The National Standards Sausage-Making

June 9, 2009

Every decade or so we have to debate the desirability of adopting national standards for education.  People tend to be in favor of them when they imagine that they are the ones writing the standards.  But when everyone gets into the sausage-making that characterizes policy formulation, it generally becomes clear that no one is going to get what they want out of national standards.  What’s worse is that the resulting mess would be imposed on everyone.  There’d be no more laboratory of the states, just uniform banality.

Of course, some people always hope that they’ll somehow manage to sneak their preferred vision into place without having to go through the meat grinder.  That’s what is happening now with the National Governor’s Association effort at “voluntary” national standards.  In a process completely lacking in transparency and open-debate, some are rushing to announce a national standards fait accompli.

My colleague Sandra Stotsky tells us what’s what:

“If another country wanted other countries to respect its educational system and the reforms it was trying to make, who would it choose to lead such an important professional project as the development of its national standards in mathematics and in the language of its educational system itself?  In any other country in the world, one would expect a distinguished mathematician at the college level to be asked to chair the mathematics standards-writing committee–someone who commands the respect of the mathematics profession (and obviously is an expert on mathematics).   For the language standards-writing committee, one would likewise expect an eminent scholar in a college-level department–someone whose command of the language and understanding of the texts that inform the development of this language could not be questioned.   If the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers had thought about national pride (and national need) as well as academic/educational expertise, then all of us would respect the Common Core Initiative and look forward with eagerness to the drafts the NGA and CCSSO have promised to make public in July.

 These two organizations could have followed, for example, the exemplary procedures followed by the National Mathematics Advisory Panel, on which I had the privilege to serve.  The Panel was chaired by the former president of one of the major universities in the country, all Panel members were identified at the outset, their qualifications were made known to the pubic, their procedures were open to the public and taped as well, and the final product was hammered out in public, after dozens of reviewers provided critical comments. 

 But instead of choosing nationally known scholars to chair and staff these committees–to assure us of the integrity and quality of the product–the NGA and the CCSSO have, for reasons best known to themselves,  treated the initiative as a private game of their own.  The NGA and the CCSSO haven’t even bothered to inform the public who is chairing these committees, who is on them, why they were chosen, what their credentials are, and why we should have any confidence whatsoever in what they come up with. 

 One person has announced on his own to the press and to a state department of education that he is chairing the mathematics standards-writing committee. He has not been contradicted by anyone at NGA or CCSSO, so we must assume he’s for real.  It turns out he is an English major with no academic degrees in mathematics whatsoever.  No one has yet announced on his/her own that he/she is chairing the English standards-writing committee.   One wag has already wondered whether this person might be a mathematics major with no academic degrees in English.  But it’s possible the sad joke in mathematics is not being repeated in English. 

 This country deserved better for a project of such national importance.”

Sandy Kress added these words of wisdom (pardon the capitalization since this was a comment on a post at Eduwonk):

“i suspect after the good feelings wear off, other governors and chiefs will begin to ask whether they can or should consider new standards at this time. once they learn about how hard it is to write new standards, they will ask even more questions. when we get to the controversies around whole language vs. phonics, they will ask more questions still. then comes computation vs. concepts. then comes all the many questions that arise once you get below the level of 30,000 feet. then – God forbid – you might even get to the place where you might possibly find the new standards under consideration to be no better than (or even possibly worse than) the standards you have! could it be that the tradeoffs that happen nationally will be the same as those that occur in the states? could the same interest groups intervene? could this nice dream be interrupted by the demons that bedevil state standard setting? could these interests be the problem as much as variation? oh no, could it be there’s no santa… no, i won’t go there.

and, oh yes, what about performance standards? if we ever get to detailed precise standards in each grade for reading and math, do the participants agree to common performance standards? if they don’t, who’s kidding whom? the real problem today is not so much that some states have vastly higher standards than other states; it’s more that their performance standards are greatly different. have the states, or will the states, commit to making those the same? if not, this will be utterly fruitless.

listen – DO NOT GET ME WRONG – i’m all for higher, fewer, clearer standards. i’ve spent a lot of time working on improving texas’ standards over the past 20 years. i’ve spent a lot of time with the hunt institute pushing more common standards. this is indeed the right thing to do.

but this process is going to be much more difficult than some think. it won’t happen overnight, nor should it. and there will remain great variation at the end of the day. it is utterly naiive and/or foolish to expect states to jump track from their current gameplans, particularly where they’re reasonably well thought out.

be prepared for states to recognize this “the morning after.” texas just recognized it before “the drinking began.”

also be prepared to realize that a better approach might be for one or more of these organizations to begin by recruiting the best and the brightest and actually doing the hard work of developing a few sets of model standards and then shopping them to the states, with the political support of those who rightly want high, common standards as well as perhaps some incentives from the feds to take these steps.” 

(edited for typos)

12 Comments | instructional reform, school accountability | Tagged: , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

Post-Apocalyptic 21st Century Skills

March 4, 2009

I can’t figure out how to embed this, but it is well worth clicking on the link.  The Onion does a news analysis of the real skills our children will need for the post-apocalyptic 21st century.  One analyst emphasizes the need for basic skills, like how to collect water from the morning dew in human skulls.

http://www.theonion.com/content/video/are_violent_video_games

UPDATE:  Here it is embedded:

4 Comments | instructional reform | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

Wagner and the Wisdom of Tevye

February 17, 2009

Townsperson: Why should I break my head about the outside world?  Let the outside world break its own head….

Tevye: He is right…

Perchik: Nonsense. You can’t close your eyes to what’s happening in the world.

Tevye: He’s right.

Rabbi’s pupil: He’s right, and he’s right.  They can’t both be right!

Tevye:  (Pause). You know, you are also right.

 

Fiddler on the Roof is coming to Fayetteville (the Ozark center of Yiddishkeit) in May.  But it felt like Fiddler arrived early with Tony Wagner’s visit yesterday to promote his 21st Century Skills (TM) concept.  People asked him a variety of questions and as it turns out, they were all right.

 

My colleague Gary Ritter commented that Wagner’s anecdotes sounded more like examples of bad teaching than of a bad curriculum.  You’re right, Wagner replied.  There is also bad teaching out there.

 

A student questioned his lack of empirical evidence to support his claims.  You’re right, Wagner replied.  He admitted to lacking quantitative evidence but said he was a qualitative researcher.

 

Stuart Buck noted that in the book Wagner profiled 3 schools that ignored the state tests, taught in a way they believed best, and still did very well on those exams.  So is the problem really with accountability testing?  You’re right, Wagner replied.  The problem is in the unnecessary over-reaction of risk-averse educators.

 

A math professor asked about whether too much content was really the problem.  You’re right, Wagner replied.  He’s not against content and agrees that content is essential for developing his 7 essential skills (TM).

 

It didn’t really seem to matter if his answers contradicted claims he made in the book or even ten minutes earlier in his presentation.  In the end, everyone was right and he was for everything people suggested.  He was for accountability testing (as long as it was done right).  He was for academic content (as long as it was the right amount and on the right stuff).  He was for teaching to the test (if the test was a good one). 

 

The quick, confident answers and the futuristic jargon may have wowed some, but it left me and many others a bit bewildered.  He can’t be for all these things.

 

Happily there is a video record of his lecture.  It’s actually from his web site, but it is almost identical to the lecture that he gave at least three times yesterday to different audiences.  Notice that in minute 20 he clearly says that our kids don’t need content; they need “competencies.”  And the best part of watching this video on the web is that it is free as opposed to the $20,000-$25,000 consulting fee that Fayetteville schools paid him for more or less the same thing.

See: http://www.schoolchange.org/videos/the_global_achievement_gap_video.html 

7 Comments | instructional reform | Tagged: , , , | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

Get Alfie Kohn on the Phone!

February 13, 2009

According to research published last week in the New England Journal of Medicine, smokers who were offered financial incentives to quit smoking were more likely to do so.  As the Wall Street Journal describes it:

“For the new study, researchers, led by a team from the University of Pennsylvania, tracked 878 General Electric Co. employees from around the country for a year and a half in 2005 and 2006. Participants, who smoked an average of one pack of cigarettes a day, were divided into two groups of roughly equal size. All received information about smoking-cessation programs.

Members of one group also got as much as $750 in cash, with the payments spread out over time to encourage longer-term abstinence. Those participants got $100 for completing a smoking-cessation program, $250 if they stopped smoking within six months after enrolling in the study, and $400 for continuing to abstain from smoking for an additional six months.

All participants were contacted three months after they enrolled in the study and periodically after that. Those who said they had stopped smoking at any point during the study were asked to submit saliva or urine samples for testing so that their claims could be verified.

About 14.7% of the group offered financial incentives said they had stopped smoking within the first year of the study, compared with 5% of the other group. At the time of their last interview for the 18-month study, 9.4% of the paid group was still abstaining compared with 3.6% of those who got no money.”

Wait a minute!  If I’ve learned one thing from Alfie Kohn it is that extrinsic rewards undermine intrinsic motivation.  The smokers paid to stop should have had the internal motivation to quit undermined and should have been less successful than those who quit for the pure joy of it.

I’ve got an idea.  Let’s stop paying people for their work because it only undermines their internal motivation to work.  And to avoid undermining Alfie Kohn’s motivation, I’m sure he’d understand if people stopped paying him for his lectures and books.

3 Comments | instructional reform, teacher pay | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

The Wagner Epic Continues

February 3, 2009

No, not that Wagner.  There is more on Tony Wagner, the snake-oil salesman educational consultant.  My op-ed on Wagner ran in the Northwest Arkansas Morning News.  I’ve also reprinted the text below, since it is easier to read that than the scanned pdf in the link.

The first community discussion on Wagner’s book, The Global Achievement Gap, was held last night.  It wasn’t too bad.  A number of teachers (at tables other than mine) expressed resentment at the suggestion that they weren’t already aware that critical thinking and creativity were desirable.  But administrators and GT teachers seemed more enamored with the book.  And the reaction from parents and community members included a fair degree of skepticism. 

It’s hard to get people to think critically about people who push a focus on critical thinking.  To be for critical thinking is like being for goodness and light.  The tricky part is in how you get there.  To the extent that Wagner has any concrete suggestions, he seems to be taking folks down the wrong path.  He wants less emphasis on content and less testing.  But he shows no evidence that higher levels of critical thinking can be found in places or at times when there was less content and less testing.  In fact, the little evidence he does provide would suggest the opposite.

Some smart folks are pushing back against these data-free educational consultants.  Sandra Stotsky had an op-ed on Wagner last week.  Dan Willingham had an excllent blog post on Alfie Kohn as did Stuart Buck.  And Robert Pondiscio at Core Knowledge ,  AndyRotherham at Eduwonk , and Ken De Rosa at D-Ed Reckoning have added their two cents (which, with the new stimulus package, will become 2 trillion cents).

So here is my op-ed pasted below:

Fayetteville Public Schools Need Evidence, Not Snake-Oil (submitted title)
By Jay P. Greene

              The Fayetteville Public Schools purchased 2,000 copies of Tony Wagner’s The Global Achievement Gap and organized a series of public fora to discuss how that book might guide our schools.  The District is to be commended for engaging the community in this process.  But it is unclear why the District selected Wagner’s book as the focus of this discussion.

Wagner’s book makes claims about what skills students really need to learn, what is blocking them from learning those skills, what countries are more successful in teaching these skills, and what some schools are doing to remedy the problem.  But he provides no systematic evidence to substantiate any one of these claims.  In short, the book is a series of anecdotes that more closely resembles what one would find in a self-help manual than in a work of social science.  If we apply our critical thinking skills, which Wagner says are essential, we should reject this book as a sound basis for planning the future of Fayetteville schools.

First, Wagner says there are seven essential survival skills that our children need to learn.  How does he know that these are the essential skills?  He chatted with a CEO on an airplane and selected a few more to interview.  Does he review any research on the types of skills that predict who will become successful adults?  No. Wagner relies upon the authority of his experience and the experiences of a handful of corporate executives to identify the essential skills.  Accepting claims on this basis would be the sort of thing we would hope people with critical thinking skills might reject.

Frankly, the seven skills he lists — critical thinking, collaboration, adaptability, initiative, communication, analysis, and imagination – seem reasonable enough, but they are also so vague as to be unhelpful in informing schools about what to do.  How exactly do we produce critical thinking or adaptability or creativity?  It’s not as if educators have been unaware of these goals, but they haven’t generally been effective at developing strategies to achieve them.

Then Wagner identifies what he believes is blocking the acquisition of these seven essential skills – high stakes testing.  What evidence does he present to support this claim?  Again, he presents no systematic evidence to demonstrate that there is a tradeoff between the content knowledge required in accountability testing and the essential skills he wants.  Couldn’t it be the case that improving mastery of basic skills and content knowledge provides the foundation for these seven skills?  It’s hard to be imaginative, analytical, etc… without knowing subject matter and basic skills of literacy and numeracy.  Einstein may have said “imagination is more important than knowledge,” as the book’s dedication indicates, but Einstein couldn’t have succeeded without a firm grasp of advanced mathematics.

If Wagner were right that accountability testing undermines essential skills, then surely these skills must have been more plentiful before testing became as salient as it is today.  But Wagner does not (and cannot) provide any evidence to show that.  Instead, he shows (on p. 74) that students in the United States significantly lag students in Finland, Hong Kong-China, Japan, and Korea in certain problem solving skills on an international test called PISA.  As it turns out, high stakes testing is extremely prominent in most of these countries with strong problem-solving results – a fact curiously at odds with Wagner’s claims.  If accountability testing undermines essential skills, why do countries with such strong accountability systems manage to succeed so well in teaching the essential skills Wagner wants?

Wagner describes three model schools that he says have been effective at teaching essential skills (although he again fails to provide any evidence that they are as successful as he claims).  But it is by no means clear that the approaches adopted by these three schools are the only valid approaches or that they could be replicated easily by others.  Replication is especially problematic because the three models he provides are all charter schools or alternative schools of choice.  Perhaps the secret of these schools’ success has something to do with school choice and not the features he describes.  If true, it’s not clear how Fayetteville could imitate the success of these schools.

To achieve our goals in education we have to adopt approaches backed by systematic evidence.  If we believe critical thinking, collaboration, and creativity are the most important goals for schools, then we need systematic evidence on systems of teacher preparation, curriculum, and pedagogy that effectively produce those goals.  There is a growing body of scientific research on these issues, including a number of studies sponsored by the U.S. Department of Education’s Institute for Education Sciences, that the Fayetteville Public Schools might wish to consider rather than consulting with the latest peddler of educational snake-oil.

10 Comments | instructional reform, school accountability | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

Critical Thinking About Critical Thinking

January 27, 2009

snakeoil553.jpg

Fayetteville Public Schools have been hypnotized by Tony Wagner’s The Global Achievement Gap.  They’ve bought 2,000 copies, which they’ve distributed to administrators, teachers, and members of the community.  They’ve organized three public discussions of the book.  They are bringing in Wagner himself.  And they’ve indicated that they would like to use this book as a guide for planning a new high school and other changes.

My colleague, Sandra Stotsky, applies her critical thinking skills in today’s Northwest Arkansas Times to Wagner’s call for more emphasis on “21st Century Skills,” like critical thinking, adaptability, and creativity, and less emphasis on subject content:

“Who can argue against teaching students ‘agility and adaptability’ or how to ‘ask good questions?’ Yet these ‘skills’ are largely unsupported by actual scientific research. Wagner presents nothing to justify his list except glib language and a virtually endless string of anecdotes about his conversations with high-tech CEOs.

Even where Wagner does use research, it’s not clear that we can trust what he reports as fact. On page 92, to discredit attempts to increase the number of high school students studying algebra and advanced mathematics courses, he refers to a ‘study’ of MIT graduates that he claims found only a few mentioning anything ‘more than arithmetic, statistics and probability’ as useful to their work. Curious, I checked out the ‘study’ using the URL provided in an end note for Chapter 3. It consisted of 17, yes 17, MIT graduates, and, according to my count, 11 of the 17 explicitly mentioned linear algebra, trig, proofs and/ or calculus, or other advanced mathematics courses as vital to their work – exactly the opposite of what Wagner reports! Perhaps exposure to higher mathematics is not the worst problem facing American students!

Similarly, while I agree with Wagner that too many public schools fail to teach ‘effective oral and written communication,’ I am utterly puzzled by his contention that teachers’ obsessions with teaching grammar, test-prep and teaching to ‘the test’ are the problem. Really? Which English teachers? A lot of parents would kill to get their children into a classroom where they knew the teacher cared about grammar, or at least was brave enough to try to teach conventional sentence structure and language usage.

As for too much testing in schools, another of his complaints, Wagner again cites no relevant research. On the other hand my colleague Gary Ritter finds that here in Arkansas public schools the most tested students – those in grades five and seven – spend only 1 percent of total instructional time being tested, probably less time than spent in class parties or on field trips. And without testing, how can we figure out what our students know, and which programs successfully teach them?

Wagner’s book is engaging and sometimes points to real defects in American schools. Yet it fails to use research objectively to ascertain what is truly happening in America’s 90,000 public schools. Moreover, like all too many education ‘reformers’ Wagner is simply hostile to academic content. Wagner does not seem to care if students can read and write grammatically, do math or know something about science and history – real subjects that schools can teach and policy-makers can measure.

Unfortunately, Wagner dismisses measurable academic content while embracing buzzwords like ‘adaptability’ and ‘curiosity,’ which no one could possibly be against, but also which no one could possibly measure. Do we really care if our students are curious and adaptable if they cannot read and write their own names? “

I have my own op-ed on Wagner pending at another local paper.  Meanwhile my colleague Stuart Buck has an excellent blog post on a related topic — Alfie Kohn’s attack on Core Knowledge.  Even worse, Stuart notes, Kohn accuses people who disagree with him of having bad intentions and not just being mistaken.

It is puzzling how this entire industry of education consultants, including Wagner, Kohn, Kozol, and Gardner, manage to have such large followings with such weak arguments.

8 Comments | instructional reform | Tagged: , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

Willingham Strikes Again

January 10, 2009

Psychologist Dan Willingham strikes again with another excellent video about educational psychology.  In this one he makes a strong case for the importance of teaching content for teaching reading.

2 Comments | instructional reform | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

The Way of the Future: The Guide on the Side?

January 1, 2009

(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)

Over at VoxEU, Lisa Barrow, Elizabeth Debraggio and Cecilia  Rouse present a random assignment study showing that computer aided math instruction led to significantly higher scores for participating students.

We need more research on this, but it seems to back the notion that the schools of tomorrow may look very different from those of today. I’ll wager that mixed models of technology delivered instruction, where a smaller number of highly skilled teachers serve as “guides on the side” rather than a “sage on the stage” ultimately becomes more prevalent.

Of course, that’s only a guess, but ultimately greater experimentation with different delivery methods will point new ways forward.

5 Comments | instructional reform | Tagged: , , , | Permalink
Posted by matthewladner

How a Physics Textbook Changed My Life

December 23, 2008

books

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

Jay Matthews argues that most textbooks don’t serve enough of an educational function to be worth using:

Textbooks still make good dictionaries, with glossaries at the back. They also reassure parents, who don’t get to see teachers in action but are comforted, in a perverse way, that their kids’ schoolbooks seem just as dry and predictable as theirs were. But like the newspapers that have been my life, textbooks are creeping slowly toward obsolescence.

(HT Joanne Jacobs)

I can’t tell whether Matthews thinks textbooks are becoming obsolete simply because books themselves are becoming obsolete – he talks about how some teachers are starting to “write” their own textbooks for their classes by using the internet to gather material, etc. – but it sure looks like he thinks there’ s something especially obsolete about the textbook.

If so, I must strongly demur. Matthews seems to have missed what has always been the primary function of the textbook – to compensate for the teacher’s deficiency. It’s certainly true that some teachers are so on top of their material that they can write their own textbooks, but others are so not on top of their material that they just lean on the textbook as a crutch, teaching everything straight out of the book.

Indeed, who has not heard the frequent complaint about teachers who just teach everything straight out of the book? Welll, where would we be if they couldn’t even do that?

I must confess that looking back on when I first taught my own class at the college level, the biggest weakness of my teaching in that class was that I did too much by rote out of the textbook. But I did it because, as a novice, I lacked the confidence to strike out on my own.

But I have an even more striking example to set before you. When I was in high school, I had a really brilliant physics teacher who didn’t use the textbook at all. He spent the whole class illuminating the subject matter in his own highly motivated way, bringing in unusual examples and exploring subtle nuances.

As a result, his teaching was incredibly engaging to the few students who shared his intense interest in the subject, and completely useless to the majority who did not. They needed to be walked through the basics slowly and carefully – sort of the way a textbook does.

There was one girl in my four-person lab group in that class who was completely lost. She was getting a D and had no idea what was going on. So I started helping her out with her homework.

“Just ignore the teacher,” was my main advice. “Read the textbook and learn what’s in it. Don’t pay attention to anything in class, because almost all of it isn’t going to be on the test and will just distract you from what you really need to be learning.”

She went from a D to an A.

And you know what? I’m married to that girl today.

So don’t tell me textbooks are obsolete.

As a great rumination on the science of physics once put it:

This day and age we’re living in
Gives cause for apprehension,
With speed and new invention,
And things like fourth dimension.

Yet we get a trifle weary
With Mr. Einstein’s theory.
So we must get down to earth at times,
Relax, relieve the tension.

And no matter what the progress
Or what may yet be proved
The simple facts of life are such
They cannot be removed.

You must remember this:
A kiss is just a kiss, a sigh is just a sigh.
The fundamental things apply
As time goes by.

And when two lovers woo,
They still say, “I love you.”
On that you can rely!
No matter what the future brings
As time goes by.

Moonlight and love songs,
Never out of date.
Hearts full of passion,
Jealousy and hate.
Woman needs man,
And man must have his mate – 
That no one can deny.

It’s still the same old story,
A fight for love and glory,
A case of do or die.
The world will always welcome lovers
As time goes by.

(Copyright Warner Bros. Music, 1931)

12 Comments | instructional reform, teacher quality | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by Greg Forster

Eformray Ealismray

December 18, 2008

drevil3

(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)

Well, a few days after I begged my friend Mike Petrilli to ixnay on the averickmay alktay now he has labeled the Fordham position on federal education policy making as “Reform Realism.” Get it- it’s a lot like “smart growth!”

Don’t get me wrong, even a crusty “Local Controller” like me finds things to admire about the Fordham position. But easplay, no more inguisticlay inspay!

In addition, I thought the Senate voted down national standards 98 to nothing in the late 1990s. Perhaps this is a new fantastic version of realism- but who knows what will happen next?

6 Comments | blogging, instructional reform | Tagged: , | Permalink
Posted by matthewladner

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