Disturbances in the Force

The news from the field of education of late has been less than encouraging. It seems that all the vast and complex problems we are facing as a society have beaten us down. We are more and more willing to take assurances from on high that something is working, goldangit.

One of the latest disturbing news items is the sudden rush towards national “core standards.” Yes, you read that right. If you are someone who was paying attention to education in the 1990s, you will probably get a distinct sense of deja vu from those words. I was a member of two state task forces (Missouri and New Mexico) charged with writing state standards, in my case working on dance as an art form.

What I remember most clearly about the process, both within the arts and in the other groups working on curriculum areas such as English language and mathematics, is how arbitrary, political, and non-standardized it was. To create the national standards that we worked from, “experts” in each curriculum area gathered and hammered out their own vision of what those standards should look like. It was a process very akin to drafting legislation, complete with special interest groups, political intrusions, and wild incongruities.

Now, a couple of decades later, apparently Education Secretary Arne Duncan and President Obama are either unaware of this history or are hoping that we don’t remember it. An administration that has struggled mightily to effect positive change in health care, financial regulation, and unemployment relief (to name a few) has swiftly gotten 27 states to adopt a set of curiously unexamined national standards, and a dozen more to move close to passage. How did they do it?

Marching... forward?

Four words, worth billions to the states: “Race to the Top.” The administration has pledged $3.4 billion to the states as part of this initiative. I’m not sure if I could fairly characterize this as bribe money, but since states risk not getting any of it unless they adopt the standards, it certainly stretches the definition of “voluntary participation.” The interesting part is that none of the news coverage has been about the actual contents of the standards, but rather focuses on whether or not states will adopt them.

According to the NY Times, “The effort has been helped by financial backing from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to most of the organizations involved in drafting, evaluating and winning support for the standards. The common core standards, two years in the making and first released in draft form in March, are an effort to replace the current hodgepodge of state policies.” (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/21/education/21standards.html?_r=2&hp)

The article continues, “They [the standards] lay out detailed expectations of skills that students should have at each grade level. Second graders, for example, should be able to read two-syllable words with long vowels, while fifth graders should be able to add and subtract fractions with different denominators.”

So, to summarize:

• A private foundation created by one of the world’s wealthiest men funded the creation of “national” standards by “experts” in their fields.
• An unelected and unexamined group of people has decided for the entire nation which skills students should be able to master at each grade level; never mind that age and grade level are NOT determinant of readiness to learn any specific skill. (That whole discussion has been buried as inconvenient.)
• Private enterprise stands ready to scoop up billions of dollars in federal money that will pass right through the states’ hands and into those of textbook and test publishers.

Anyone think this is a good idea?

Here’s the way the Times put it: “Increasingly, national standards are seen as a way to ensure that children in all states will have access to a similar education — and that financially strapped state governments do not have to spend limited resources on developing their own standards and tests.”

Don’t you love the passive voice here? National standards “are seen…” Doesn’t that sound like there’s a growing movement in favor of this idea? But what evidence does the article provide? only a quote from Arne Duncan:

“’We’ll have states working together for the first time on curriculum, textbooks, assessment,” said Mr. Duncan. “This will save the country billions of dollars.’” Wait a minute. Isn’t “the country” spending billions to make this happen? This little statement contains the true heart of the matter, and the real reason why there is no outcry from a Republican party that can’t seem to find any other single Obama policy they will accept: there’s money to be made, boys!

Instead of all the “hodgepodge” of state standards, which result in spreading the textbook and testing dollars around to various sources, the biggest publishing companies now stand to rake in all the state dollars for the uniform, standardized textbooks and tests. And since it’s all new, everyone will have to buy new. It’s the capitalist’s dream of the function of government: to shovel the public’s money into private enterprise.

Once again, dear readers, we are hoist on the petard of profit. Once more we are rushed willy-nilly into a great flurry of sound and fury signifying nothing more than a transfer of money from our pockets to the coffers of big business, all gussied up in the self-righteous raiment of “better education.”

If you can find anyone to take the bet, you could make a lot of money by wagering that, when all the dust settles, actual teaching and learning will continue to languish in favor of showy, big-dollar initiatives that do little more than make politicians seem like they are doing something about a problem they clearly know nothing about.

EduSpeak: Nonlinguistic Processing

Students choreograph their concepts of the immune system into a dance study.

Robert Marzano, the “Art and Science of Teaching” education guru, has a short article hidden in the back of the May, 2010 issue of Educational Leadership, the ASCD monthly journal. The title of the article is, “Representing Knowledge Nonlinguistically,” and the main thrust of the piece is that this type of processing “can have a positive effect on student achievement and provide diversity in the way that students process new information.”

He goes on to list “Five Points to Keep in Mind:”

1. Nonlinguistic representations come in many forms.
2. Nonlinguistic representations must identify crucial information.
3. Students should explain their nonlinguistic interpretations.
4. Nonlinguistic representations can take a lot of time.
5. Students should revise their representations when necessary.

As my fellow teaching artists might say at this point, “Duh!” This is how arts integration works, all the time. Hellooooo?!?

Boiled down, “nonlinguistic representations,” as Marzano uses the term, means creating some vehicle other than written text to contain and express knowledge. His examples are “graphic organizers, sketches, pictographs…, concept maps, dramatizations, flow charts, and computerized simulations, to name a few.” Why he doesn’t name dances, paintings, scripts, and musical compositions is a mystery. It would have helped lead him to the central idea he seems to be missing: it is the creative process, resulting in some sort of creative product, that allows students to order and make sense of their learning and to communicate their understanding to others.

Marzano, as perceptive and influential as he may be, is wearing the same blinders that most educators must put on in today’s climate of focus on “student achievement” (read: test scores). He cites one of his own studies to show a 17 percentile-point gain in test scores for students whose teachers use “nonlinguistic strategies” over those whose teachers rely on more “traditional” methods. This in itself is an impressive bit of evidence that current accepted, “traditional” teaching strategies miss the boat more often than not.

But this discussion will continue to be relegated to the back pages of professional journals until we start thinking of teaching and learning in new ways. That entire issue of Educational Leadership is devoted to a discussion of “The Key to Changing the Teaching Profession.” The journal looks at teacher preparation (college-level education curricula), merit pay, and other suggestions for supporting good teaching while rooting out ineffective or counterproductive practice.

However, the measures for evaluation of teacher effectiveness continue to revolve around “student achievement,” which means that we are focusing on once-a-year test scores to make judgments about a year-long process of teaching and learning. It is wrong and harmful to reward or punish teachers for something that is fundamentally out of their control, and it distracts us from instituting new and meaningful ways of evaluating teacher success.

The main difficulty is our American longing for the quick and the easy. We’d love to have some kind of national yardstick that we could apply to any school and any classroom to see how “good” they are. But, just as with assessing student understanding, there is no such fair and accurate system of measurement. Evaluating teacher effectiveness requires actual humans in the actual classrooms, using checklists and rubrics to assess the teaching and learning environment. Those same humans also have to look at the methods the teacher is using to assess student learning, and they need to compare and contrast the achievements of the teacher’s current students with those of past years, to look for patterns that will indicate the strengths and weaknesses of the individual teacher.

Typically, this is the domain of the building principal, who is charged with the responsibility of evaluating staff on an ongoing and annual basis. Collecting standardized information about teaching practice from principals, we can then employ our critical thinking skills to evaluate schools, districts, and larger systems based on a wider and deeper set of information.

This, of course, means we would have to abolish the current system of “grading” schools based on their once-a-year high-stakes test scores. We have already seen how that system punishes success by applying a “one size fits none” standard to individual schools without regard for context, parent and student satisfaction, and a host of other relevant but ignored information.

Marzano does arts integration and the field of education a disservice when he says, “Nonlinguistic representations are one of many powerful techniques available to classroom teachers,” effectively burying this incredibly important strategy among the myriad teaching and learning strategies jostling for overburdened teachers’ attention. You’d think that any strategy that brought a 17 percent gain in test scores would earn more attention, especially from someone so well-respected in the field.

When you add in the power of aesthetic choices and the response to and discussion of artistic products that demonstrate student understanding, the real question becomes, “Why is it taking so long for educators to see what is right in front of their eyes?”

Weasels in the Woodwoork

Albuquerque has a weekly alternative newspaper called the Alibi, and it is as left-of-center as any of these tabloids from around the country. In the interest of balanced journalism, I’m sure they feel they have to provide space to commentators such as Paul Gessing (described below his article as, “president of New Mexico’s Rio Grande Foundation, an organization that promotes limited government, economic freedom and individual responsibility.”

The title of the op-ed piece is, “New Mexico’s Education Debacle: Where’s the outrage?,” and here’s the link to the full article – http://alibi.com/index.php?story=32704&scn=news

Gessing begins his article by claiming that, “unlike so many topics with a partisan bent, Republicans and Democrats can agree: 1) New Mexico’s K-12 educational system has been in crisis for some time; 2) reform is necessary to save our state’s children from low-wage jobs and lives on the margins of our society; and 3) education is one of the greatest concerns facing New Mexico.”

Here are a couple of definitions of “crisis:”

• an unstable situation of extreme danger or difficulty; “they went bankrupt during the economic crisis”

That’s the one I suspect Mr. Gessing is trying to get us to think of. But here’s another:

• a crucial stage or turning point in the course of something; “after the crisis the patient either dies or gets better”
  wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn

This one sounds more like what we are facing, both in New Mexico and across the nation. We have created and attempted to preserve a factory-oriented education system that no longer functions in the modern world. It’s the equivalent of a dependence on fossil fuels: futile, wasteful, and unsustainable. The free-marketeers want to take the “fetters” off of “free enterprise” and let the market decide what survives and what does not.

Of course, in the real world, this utopian fantasy does not itself survive against the inexorable forces of greed and lust for power that corrupt unfettered capitalism. The purpose of regulatory structures is not to put government in charge of business, but to safeguard the average person from the rapacious nature of soulless corporations that are defined as legal “persons” but have nothing resembling conscience or accountability.

Along these same lines, the purpose of public education is not to deliver a uniform, “national” curriculum, with all the states and districts marching along in lockstep and turning out identical student “products.” Public education’s purpose is to provide every child with the opportunity to learn about her or his world and to interact with it positively. This is properly the function of the state, because the state has no profit motive in providing such public services, like police and fire protection.

Gessner concludes his essay with the assertion that, “choice remains one of the best ways to force traditional public schools to improve while creating innovative options for children. If vouchers are not politically feasible in New Mexico—and at this point it seems they are not—tax credits allowing individuals and businesses to fund educational alternatives are the best option.

“Liberals and conservatives alike must recognize New Mexico schools are in crisis, and no amount of funding will help. It is time for policy-makers to tackle the issue head-on, to try an array of remedies and see what works. Our children simply can’t wait.”

Clearly, this is not one of the brighter lights in the free market, but he is just one of the first to begin pounding the drumbeat: vouchers vouchers vouchers PRIVATIZE vouchers vouchers… Is anyone asking the question, who really benefits?