False dilemma: The either-or fallacy and the standardized testing debate

"They call me Mr. Knowitall
I will not compromise.
I will not be told what to do.
I shall not step aside.

They call me Mr. Knowitall
I have no time to waste.
My mouth it spews pure intellect.
And I've such elegant taste! [...]

They call me Mr. Knowitall
I am so eloquent!
Perfection is my middle name,
And whatever rhymes with... eloquent."

                                         ("Mr. Knowitall," Primus)

A few days ago, I came across a blog post by a fellow who chose to write about standardized testing, something that has been written about eighteen or so trillion times.

But this article was different.  It didn’t recycle old rhetoric and clichés, nor was it unduly burdened with melodrama and gross hyperbole, two sins that many, including perhaps yours truly, indulge in from time to time – some deliberately (cheesy and manipulative writers), some accidentally (bad writers).

Instead, I found its tone revelatory in its simplicity.  It says only what it needs to.  It is clear – both precise and concise.   It is so short that my attempts to excerpt it would lead me to duplicate almost the entire article, which only clocks in at just over 800 words.  It is eminently readable, and it accomplishes this without dumbing down the jargon, technical language or rhetoric.  

A few choice snippets:

“As a teacher, if my livelihood is based on test results, then I will do everything possible to ensure high marks, including narrowing the curriculum and prepping fiercely for the test. The choice between an interesting project and a paycheck is no choice at all. These are amazing disincentives to student learning. Tying teachers' careers to standardized tests does not foster creative, passionate, skillful young adults. It does exactly the opposite.”

“As a large body of research suggests, standardized test data are imprecise for two main reasons. First, they do not account for individual and environmental factors affecting student performance, factors over which teachers have no control. (Think: commitment, social class, family.) Second, high-stakes, one-time tests increase the likelihood of random variation so that scores fluctuate in arbitrary ways not linked to teacher efficacy. (Think: sleep, allergies, the heartache of a recent breakup.)”

“Because standardized tests are an inexact estimate of a teacher's ability, they are also unfair. By focusing on a sliver of the curriculum -- often rote facts --standardized tests do not measure meaningful understanding. (Think: ‘Who was the last French monarch?’ versus ‘How much violence is justified in revolution?’) And unless you believe bubbling the letter of the best answer is crucial in the 21st century, standardized tests exclude evidence of important skill development.”

And I love the way the author, Jack McKay, describes testing as America’s “new national pastime.” Hell, baseball is all about the stats now, why shouldn’t teaching be so as well?  Then they could print test scores and passing rates on the back of teachers' I.D. badges -- like baseball cards!  *sigh*

What most caught my attention, however, was this phrase:  “[E]ducation reform has been cast as a false dilemma between students and teachers…”

I wrote my Masters thesis on the either-or fallacy in public policy (specifically, as pertains to education and pedagogy) decision-making.  The either –or fallacy (also called false dilemma or the black-and-white fallacy) is, simply put, the assertion that any set of options is necessarily reduced to either x or y.  I am a passionate opponent of this manner of oversimplified, prone-to-extremes type of issue analysis.  (Think: America’s 2-party system.)

People seem to naturally gravitate towards this simplified manner  of thinking, unfortunately. Have you ever noticed that when you disagree passionately with a person, you often abandon a moderate stance in order to more vehemently oppose that person?  It’s easier to defend an extreme position, because it eliminates the complexities and nuance of any argument, and liberates you of the need to make concessions.

Think about it in debate terms.  There are two ways to approach debating:  One is to use the friction of debate to unlock new lines of inquiry, probe diverse viewpoints, better understand the gestalt of an issue, and reach a better (or at least more acceptable) solution to a problem.  I’ll call this constructive debate.  The second way is to “win,” whatever the cost, in other words, to take down your opponent.  I’ll call this destructive debate. 

There’s nothing harder than engaging in constructive debate with an adversary who is hell-bent on destructive debate.  You want to look at multiple sides, make the necessary concessions to show that you’re not a one-note ideologue; you want your discussion to be rich, nuanced, erudite, but your efforts to recognize the aspects of your adversary’s arguments with which you might agree only fuel his rhetorical zeal, and he in return gives you no such consideration. “Score-wise,” you have capitulated, whereas he has not.  He sees your acquiescence as a sign of weakness, your lack of sureness as to your own core beliefs. Clearly, he tells you, you have no consistent principles.  You feel the center of the debate shifting unacceptably towards your adversary; your confidence slides as he is further emboldened.  This creates a new problem.  You certainly don’t want your supporters to see you agreeing with aspects of your opponent’s position, while not winning any points of your own.  They might think your opponent’s position has merit!  So what do you do? You ratchet up your end of the dialogue, take a slightly more extreme position to “titrate” the discussion more into balance.

Oh, but this has the opposite effect, rather like trying to steer out of a skid.  Ere long, you and he are at radical opposite ends of the spectrum, two polarized extremes, an either-or.  Another debate that could have been a constructive discussion, turned into a destructive battle.

Even the best of us falls into this trap occasionally.  Even, it seems, the esteemed author of the blog article I’m currently lauding.

He writes:

“I believe student results from standardized tests should not be used to evaluate teachers because the data are imprecise and the effects are pernicious.”

“Let's decouple high-stakes testing from teacher evaluations for the sake of students and teachers alike.”

Hey, I agree with him! Well, mostly, that is…

And isn’t that the lure of the either-or trap?  It satisfies our driving human need to emote.  To want to say “Hell yeah!” or “Hell no!”  It’s much less cathartic to scream out, “That’s pretty much it, but there are a few details I’d like to take issue with!”  The either-or fallacy satisfies our need for easy categorization (are you a pro or a con?) and our need for fraternization (it’s easier to match black with black and white with white than it is to color-match an infinite number of shades of grey).  No public speaker is going to rouse a teeming crowd of would-be hangers-on to orgasmic outbursts of applause with “Pretty much!  That’s basically it!”

Look at these modified versions of his sentences:

“I believe student results from standardized tests should not be used as the main metric to evaluate teachers because the data tend to be imprecise and the effects can be pernicious.”

“Let's drastically reduce the impact of high-stakes testing results on teacher evaluations for the sake of students and teachers alike.”

I don’t think the utter elimination of high-stakes testing is the answer, necessarily.  That's the "or" to the "either" of testing. Any assessment can show us something useful.  If four physics teachers at a high school all give the same assessment to their three classes of 75 kids, and the results are radically different, there is a good chance that there’s some reason why.  The score disparity might just alert the teachers, or the department, or the administration to a conversation that needs to be had, a need that is not being met, or simply an artifact of the testing process itself that should be discussed, if for no other reason than to eliminate it from consideration as a failure of one aspect or other of the system.   Those conversations cannot happen if there are no diagnostics of any kind, and standardization (or "norming") is the best way I can think of to achieve, or at least approach, a state of ceteris paribus.

Now, and this is important, the reason is NOT AUTOMATICALLY teacher inefficacy, which would automatically be the assumption under the very real current educational regime that McKay describes.  Therein lies the problem – not so much the assessment itself (although we do way the hell too much of it, and at the expense of instructional time, no less), but the high-stakes, make-or-break impact of what we do with the result.

Simply put:  We trust the numbers more than we trust the people.  In fact, one might to moved to say (if one were wont to hyperbolize) that we trust the numbers to the exclusion of trusting people.   And as McKay correctly points out, the results are catastrophic.  I mean, “can be” catastrophic.  (Modal verbs make great qualifiers.  Consider the subtle, almost subliminal, impact of qualifiers on a debater's presentation by checking this out .)

Anyhow, I enjoyed the McKay piece, and I suggest you read it.  It’s short, much shorter than this (1,300+ words at this point already). And I think he is possibly more eloquent than I.  He doesn’t claim to be a Mr. Know-it-all; he pleads with us for debate (constructive, not destructive), dialogue, a discussion, a conversation.

Works for me.  I may disagree with you, but I’ll always try to talk to you, not at you.  Unless you piss me off, then I’ma have to take you down…

Can blood-feud policy adversaries ever sit at a table and have this kind of constructive discussion without resorting to the cheap and ultimately destructive rhetorical shortcuts of partisan false dilemmas?  Oh, snap, by resorting to the binary of "constructive" and "destructive," did I just create my own either-or?

I suspect I know the sad answers, but still, I’m A.S.K.ing…

"I was proud to say I was a teacher." Past tense.

"Huddled in the safety of a pseudo silk kimono
A morning mare rides, in the starless shutters of my eyes
The spirit of a misplaced childhood is rising to speak his mind
To this orphan of heartbreak, disillusioned and scarred
A refugee..."
                                               ("Pseudo Silk Kimono," from Misplaced Childhood, by Marillion)

“I was proud to say that I was a teacher.”  Please note the use of the past tense in that sentence. I was proud.

First, Gerald Conti’s retirement letter went viral (I’d like to think my little blog helped a little).  Conti, who for the time being, teaches in the high-performing Westhill School District, just outside of Detroitesque Syracuse, NY, posted his letter on his personal facebook page, and for a short while, it stayed in the local community.  A very short while. The rest, as they say, is history. 

And just as Mr. Conti was fading from news headlines a few weeks later, another public resignation shocked the teaching world, at least here in New York State – this time, a principal.  Kathleen Knauth’s retirement letter was shorter and sweeter, but packed just as much of a punch.  It did not have the same viral impact, confined largely to New York State (and my humble blog).  This surprised me, since the Frustrated Teacher is so commonplace an archetype as to be practically a cliche, but an administrator breaking ranks with Management to speak truth to power? That blew me away.

A subsequent public resignation from a School Board member, Julie Brissette, also in Upstate New York, drew almost no news attention outside of Syracuse’s city newspaper, the Post Standard.  I thought, perhaps, that what I had hoped would be a movement of principled acts, of Gandhi-esque gestures, of gentle, humble, almost plaintive middle fingers at the educational powers that be who are destroying the most important of our domestic institutions, public education, was dwindling into nothingness.  The starter engaged, the engine almost turned over, but the motor never roared like it should have.

Not yet, anyway.

They say a picture is worth a thousand words.  So what's a 10-minute youtube video worth?

Enter Ellie Rubenstein, a teacher from Illinois (Finally, one who’s not from New York! I was beginning to think it was just New Yorkers who were pissed off about all this!)  A few days ago, Rubenstein posted a 10-minute long video to youtube (watch it here) that has drawn, at this point, almost 400,000 views.

An excerpt: 

Over the past 15 years, I've experienced the depressing, gradual downfall and misdirection of communication that has slowly eaten away at my love of teaching. The emphasis in education has shifted from fostering academic and personal growth in both students and teachers to demanding uniformity and conformity.  Raising students' test scores on standardized tests is now the only goal, and in order to achieve it the creativity, flexibility and spontaneity that create authentic learning environments have been eliminated. Everything I love about teaching is extinct.  Curriculum is mandated, minutes spent teaching subjects are audited, schedules are dictated by administrators. The classroom teacher is no longer trusted or in control of what, when or how she teaches.

Eventually, if it is heard enough times, it will believed by the people who need most to hear it.  Let's all listen:

Julie Brissette:  I no longer choose to spend my valuable free time representing a community that, it appears, puts private agendas ahead of the children.

Kathleen Knauth:  This is not the purpose of public education and I believe [these educational reforms are] destructive in many ways to the children and to the teachers, and to education as a whole.

Gerald Conti:  I am not leaving my profession[;] in truth, it has left me. It no longer exists.

Ellie Rubenstein:  Everything I love about teaching is extinct.

Don’t anyone dare accuse these educators of “giving up” on students, the spiteful insult defensively hurled most often at educators such as these, who have made this hard choice. Nothing could be further from the truth. They are not giving up on students; they simply no longer wish to be part of a system that is actively damaging them. They recognize that their enemy is too great to defeat from within the system, and as long as they stay and obey, they are inadvertently helping to perpetuate the problem, even as they try their best to shield students from it.

If this is your first awareness or inkling of this issue, please take a few moments to look back in time two months to the letter that got it all started, at my earlier blog posts on Gerald Conti and Kathleen Knauth (click the names for links to the articles).

We recently celebrated Memorial Day, in which we pause to remember those fallen in defense of this great nation. Let us also remember that , in their own way, teachers serve this great nation too. And when one falls, we should notice, and we should understand why. It’s a different kind of battlefield, but it’s a very real fight.

And it’s one worth winning.

Thank you, Ellie, Kathleen, Julie, Gerald.

Apollo vs. Dionysus: Is teaching (and teacher evaluation) an art or a science?

"The universe divided
As the heart and mind collided
With the people left unguided
For so many troubled years
In a cloud of doubts and fears
Their world was torn asunder into hollow hemispheres"
                                   ("Hemispheres," by Rush)

I failed a college class once.  I was a high-school senior, sixteen at the time, and for some reason I decided to take a typing course at a local community college (Ohlone College in Fremont, California).  I was pretty sure it would be an easy A; I mean, it was… typing.  Duh.

I know, I know, shades of Anthony Michael Hall in The Breakfast Club. [Note: If the video doesn't work, the script's key lines are beneath the viewer. Sorry. If anyone finds this scene online, shoot me a link?]

But after a couple of weeks of “A-S-D-F, J-K-L-sem,” I couldn’t take it anymore. I started to lag on my touch-typing practice assignments.  I couldn’t focus.  Other students in the class were racing ahead of me.  I was… I was… struggling.

I stopped coming after week 6 or 7 and never went back. I got the “F” on my grade report in the mail. It was strangely surreal.  It almost felt like a rite of passage.  Or perhaps that’s all in historical retrospect.  Yeah, when it happened, at the time, I was pretty rotted (bit of Newfoundland slang courtesy of my Newfie wife).

I’m a pretty decent typist.  Even then, I wasn’t terrible.  I would clock in at around 40 words per minute (I think I’m probably around 50-55 now). My error rate wasn’t too bad either because I would always look at my fingers when I typed.  “Hunt and peck,” my teacher called it derisively.

I always wanted to be able to touch-type without having to look at what I was doing.  My mother, when I was in intermediate school, had a secretary who was an absolute whiz at typing – she could type 90-100 words per minute, and she didn’t even need to look at her fingers.  It was mesmerizing to watch her, much as I felt when would watch early MTV videos of Eddie Van Halen playing guitar. I was watching a master at work.

Try as I might, I was completely incompetent as a typist if I tried to do it the “proper” way.  But somehow, I had gotten it drilled into my head, in the short time I was in that class, that the “proper” way was what mattered.

I feel much better about myself now, and am a happy 50-wpm hunter and pecker.  Oh dear, that didn’t come out quite right…

I bring this up because I currently tech in a discipline – Composition – where process is everything, perhaps equally as important (to some, more so) than product.  But when I was an undergraduate, I never learned the Writing Process. In fact, the process of writing I developed for myself and subsequently engaged in would be scorned mightily by any modern-day college Comp teacher.  I think back to my Psychology 415 seminar at Cornell University, “Concepts, Categories and Word Meanings,” with Frank Keil, in which one 5-7 page paper was due each week.  We would be assigned a mountain of reading – good stuff too: language acquisition, philosophy of language, epistemology.  And then we would have to write a summary/review/critique, of sorts.

My “writing process” at the time consisted of the following steps:

•    Do the readings;
•    Think about them for a few days;
•    Go to a computer lab in the morning of the paper due date (class was at 1:15 pm);
•    Sit comfortably and spread my sources our around me in a grand parabola ;
•    Take a deep breath, reflect, and crack open a Snapple Cherry-Lime Rickey (why did Snapple ever stop selling sodas, anyway?);
•    Crank out a 5-7 page essay in 3-4 hours;
•    Go to class;
•    Get an A!

Somehow, my mind, on its own, always seemed to have conjured up a general sense of what I wanted to write, and an organic flow; my essays all had what I now recognize as the basic chunks of an essay: introduction, body, conclusion.  My transitions were seamless, and my wording punchy, erudite and with a definite personal "voice." How did I do that, without actually deliberately doing that?  I recently paid someone a small fortune to crack the corrupt hard drive on an ancient computer of mine, and I recovered all of my essays from that 1989 class and re-read them, as well as my 25-page final essay, "Towards a more defined theory of children's responses to transformations upon natural vs. artifactual kinds: A literature review and research prospectus," also written in the same fashion.

Not bad!

If you had asked me then, I might have told you that all of the traditional formative steps in the so-called Writing Process – organizing the information, brainstorming, pre-writing, even drafting – I did in my head.  I would never teach one of my Composition students that this was okay.  Do as I say, not as I do?

One size does not fit all.  So is talk of "process" just bunk?

Another anecdote.  When I lived in California, I used to frequent a particular Borders Bookstore in Milpitas (just south of Fremont and north of San Jose). One day, they had students there from a local massage school offering free massages, in what I can only imagine was that particular institution’s version of fieldwork for credit. I selected a practitioner and flopped down on the table for 10 minutes of bliss.

It was awful.

At various times during the “massage,” I signaled (first subtly, then eventually not so subtly) that it wasn’t working for me. It was mechanical, brutal, unpleasant.  She dismissed my concerns, and said she knew what she was doing.  As most of my massages up to that point had been of the, uh,  “amateur” type, I gave this “professional” a little leeway.  But soon, I had to terminate the massage.

The woman became upset with me, saying that what she was doing was supposed to feel good because her textbooks had told her so.  She had learned a fixed way of performing massage, and clove to it, and in the process, had formulated the opinion that if a client didn’t like it, it was the client’s fault.

I’ve seen this behavior many times since, primarily in two places: 

1.    In the delusional behavior of floundering chefs and restaurateurs (let me be very clear – there is NO SUCH WORD as restauranteur) given emergency attitude adjustments by such culinary heavyweights as Gordon Ramsay and Robert Irvine to save their failing establishments;

2.    In the equally delusional behavior of high school administrators who observe and evaluate teacher performance, and who seem to feel that: if teachers do not have exquisitely detailed daily lesson plans that indicate exactly what they plan to do; if teachers do not have their chalk/white boards partitioned into exactly the same prescribed sections (date, "essential question," objective, do-it-now, agenda, key terms, ticket-out-the-door); if teachers do not, over the course of a 50 or 55 or 75 minute-lesson, physically behave the same (usually, in lockstep adherence to whatever the administrators believe “the research” tells them teachers should be doing); then that teacher is de facto a “bad teacher,” and is evaluated as such.

With regard to the former, I will only say that despite the assistance provided by Chef Ramsay, something like 90% of these failing restaurants fail anyway. Why? They hold fast to their illusory prescribed norms instead of listening to the customers, the community, and common sense. With regard to the latter, I can only say that this madness is allowed to continually be perpetuated because it is imposed top-down by administrators who are desperate to “demonstrate” accountability.

Please note that “demonstrating” accountability is actually not the same as “being accountable." High school administrations concern themselves only with the most superficial indicators of teacher performance (does a teacher appear to be following certain prescribed “recipe” for teaching performance, whether or not s/he is actually producing good teaching is irrelevant), much as they concern themselves only with the most superficial indicators of student performance (test scores). When my evaluators would come to the classroom, they would not attend to the lesson itself; they barely even listened. Instead, they would have a lengthy checklist of clearly visible indicators to look for. If they were all there, that was all they needed, and they could comfortable make the leap of assuming that since all of the required components were there, the teaching was robust.

In 2000, I was observed by an assistant principal in my Spanish III class. The class was taught entirely in Spanish. The administrator spoke no Spanish. He had been a math teacher for 20-something years. Oh, we had a Spanish-speaking administrator on-staff – in fact, she was credentialed in the same three areas I was: English, Spanish, ESL – but staff evaluations were assigned by some mysterious process and that was just the way it was. Being a 3-level Spanish class, I conducted the entire class, start to finish, in the target language. The class went pretty well. Student participation was good. We reviewed homework. There were some class notes and discussion, a little guided practice. I assigned homework.  Everything went smoothly. I was pretty pleased.

Not my observer. Because I did not have clearly written objectives and an agenda on the board, he says, he was never able to get a clear sense of what that day’s lesson was. A lesson had to have a discrete start and finish, with some kind of assessment, and those phases had to be clearly discernible. Each days’ lesson should accomplish one defined measurable objective. Mine did not, as far as he could tell.

“Uh, but Sir, you do not speak Spanish. The whole lesson was in Spanish.”

“Good teaching is good teaching. It’s evident. I know it when I see it.”

Like pornography, huh?

If you are not familiar with the awesome and wonderful scene from Dead Poets Society where Robin Williams's Mr. Keating first meets his class, now is a good time to familiarize yourself.  Go ahead, view for a few minutes. I'll wait right here.  Good teachers are Mr. Keating. But Common Core, NCLB, Race to the Top, and the school administrators mindlessly enforce their mandates and embrace them as gospel are all Dr. J. Evans Pritchard, PhD.

Hold on, now.  Maybe I’m going too far, being too simplistic.  

Jeffrey Hammond, Professor English and George B. and Willma Reeves Endowed Chair in the Liberal Arts, deflated some of the out-of-contraol romanticization of, and schooled me but good in, my post Dead Poets' Society teacher-worship when he wrote in 2009: “In the end, the extreme rationalist and the extreme romantic are more alike than they know.” Damn. I hate to admit it, but that's sage advice right there.

“The great pendulum is poised to swing back from the heart to the head, but as this movie confirms, we poets and nonpoets alike are “dead” inside unless we honor both,” he added.

So there is, or must be, some kind of middle ground. There must be some science mixed in to the art of teaching, and by extension, teacher evaluation. A little bit of Apollo mixed in with the Dionysus.

But how?

I’m just A.S.K.ing…

Race to the Top and the 10th Amendment -- a look back at 2009

Did you ever wish you could go back in time?  Here, let me help you. 

Reprinted below is a discussion of an editorial from August 25, 2009, written by Paul Riede, who often writes on educational matters for Syracuse's Post Standard newspaper.  (Link to the article here, although most of it is reproduced in segments in this post.)

Prophetically, he titled his piece "State education law misguided, but so are Obama requirements." I have already blogged about Obama's bizarre flip-flop on the relationship between testing and accountability, as well as the eerie stranglehold, the near-total dominion, that the wicked trinity of NCLB, Race to the Top and Common Core have on our beloved profession.

But I have to admit, when I was teaching in Syracuse in 2009, and there were whispers of, "Hey, there's a ton of money available for schools that increase student performance," my ears perked up a bit.  I think everyone was a bit suspicious, but I'm not sure anyone really saw what was coming.

Well, except apparently Paul Riede.

Riede’s 2009 approach to RttT was grounded firmly in that age-old GOP rallying cry: “States’ Rights!” In making his claim, he presents a middle ground that I want to discuss for a moment, that many anti-RttT, anti-Common Core, anti-NCLB people, including myself, often ignore:  that it’s important not to conflate the lambasting of current methods of implementation of Common Core and rubrics of Race to the Top funds dissemination (which is thoroughly justified) with the rejection of all notion of content-area standards (which is foolish).

Riede dodged this false dilemma, this either-fallacy, by saying (emphasis mine):

Clearly, student test scores should not be the only thing used to evaluate teachers. School officials who give too much weight to such tests to the exclusion of the many other means of evaluation would be doing a disservice to teachers and their students. In important ways, an overemphasis on test scores limits teacher creativity and encourages a "teaching to the test" syndrome that can stultify a learning environment. But to ban administrators from even considering how students do on such tests -- the most important of which measure basic math and literacy skills -- is ludicrous.

That is particularly true as schools gain the ability to use the tests to track students' progress from year to year. If one teacher manages to get most of his or her students to make a year's worth of academic gains while the teacher next door gets only half those results with similar students, that's something administrators should be able to consider.

In this, he made a valid point. He is rejecting the extremist knee-jerk reaction position, which is, in general, a rhetorically sensible thing to do.  The rabid sentiments expressed by educators (again, including myself) often do not allow for such nuance. Political activism typically pushes one to the most extreme version of one’s own position, as combatants strive to distance themselves as much as possible from their ideological opponents. Of course test scores should be looked at – somehow – and of course they should not be the sole basis for decision-making, nor should they be disproportionately, or even heavily, weighted (as they so often seem to be).  I’m not sure that even the most venomous test-haters out there would call for the elimination of all testing, so Riede’s criticism seems at least partially valid.

Riede was consistent in his moderate stance in criticizing the state of New York for its attempted response to RttT:

The Obama administration is taking aim at New York and other states that ban public school officials from considering student test scores when they evaluate teachers. The administration is right to question states about such counterproductive laws, passed at the insistence of teachers' unions. But it is dead wrong to punish them over what should remain state policy decisions.

Obama Education Secretary Arne Duncan has proposed a "Race to the Top Fund" that would divvy up some $4.3 billion in federal stimulus funds to states that are pursuing school reform and have innovative plans for further improvement. But under Duncan's plan, not a cent of the money would go to states that ban the use of test scores in teacher evaluations. Placing restrictions on charter schools could also hurt a state's chances. That would appear to leave New York out of the running for any of the money, along
with California and a few other states.

Last year, the New York State Legislature and Gov. David Paterson succumbed to pressures from teachers' unions and approved a two-year ban on the use of student test scores in teacher-tenure decisions. The unions argued that the tests were not designed as teacher evaluation tools and should not be used as such.

Riede called the state’s argument “silly” and its ban on considering testing in teacher evaluation a “counterproductive law,” and expressed a wish that New York would lift their ban, for pedagogical reasons.  I call Riede's snap judgment into question here; there is nothing silly about arguing that "the tests were not designed as teacher evaluation tools and should not be used as such." And I think most, if not all, teachers would line up behind that statement quite happily.

By his comment, Riede seems to want to say that test scores are, or ought to be, one of many rubrics to be used in concert to assess students and teacher performance, and it’s hard to argue with that stance, although I think the more important factor is growth, as opposed to a single, decontextualized raw test score, as I try to illustrate here: 

Recently, I had a girl recently in an English 10 course who, at the start of the year, could not write a coherent paragraph, much less a coherent sentence.  It was an Inclusion class, and she was a special-needs student, with major written/expressive language difficulties.  But I and my aide, as well as the support systems the school provided, worked with her all year. She passed the course, albeit just barely, with some modifications for her needs - allotted time, occasional alternative assessments, etc...  -- but no modification in the rigor and standards I required for passing the course.  In other words, the content standards remained fixed, but we adapted our pedagogy to help her rise to meet them, we did not lower our standards for her convenience and the school's passing rate numbers.  At the end of the year, she took the New York State English Language Arts Regents Exam, which at the time was a 6-hour test given over two days (and because of her special needs, she would have had double the time, so imagine being forced to take a 12-hour test in two marathon 6-hour sessions).  This test had not one but FOUR full-length essays on it.  Click here, and look at June 2010, to see what I mean.

Passing was a 65.  She got a 59 on the exam.  I was ecstatic.  This was a girl whose level of writing started off only slightly better than my 7-year-old daughter's (maybe not even that) who came literally within one or two rubric points out of 24 of passing a major composition test with four essays -- not only were her skills improved, but also her stamina and attention and focus, to be able to have even finished the test.  Even she was happy -- "Well, I almost passed it!" she told me, smiling.

In the eyes of the State of New York, in the eyes of the Board of Regents, and in the eyes of the administration of the Syracuse City School District, however, she (and by extension, her teacher and the aides that attended to her tutelage) was a failure.

I would rather have a class full of 25 of this girl than a class full of students who could receive easy grades of A and B, but coast comfortably to grades of C.  But of course, a teacher who had the latter would be lauded for his 100% pass rate, and a teacher with the former would be fired.

I ask you: Which one is doing the real teaching?

I support the existence of standards – national content-area standards, even, and even of tests to assess performance within those standards – but the NYS Board of Regents has gone from being a board that primarily monitors course content and testing to a Sauron-esque Master of Puppets (Lord of the Rings and Metallica in the same noun phrase – top that!) with its slimy tendrils (Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn) reaching into all areas of pedagogical practice.  Now magnify that by a factor of 50, and you have what is happening at the federal level.

Clearly, a set of standards is an essential component of any functional educational system.  I absolutely reject the Libertarian and Objectivist (yes, I know that they are philosophically divergent views, but their political positions overlap largely) notions of full school privatization and total local/parental control over all content and standards, as expressed here last year by C. Bradley Thompson: 

Just as antebellum Americans in the North had to be roused, educated, and radicalized on the evils of government-sanctioned involuntary servitude and on the need to abolish slavery, so too 21st-century Americans need to be shown the horrors of government-run, involuntary schools and persuaded to abolish them. Americans must come to see not only that the public school system is failing, but also that it cannot be reformed—because, like slavery, it is fundamentally immoral.

It might not be such a terrible thing if the Common Core standards were allowed to continue to exist, and just kind of “sat there” as guideposts, instead of being forced down teachers’ throats at the point of a gun, with financial inducements, punitive measures, implied threats and consequences, and an inordinate crush of weighty bureaucracy designed to do nothing more than fatten Pearson’s coffers and increase the extent of government control into an area where, even if you successfully made the argument that it belongs, it certainly has no expertise.

Even Riede, who (in 2009) seemed somewhat sympathetic to RttT’s mission, made this argument back in 2009, not based on the absolute evil of RttT (this was before Common Core was birthed, ravenous and already snarling, from RttT’s festering womb and began suckling on its wretched mother's wrinkled teat), but on the idea that the Federal Government is just too involved:

The New York Legislature should repeal the legislation, or at least let it expire next year. But that decision should be a state one, not a federal one. Duncan's proposal to deny millions of dollars in potential grants to states that don't comply with his policy preferences is an example of the kind of federal overreach on education that many hoped had ended with the Bush administration.

How very Tenth Amendment of him.  It is an interesting exercise in political philosophy.  The federal government created a disastrous policy and signed it into law.  A state drafted a policy defense and signed it into law, but the state’s law itself was an over-response.  The federal government responded by threatening financially devastating punitive measures against the state for blocking the will of the federal government.  Riede argued that, even though the federal policy was a bad one, the state’s defensive position was just as bad, and should be repealed.  However, he argued, it was not the federal government’s job to force or coerce that repeal, since it was a states’ rights issue.

Riede’s solution?  For Duncan to grow the hell up and not be so petty:

Duncan should reconsider the conditions on his "Race to the Top Fund" and direct the money to wherever schools and teachers are working diligently and creatively to help students succeed.

And we all know how that worked out….

Can schools be trusted to keep to rigorous content-area standards without the government heaving its weight behind them?  Should government have any say in what schools teach?  How about how schools teach? (Not the same thing – one is content, the other is pedagogy.)  And if so, how to titrate it to an acceptable level? And who decides what is an “acceptable” level? Will government ever trust schools and schoolteachers again?  Was the failure really mine that that English 10 student only pulled a 59 on her final, and is there anything government can do to make sure that such a tragedy never happens again?

If you taught in New York State in the 70s and 80s; Is my perception of the shift in the NYS Board of Regents' shift in priorities on the money, or am I misremembering a non-existent glorious past because the present has become so exaggeratedly bleak?

This is perhaps not a simple black-and-white issue, as many pundits might make it seem (even, I fear, myself at times).  Any ideas?

I’m just A.S.K.ing...

First Gerald Conti, now principled principal Kathleen Knauth calls it quits - John Galt claims another educator

Last month, I wrote:

Ayn Rand wrote Atlas Shrugged in 1957.  In it she described an alternate America in which people of integrity in education, art, letters, and especially industry, are becoming increasingly forced by the government to act against their own best interests, in the name of serving other masters - the collective, the State, the amorphous entity known as the "common good."  Bit by bit, the great minds of America realize that the vocations, professions, lifestyles that they love and cherish are being ruined by oppressive and meddlesome rights-denying bureaucracy that, more often than not, doesn't really understand the nature of what it's meddling with.  In the end, these great minds decide (are persuaded, actually, by a mysterious figure named John Galt) to "go on strike," and one by one, over a period of time, they vanish from the world, their factories, industries, mines, foundries and establishments abandoned or destroyed by their own hand.  The nation is sent into a panic, both at the trend, and at the fact that so many of the "prime movers" of what Rand called "the motor of the world" have simply vanished -- ceased utterly to be productive, by choice -- daring the country to try and survive without them.

A few weeks ago, I blogged about Gerald Conti’s decision to leave the teaching profession early:

"After writing all of this," he writes in his conclusion to [his] two-page letter, "I realize that I am not leaving my profession, in truth, it has left me. It no longer exists. I feel as though I have played some game halfway through its fourth quarter, a timeout has been called, my teammates’ hands have all been tied, the goal posts moved, all previously scored points and honors expunged and all of the rules altered.  For the last decade or so, I have had two signs hanging above the blackboard at the front of my classroom, they read, 'Words Matter' and 'Ideas Matter'. While I still believe these simple statements to be true, I don’t feel that those currently driving public education have any inkling of what they mean."

His retirement letter, which went viral, sparked what I hoped would be a national outrage.  It almost did, and maybe that outrage is still there, slowly simmering.  My own blog post got hundreds of hits - thank you, fearless readers! -  in a very short time, but that has slowed down greatly (625 reads of my article in the past month, but just 13 over the past week.)  I also see less of Mr. Conti’s name in the news blotters and aggregators.

What I do see a lot more of is Common Core-fueled angst, plus a healthy dose of frustration at  onerous (and by most accounts, idiotic) teacher evaluation procedures.  This is a heartening sign, perhaps.
 
What I mean is simply this:  The Gerald Conti outrage was a grass-roots outrage. The words of support for Mr. Conti  that I read on blogs and newsposts all last month were largely from the community at large – laypersons.  Sure, there was a healthy sprinkling of teachers and former teachers in the mix, but the majority seemed clearly to be just plain old folks sharing their sentiments and (mostly) supporting Mr. Conti’s decision.  However, now that the focus has turned very specifically from Gerald Conti as a human-interest story to the more technical issues of education standards, assessment and evaluation, and teacher personnel management, I am starting to see more educators whip out their virtual pens and rattle their sabers in protest, publicly, and THAT is a welcome sign.

The fear that educators so often feel that forces them to swallow the Kool-Aid and “play the game” (see my thoughts on the ties that bind teachers’ mouths and minds here and here) seems to finally be being overcome by the patent absurdity of the system in which we find ourselves.

Maybe more educators will begin putting their money where their mouths are.  Case in point, the latest publicized exemplar, reported by WGRZ-2 in Buffalo, of a principled departure and a poison pen retirement letter – this time, by a principal:

Principal Kathleen Knauth says the new state standards for teacher evaluations have drastically changed her role as an educator for the worse. That is why she is leaving Hillview Elementary [in the eastern suburbs of Buffalo], where she has been the principal for ten years, at the end of this school year:

"Everything is so fundamentally against my belief system that I had to make a change," she says. Knauth says the new statewide teacher evaluation process changed her job description so much, she decided to retire early.  "I really miss being a principal instead of being a typist and a statistician," says Knauth.

Her letter is shorter and sweeter than Gerald Conti’s letter, but I can’t help but think that it could potentially have more impact, coming from an administrator, who are traditionally assigned the role of defending the school and the district, and even going down with the ship, if need be.  Here is page one of the letter; read the full letter here:

In Ayn Rand's not-so-fictional America, the nation could not survive with its greatest minds and producers "on strike."  How many teachers will have to leave before anyone really notices?  (Edit: I just added a new post, 6/1/2013, on that very issue here.)  What do you think?  Is this part of a growing trend?  Will a “Tipping Point” be finally reached?  Does anyone else out there feel the same?  I dunno (but I sure hope so), I’m just A.S.K.ing…

The Prisoner - What Classic TV Can Teach Us About Tech

[Updated August, 2017]

I have a love-hate relationship with technology in education. 

I love to use technology in my classroom.  In fact, in some ways, I can’t do without it.  Not long ago, I arrived to an 8:00 class all ready to do a scintillating lesson that required use of the computer and LCD overhead projector in a so-called “smart classroom.” The tech didn’t work; there was a problem with the toggle that switched the feed from the Elmo to the computer, and I could not get the computer monitor’s contents displayed on the big screen. For a few minutes I tinkered with it to no avail.  Then I shut down and restarted everything. No dice. I even tried to go all “The Fonz” (you younger teachers fresh out of school will have no idea what I mean by that, and believe me, I weep for you…) and aside from a few chuckles out from my students, reaped no positive results. I glanced up at the clock and realized I had wasted a good 6-8 minutes, out of a 50-minute class, on this pursuit. I paused, uncertain for a few moments. More time wasted. For a short while, I felt quite stupid that my brilliant and carefully choreographed lesson was dashed against the rocks of fickle fate.

See? Technology makes me so crazy, even my metaphors are stupid.

Long story slightly less long, I called an audible, lateral-tossed the football to an alternate me (stupid metaphor #2), and got on with the class, and my extemporaneous lesson was fine. Why?  Because as much as I was hoping to be able to use the technology, I still was well-prepared and conversant in the subject matter, I knew where I was in the course sequence, I had good personal relationships and rapport with my students, and I built the course to be responsive to their needs, as opposed to dragging them kicking and screaming through the course on some pre-determined and inflexible pace. In short, when the tech failed, the human element was there to save the day.

I’m not so sure we’re headed in a good direction with tech. It’s bad enough standardized tests have become practically the gold standard for educational assessment. It’s worse that rigid adherence to bullet-point lists of standards are all that is required to “prove” to an observer that the education is sound and of good quality. In fact, in many schools, as long as your lesson plans have the appropriate sections, list the links to the State Standards, and as long as your instruction follows a particular sequence of steps and a designated format, and as long as you incorporate all the relevant trendy buzzwords from the district’s educational philosophy du jour – probably the product of the ministrations of some high-priced and charismatic outside consultant – you are a “good teacher,” and it doesn’t really matter if your students are benefiting or not: as long as your instruction at least superficially follows the prescribed norms; there just simply isn’t time to provide more thorough analyses of teacher performance, so superficial indicators have to do.

But the superficiality does not stop there. An onslaught of trendy new technological platforms, gadgets and processes are threatening to take the human element even further away from the educational experience.  Now, when most people talk about integrating technology into the classroom, they’re talking about much more than simply projecting traditional content or using web-based communications to interact with students.  Now, students can do class "presentations" with no content, but they look good, and that's just as good as an essay, right? (Buzzword of the day: "alternative assessment.")

Now there’s talk of “a tablet for every student,” or “an iPad for every student.” Wot?

Have you ever seen how well students take care of textbooks? Notebooks? Their own papers? A school I worked at recently didn't even have procedures for being compensated for lost materials such as books, and used to lose some $20,000-$30,000 per year in unreturned supplies.  Just sayin'.

How bad has our love affair with tech gotten? Now, out of expediency (I say laziness, stupidity, and is there an adjectival form of "bandwagon?"), some institutions are even starting to computer-score essays. No, not multiple-choice tests... essays. For the record, I once submitted an essay to be machine-scored.  It got a perfect score (a 6, top score on a six-point rubric).  And it was a very well-written essay. (Duh.) Except for one thing – the essay was total nonsense.  Not only was it not even remotely related to the assigned prompt, but it was not internally consistent. If an Alzheimer’s patient wrote a paper while high on cocaine (yet somehow managing to maintain good grammar, syntax, punctuation, etc…) that would have been my essay.  I did it on purpose. I wanted to see what would happen.

Never put all your trust into something that cannot trust you back.  Except my ’04 Camry.  Love that thing. [Edit - As of August, 2017, it has 294,000 miles or so on it, and is really showing its age. It will not last to the new year, alas.]

I don't think tech is necessarily a bad thing, but I do get the distinct sense that tech is being forced into classrooms because of its "cool" factor and not because students (or faculty, for that matter) are developmentally ready and primed to receive the changes. I think that can and will have disastrous effects.  Too much tech without the human element and you basically have, well… The Matrix.

At just 17 episodes, the British TV series The Prisoner was short-lived, especially by modern standards.  The fact that it’s not a title that’s on the tip of everyone’s tongue might further lend one to think it irrelevant or – gasp! – a failure.  Make no such mistake.

Number Six, the show's ex-secret-agent protagonist, does have a lot to teach us.  My last post on this illustrious television show answered that age-old question: Can’t we all just get along?  (Correct answer: What are you selling?)  In this post, I direct my gentle reader to the episode entitled “The General.”  In it, Number Six learns that a fellow named “The Professor” has created a revolutionary educational process that, by hooking students/subjects up to a sophisticated machine (called “The General”) they may be given the equivalent of a three-credit college course in a matter of minutes.  Soon, The Village (the setting of the show, basically a black site for interrogating and breaking rogue agents) is aflutter with newly erudite scholars of “Europe Since Napoleon,” the title of the first such “course.”  Number Six quickly realizes that everyone who tries to describe what they have learned in the course does so word-for-word each the same as everyone else he encounters.  Realizing that the machine completely eliminates the normally clearly demarcated line “between knowledge and insight,” Number Six correctly deduces that it is intended to be used as a form of mind control in order to control the denizens of The Village and extract information from them. The Villagers’ apparent trust in the process makes them even more susceptible, and Number Six reasons he must destroy The General (which he does, of course) in order to save both himself and his fellow Villagers.

View the full episode here. 

My very next post will be a research-based look at my general angst about our rush to over-technologize American public education.  It will be longer and denser, but more “scholarly.”  And it will read rather as a “Part II” to this post.  Read it!

For now, I leave you with this question: Are we going too far, too fast? Should we not pace ourselves a little bit more? Will upping the tech really change the culture, which is perhaps the real source and reason for school failure? And what exactly is meant by “change the culture,” anyway?  And why am I asking so many questions, when I only said I was going to ask one?

Gerald Conti shrugged...

[Updated August, 2017]

Westhill High School, just outside of Syracuse, NY, is one of the top schools in one of the top school districts in Upstate New York.  And just this week (this post was initially published on April 4, 2013), one of its veteran teachers publicized his retirement letter, touching off a nearly viral outpouring of sympathy, empathy and, dare I hope it, outrage.  No, not outrage that he was leaving, just two years shy of the full retirement benefits that a 30-year tenure would bring.  Outrage at the direction public education is going.

Could this be the straw that finally breaks the camel's back?  I sure hope so.

I've been complaining about the same stuff for 15 years (read my statement of philosophy).  Behind closed doors, colleagues would listen, nod their heads, "Yeah, man, that sucks, someone should do something."  I've never been one to keep my mouth shut about things like this, so I often would do something, or say something, and then, curiously, all of the sympathetic support, the righteous anger, the steely resolve, would vanish in a puff of fear-for-one's-job.  I never knew when to shut up (if you know me, you're nodding your head), so I was occasionally, uh, "denied tenure," I think is the polite way to say it. I could never "play the game," as I was often told to do in hushed tones by my colleagues.

But Mr. Conti, he did it right.  Read his letter here.  Not in a huff or in a fury, like the Weasley twins quitting Hogwarts, but in quiet, resigned (no pun intended) sigh of disgust tinged with profound sorrow.  His letter is not Twisted Sister's rageful "You're gonna burn in hell..."; rather, it's Metallica's matter-of-fact "I dub thee 'unforgiven.'"  He simply decided it was time for him to go.

Ayn Rand wrote Atlas Shrugged in 1957.  In it she described an alternate America in which people of integrity in education, art, letters, and especially industry, are becoming increasingly forced by the government to act against their own best interests, in the name of serving other masters - the collective, the State, the amorphous entity known as the "common good."  Bit by bit, the great minds of America realize that the vocations, professions, lifestyles that they love and cherish are being ruined by oppressive and meddlesome rights-denying bureaucracy that, more often than not, doesn't really understand the nature of what it's meddling with.  In the end, these great minds decide (are persuaded, actually, you'll have to read to learn more) to "go on strike," and one by one, over a period of time, they vanish from the world, their factories, industries, mines, foundries and establishments abandoned or destroyed by their own hand.  The nation is sent into a panic, both at the trend, and at the fact that so many of the "prime movers" of what Rand called "the motor of the world" have simply vanished - ceased utterly to be productive, by choice - daring the country to try and survive without them. 

They are right. It can't.

When I read Mr. Conti's letter, I felt that sense of righteous rebellion, mixed with a twinge of sadness.  I sense the spirit of those in Rand's novel, who, realizing that their spirit is being taken away from them, decide to withhold all access to that spirit from the bureaucratic vampires, moochers and looters (some of Rand's favorite words), to give them nothing to feed on.  Lacking sustenance, maybe they would starve.

I'm guessing it was not Mr. Conti's deliberate and specific purpose to send that particular message to the Board of Education at Westhill.  Maybe Atlas Shrugged never crossed his mind.  (Maybe he's never even read it.)  Maybe, like The Prisoner, he just wanted to escape.  Either way, his personal integrity shines like a beacon for all to see. But will anyone follow?

"After writing all of this," he writes in his conclusion to the two-page letter, "I realize that I am not leaving my profession, in truth, it has left me. It no longer exists. I feel as though I have played some game halfway through its fourth quarter, a timeout has been called, my teammates’ hands have all been tied, the goal posts moved, all previously scored points and honors expunged and all of the rules altered.  For the last decade or so, I have had two signs hanging above the blackboard at the front of my classroom, they read, 'Words Matter' and 'Ideas Matter'. While I still believe these simple statements to be true, I don’t feel that those currently driving public education have any inkling of what they mean."

I've had so many colleagues tell me privately, "I really should switch careers," "This isn't what it used to be," "I don't know why I put up with this," "This isn't worth it!" and "This is just so damn depressing!"  But they stay.  Is there honor in suffering?  Is there glory in that kind of woeful sacrifice?  (Maybe it's a religious thing? Self-flagellation?)  Or is it better to send this simple message?   "No, not anymore."

Education - A Politicking Time Bomb

[Updated August, 2017]

Language teaching – well, all teaching, really – is political territory. If you teach structure and correctness, or teach to any kind of “standard,” you practice hegemony, and are some kind of imperialist swine who is so swollen with privilege that you obviously have no moral center. If you practice a holistic, communicative, or social constructivist-inspired method, then you are averse to objective standards and are a politically correct commie-lib anti-American historical apologist.

Extremists love the either-or fallacy.

The irony is this: It is true that our educators are, and have been, among the greatest purveyors of mass propaganda. (Or at least the governments, Boards, and agencies that control them are.) Just look at a few select bullet points:

• From the Right: This worrisome tidbit, the 2012 Texas G.O.P.’s official platform with regard to education; read it and tell me that there aren’t those in the government trying to “program” minds (note - this language has been scrubbed from the platform as of 2016, thank goodness):

Knowledge-Based Education – We oppose the teaching of Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) (values clarification), critical thinking skills and similar programs that are simply a relabeling of Outcome-Based Education (OBE) (mastery learning) which focus on behavior modification and have the purpose of challenging the student’s fixed beliefs and undermining parental authority.

• From the Left: Recent attempts by New York State to remove "offensive" words from their standardized tests, such terrifying and corrupting words as "birthday." Test makers are not allowed to even reference anything that might make a student feel bad, such as mention of private ownership of personal computers (because not all students have them so it's unfair to mention it, as it might upset the students in the class who don't?) So instead of celebrating diversity, the State is propagandizing a fake homogeneity?

• From both sides: Modern iterations of teacher education and evaluation programs, often not set up to reward teachers for powerful teaching (whatever the heck that means) but to reward teachers for cleaving to the prescribed ideological dicta of a particular district or state; naysayers and activists, free-thinkers and rabble-rousers, are expurgated summarily, denied tenure, etc... under the guise of their being anti-social or disharmonious. 

With regard to the last bullet point comment about the hive mind of educational administration and its desire to root out any behavior that is "anti-social," "unmutual," or "disharmonious," that is, not lock-step with their stated principles (even when their guiding principles are destructive to educational and pedagogical integrity), take 48 minutes of your time for this excellent allegory from 60s classic British cult TV show The Prisoner. Watch the whole episode here. It's okay if you're not familiar with the overall premise of the show, all you need to know is that it centers on a secret agent who has resigned unexpectedly due to matters of conscience, and the "powers that be" are trying systematically to break him down to get him to spill his secrets and cooperate with them, and either fall (back) in line, or be destroyed. Very surreal, Kafkaesque, classic 60s British camp TV, but with a searing counter-cultural (some would say, and have said, subversive) message. EVERY teacher should watch this episode, and tell me if they don't feel the same more with alarming frequency.

When we celebrate diversity, should it not be more than skin (color) deep? Should it not include a diversity of ideas, experiences, perspectives, and should it not respect and protect the right and abilities of members of the educational community to hold, offer, and share such?