids’ home language and whether the family owns a computer, and that’s about it. (Their database of info on schools only includes data from the 2003-2004 school year. Their population data for my school, for example, is about 200 students off. Next year, if they follow the same schedule, they’ll be about 500 off.)

So there it is. The next time you read about the requirement to use “research-based strategies” in improving student “achievement,” remember that it’s from the same people who bring you the “Nation’s Report Card,” with about the same level of rigor in their “research.”

Yes, I’ve been lazy. It’s easy to get that way when you’re at the Georgia Governor’s Honors Program for six weeks, working with amazing kids and fabulous teachers 24/7. Here’s a little stopgap before I actually get inspired.

Those of you who are not educators might like to know that every five years or so your schools must be accredited, which means we must produce reams and reams of paper that documents that we are worthy. For us in Georgia, the accrediting organization is SACS, the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools. We crank out these volumes in preparation for a visit from the “SACS team,” which sweeps through like locusts in a three-day visit and not only reads our reports [::stifles snicker::] but also visits our classrooms and interviews random teachers and students and parents.

So, in order to better prepare us for our SACS visit, here are some fun things to do for your SACS visitors (Guess which one of these I actually did):

• At breakfast, put food into your pockets, “for later.”
• Whenever you meet a SACS team member, inquire amiably about this “SACS thing” and how they “got into it.”
• When asked what the school’s mission is, say that it’s to “test the children until their ears bleed.”
• Hang a black leather mask and cat-o’-nine-tails in your closet door.
• Do the same, only in 1st grader size.
• Whenever a team member’s back is turned, say, “Oops!” and then just smile broadly when they turn around.
• Display the filthy limericks your class wrote on a bulletin board.
• If asked about the emergency plan, just pat your pocket and say, “If anything comes up, I’ll know how to handle it.”
• Replace all the alphabet charts with the Russian Cyrillic alphabet.
• When queried about the school’s improvement plan, comment that you “don’t really cotton to all this modern stuff.”
• Have e-Bay up on your browser, and periodically run over to check it.
• Share with the team members your students’ exemplary ITBS score sheets, with the names obviously whited out and written over.
• Keep the class hamster in your pocket. Or in your hair.
• If asked what stumbling blocks you see preventing you from implementing your action plan, say, “The county administration.” Or “No Child Left Behind.”
• Reach into your purse repeatedly and take a swig from the small bottle you keep there.
• Say, “Class, can anyone tell me what Billy did wrong this time?”
• Keep asking, “You’re not writing this down, are you?”
• Give the children noogies.
• Reward the children with skull tattoos.
• Announce to the class, “Y’all go to the media center and read for a while. Miss _____ is tired and needs a nap.”
• Shout “Food fight!” in the cafeteria.
• Be showing Rambo, Part III when they walk in.
• When asked about any aspect of the SACS report, give a wrong answer and then say, “No, wait, that was last time.”
• Keep smiling!

Till next time!

I just completed a course in education research. Well, technically I haven’t completed it, because my main project, if it’s accepted by the instructor, can’t even take place until this summer, but in any case the course is over.

Here’s what I’ve learned: all data is bogus.

I know you’ll find this difficult to believe, but scientific research can’t seem to pin down what works and doesn’t work in our schools. “Smaller class size,” says the Kentucky study. “Not really,” says a study from London. “Accelerated Reader,” says Renaissance Learning and all its ‘research institute’ fronts. “Not likely,” says other studies.

“Read to your kids,” says all kinds of studies. “Nope,” says a study released today by the feds, which says nothing parents do makes as much difference as how much money they make and how much education they got before having children.

Well.

What’s the deal here? Big Pharma does this all the time: control group, test group, crunch the numbers, and hey presto! reliable data. And Vioxx.

So why can’t education do the same thing? This is an easy one: they can’t control the variables. Ever. In any way. Sure, you can “take them into account using statistical methods,” like chicken feathers and eye of newt, I suppose, but the problem there is garbage in, garbage out.

However, there is a bigger problem with educational research, and that is measuring results. Scratch a study and you’ll find they’re all about the same thing: increasing student achievement.

Quick: what is “achievement”?

You see the problem. Even if we all agreed that “student achievement” was properly measured by the standardized tests we have or might develop, which we don’t, by the way, the problem remains that the variables going into the results of standardized tests are just as squirrelly and uncontrollable as those skewing the study itself.

Here’s a direct quote from the horrible, horrible textbook from the course which just ended: “Of course, if the mechanisms underlying the creation of academic achievement were understood completely, and if each of the variables was measured well, then a longitudinal survey… could provide adequate information on causal effects.” [Haertel, G. D. & Means, B. (Eds.). (2003). Evaluating educational technologies: Effective research designs for improving learning. p. 196-7]

This of course is the classic Ham & Egg routine from vaudeville: “If we had any ham, we could have ham and eggs, if we had any eggs.” But nobody’s laughing, somehow.

Until we all agree on what achievement is, until we have a universal standard to measure and ways to measure it, then all educational research must be regarded with suspicion.

On Feb. 28, the estimable New York Times reported on one of the seemingly biweekly governors conferences. (Perdue on the phone to Schwarzenegger: “Hey, I’ve never been to Rhode Island either! Let’s go talk about inner city crime!”)

At this particular conference, they were rattling around about No Child Left Behind, or as we call it at my school, Every Child Dragged Along, and the Times reported that the governors said that “business leaders” said that workers were arriving without the appropriate level of skills. The governors responded by deciding to “toughen the standards,” i.e., make the tests harder. Well, thirteen of the governors did. Those big ol’ important states didn’t. But thirteen of the smaller ones did.

Workers without skills? What does that mean?

Let’s assume for a moment that these leaders of business cannot possibly be talking about college grads. And let’s be a little more generous and assume that they are probably not talking about graduates of any of our technical schools.

So what does that leave us? High school graduates? Are we talking about high school kids not having “skills”?

Okay, well, then, I think it’s wonderful that the leaders of our business world are concerned that their workers come to them without a firm knowledge of the Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928, or the Bohr model of the atom, or the difference between a Petrarchan and a Shakespearean sonnet.

What? That’s not it? That’s not what they’re whining about? Oh, skills, not knowledge. I get it. They have an unacceptably large number of high school level workers who cannot read, write, compute, etc. Well, that’s different.

Now I can totally see why the governors would immediately want to make the tests harder.

Are these people actually the leaders of our economic system?

If it were me, I’d be taxing the hell out of business to pay for elementary reading coaches, to pay for a radical restructuring of K-2, to pay for whatever it would take so that every child who is capable would in fact be reading by 3rd grade. But that’s me, liberal that I am.

Last year, I was at the Georgia State STAR Student banquet, where I heard a leader of business actually say, “If we raised the graduation rate in Georgia to [some number I’ve forgotten], it would add an extra [some number in the millions] to our state’s economy.” He said it to a room full of Georgia’s absolute best educators and students, apparently without realizing that all of us were thinking, “So what you’re saying is that it would be worth it to Georgia’s businesses to give us that amount of money to improve schools?”

But, liberal that I am, I don’t think that’s what he was suggesting. I think what he and the governors want is for us to take those students who would have dropped out thirty years ago and, by sitting on them harder, turn them into the 12% who actually graduated, and that’s just the ones that graduated, not the ones who went to college. And then, you see, the profits will just roll in.

Well, not to the schools, but you get the idea.