Textbook Dependence

There's been lots of talk lately on textbooks (or maybe not so lately--I've been avoiding writing). First, Beverlee Jobrack's Tyranny of the Textbook: An Insider Exposes How Educational Materials Undermine Reforms was published. Next, the edu-world was all aflutter over Apple's entrance into the textbooks market. Finally, veteran textbook author and publisher Annie Keeghan offered some not-so-pretty insights into the aging, hulking industry textbooks have become.

I haven't gotten a chance to read Jobrack's work, but luckily Education Week curriculum journalist Erik Robelen and by the Fordham Institute's curriculum expert Kathleen Porter-Magee did.

I agree with Jobrack's premise as stated by Robelen that in discussions of education reform:

improving the curriculum—what actually gets taught in classrooms—is all too often left off the table. And the author, who provides an insider perspective on the world of developing and selecting curricular materials, contends that this neglect is a key obstacle to increased student learning.

Now I can't refute Jobrack's contentions, but I can speak to my opinion on textbooks, which is that they may well be inaccurate and I can only imagine that they are just slapping new labels on old content. (And this is why textbooks on i-pads will not be "revolutionary.") I also can mostly speak as a social studies teacher. When I taught strict ESOL, I didn't use one textbook in particular but various books and resources depending on what I was teaching. That was true of social studies, too, but I did lean on the textbooks more. But I think the problem with textbooks is two-fold:

1) Especially in subjects such as social studies, textbooks are over-emphasized. Sure, textbooks are useful. Especially when I teach social studies, I use them as reference books and encyclopedias. I like to have two or three sets of textbooks in the class--to check different sources but also so that students of varying reading levels can access the content. Otherwise, I have students read historical fiction and non-textbook non-fiction books, and I use articles and readings that I come across on relevant topics--from the newspaper, from periodicals. What I like about using these is that they usually reflect in some way current scholarship in certain matters, and they are what I want my students eventually to be able to read and make sense of outside of school, independently. Part of what I'm teaching students is that yes, there are facts in social studies and history, but there is also how you put together the facts, interpret them, and which facts are accepted and which are controversial and why. This leads me to the problem that. . .

2) teachers, especially at the secondary level, don't often know enough about the subjects they teach to know if the textbook is wrong or to come up with readings beyond it. When you know very little about a subject you will be teaching, if for example if you are assigned at the last minute to teach World History (as I have been), when you know much more about US History, there's going to be a lot to learn in a brief amount of time and the textbook will get leaned on more and questioned less. I won't be able to fact-check an entire textbook and nor should I have to--that's the publisher's job. And, unfortunately, these days it seems like textbooks need even more scrutiny.

Porter-Magee is right on when she says you can't just have a great curriculum and expect teachers who don't know what they're doing to implement it well. Pedagogy matters; quality of instruction matters. Nor should we just make "teacher-proof" curriculum. Where I might disagree or question Porter-Magee is when she talks about emphasizing data-driven instruction:

And so any discussion about classroom-level implementation of curriculum should include a discussion of using formal and informal assessment to track student mastery of essential content and skills, and of using the data from those assessments to really drive short- and long-term planning and instruction. This kind of data-driven instruction is essential in ensuring not only that teachers have covered essential content, but that students have actually learned it.

Implementation and assessment are vital but before they even get to the classroom (and continuing as they're there), teachers, especially at the secondary level, should be much better educated (and yes I think they should also be better trained) in the subjects they teach. Teachers should rely less on textbooks and more on other books, texts, and other sources of information. Teachers should be able to spot and to point out inacccuracies. They should help students notice diverging viewpoints or conflicting information in different sources and they should facilitate discussions about these different perspectives--their genesis and how to evaluate them. Far from making textbooks and curricula teacher-proof, teachers should be able to make sense of and judgments about the curriculum and texts they're teaching and to teach their students to do the same.

To attract people that knowledgeable and educated, we have to at least provide much better working conditions, greater professional autonomy, and better pay, but I guess I already covered that in another post.

The Teacher Tea Leaf Reports on SchoolCrock: An Explanation

SchoolCrock has published the teacher tea leaf reports using a new tool that was created by interactive journalists at The New Hack Times and WNLIC. The goal of the tool: to make the tea leaves easier to understand and put the prophecies into context.

The tool can be found on Web pages created for every school whose teachers’ prophecies were released on Friday by the city’s Department of Testucation. You can find those pages by typing in a school name in the box on the left.

You will find a wealth of tea leaf reports on that page, starting with an overall snapshot of the school, as told by the percentage of teachers at that school whose leaves from herbal or black tea were “above average” or high — two of the city’s five prophecy categories. You’ll also be able to see how that compares to schools across the city.

Below those school tea leaf reports are the names of individual teachers, grouped by grade. The complete tea leaf report listed with the teachers’ names are the prophecies, meaning that teacher’s place when compared to other teachers like her or him, on a scale of 0 to 99.

A teacher can have up to four rankings for each grade taught: for black teas during the 2009-10 school year, black tea career, herbal teas in 2009-10 and herbal tea career. Career prophecies are based on one to five years of tea leaves.

The leaves are situated along a black line. That line indicates the margin of error for that teacher’s prophecy. A fuller divination, and an example, can be found on each school’s page.

Clicking on a teacher’s name brings up additional foretellings: the amount of coffee grounds in the cup the prophesy is based on; an “expected” divination based on images manifest in the clouds; and the actual average tarot card readings of those students. Tarot card readings are reported as standard deviations above/below the citywide mean.

The difference between the expected divination and the actual divination is considered the “value added” by the teacher.

One more piece of foretelling can be included with a teacher’s listing: his or her response or explanation of the ranking, as submitted to SchoolCrock. We encourage teachers to add their responses.

A module that allows you to search by teacher name is also on that page.

For more information, see our FAQ (Frequently Avoided Questions).

In creating this tool, SchoolCrock decided to showcase only the most recent and career prophecies, since we agree with many critics that the older tea leaves are less useful. We wanted to make clear the margin of error, since one of the weaknesses of these prophecies is the large margins. And we wanted to put every collection of tea leaves in the context of the school and expected divinations.

All of the leaves were provided by the city’s Department of Testucation (prophecies for teachers in charter schools and District 75 are expected to be released on Tuesday). A team of journalists spent several hours verifying the tea leaves, dealing with anomalies, searching for missing tea cups and making sure everything foretold as planned before posting it on our site.

We are interested in your feedback. You can add your thoughts in the comment section below or e-mail us at SchoolCrock@nhtimes.com.

Rather than Choosing "Best" Teacher, Parents Should Seek Best Match

I have another guest post up, this one over at Nacy Flanagan's Education Week blog, Teacher in a Strange Land. In it, I respond to the matter of letting parents choose their children's teachers.

Check it out.

Legislating to the Test

Recently, the Virginia Senate passed a bill that would eliminate the 3rd grade SOL (Standards of Learning) Tests in Science and Social Studies. That means less standardized testing! As a Virginia public school parent, I should be thrilled, right? Not necessarily.

See my post on this over at The Core Knowledge Blog.

Charter or Traditional: Making Kids Play Musical Schools Is Wrong

Here's a composite of conversations I've had with other education folks (and myself) about charter schools:

Q: Are you in favor of or against charter schools?

A: Well, I'd rather we didn't feel the need to have them in the first place. I have what I think are valid concerns about segregation, isolation, inequity, and denying appropriate and accessible education to special needs and ELL students.

Q: Okay, but they're here. Would you rather have them all closed and go back to the structure we had?

A: No, no. I acknowledge they're here to stay, for the foreseeable future at least. But if their existence is a reality, I'd rather they be community and educator-initiated, under the umbrella of and accountable to the districts and communities where they're located with no profit motive (as Chad Sansing describes here).

Q: Well, charters sometimes form because the home district is too rigid and too dysfunctional. Look at DC. Charters formed their own system entirely apart from DCPS precisely because they were fleeing the dysfunction of DCPS. Then charters grew in part because people got even more turned off by Rhee-form.

A: Yes, yes, I understand that. And I understand it's much easier to say, well, make the traditional district better, more responsive, than it is for that to actually happen any time soon. How long must families wait for that to occur? Now I get to ask a question: What happens when charter schools are largely unsuccessful according to the current accountability schemes with the same population the traditional, home district seemed to fail with?

I'll answer my own question. If we're just going to judge schools' success or necessity according to (in many cases poorly conceived) standardized test scores then it doesn't matter, if they're charter or traditional, we're not going to know how successful or unsuccessful any school is in improving the quality and meaning of the education for the students they are supposed to serve.

This is why I am against closing charter schools based on test scores, just as I am against closing neighborhood based on test scores. There is so much else to consider. The IDEA Public Charter School in DC serves students at-risk for dropping out. It faces closure. The school has been around for ten years. I've never stepped foot in the school, so I don't know what or how much those students are learning. I don't know if they're getting the best and most appropriate and meaningful education possible under the circumstances. Maybe they are, maybe they aren't. Maybe it should be closed, maybe it shouldn't. But test scores alone most certainly don't tell me that either.

Just as when a neighborhood school closes, when a charter school that has become a fixture in a community, that the community is largely satisfied with, that fills a need that other schools don't, is closed, it will have a very negative effect on the student population and the community it serves. And what will then replace it?

Disruption as a goal is not a positive one for education. I don't care what kind of school they're in, kids and their families, especially those with enough disruption, crisis, and loss in their lives already, shouldn't be forced to play musical schools to the tune of "Get Those Test Scores Up." If that's our idea of reforming education, we're in big trouble.

Opportunity to Listen

Each day this week I have presented a response to different parts of Governor McDonnell's "Opportunity to Learn" education agenda. On Monday, I gave an introduction and talked about the goal of advancing literacy in the early grades. On Tuesday, I wrote about implications for repealing the unpopular Kings Dominion Law. On Wednesday, I talked about proceeding thoughtfully and carefully with expanding choice in the Commonwealth. On Thursday, I discussed evaluating principals and teachers. This concluding post brings me to the end and back to the place where I started in the first post of this series: Money.

It looks like McDonnell has some great funding initiatives in his agenda but it's hard to reconcile them with the major budget cuts and bleak fiscal outlook across the Commonwealth. Every day, I read a new tale of budget woes, possible layoffs of essential staff from school districts across Virginia including Culpepper, Norfolk, Richmond, York, Hanover, Pittsylvania, and Northern Virginia, and of cuts to essential education programs such as preschool for low-income kids.

I understand that a big part of budget woes stem from the mandated VRS contributions that localities now have to make. The Virginia Association of School Superintendents has said that the proposal to put $2.2 billion in Virginia's retirement system is a big cause of the draconian cuts. At my most cynical I think that McDonnell is doing this here and now to demonstrate that the benefits make we offer our public servants are unsustainable and to starve the public schools so that they're set up to fail. At my most charitable, I think Bob McDonnell is very nervous about having debt and wants to remedy the situation ASAP and that he doesn't understand that while there is always room to be more efficient, quality education is not something that can be done well on the cheap.

The public has to realize that retirement benefits are not extras; rather, they are deferred compensation. They have been promised as part of an agreement the state made with employees. The problem with striving to replenish the VRS funds all at once is that causes a bigger and longer-term problem: compromising the quality of education districts in Virginia can provide. Talk about robbing Peter to pay Paul.

We will never improve our public education system by starving it of funds and pushing it to a breaking point. Redlining our schools is the wrong thing to do. Unfortunately, in this context, money matters. The government is not a business; schools are not businesses--that's for car dealerships and supermarkets. While there are always ways to reduce wasteful spending, providing a quality public education to ALL of Virginia's children is inherently inefficient, but in Virginia it's required by law and it's what good governments in healthy, democratic societies do. Fiscal conservatism is one thing, fiscal lunacy is quite another. As former Harvard President Derek Bok put it, "If you think education is expensive, try ignorance."

So, Virginians, where should we go from here?

The VASS (Virginia Association of School Superintendents) set a fine example by presenting their vision in an education reform blueprint. Why not convene task forces and associations of other stakeholders from across Virginia to present their ideas? Teachers and principals from across could tell us what they specifically need to better support and evaluate all teachers, to attract and retain high-performing teachers, and to remove those who shouldn't be in the classroom. Parents could discuss what improvements and changes they'd like to see for their children's education and what they value in schools. Educators from colleges and universities in Virginia need to be consulted: What are deficits are K-12 students arriving with and what are K-12 schools doing well? Virginia-based industries should also be called on to let us know what kind of education and skills they need potential employees to have. Virginia's scholars could examine the curriculum and practices in schools and let us know where the gaps in the curricula we're presenting exist and how we can improve our pedagogy. School finance experts could let us know what's smart spending, what's wasteful, as well as what's possible. Finally, we need to hear from a diverse group of students about the kind of learning communities they'd like to be a part of.

I urge Virginia's governor and legislature to resist the pressure to bow to the interests of big money and lobbyists, to hear their constituents, the taxpayers, and the people of Virginia. The Governor and the legislature must do what's best for quality education for Virginia's public school students, in line with what their parents envision for them, with what our professional educators say is sound practice, with what Virginia's communities and industries need to grow and thrive, and with what's best for the future of the Commonwealth.

The next and most crucial step will be for Virginia's politicians to listen.

cross-posted at the Virginia Education Report

Opportunity to Evaluate Teachers

Welcome to Part IV of my response to Governor McDonnell's "Opportunity to Learn" education agenda--we're almost to Friday, folks! On Monday, you read about advancing literacy. On Tuesday, you read about extending the school day/ year. Yesterday, you read my thoughts on expanding school choice in Virginia. Today, I'll share my thoughts about McDonnell's ideas for evaluating, retaining, and recruiting teachers.

The "Enhancing Teacher Quality, Strengthening Teacher and Administrator Contracts, Evaluation Policies and Streamline Grievance Process" section proposes to establish annual contracts and evaluations for teachers and principals. This, the McDonnell administration says will, "allow for a new evaluation system to work by attracting and retaining the top-tier educators in our K-12 public schools." The agenda also calls to streamline the grievance process. As long as due process is built in (and no, merely saying, "don't worry there will be plenty of due process" is not sufficient) no one I've heard of disagrees with streamlining the grievance process. However, McDonnell's ideas to "enhance" teacher quality and "strengthen" contracts are more controversial.

First of all, teachers and principals should be evaluated yearly and observed and given feedback even more often. The biggest question, though, is how this will be done, based on what, and with what consequences. Will teachers be evaluated with an eye on craft and content or with an eye on test scores? Will the goal be to improve practice and strengthen curriculum? Will the goal be to support teachers? Or will the eye be on standardized test scores parading as real achievement and learning, de-selection, and playing gotcha? If the eye is narrowly focused on boosting test scores and de-selection, we're going to lose good teachers and fail to attract new ones.

Another problem is that this walks and talks like yet another unfunded mandate. Virginia principals barely have enough time to do the evaluations they have. Furthermore, while there are certainly incompetent principals out there, at least one reason that incompetent teachers aren't removed faster is because principals have so much to do. Has Governor McDonnell ever been inside a public school principal's office and seen the students waiting outside, the stacks of unfinished paperwork, and heard the phone ringing off the hook? Has he ever tried to schedule an evaluation? Or how about re-schedule an evaluation?

Streamlining the grievance process may eliminate some paperwork, but mandating yearly high-stakes evaluations without making other changes will merely replace it, and then some. Tennessee recently changed their teacher evaluation process without thinking it through and it's been a nightmare for principals and a largely useless, bordering on absurd, process for many teachers. If we want all principals and teachers to be evaluated once a year, we had better fund it, staff it, and make sure the process is fair and that the tool itself is useful.

I would add a peer evaluation component to the evaluation process. I'm not quite comfortable with students doing high-stakes evaluations but I certainly think collecting and implementing feedback from students should be a required part of a teacher's evaluation process. I'd like to see master educators in each school who evaluate and mentor other teachers while still teaching some courses of their own. Also, we need to diversify evaluations: What a first-year teacher needs is different from what a veteran needs and what a math teacher needs is different from what an art teacher needs. For ideas about where Virginia districts might go, this Massachusetts teacher, who has published a book on the subject, has some great ideas for better evaluations. Montgomery County, Maryland, has had great success with their peer-review teacher evaluation process. Finally, two districts in California have done well revamping their teacher evaluation systems by integrating support and evaluation. Finally, Accomplished California  Teachers put together an important report about improving teacher evaluations, with one of the authors, NBCT David Cohen, offering some further insights on the process here.

As for one-year contracts, I don't see how using them (which by the way will not be a big change in some Virginia districts as budget woes have forced many principals in recent years to offer one-year contacts) strengthens contracts. In fact, it sounds more like weakening contracts (and like spinning one's education agenda). I also don't see how offering them exclusively will attract top-tier educators. Here's a job. Please leave the one you have or give up other opportunities for this one-year contract. Now run along and get those test scores up. I don't see that as a winning recruitment strategy. Moreover, as Chad Sansing pointed out, it's not really going to grow the profession as much as it will offer "jobs."

One-year contracts will also undermine stability and continuity in communities. Of course I want my children to have the best teachers possible, but the fact that the educators at the schools my kids attend have gotten to know our community, our family, and my children as learners, facilitates that. Most of them and most of the educators I have worked with work long hours with too much to do. I, for one, don't want to reward them with the prospect of one-year contracts and I don't want the uncertainty of not knowing which educators will be back each year. In these hard economic times, Virginia's families have enough uncertainty already.

I've also heard McDonnell wants to use merit pay. I was glad that his administration took a more cautious route and merely piloted merit pay before going all out with it. And as I explained here, I think we need to raise salaries across the board, as well as differentiate pay more than we do currently, based on a combination of  responsibility and experience. Educators who lead extra-curriculars, or who take on mentoring, peer evaluating, or more responsibilities should be paid more. Also, we should pay teachers more who work in hard to staff schools with more challenging populations. They have to work harder and have more difficult jobs. Also, it is harder to attract STEM people. It just is. I am not a STEM person and I don't like that they would get paid more, but I understand we can't ignore labor market forces. Nevertheless, merit pay should not be based on a boost in test scores and nor has such merit pay proven to raise achievement in other places. As it has in DC, such an approach easily turns into: Here, you teach the more affluent kids who score higher on standardized tests. Congratulations! Here's some extra money.

By all means, let's re-imagine and then revamp our evaluation tools and processes in Virginia. Let's pay educators more and let's attract the best ones we can to our state. But let's do so in ways that are fair, meaningful, and cognizant of the unique roles educators play. A hasty switch to annual high-stakes evaluations, one-year contracts, and merit pay based on standardized test scores will increase paperwork and teacher turnover and lower morale without growing the profession or improving the quality of teaching. We can do better by our educators and by our students.


cross-posted at the Virginia Education Report