I met with a set of parents today making sure everything was on track for their son.  I knew I was going to get contacts after putting the children’s standardized test scores into the online grade book for the appropriate subjects.  Some called, most emailed, this family emailed and took the time to come and sit down in person.

Then they thanked me for taking time to see them.  Their most valuable relationship and deepest responsibility, second only to the one with God, their son was the topic.  They cared enough to both come, sit down, and talk about exactly how he is doing and what they can do to help him be his very best.  And they thanked me.  By the way, and it shouldn’t be surprising, their son is already a fine young man with great promise.

I still miss my little kids from the low income areas of town, the mean little guys who get kicked out of school, the children with un-empowered parents.  But, it is such an honor and delight to work with families that truly care, that stay in touch, and who support me when I am working to stretch their children in knowledge, work habits, and wisdom.  There is a gnawing place inside me that says my other little friends need me more.  It just can’t stop me from loving working with this beautiful group of kids and families.

And, I continue to learn that the Phi Delta Kappa’s study of risk in children was too true in too many areas.  Risk and pain in the midst of our culture of pleasure and consumption are pervasive in the lives of children.  Any child can show up in pain.  Every school has kids in deep need.  I was there after school one day this week to talk down a little guy working himself into hysterics after misbehaving and getting caught in daycare.  I was there today when a young man from across the hall who had spent the end of the day sitting in the office was left sitting in the hall while his parent talked to his teacher at length making sure everything was fair.  And, one of mine from last year, a girl who I literally picture living on the edge of life’s cliff, a student who worked hard all last year with me to raise her academic and behavioral levels, a kid who has been suspended this year for going to get her other homework (without arranging permission to leave the room), met me on the way out of the building today.  She brought me one of her school pictures.

If everything a person could get a thank you for was as wonderful as helping kids grow up, there would be a lot more thank-yous in the world.

Heading off to bed to rest up and teach teachers tomorrow with a prayer of thanks for those who remember to say thank-you, a prayer of support and strength for those who continue to serve in places without enough thank-yous, and gratitude to a God beyond comprehension who keeps changing my life plans and setting me in places where the feast is prepared, bountiful, and multiplied by sharing.

peace

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The following was excerpted from an article highlighted in ASCD’s education news brief today.  My question is after the article.

Most Ky. juniors aren’t ready for college, ACT says

TEST SAYS: NOT MAKING THE GRADE

By Jim Warren and Cheryl Truman – jwarren@herald-leader.com

Kentucky is one of only a handful of states requiring the test, which assesses English, reading, mathematics and science skills. Each subject is scored on a scale of 1 to 36. The test is administered statewide on the same day…

State education officials said that, based on the 2009 ACT scores, 46 percent of Kentucky’s juniors are ready for college-level English courses, 21 percent are ready for college-level algebra, 30 percent are ready for college-level social science courses, and 16 percent are ready for college-level biology classes. Those numbers essentially are unchanged from last year.

OK, here is my question.  We give high schools four years to prepare kids for college and these numbers are from a test taken in the third year.

So, (as tempting as it is to take cheap shots at Kentucky’s educational system! LOL), is the REAL problem that only this percentage of kids are ready by their Junior year?

Or is the real problem that the percentage who DO SHOW that they are ready for college have to put up with another year of high school before being allowed to move on?  I know what my youngest daughter would answer!

peace,

Greg

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Had a very good final day with my kids.  One young man came up serious and polite and said, “I want you to know you have been a turning point in my life.”  Pretty wonderful for a fourth grader!  Lots of hugs, some second and third hugs about did me in.  As much as kids love summer, they are going to miss our class time together.

Also got to share with them that while we stay neutral in public schools and require respect for all views, it does not mean that all things are equal and true.  Assured them that there is Truth, there is right and there is wrong, there are choices that lead to a quality life and ones that do not.  I congratulated them on being the highest achieving homeroom I have ever had.  I reminded them that when they see me at school next year, we are still teacher and student.  But, I also assured them that now when they see me away from school they are my young friends and free to ask me anything they need to know about Truth, right, wrong, life.  AND I am free to answer!

I promised them that they will be in my prayers until we are back together and invited them to have their parents contact me if they need anything over the summer.  We laughed a lot, learned a lot, and practiced loving respect.  I cannot ask any more than that of my little friends.  Well done kids, well done!

peace,

Greg

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It happened to me again today.  I was finishing the class sessions with a small group of teachers in our course on diversity in the classroom.  As usual on the first Saturday, some of them said they didn’t know anything in their classroom to bring and share for how they teach diverse populations.  When they started looking and sharing, plus discussing issues from the text and lectures, it was obvious that this is a group of strong teachers who do many things to take care of the diverse populations they serve.

So, this afternoon I took us into the final discussion of how can classroom teachers change what schooling has been unable to solve in my entire career — the achievement differences evident in groups identified by race or income.  Their hearts were evident as they talked about the pain in trying to reach the one’s who refuse to be reached.  Trying to love and guide the one’s who refuse to show any acceptance or response.  And, I started choking up.

I tried to share with them stories from my career of kids who never let anyone know anything was getting through, but came back later to say we changed or even saved their lives, of some of the Christalites we loved with all our hearts and did everything we could for only to see them die young, and of how our society just fails in general to show gratitude.  I wanted them to know that every effort to live out the Gospel to/with kids matters.  And, I was still struggling not to tear up and break vocally.

When it came to me that I needed to share with them that we are NOT God.  We are not given the power to reach them all.  Indeed, as one who believes in human free will even unto the ability to choose hell,  God has not granted God the power to reach us all.  But, He died trying anyway.  Here is to every child loving teacher who walks in His footsteps.

peace

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A sixth grader in the building for after school daycare came in my room, over to my desk where I was fuming with an uncooperative computer and a too large stack of papers to grade, came around the desk and gave me a shoulder hug. He was with me for two years as a gifted student before the system sent him on to middle school as a special education student. Here is to seeing the gifts in all our children expressed with gratitude for a clean card given back to me today. peace

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I read the first chapter of Lewis’ Caspian to my fourth graders.  We just have this book and Final Battle to go.  Also read and gave them copies of James Whitcomb Riley’s “Little Orphant Annie” as the storm darkened and the wind blew.  Spent time talking with them about how to thrive and avoid hassle in public school environments.  Confronted a little girl who thought lying followed by throwing a crying fit was the best response to being caught with gum, and two little boys exchanging a toy right after we talked about staying with the rules.  They really do not understand what a big deal future teachers will make of such small things as they transition from being considered “cute little kids” to adolescents.  Two more identical toys materialized on my desk after school! Ha! They made me laugh with that!  Also, answered a student’s questions about how there can be acid in rain.  Helped them work through how to think through puzzling situations by asking me questions about a murder in Uganda….and laughed with them all as we braved the wind on the way to the busses.

It was all important.  Most of it was fun.  All of it was loving and helping them grow.  And none of it is in the damn standards or on the minimum competency exam the public believes is guiding us to excellence.  Only teach what will be tested?  I think not.  Fire me for teaching too much.

peace

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The false supposition at the base of the entire accountability and testing movement is that you can force improvements in teaching and learning by testing.

To get a little too Dr. Phil about it, you cannot increase the weight of a hog by repeatedly weighing it.  You must feed it!  Children learn by engaging in meaningful learning opportunities.  Tests do not teach.  They take time, money, and teacher attention away from helping children experience those opportunities.  Now we are doing constant ongoing (and purchased) assessments in order to track progress in raising the test scores.  Note that repeated emphasis on test scores, may raise test scores.  But, it is a giant leap of faith to assume that those scores represent anything more than focusing on the specifics of the test rather than real learning opportunities.  The current movement requires blind acceptance of the assumption that numbers going up on what the test company produces and sells means children are learning.  Any quick survey of their writing or conversations will show you the opposite.

Of course there is the contention that because the teacher knows the children will be tested, the teacher will be more devoted, harder working, more professional and accountable, and will better prepare the children.  The first problem with this assumption is that no valid research ever established that properly trained and supported teachers were the problem in the first place.  The horror stories of educational failure are overwhelmingly from places where the children come to school from and in environments of poverty and violence.  The teachers do not create those conditions.  They pour heart and soul into helping children rise above them.  And to assume that subjecting the child of that world to a high stakes exam and threats of failure will eliminate the harm from neighborhoods we should never have allowed to exist is comparable to an educational war crime.

What the tests cause teachers to focus on is the tests.  The trainers and bosses come around to make sure you do not miss the message that you are to focus on what is on the test, and only what is on the test.  This is not educational accountability.  It is idolatry at the temple of the testing industry.  To say that the area of knowledge the student discovered on TV, in a book, on the computer, or in their travels is insignificant and must be kept out of the classroom is lunacy.  But, that is exactly what the current movement is saying if the child selected topic is not on their current standard list and frequently translated to questions on the test of them!

I said before that I support the use of nationally normed tests to provide the teacher with valuable information on local strengths and weaknesses.  I also support deciding what you will assess students on and making sure you provide meaningful learning opportunities that will prepare them to do well on those assessments.  That is basic ethics, and it is the core idea of my Masters program’s design model (Understanding by Design).  But, those assumptions should allow freedom to deviate to pursue the interests of a child, to “differentiate” content and approach to match the areas that give energy to the child’s efforts to learn and grow.  I do not want to focus on the minimum children can do, I went into this profession to help them fly.

One example for non educators would be the testing of writing skills.  Indiana’s test uses the six trait writing model for the basis of its grading rubrics.  This makes grammar one sixth of the score.  So, schools under the gun to raise scores on the test found that teaching other traits of writing, even if the children cannot produce grammatically correct sentences, raises scores.  The result is that teachers are directed to stop teaching grammar and focus on the other aspects of writing.  I now have teachers in Master’s classes who have come through that system and cannot write a simple sentence with noun-verb agreement, or maintain parallel tense or person.  They beg for help to edit and correct their work, and to learn how to produce written materials which will not be an embarrassment when sent home to parents taught under the old “un-accountable” system.  But, they could score points on the test by having a beginning, middle, and end; by showing creativity and voice, etc.  Problem that is they and the students they now teach are and will be illiterate in the basic conventions of our language.

Keep weighing those hogs, train better hog weighers, insist on nothing but better hog weighing, and the hogs will starve when it was their basic nature to eat all along.

peace

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The current emperor of American education goes by the aliases of Standards, High Stakes Testing, and Accountability.  He struts across the nation proclaiming how he is saving all the children while locking all educators from pre-K through grad school into lock step content, procedures, and tests.  Widely promoted by the same president who took us to Iraq to get rid of non-existent weapons of mass destruction while continuing Reagan’s trickle-down economics right into the current financial abyss, this movement enriches test companies and consultants and is destroying the last expressions of anything resembling education in America’s schools.

This week’s faculty meeting was to inform us that we will now “map our curriculum” and do our lesson plans online courtesy of a “wonderful” company that not only gives us unlimited web storage but allows all users worldwide to view the lessons of all other users.  This way the state can hold us accountable for meeting its “standards.”  If anything is not in the standards, we were reminded again, then it is not worth teaching and must be put aside and no longer taught.  So, one more company gets rich, teachers lesson plans become more homogenized, and teachers spend more time focusing on tasks and lists instead of children.

I have so many objections sputtering through my head that this may become several posts.  So, let me start with what I agree with!  Teachers should have standards and work to help all children achieve.  Standardized tests are valuable tools for making sure what is done locally is keeping pace with what other children are achieving nationally.  Test data should be disaggregated to ensure that all sub-groups present in the classroom are being served successfully.  I have been doing all of those things since long before the current movement began.  But, my standards, testing, and research have always been focused on the real children sharing my room for the year, and my methods and behavior have always been expressions of living out the Gospel.

What I disagree with:  This movement has nothing to do with any of that.  We have stopped using nationally normed tests.  We have stopped focusing on children as the center of what we do (or adult learners in grad ed, or of Jesus in Christian ed).  We focus on the accrediting agency’s latest pronouncements of what every classroom must look like, and the latest list of what standards and methods will raise the number of kids who score high on the minimum competency exams based on the narrow standards lists in use until the next revision.  We do not aspire to inspire children to excellence in either academic pursuits, expressions of humanity, or lives of grace.  Those are not on the test even if they are given lip service in the standards.

I have watched the real ability of students, from elementary school through practicing teachers pursuing graduate degrees decrease as each year of this movement goes by.  But the test companies are doing great!  The bureaucrats who have left the classroom to pursue careers of personal ego and influence have incredible power. The consultants are rolling in money.  The accountability industry is funneling obscene amounts of education dollars into the pockets of people who never spend a single moment with children in a classroom.  And the students’ reading ability is lower, their writing ability is becoming non-existent, and their sense that learning matters for anything beyond the test is almost gone.

American education has been sold invisible clothes.  Our leaders know it, but dance down the street singing the tailors’ praises anyway because that is the current path to successful careers.  Veteran child-centered teachers are leaving the profession in ever increasing numbers.  Rich people are getting richer.  Schools are doing a worse job, not better.  And what the children are exposed to is as obscene as an emperor exposing himself in full knowledge of his sin.

peace

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I have only written a few short pages.  Am now pondering writing about “curriculum” for the post-modern or post-post modern era and just letting the stories flow into it where they seem appropriate.  For me it would still be a “theology” of sorts as the question of what to teach is essentially one of what knowledge, understandings, and approaches to learning are worth knowing and therefore worth teaching.

I will have to actually start to see if old labels will serve as signposts people are comfortable with in order to explore new territory.  I suspect that like Lincoln and Guba in evaluation/research, I will find that much of the current vocabulary is too loaded with presupposed meaning to be kept.

My initial thoughts are along the lines of moving toward thinking that is globally conscious and locally grounded, meaningful for learners in the present tense but not ignorant of future implications, comfortable with paradox and apparent contradictions, empowering (there is a loaded old word that may need updating without being lost), and relational both in terms of interactive with the learner and a catalyst for growing in relationship with other learners.

ALL suggestions, insights, challenges, questions, and WTFs welcome!  That is the purpose of the post.

peace

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The field of education has been overrun by the assessment of other’s work by means of the rubric.  I first hated them for the simple human reason that the first person who promoted them to me was an irritating woman with an excessive ability to whine, even words she liked.  So, I heard the word rubric always in her nerve damaging voice.

Then art, music, and writing teachers in my Masters classes as students, taught me how these simple descriptive and point assigning devices could be used not only to grade large quantities of work (which says something in itself about the current nature of what passes for education), but also to define the acceptable characteristics of quality work in a manner which would allow the student to know exactly what was expected and free the instructor from charges of biased grading.  So, for a time, I have advocated them to at least some people in some settings.

Then I read my friend’s comments about his university’s insisting on constant rewrites of rubrics.  I read my own dean’s vision of the future, with better rubrics to ensure higher academic standards.  Today I finished Ryszard Kapuscinski’s small book The Other.

After decades of traveling the world and meeting others in some of their most disturbing times and circumstances, he tries in these lectures to bring to bear the work of philosophers and theologians on the significance of encountering both ourselves and others, in our interactions with anyone who is an ‘other’ to us.

And, I think I see a connection that may or may not make sense here without reading the entire book or some of the original authors.  We used to encounter the other as groups of different race, religion, and culture.  Now the lines are blurred and we encounter others more as individuals different from our selves.  Central to the idea that these encounters are important is the idea that we also become more aware of our true selves when we have meaningful encounters, including open dialogue, with the other.  Set against this, is the idea of mass society where we are all swept along the same, and worse, totalitarian mass society where we are ordered to conform to the sameness.

Now what about the classroom where students are to engage new knowledge, new forms, new possibilities of combination?  Does it not require conversation with others who do not think like us?  Who do not agree with us?  Who do not conclude what we conclude presented with the supposed same prompts?  Who may have grown up in our same city with an entirely different (other) view of how the world is put together (aware of it or not)?  What does the introduction of a grading rubric do to this setting?

Can it be written in such a way as to value the sharing and the disparity of answers needed to have meaningful dialogue between others?  If the bottom line is a certain product, produced and presented to please a predetermined scale of measurement, will it not force that which might be other than the propher’s desired view to flee and hide?  How can I encounter the difference in you if you are pursuing the points on the same rubric I am, and vice-versa?  How can there be any chance of a new construction based on a dynamic of group encounter with many facets of the same truth if the rubric is written in advance?  And if it is not only written in advance by an instructor (who could later negotiate its change), but also passed up the ladder to ‘authorities’ who will declare its worthiness or unworthiness for use, is it not a tool to allow only common speech and thought?  Has it not become a deadening hammer of totalitarianism within the confines of a supposedly free academy?

I wonder how many universities would approve rubrics which reward telling us something we have not thought, have not combined as you combine them, have not recognized in ourselves, have not valued in you, which challenge or betray our dogmas in a way which lead to meaningful dialogue without requiring final acceptance of the status quo?  No I wish there was still room to wonder.  See you on the trail, the proch, or at the pub.

peace

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