Teacher World

This is the last in my series on Diane Ravitch. I have been blogging about her recent article from the August/September issue of neatoday magazine. In her article, “Stop the Madness”, she explains why she no longer supports NCLB, and she ends her article discussing how we can improve our schools.

According to Ms. Ravitch, “We must first of all have a vision of what good education is.” We should be asking what constitutes a well-educated person, what we want students to learn before they graduate, what we want them to accomplish, and why we educate students. In other words, we need to agree on what education is, what it looks like, and why we want to be a part of it as teachers.

Second, she says we need to look beyond reading and mathematics and decide what other qualities are synonymous with a well-educated, well-rounded student. We want to turn out students who are able to think for themselves, have good character, are able to make good decisions, have courage and humor, and who treat others with compassion and fairness. And we need to teach students to be responsible citizens who make educated decisions by rationally studying different points of view.

Finally, she states that we need to send out academically well-rounded students who are able to use both math and science to understand and solve real problems in their communities and in their world and who can also appreciate and participate in their artistic and cultural heritage. In other words, we need students who participate in  significant ways, who enjoy the world around them, and who are willing and able to work to improve it. We need to teach them about the world in which they live and help them to find their niche within it.

What kind of test could ever adequately measure these truly important things? There is no such test because the true test of these qualities is life and the purposeful living of it. As Diane Ravitch states, “If these are our goals, the current narrow, utilitarian focus of our national testing regime is not sufficient to reach any of them. Indeed, to the extent that we make the testing regime our master, we may see our true goals recede farther and farther into the distance.” She concludes by stating that, if we continue on this current path, we are likely to produce a generation who equate learning with the drudgery of “worksheets, test preparation, and test-taking”.

In her final plea to turn the current tide by doing away with NCLB in the hopes of saving our public schools, Ms. Ravitch wraps up with this eloquent, heart-felt statement: “As we seek to reform our schools, we must take care to do no harm. In fact, we must take care to make our public schools once again the pride of our nation. To the extent that we strengthen them, we strengthen our democracy.”

(Diane Ravitch’s article was based on her book entitled The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education,)

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I have been blogging about Diane Ravitch’s article in the August/September issue of neatoday magazine, entitled “Stop the Madness”. If you have read my previous blogs, you know that Ms. Ravitch has held a number of prestigious positions in the education field and was a staunch supporter of Bush’s NCLB until she began to study the results of these policies and what it has done to public education. Because she is so knowledgeable and makes such valid points, I have been spending intensive time discussing some of her most critical points. So here goes my third blog on what this remarkable woman has to say about NCLB.

One of Ms. Ravitch’s strongest arguments against NCLB states, “NCLB assumed that shaming schools that were unable to lift test scores every year-and the people who work in them-would lead to higher scores. It assumed that low scores are caused by lazy teachers and lazy principals. Perhaps, most naively, it assumed that higher test scores on standardized tests of basic skills are synonymous with good education. Its assumptions were wrong.”

I love this statement because it resonates with truth. Public educators and principals are being shamed to improve test scores. Our results are publically displayed every year and compared to other districts’ scores. Even within school systems, individual schools are compared to each other, and those schools that did not produce excellent scores are made to feel inferior in comparison with those who did. In reality, those differences probably had more to do with the difference in the neighborhoods surrounding these schools, which make up each school’s population, than differences in the effectiveness or ineffectiveness of the schools’ staffs. I have seen it in my own district. For three years in a row now, my elementary school has gotten higher test scores than our sister elementary school. The competition and fear that this has created between our two principals has been extremely unhealthy for both staffs. This is only one sad example of the result of “shaming” schools into achieving higher test scores. Anyone who believes that creating this level of competition and frustration is an educationally sound practice needs to spend some time in schools that are panicked over raising test scores.

I applaud Diane Ravitch for admitting that the policy she initially supported whole-heartedly is flawed and is not “synonymous with good education”. When I look back over my years of teaching, and this will be my 31st, I feel such sadness for young people just starting out in the teaching profession who think that what we are being asked to do is excellent teaching. Somewhere along the way, teachers have metamorphosed from well-rounded, creative lovers-of-passing-on-the-excitement-for-knowledge to test-taking trainers. And while I still love working with kids, and I love being involved in co-teaching and the strategies of co-teaching, I have lost some of the wonder of teaching. As we fast approach 2014, and the ridiculous expectation to achieve 100% passage of state achievement tests, I dread the panic that is going to become synonymous with “good education”.

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Okay, I apologize but I am still not done discussing Arne Duncan’s speech to parents at the Annual National PTA Convention in June. So, like it or not, I will spend the next two blogs discussing my reaction to some of his other note-worthy points.

In his speech, Mr. Duncan stated that in his numerous visits to school districts throughout the country he found that parents and teachers shared two common concerns about public school education. According to him, “First, they feared that schools were ‘teaching to the test.’ And second, they worried that the curriculum was narrowing, as school districts placed too much emphasis on boosting test scores on fill-in-the-bubble tests in math and English.” He acknowledged the current administration’s determination to deal with “a narrowing of the curriculum, and an over-reliance on fill-in-the bubble tests.”

And yet, we continue to hear about merit pay based on test scores, cutting teachers’ salaries based on test scores, and non-renewing teachers’ contractions based on test scores. So with so much riding on test scores, is it any wonder that teachers might feel the need to teach to the test? Is it any wonder that our curriculum is narrowing as what needs to be covered prior to the administration of these tests continues to increase? And does it come as a huge surprise that with less time to cover more material, if choices have to be made about what will be taught, the information that is not critical for the test will be pushed back for a later day?

This is the world that has been created for teachers and students due to the enormous emphasis that has been placed on one set of tests. If we don’t want education to narrow then we need to stop limiting how we measure student progress. Let’s pursue educational reform that would target the mapping of yearly progress for our students throughout the year, not just at one time during the year. And let teachers get back to what they entered the teaching profession to do: to instill within each student a love for learning and a desire to succeed.

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Okay, some of you have read my blogs all year about co-teaching and the class I had this year. If so, you know that my team teacher and I were given a large number of low-achieving Gen Ed students, and my homeroom specifically was comprised of a homogeneously low group with no real leaders. We worried and stressed over the OAA’s, and I can honestly say that we never worked harder than we did this year to prepare our students. The dreaded news arrived last week that the test results were in. As I opened my email which would disclose the dire news, it was a feeling akin to facing your executioner. I forced myself to study the numbers which flashed on my screen, in spite of the knot tightening in my stomach. And, guess what?

Our students’ scores were awesome! Unbelievable based on the difficulties we faced! Our combined classrooms had a 90% passage rate for both reading and math and 100% for science for our general education students! Amazing! And our SPED students did a wonderful job as well. The passage rate for reading was 60%, and for math and science it was 50%. This was a huge improvement over last year’s SPED results. My first reaction was total elation and a sense of pride that our hard work really paid off. There was no way, judging from last year’s test results, that we should ever have achieved such an outcome. After I came down from the ceiling, I began to ask myself what these test scores had taught me. So here goes:

1. Co-teaching works. Pure and simple! The methodology behind co-teaching sounds great, but we proved it is great. The ability to restructure a classroom in dynamic ways with the aid of an intervention specialist and a paraprofessional is hugely responsible for the results we attained.

2. Homogeneous grouping of children, especially of lower achieving children, is a huge and unnecessary stress on teachers and is unfair to students. I cannot emphasize enough what a constant struggle we faced with my students to get them to progress. Statistically, my homeroom had a lower passage rate by one student for both reading and math on the OAA. But I can hear you saying, “Hey, quit whining! That’s just part of the job you signed up for.” And to an extent, you would be right. We all know we will have students who will need extra time and help from us to be successful. But I did not sign up for a classroom where the majority of the students fell into this category. Maybe I’m wrong, but I was under the impression that we believe in the philosophy of inclusion. If it’s good for the SPED population, shouldn’t it be good for the Gen Ed population as well?

3. As much as I am celebrating our victory, I am fearful of the message it sends to others, especially our principal. You see, I am afraid that some people will look at what we achieved and say, “See, we knew they could take on this difficult task and succeed. All of the concerns they voiced last year were proven wrong, so we can load up the co-teaching classrooms in the future just like we did this past year. They will make it work!” Maybe we performed way beyond even our own expectations, and maybe we were just lucky. I would rather not be thrown back into the fire to see which it was.

4. It felt so good to see those exceptional results, but I am already dreading the stress that these tests will make me feel again next year. And that’s what’s wrong with these tests. They have become too important to teachers whose very jobs may someday ride on the outcome of random questions which, supposedly, are the criterion for determining how effective they are, not their students, but they are as teachers.

So, for now, I celebrate our students’ success, our success, and try very hard not to worry about next year’s tests. (At least for a couple of weeks…)

Changes in Teaching, Teacher-World's Blog, special education, state achievement tests co-teaching, Gen Ed students, OAA, SPED, state achievement tests, test results

Now that school is over for the year and I have more time to contemplate what to look forward to in educational reform, here it is, as promised, but with a slight twist. I was going to write about what I thought was a more positive approach to Ohio’s round two RttT application, but upon deeper reading and rereading of the first application, I am feeling  some trepidation. Let me see if I can explain myself better.

When our school system was in the decision-making stage for round two trying to determine whether we wanted to jump on board, our union sent us a list of reasons to support or oppose the participation of local schools in round two. When I read the first statement of support, I was initially enthusiastic. Here it is: “Each participating LEA will develop its own (teacher) evaluation model. Districts, in partnership with their local unions, will develop evaluation systems that meet the criteria outlined in the preliminary scope of work. The Educator Standards Board is developing a model evaluation framework that districts may choose to use…(RTTT - Phase II Information and Clarifying Points, 2010)”

Yes, I thought! They are going to let local school systems work with their unions to come up with a fair way to evaluate teachers. Then I read a little closer, and got snagged on these tiny little words: “that meet the criteria outlined in the preliminary scope of work”. Hum…What does that mean? So I went back to the original RttT summary, and then I got really concerned. Here is what I read: “ODE will collaborate with LEAs and teachers unions to develop a teacher evaluation model that includes annual evaluations, provides timely and constructive feedback, includes student growth as a significant factor-”. And that’s where I stop. Now, let me be clear. I totally agree that we should be responsible as teachers to show student growth, that is, after all, why we are there, but if that growth is going to be solely or even partially measured by state achievement tests, I have a problem with RttT.

Don’t get me wrong! Measure student progress, by all means! That should be part of a teacher’s evaluation. But do it in a variety of ways. Make common formative assessments which can be administered regularly. Use these to chart student progress, and use these results for grade level collaboration, mentoring, and planning. Establish grade level teams where teachers work together to study those assessment results in order to better facilitate student progress, and let teachers’ willingness to work together on these teams be another important aspect of teacher evaluation. And there are so many other worthy factors in determining teacher effectiveness. But never, never base my effectiveness as a teacher on one test for which students have no ownership. And without the new summary for Ohio’s RttT round two in front of me, I have no idea what criterion will be proposed to determine student progress. Hence, I have legitimate misgivings and concerns.

So I appreciate the OEA who clearly stated: “Although student outcomes can be considered as one of several criteria for assessing the practice of teachers and principals, OEA believes as most researchers do that the use of student outcomes as the primary indicator of success is inappropriate to achieve the desired result of a valid, fair and robust educator evaluation system.” Now this is language I can agree with! What about you?

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If you are an advocate of rewarding teachers whose students perform well on state tests, I have a little, true story I would like to share with you which might bring some clarity to this issue. Before I start, I want to reinforce that this is just one story. There are more where this comes from, and I’m sure I am not the only teacher out there with a story such as this.

After several weeks of test prep activities, I gave the OAT Reading Practice Test to my students this past week. When I graded them, I was disturbed to find that one of my very capable students scored a 42%!!!!!!!! I was further discouraged when I studied some of his responses. For example, in spite of the fact that we had just completed a variety of summarizing activities emphasizing how to summarize various types and lengths of text, this student wrote a one sentence summary! One sentence!!!! How is that even possible? And when I talked to him after grading the test, he could offer no explanation for his poor performance and minimal effort. He just “didn’t know” why he had done so poorly and why he did not fully answer questions on the test. He just “didn’t know”!

Here is where the frustration comes into play for teachers everywhere, and this is what the public does not understand. I could masterfully teach every concept, skill, and strategy my students will need. I could stand on my head, do a song and dance routine, beg and bribe. But if they don’t feel like putting forth effort; if it doesn’t matter to them, it doesn’t matter what I do or how I do it! My effectiveness or ineffectiveness as a teacher surely should not be based on a test that students may not care about. I can talk about the importance of these tests till the cows come home, but if they don’t care, or if their parents don’t care, all of my words to the contrary don’t matter.

What we do in education is not always black and white. We deal with kids, and nothing is ever certain with kids except the uncertainty. Please don’t judge my effectiveness as a teacher on test results which are taken by students who may be uncertain about the test’s importance.

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Who is stressed to the max right now? I have to assume that I am not the only one. This is the time of year I most dread as we prepare to administer state achievement tests in April. I have to think that most of you feel the same. So, this blog is to wish you patience, perseverance, and a little bit of luck in the next few weeks.

We are in the final stretch with only two instructional weeks to go. You have probably tested, intervened, and retested numerous times. You have utilized every technique in your arsenal to reinforce the skills you know your students will need in order to be successful. You have probably administered a practice test which has either encouraged or sobered you, or a little of both. And you are in the process of doing damage control based on the data you have collected from those tests. You have planned, prepped, and graded to the point of exhaustion. You have encouraged, coached, pushed, and driven your students to be the best you can get them to be. Yet, you are still hanging in there and will not give up until that very last day; the day you pass out the test, step back, and place it all in your students’ hands.

So here are a few words of advice for the next few weeks:

* Try not to stress out too much.
* Do all you can do now, so that later you can honestly tell yourself and anyone who will listen to you that you gave it your all.
* Build your students up and tell them how capable you know they are, even if you worry about some of their capabilities.
* Take a few minutes each day from your frantic activity to laugh, to commiserate with your fellow teachers, and to feel the commonality of what you all face together.
* Remind yourself that the outcome of these tests is not the true measure of what you are and the job you do every day.
* The night before the test, toast yourself and what you have accomplished with a glass of your favorite beverage, and reconnect with your family members who have sorely missed you over the past few weeks.
* And when you pass out those tests, let it go. It’s out of your control at that point anyway, so relax. Your part is over.

So, here’s to great test results for all of us. Now that is worth a toast!

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Here we go again! Facing more changes to our standards in the state of Ohio! If you are anything like me, you are waiting anxiously for these revised standards to be released, as I understand it, sometime in the summer. Then the questions will be answered: what does this mean for us; how will it change what we currently teach; and what new materials will we need to do our jobs?

This is just so typical of education. Just as we get used to what we are doing, things change yet again, and we are told to make the necessary adjustments to our curriculum to accommodate those changes. So for us begins the worrisome questions which seem to have no definitive answers: What standards that we currently teach will be changed, and what new standards will be added? Will we know early enough in the summer to prepare and gather the materials we will need in order to adequately cover these new standards?

If you are like our school system, you order test prep materials in the summer for the following year. Will what we order align with the revised standards, or will they be ineffective in preparing our students for the state achievement tests? Will those who are responsible for deciding on these changes also be adjusting the achievement tests for next year to reflect those changes? This seems unlikely when you consider that for two years there is not enough money for our state to produce social studies tests, so we aren’t taking them this year or next year. If there isn’t enough money to provide us with all of our tests, where would the money come from to update current tests to reflect the new standards?

What about those standards-based report cards we worked so hard on last year? Will they be obsolete, or will they require minor tweaking? And will we know in time to meet as a committee to make decisions as to exactly what changes need to be made before the start of the school year so that teachers know what they are expected to assess for each trimester? And what about the formative assessments that many of us worked to create? Will they have to be changed as well? And when and how will all of this take place in order to start the school year off in an organized and prepared fashion?

Does anyone else feel like we are on a merry-go-round that never stops? Anyone else feeling like jumping? Oh, I know we won’t! We’ll do what we always do. We’ll complain for awhile, and then we’ll roll up our sleeves and dive in. And we will do what is necessary to provide the best instruction for our students.

But, for right now, I’m still in the complaining stage! Feel like joining me?

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Let’s talk seriously for just a minute about a pretty ridiculous penchant we have here in the United States to try to pretty things up simply by changing what we call it. Take for example the following euphemisms: a janitor is now a custodian, a garbage collector is a sanitation worker, a classroom aid is a paraprofessional, and the list goes on. I guess we are supposed to be fooled by the new titles which are more respectful names for things that haven’t changed one iota, but they sound so much better. Don’t they?

And now the newest name-doctoring has been added to our educational terminology. Instead of OATs, this year I will be administering OAAs. What’s the difference, you might ask? Apparently a world of difference, as we will now administer Ohio Achievement Assessments instead of Ohio Achievement Tests! Gee! I feel better already, don’t you? I wonder how long it took and at what cost to make this miraculous change.

Is one of the reasons behind this significant improvement to make sure we all know that these tests line up with the standards we have been assessing throughout the year (like we haven’t had that drilled into our standards-based brains constantly over the last several years)? The only other rationale I can think of behind the new name is to distance ourselves from the word test, I guess in the hopes that these “assessments” will be more positively perceived by teachers, students, and parents.

Really? If it quakes like a duck and waddles like a duck, no matter what name I call it, don’t we all know it is a duck? I don’t care what name you call it, it is a test and calling it something different doesn’t make it any less a test. It will not change the fact that teachers will labor all year to provide students with the strategies and skills they will need and be in a continual process of assessing where they are in their journey to master the standards covered each year. It will not change the fact that students will spend the year being tested in a variety of ways all leading up to the mother-of-all-tests in the spring which they dread as much as a visit to the dentist to have teeth pulled. It will not change the fact that the parents who put academics first will push their children and worry about the scores their children will get, and that the parents who aren’t as academically minded will proceed as normal, placing no real energy or concern into how their children perform at all. 

I don’t know about you, but I will administer those “assessments” in the spring with the same enthusiasm (please note the sarcasm here) as I have every year. I wish the name made it easier to swallow, but a duck is a duck, and a test is a test. Period! So, happy testing, oops, assessing, everyone!

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As I mentioned in a previous blog, the U.S. Department of Education will by holding meetings to look at a variety of educational issues. I would like to address another one of the issues they will be discussing: assessing students with disabilities. This is an issue that has become extremely problematic since the introduction of NCLB, which has created the impossible expectation that all students, including those in special education, are expected to pass their state achievement tests. Teachers everywhere shook their heads in disbelief when this was added to the list of expectations by our government.

Before NCLB, we administered achievement tests to all students, but SPED scores were usually not factored into overall school’s scores because, for most of these students, the tests were extremely difficult and tedious. Through no fault of their own, this population of students struggle with the regular education curriculum and require accommodations and modifications, which are delineated in an IEP, in order to be successful in the classroom. Now, with the push for inclusion and co-teaching, most of these students are in a regular education classroom all or most of the day. Let me be clear that I am all for inclusion and for pushing these students to participate in as much of the regular education curriculum as they can. But even with my higher functioning SPED students, curriculum needs to be adjusted regularly to allow them to experience success. Accommodations and modifications range from shorter assignments, extended time to complete assignments, tests and selections read to them, etc. So we make all of these provisions for them knowing that it would be difficult or impossible for them to be successful without them, and then we sit them down in the spring and make them take the same test that the regular education students will take with no reduction in length, and the only modification they have is that the directions and questions can be read to them. The numerous selections on the reading test cannot be read to them, and calculators cannot be used on the math test. Then we take their results and include them with those of the regular ed population. Does this seem reasonable or fair?

Why don’t we test and evaluate these students in a more meaningful manner? What if we looked at their progress to determine if they have achieved AYP? Isn’t that a more meaningful measure of success for these students than expecting them to somehow miraculously perform on tests in a way that their IEP would collaborate is not their most effective way of performing? When I think of the stress we place upon these students to pass these tests, it seems preposterous to me. Wouldn’t we better serve them by striving for yearly progress in their educational journey, and setting realistic and attainable goals to help them be successful in that endeavor? Don’t get me wrong! If a SPED student is capable of passing these tests, let their scores by factored into their school’s scores. But for those who can’t, let’s evaluate them fairly and not make them feel any less able than they already do.

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