Education Policy

The Sky Isn’t Falling

QuoteDianna Terrell Leave a comment

Training demonstration at Homestead Air Reserve BaseAs if teachers in the Granite State didn’t already have enough demands to respond to, following the 2016 election teachers have been increasingly the scapegoats for nothing less than the death of democracy.*

Recently, an important leader in the state, and champion of historical education jumped into the fray in a letter to the editor, where he maligned the “alarming history deficit” present in the thousands of students who visit the New Hampshire Historical Society each year. As I have done in other blog posts in the past, I find myself in a position of wanting to defend public school teachers and, more generally, the quality of public schooling in the United States.  I am compelled to disagree with this and similar narratives of crisis that tinge statements about education in our country.

It’s important to acknowledge first that I share Mr. Dunlap’s concern about the lack of time spent on historic and civic education in public education in the elementary years. No Child Left Behind yielded a hyper focus on math, reading and high stakes assessments like the NECAP (and now the SBAC).  Something had to give, and this meant many schools devoted disproportionate amounts of instructional time to those subjects typically to the detriment of social studies and the arts (among other things like recess, by the way!).  In many ways, he is quite right to highlight this as a negative consequence of the Accountability Movement. Yet, while I agree that things aren’t great, I disagree that things are getting worse.

In fact, evidence suggests when it comes to both civic and historic knowledge nationwide things are actually improving significantly.

Evidence suggests when it comes to BOTH civic and historic knowledge nationwide things are actually improving significantly.

  • Since 1998, eighth grade student performance on the National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) civic literacy and historic literacy test has risen.
  • Score gains for Hispanic-American eighth graders have narrowed what was once an intractable “achievement gap” by 14 percentage points since 1998.
  • White children, Asian American children, children enrolled in Free-and-Reduced Lunch programs (a proxy for childhood poverty), non-English speakers and children with disabilities have also seen a significant improvement in scores since 1998. This data can be accessed on the NAEP website.
  • In NAEP history assessment, the percentage of children scoring at or above the “proficient” category in history rose significantly since 1994. (Recall, “Proficient” and “Advanced” are the top two categories of the NAEP. This would be similar to scoring 3 or 4 out of four possible points on the Smarter Balanced Assessment.)
  • Regarding the sudden drop in civic and historical knowledge, the data does not appear to bear this out with no decline in civic knowledge or historical knowledge on the NAEP.
  • In both civics and history, New Hampshire does significantly better than the national population. How do we know that when the data isn’t disaggregated for these tests at the state level? The data show that English-native speakers, white children, children living in homes with a college graduate and children being raised outside of poverty perform much better than the national average – a phenomenon called “the Achievement Gap.” Similar to all of New England, New Hampshire’s über-homogeneous, English speaking, college-educated population generally does exceptionally well on these measures of academic success. In fact, the New England states – and NH in particular — perform equivalently to the highest performing nations globally.

While there is reason to take heart, there is not yet reason to celebrate.

Civic and historical awareness in our children and adolescents can still improve. While the average scores on civic knowledge nationwide are consistently well above the “basic” level, only 23% of our nation’s children score in the proficient or advanced range.

Despite these clear shortcomings, I caution Granite Staters against adopting the tone of crisis in our state’s public schools. This is because in my work with Granite State teachers, I have become acutely aware of the fact that this narrative of crisis, and “lack of knowledge “of our children, unfairly maligns and shames an already battered profession.

The narrative of failure and crisis in our schools unfairly maligns and shames an already battered profession.

While it’s tempting to adopt the narrative of crisis, where we express shock, alarm and even disgust with what our children don’t know, Granite Staters must work productively and positively to continue to improve the outlook for civic health in New Hampshire.

So, instead of shaming students and their teachers for what they don’t know, we might focus on the many successes in our education system that reflect the hard work and dedication of our state’s public teaching force. When looking for outliers and success stories, it’s easy to identify high-leverage, promising practices that yield results and use that to our advantage for teaching children how to engage. So what are some of the success stories?

  • Between 2013 and 2015, the state of New Hampshire’s 4th, 8th and 12th graders ranked the first, second and third in the nation on math, reading and science. In other words for the last seven years, New Hampshire public schools have outperformed more than 47 other states in our scores on these tests.
  • Nationwide scores are improving in math and literacy. Some academics and researchers have credited the shift to the Common Core State Standards, and the massive push in professional development and training for teachers to support it – as the underlying cause. Civics and Social Studies advocates must leverage the social studies literacy standards embedded in the Common Core State Standards to assure that more time is spent in these areas including non-fiction “informational text” literacy and writing. Informing oneself is a civic virtue and connecting these dots takes very little effort.
  • One highly-regarded academic, Diane Ravitch, an active public school advocate, former Deputy Secretary of Education during the Bush administration, and researcher at New York University, has frequently highlighted data showing the improvement of our nation’s school children on multiple measures of academic success – besides the high-stakes tests on which many middle and high school students exert questionable effort.

Finally, we must understand:

There has simply never been a “golden era” of historical knowledge.

This is a bitter pill to swallow for college educated Baby Boomers and those from the Greatest Generation, but these are the facts. It’s likely that rather than our kids getting dumber, the nature of knowledge, the patterns of behavior, and the skills of engagement look differently when viewed through the generational lens.

We have many assets working to our advantage here in New Hampshire beginning with our talented and dedicated teaching profession who have put New Hampshire consistently at the top. We need to stop asking why our kids don’t know “basic facts” and begin to ask how we can transfer our state’s children’s abundant talents and passions for other subjects into history and civics. We have an excellent foundation to make this happen, it’s a matter of framing the challenge appropriately and directing our energy for positive change.

*See, for example, this article (https://www.usnews.com/opinion/knowledge-bank/articles/2016-11-22/donald-trumps-election-is-civic-educations-gut-check) which makes the case that most civics teachers’ lack of content expertise is to blame. The author goes on to claim (without providing any numbers to substantiate the claim) that civics teachers are all primarily athletic coaches

What’s a “Microcredential?” No one seems to know, but everybody wants them.

Dianna Terrell Leave a comment

We don’t teach teachers to teach in the manner that we know learners learn. It reads like a typo, but the problem is as simple as that.

Cognitive psychology is clear about the manner in which children and adults learn. Humans are not blank slates, as was once argued. Rather, we know that individuals reflect on confusing phenomena they observe. They gather data, form hypotheses and test those hypotheses. They discuss their observations and ideas with others to gain multiple perspectives. When a hypothesis checks out, they adopt it as a theory and begin to build schema and conceptual frames that explain how related phenomena function. As their expertise grows, they form linkages between those conceptual frames.

Yet, we still teach as though individuals learn by listening to lectures. We teach as though all students have experienced the same things at the same time, and in the same ways. We still teach as if all the learners in a classroom are there for the same reasons and need the same knowledge.

Learning is more effective and fruitful if we take the lessons of modern cognitive psychology, and teach students they way they naturally learn, customizing lessons to the needs and experiences of individual students.

The currently emerging online platforms are poised to enable a revolutionary change in the ways we implement teacher education. It is for the first time in my decade and a half as a classroom teacher, teacher educator, and education researcher, possible to optimize the learning experience to not just match what is possible in a conventional classroom, but actually surpass it. In my experience, when taught with these methods, students respond with engagement and curiosity, and learn more effectively.

Using these methods I have seen students take risks, and feel ownership for their learning in ways that are unparalleled in the traditional high school or college environment. My students have reported that they are intrinsically motivated to participate in online coursework. While they may not use terminology like “intrinsic motivation,” what they describe about their learning experience conveys precisely that. When reflecting on a well-designed hybrid online course, students describe their desire for knowledge; the clarity they gained about the applications of knowledge; their total loss of a sense of time while they followed a thread of thought around curated sources on the internet for hours on end.

My ambition is to extend these online learning techniques to current classroom teachers. It is a professional and personal goal of mine to prepare teachers to recognize the individuality of students in their classroom, and to aspire to be more than lecturers. Yet, the obstacles to achieving this goal are numerous and deeply entrenched.

In various roles in multiple organizations I have witnessed two different avenues of teachers’ professional learning, and I see a clear path for a third way. Here, I lay out the challenges in these two conventional avenues of professional learning and development, and describe how they will be eclipsed by a high-quality, online microcredentialing environment.

In my role as a faculty member at Saint Anselm College, where we prepare teachers for the classroom, I have used flipped classroom environments to train preservice teachers to design curriculum and assessments rooted in an inquiry approach to learning. Students understand that a foundational objective of the class is to design student-centered curriculum, in which teachers’ set goals and objectives for students that require individually tailored activities and assessments. This approach to curriculum design requires teachers to meet students where they are in the classroom, and to scaffold learning experiences that will allow students to realize his or her particular ambitions while simultaneously demonstrating mastery of clearly defined competencies.

When students leave the class, and the program for that matter, they are prepared to teach ambitiously and with individual students’ needs in mind. However, the dominant teaching culture – to which those novice teachers were exposed through their own P-12 experience, and into which they will return as practicing professionals – is saturated with a traditional, transmissionist pedagogy. Studies of the socialization process for novice teachers demonstrate time and again that the pressure to return to a transmissionist stance typically overwhelms even the most ambitious graduate.

To exacerbate the situation, the typical “in-service,” professional development model can replicate this transmissionist stance. Workshops follow a predictable approach: Teachers gather in the audience where they remain seated throughout the day to listen to presenters describe their experience in the classroom. While nearly 100% of teachers engage in up to 30 hours of professional development a year, only a small minority of those teachers report satisfaction with development workshops (Grunwald Associates, LLC & Digital Promise, 2015).

In this fully uninspiring environment of teacher socialization and professional development, it doesn’t take a leap in logic to understand why teaching practices have changed so little over the last 150 years.

In my role as an inaugural trustee for the New Hampshire Institute of Civics Education and as the principal investigator for a community grant from the New Hampshire Charitable Foundation, I have had several opportunities to design and execute professional development experiences for local history, social studies and civics teachers. We have worked hard in planning sessions to create experiences that break that mold, and which allow teachers to engage with and explore new material. To assess the quality of the workshops, teachers are asked to design lesson plans, in which teachers illustrate how they will integrate these new activities in their practice. A simple guideline for the lesson is that it must include the content of the professional development, and it must include inquiry-based activities that students can engage in. (Read: NO lecture!) The ultimate performance assessment for teachers is to actually observe teachers applying new learning in practice. This assessment model does not reach that gold standard, but it does provide an example of a promising practice that comes close.

Still, even in light of our efforts to have teachers apply new learning in practice, we also know that in service days like ours have a short shelf life. This is due to the “drive by” nature of the workshop. In other words, teachers come and go from these “one-off” development workshops. Without networking the teachers, without creating a community of inquiry, without follow-on communications and designing subsequent development opportunities with feedback from prior participants in mind, the new strategies gained in the workshop quickly fade with time.

We cannot logically demand access for students to a tailored education that meets their authentic and individual needs without first revolutionizing how teachers are trained, and how they think about teaching.

Geographically independent, asynchronous online microcredentials offer a third avenue for professional development and will mitigate many of these problems by providing lasting, meaningful content. Critical to this effort will be engaging leading thinkers in education who can consolidate knowledge from the fields of cognitive psychology, curriculum design and assessment, and instructional technology including digital platforms. An effort like this must also harness the content knowledge and expertise of leading teacher educators in critical shortage fields as well as those dedicated to working with high need populations. A leader on this project must also possess a deep and integrated understanding of the structures higher education and professional development, and local, state and national policies that govern teacher learning and licensure. In my analysis of this fluid but rapidly expanding industry, I have not identified an existing model for online microcredentialing that meets this high bar or integrates knowledge from these divergent fields.

Certainly, we know of several interfaces that provide online learning opportunities at low or no cost including Kahn Academy, Udemy, Lynda.com, EdX and Coursera. A survey of the MOOC offerings through these well-known platforms will quickly generate the conclusion that these spaces aren’t designed for educators who wish to improve their pedagogical practice. Rather, these sites largely serve the scientific and technological industries. Digital Promise and similar organizations are building a comprehensive and diverse online platform, but the buy-in from teachers hasn’t been significant. Something is missing.

In a recent study of a representative sample of teachers, Grunwald Associates, LLC and Digital Promise found that early adapters of online microcredentialing are open to using this system as a way to improve their teaching. However, their findings also suggest that teachers question both the credibility of the staff that design the curriculum as well as those evaluating the teachers’ work. Participants in the study, though intrinsically motived by the desire for more knowledge and better teaching, wondered how “badges” and “microcredentials” displayed on their LinkedIn and Facebook pages would garner the recognition the teacher desires and deserves for their efforts. State credentialing agencies in New Hampshire and other New England states have yet to respond meaningfully to the call to formally recognize teachers’ work on microcredential programs. Digital Promise is on the leading edge of the work to consolidate learning tasks, but we can also learn from the challenges that this business has faced and seek innovative ways to address those challenges.

First, a robust online microcredentialing program must work to standardize the language of “microcredentialing.” In traditional teacher education programs, the coursework and clinical hours required to earn an endorsement for a teaching credential are relatively uniform. By referencing a “credential,” whether “micro” or otherwise, the online microcredentialing industry is promising something that it seems ill equipped to deliver. The online microcredentialing industry must network with state education agencies to determine what commitment and what display of competency should be required of teachers to earn a “microcredential,” and this “microcredential” must translate to something meaningful and more precise with the credentialing agency. For example, to earn a teaching credential, typical teachers must complete an accredited teacher education program, pass the requisite state sanctioned high-stakes exams, undergo a background check and complete an application with the state. The component that calls for a completion of an accredited teacher education program alone requires several semesters of coursework where one course typically implies 120 hours of student work. Meanwhile, the “microcredentials” offered on Digital Promise take fewer than two hours to complete. There seems to be a mismatch in work demand and measures of mastery.

Second, a robust online microcredentialing program must work to diminish the variability in quality in the coursework offered. In my market research, I dug deeply into online offerings of various institutions and online companies that are gaining traction in my home state of New Hampshire. In my quest to determine who was designing and executing these online microcredential and professional development opportunities, I was surprised to discover that I could rarely determine who authored the content. In the instances where I could determine who authored the content, I was similarly surprised to find that it was not authored by teacher educators or education researchers. In other words, while the authors of this content may be highly regarded practitioners in classrooms, there was little to suggest that the pedagogical techniques they conveyed are evidenced-based. Meanwhile, in New Hampshire alone I could name highly regarded teacher educators who have been designing inquiry-based, evidence-driven coursework and training programs for teachers for decades. Why are these expert faculty members not solicited to generate content for online microcredentials?

Third, a robust online microcredentialing program must offer module templates that reflect what we know about how people learn. As detailed at the outset of this letter, cognitive psychologist and education researchers know quite a lot about how people learn – despite what we typically see in classrooms. We know that best teaching begins with the teacher identifying what his or her students already know, and then using students’ prior learning and experiences as a springboard to further learning. The teacher can curate sources of new information that provide scaffolds for students to acquire new knowledge and demonstrate new competencies. Students’ capacity to transfer and enact that new knowledge must be assessed by the teacher. My traditional and online course design has followed these guidelines for years. Yet in an examination of the assessments of current models of online microcredentialing, the assessment process appears quite uneven. While I commend current models that require participants in the module to demonstrate their knowledge on performance assessment, a lingering question for me is, “Who is determining what mastery looks like for this assessment?” To put the question in the language of a student, “Who is correcting my work, and how do I know they know what they’re doing?” This model goes beyond the transmissionist, one-way-street model of platforms like Lynda.com (which only provide the content to students) by trying to mimic the dialogical nature of the teacher student relationship. However, it stops short of more ambitious models in the sense that these offerings are unable or unwilling to guarantee the credibility of the assessor. Additionally, we know that when a teacher provides timely, direct and standards based feedback students have more opportunity to reach mastery. No models exist online where the back-and-forth conversation between student and teacher are present and sustainable.

Finally, a robust online microcredentialing program must work to leverage existing educator networks to identify common challenges with professional learning, and to develop innovative solutions which address those challenges and work to scale the service. Teachers want professional development that helps them answer the question, “What can I use in my classroom right now strengthen my content knowledge and enhance my pedagogical technique?” When teachers find professional development offerings that work for them, they naturally return to those sources for more, and the word spreads. Currently, New Hampshire finds itself in a position unlike any other state. All of the institutions of higher education that prepare teachers have voluntarily joined forces with the aim of improving teaching quality, and the equitable distribution of quality teachers in the state. During my time as the Secretary of the New Hampshire Institutes of Higher Education Network, it has become increasingly clear that this network needs an institution-independent platform to serve as a warehouse of content, training and resources for our region’s classroom teachers. Many of the teacher educators in this network have been training teachers for decades in the state. Their professional networks of practicing classroom teachers are experientially varied and geographically vast. Classroom teachers in New Hampshire are loyally connected to the programs that prepared them. Leveraging these existing networks through an online microcredentialing program is a first step to expanding these programs to scale.

It will take significant resources to realize these short and long term goals. A successful initiative must acknowledge the ongoing technological requirements for hosting a healthy online microcredentialing environment including costs to host the platform, the platform itself (e.g. Moodle or Coursera), the requisite storage for multiple media sources like video, infographics, sound and image files; and plugins to enhance user experiences and interactivity (e.g. Zoom, )

Though these technological costs are diverse and revolving, they are minimal compared to the investment an initiative like this requires in people power. Short-term goals like developing an interface with user experience design will require contracts with graphic designers and instructional technology experts. Developing a single module, stack and microcredential series requires contracts with experts in course management systems to ensure that course designers will be able to sequence their content and customize their modules with standard and emergent technologies contemporary students have come to expect.

Long-term goals including building and diversifying microcredential offerings require contracting with content area experts including course buy-outs or stipends for university faculty by module. Videographers will need to be hired and software procured (e.g. Camtasia or Canvas) to enable content authors to establish an online presence with their students. Administrative costs for this endeavor are extensive and include everything from pulling copyrights for supporting course texts to issuing acknowledgements that participants in the modules have demonstrate competencies. Leadership on this initiative will require at the very least summer salaries for professors, consulting costs to exchange ideas about design and development with intellectual property and contract lawyers (whose content is this?), business consultants (how do we market and scale our site), state education policy actors (how can we get teachers the recognition they deserve through the credentialing process).

Support from foundations to achieve these short and long term goals is crucial. In the absence of this support, individuals, agencies and businesses will continue to shape and define the nature of online professional learning opportunities for teachers. What is missing in this equation is the input, guidance and innovation of education researchers and teacher educators who have the content knowledge, the pedagogical expertise and the established networks to bring demands of high quality to this initiative. In the industries of higher education and online learning, we find ourselves at a crossroads. We can continue to reproduce online faulty assumptions about how people learn and, it follows, how one should teach online. Or, we can recognize the convergence of research and capacity to scale online is presenting us with an opportunity to not just replicate what we have always done, but to surpass that work in a virtual environment. With help, we can work to teach teachers to teach in a way that reflects what we know about how learners learn.

 

 

When Teachers Strike

Dianna Terrell Leave a comment
Photo by Ben Sutherland

I am torn on teachers’ unions.

As a first year teacher in Connecticut, I resented being compelled to pay over $700 in yearly union dues, but within two years I was the building representative for our districts’ teaching association. Even as a rep, I still felt torn on two union mainstays: teacher tenure and the threat of strikes.

On reflection, I realize my distrust of unions stems from two things. First, teachers unions do sometimes defend pretty lackluster teaching. Frankly, I find that deplorable. Second, my knee-jerk response is to buy the anti-union rhetoric. I suspect the standard anti-union zingers resonate with many other Americans as well.

Yet, as I watch a contract dispute unfold in my state’s biggest public school district, it is clear that, though intuitively easy to buy into, the anti-union rhetoric is based on some seriously misguided perceptions of teachers’ work.

These misperceptions must be considered before any parent or community member can meaningfully comment on union activity.

Misguided Perceptions of Teaching

It doesn’t take much to find examples of wrong-headed beliefs about teaching. If you follow any headline story about teachers’ union activity, a quick scroll through the “comments” sections will yield some pretty consistent messaging.

  • Teachers’ salaries are already bloated. How dare they negotiate for raises?
  • Our district just negotiated a new contract. Why are teachers asking for more?
  • Teachers should be there for our children, and not there to “line their pockets.”
  • Teachers should only get raises if their students perform well.
  • The teachers’ union is threatening to strike when our children need them most. Why did the teachers wait until the eleventh hour to make this an issue?

And the most seriously misguided sentiment:

  • Teachers get several vacations throughout the school year. They have a two-month break over the summer, and work six hours a day. Part-time pay for part-time work is fair.

On first blush, it would be easy to buy into all of these popular sentiments. Though, all of them are mostly wrong.

An 8 o’clock to 2 o’clock workday? Yes, I’ll have what they’re having.

My suspicion is that most of the American public bases their understanding of the work of teachers on their experiences with teachers when they were children in school. Beyond this first hand experience with teachers, many Americans don’t think very hard about the true work of teaching unless they live with a teacher or they are one.

For example, if my students’ perceptions about what I did during the school day were true, I would be sleeping on a cot in the broom closet in my classroom, and my life would be sustained through a steady diet of apples and chalk dust.

Okay, that’s overstating it, but students were always shocked when they saw me eating real food in the cafeteria, and let’s not even mention what happened when they saw me in public. All this is to say students give little thought to what goes into teaching, especially when they are not sitting in a classroom.

I liken assumptions about “knowing what it means to teach” to going to your favorite restaurant, ordering your favorite dish and deciding – as you wait for then devour your meal – that you know what it means to be chef.

Clearly, when that dish is presented to you, you know very little about the ingredients, the preparation, the cook time, the training or the thought that went into that dish. The same can be said for students in a classroom. You are only consuming the finished product of teaching.

Teachers work much longer than six hours a day. Six hours a day is the amount of time teachers spend with your children. Six hours a day is the amount of time it takes for teachers to present their fully-cooked dishes to students.

The six-hours-a-day calculation leaves out the “cook time” that went into lesson planning, their assessment of students’ performance and feedback, the continuous training and professional development, the committee work and communication with parents. Let us also consider the constant preparation, clean-up and organization of materials that classroom teachers manage every day, all day. (Those lima beans didn’t count themselves into those twenty-five little plastic Dixie cups, kid!)

Teachers’ work day starts well before the school day begins (which is earlier and earlier every year). Teachers’ calendar year also starts well before the school year begins as teachers prepare the classroom for the school year, and they’re there well after the school year ends writing reports, debriefing and unpacking the school year, and making plans for the next one to come. That two-month summer vacation is something your children enjoy, not their teachers.

Work to Rule

Union activity doesn’t happen out of nowhere, either. There are many activities a union might engage in well before they resort to a strike. Before a teachers’ union strikes, they might call for a “work to rule.” In a nutshell, “work to rule” means that the teachers voice their grievances by refusing to work beyond the terms and conditions outlined by the previous contract.

This means teachers may be asked by the union not to return to the classroom earlier than they are required to set up for the school year. Teachers might be asked to be at the school and in the classroom the minimum required time of the school day. They will be asked to refrain from purchasing equipment for the classroom with their own money (about $500 per teacher amounting to billions of dollars a year across the nation). 

In other words, work to rule means the community gets what they’re paying for, which is far less than the bargain many communities usually get out of teachers.

For teachers who typically work far and above the terms of their contract, a work to rule order represents a significant change in their pre-school-year practice, and is emotionally difficult for many dedicated teachers. When you think of the things that these teachers are not doing to prepare for and serve their students, it is clear a work to rule order makes their workday much more difficult.

The truth is that it is hard to know how many teachers actually carry out the work to rule even if they say they will.

For example, that same school district that is now embroiled in the contract dispute I spoke of earlier has experienced work to rule orders before. During a work to rule order a few years back, the district changed busing companies to cut costs. As an outcome of serious mismanagement, the busing company failed to pickup children on time from school to be bussed home. Several teachers told me that they violated the work to rule order by waiting in their classroom with the children for the bus to come until after four o’clock pm.

You ask, “Yes, but what cruel and heartless teacher could leave a group of scared and abandoned 8-year-olds in the classroom unattended to comply with a work to rule order?”

The answer is very few if any of them.

So, a work to rule order in a district that is regularly mismanaging funds and contracting mediocre services for children isn’t a very effective tactic.

The Long and Winding Path of a Failed Teaching Contract

Teaches strike out of desperation when all other avenues have failed, but even then their efforts are often in vain. This is because teachers can’t win the media war when they’re out of their classrooms and picketing in the streets. When there is even the threat of such an activity, the anti-union rhetoric and false assumptions quickly kick in.

The irony as I see it is that the media glare focuses only on the teachers’ actions and spares not even a second to consider the role played by community leaders, like mayors, who may share responsibility for failed union contracts.

So, I’ll offer a bit here on the anatomy of contract negotiations, but with the caveat that my experience is limited.

Teachers typically negotiate a “master contract” with the municipality or the district every few years. This is known as collective bargaining and it happens again and again because, written in the terms of the contract is the contract’s own expiration date.

There are many people involved in contract negotiations including the mayor, the board of education, aldermen or local representatives as well as the teachers. The contract involves much more than annual salary. Rather, negotiations often focus on things like health insurance, retirement and minimum work safety standards.

These contract negotiations typically happen in the springtime for the upcoming fiscal year, and are usually settled in time for districts to predict staffing needs, post advertisements, and fill open positions by the late spring.

Contracts often reach a stalemate when any of these moving pieces or players gets hung up. Often it has nothing to do with teachers’ salary. Sometimes contract negotiations fail because of complex municipal spending and investment guidelines, like determining what percentage of healthcare costs the teachers will cover and what the municipality will cover.

Sometimes, a contract fails because teachers don’t want riders in their contracts that allow municipal governments to divest earnings from teachers’ pension plans to offset other costs in the district with a promise to replenish the pension funds at a later, indeterminate date (go figure).

To be honest, these are the types of nuts and bolts of contract negotiation that make my eyes glaze over, but it can never be said that these are trifling details.

In the largest district in New Hampshire, the contract dispute is a perfect storm involving an impoverished district, an impatient electorate and the reelection aspirations of the city’s mayor.

First, their budget timeline and decision making seems to happen three months later than other districts in New Hampshire. This results in critical contract questions being made late in the summer months. One summer, the last-minute budget shortfall led to the district firing 137 teachers (about a sixth of the teaching force) two weeks before the school year began. The results were chaotic, with children looking forward to meeting their assigned classroom teacher (who had been fired) and classrooms of over 30 children assigned to one teacher.

In the current contract dispute, 7 out of 10 members of the Board of Alderman and all elected Board of School Committee members supported the contract. Regardless, at the eleventh hour and with little warning the mayor vetoed the contract.

In a complete denial of his role in the contract negotiation breakdown and his role as leader of the city and the Board of School Committee, the Mayor called on the teachers “to iron out” the details of a new contract. Meanwhile, it should be noted the mayor is up for reelection on September 15th, and many citizens turn the other cheek while the mayor distances himself from the contract negotiation failure and focus instead on his claims of fiscal responsibility.

Questions to Ask when Teachers Strike

While I’m still torn about unions, including some of their goals and their tactics, and while the research on unions is far from a consensus, it’s clear to me that these contests raise more questions than community members and parents are often willing to ask.

As with everything in education politics the story is much more complex than the headline.

Work strikes seem to me like an outdated tactic that yields only negative and unintended consequences. Meanwhile, teachers themselves have difficulty following through with a work to rule. Teachers don’t seem to have a winning strategy or tactics. This is especially true when teachers are hung out to dry for political gain. In this case teachers are being blamed for mismanaging city revenue and being asked to find a solution on their own.

Who wants to be a teacher, kids?! Can I get a show of hands?

When teachers threaten to engage in union activity, rather than spinning out the same wrongheaded one-liners, community members and parents might question where their city leadership went wrong.

  • How long have negotiations been going on?
  • Where are the sticking points in the negotiation?
  • What does the school board say?
  • What does the superintendent of schools in the district say?
  • How are teachers being treated in my community’s schools?

Most importantly, they might ask what role their community’s elected officials have played in the stalemate, and what those same political leaders stand to gain from selling the teachers in their district down the river.

The Shocking Truth about American Schools

Dianna Terrell Leave a comment
Rafiq Sarlie "Shocked That I am Quitting Facebook"

We are bombarded by constant messages about the many failures of our nation’s schools, and how poorly America is doing in comparison to other nations.

I am not impervious to the allure of an outrageous headline. Sometimes I resist. Generally, I am a sucker for click-bait.

It’s old hat that people are instinctually drawn to these stories. There are few things more human than our desire to rubber-neck at the scene of an accident or obsess over people’s unchecked base instincts gone awry.

In studying these stories of the human condition, we tell ourselves we are learning what not to do and behaviors, people and scenarios to avoid.

We are also learning to be afraid … very, very afraid.

And so it goes with American public schools. Our nation appears to love stories about the failure of schools to the point where no other narrative can take hold.

I get lulled into the abyss of mediocrity and filth just as much as the next person by following headlines about teachers who show up drunk and pantless to the first day of school. I’m simultaneously repulsed by – and engrossed in – the endless deluge of stories about teachers who have abused their power and authority with children.

The shocking truth is that most American schools in most American states are actually doing very well. Even though it’s true, this message consistently falls on deaf ears. Decent and even exceptional performance in American schools simply doesn’t make for a good headline.

Headline News: American Public Schools do Shockingly Well

Your gut response to this headline might be skepticism or, even worse, boredom.

Let’s examine the evidence. Take a hard look at the information conveyed by this image:

b0f123c41This image is just a sliver of data consolidated by the National Center on Education Statistics (NCES). For more detailed information on international performance on math and science, check out the TIMSS data here. For more details on international tests of reading, take a look at PIRLS results here.

In a nutshell, international tests of eighth-graders’ math skills on the TIMSS test reveal:

  • American students in 34 states outperform students in Australia.
  • American students in 27 states outperform students in England.
  • American students in 25 states outperform students in Hong Kong.
  • American students in six states outperform students in Finland (the holy grail of school reform).
  • American students in two states (Massachusetts and Vermont) outperform students in Korea and Japan.

Here’s a question, why don’t the headlines read, “8th graders in Massachusetts and Vermont top all but two countries in the world at math?” or better yet “Six of Top-Ten Performing Education Systems in the World are in the U.S.?”

The news is even better for American students’ performance in reading on the PIRLS test. American students typically do better on reading assessments than they do on math assessments, and the stark differences between states and socioeconomic classes that appear in the TIMSS dataset are slightly less pronounced with reading.

Other good news is that our nation’s performance on reading assessments is on an upward trajectory, and the enormous achievement gaps revealed forty years ago are slowly shrinking.

Meanwhile, we’re all still drinking the “sucky schools Kool-aid.”

Parents in Poorly-Performing Schools Can Improve Children’s Outcomes in School

One thing that these results highlight is the stark inequality between states. This vast inequality is unappealing for many Americans. While we’re okay with unequal wealth, we are most certainly not okay with unequal opportunities to get wealth(y). So how can parents help level the playing field for their kids?

In an earlier post I mentioned that, knowing schools generally aren’t equal, many parents shop around for school districts that perform well. Parents who are able to shop around might also consider moving to a state that performs well by using this tool.

Even when a parent is not in the market for a new home, and even when a parent is living in state that is performing below the United States average (e.g. Mississippi or Alabama – sorry folks), parents should know that most of the inequality between schools is driven by poverty.

PIRLS results show that some strategies parents engage in to improve students’ scores are related to income. For example, children do better in reading when their parents read to and in front of their children. Meanwhile, we know that families living in poverty are disproportionately illiterate.

Parents are also encouraged to send well-rested children to schools, yet we know that in many cases, children living in poverty are housing-insecure or reside in multi-family households where it’s harder, for obvious reasons, to get good sleep. Two other income-dependent, parenting practices are:

  • sending children to schools that have safe and orderly environments
  • sending children who are well-fed to school

On the other hand, we also know that parents, regardless of income-level, can exercise a lot of influence. Variables deflating math and reading scores can be offset by proactive, income-independent parenting strategies. When the data is distilled down to just a handful of critical parenting practices, it turns out that all parents, regardless of income, can engage in these two high-leverage, research-proven strategies:

  • engender in their children a positive attitude toward reading.
  • stock the home with high quality books (borrowed or bought).

Confounding the Trend

American parents are largely distrustful of American public schools. In fact, in a recent poll 84% of parents gave American public schools the grade of “C” or worse. One thing is for sure, the media knows that distrust exists, and they play into it. The public eats it right up because it confirms our suspicions and fears. It’s a vicious cycle.

Would it be interesting to know the drunk and pantless “teacher” in that national story was a last-second hire, and was actually a substitute teacher not a full-time classroom teacher? Should we be appalled by her behavior? Yes. Does she exemplify the 3.5 million teachers who are generally well-qualified and who always remember to wear their pants when they go to work? Definitely not.

Professor Emeritus David Berliner of Arizona State University regularly argues that the “bad schools” narrative is manufactured crisis. Others, like Valerie Strauss from the Answer Sheet, and Diane Ravitch claim the “bad schools” message is strategically encouraged by wealthy, small-government political activists with the aim of encouraging Americans to divest from government-run public schools and invest in for-profit charter schools, private schools and vouchers programs to save our supposedly “failing system.”

To digest this data, and to understand that things are going pretty well in schools requires an understanding of the nuance behind the headline. Nuance doesn’t play well at the water cooler or in a 140-character Tweet.

The next time someone quips, “Gosh, our nation’s schools suck.” Your informed response could include that nuance. Just in case, here are some new soundbites for your witty retort.

  • Many American students are still outperforming their international peers.
  • American schools are educating a more diverse and global population than the “good ole days.”
  • 3,499,999 out of 3,500,000 teachers show up to school fully-dressed.
  • American schools are building a largely-literate nation through a publicly-funded initiative.

Scholars would call this “interrupting the narrative.” I might just call it “conveying truth.”

My only hope in countering this message is that parents begin to understand how much power they have in improving their children’s education. And, you don’t have to live in the wealthiest, highest-performing district in a top-performing state to support you children’s education either.

 

**I am inclined to advocate for BOTH structural adjustments our nation can make to offset the effects of poverty in schools AND local or individual adjustments we can make to offset those effects.

Focusing on the “Opt” in the “Opt-Out Movement”

Dianna Terrell Leave a comment

Like most others, I have had the good fortune to be alive and paying attention enough over the last ten years to bear witness to at least two major revolutions.

I never thought I would see the day when people could actually talk to other people with their wrist watch, and just last month the Supreme Court reaffirmed its’ commitment to the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment by safeguarding equal access to the institution of marriage. These are major changes – both of which were propelled by and, in turn, will have major implications for democracy.

Though not as long-in-the-making nor as groundbreaking, I’ve been watching the growing “Opt-Out” movement with a muted – but similar – enjoyment.

Is the Opt-Out Movement Truly a Movement?

The “Opt-Out” movement, where parents block schools from testing their children with high stakes standardized measures, is pretty fascinating. In a sense this small movement is akin to seeing hundreds of thousands of parents across the nation turn to each other with expressions of utter disbelief saying, “Wait … we can do that?”

For so long, parents have sent their children to school without asking many critical questions about what their children experience during the school day, including the decisions that administrators make about curriculum, or how data about their children’s performance on standardized tests are collected and used.

Parental disgruntlement has usually centered around their child’s new teacher, and concerns about particular “trouble-makers” in their child’s class. Research has shown over and over that some parents feel entitled to follow these conflicts through, while others feel disempowered or reluctant depending on their cultural or economic background. (See the book “Our Kids” by Robert Putnam or “Class in Schools” by Richard Rothstein for full descriptions of how this plays out.)

Regardless, disgruntlement is minor and scattered. Parents experience and deal with these conflicts in vacuum, and the conflicts experienced by many individuals separated by space and time could never be regarded as a movement. 

So, the recent uproar about the over use of standardized tests, and calls for opting children out of said tests, in contrast, seems to be something of a revolution in the way that parents understand their role in their children’s education.

Why We are Suddenly Concerned about Over-Testing

No Child Left Behind (NCLB) stipulated in 2002 that all children grades 3-8 & 10th or 11th be tested using a state-administered standardized test. The intent then was to reach “universal proficiency” on those standardized tests by 2014. So, all students in every state had to “pass” these standardized tests by 2014. This was an extraordinary lofty (read: unrealistic), but worthwhile goal.

Most states contracted to private companies to develop standardized tests, and the students’ tests were scored with the designation “Failing,” “Basic,” “Proficient” or “Advanced.” Students’ performances on those standardized tests were spread across the four designations. However, districts with pockets of poverty were more likely to have concentrations in the “Failing” and “Basic” categories, and districts with concentrated wealth and college-educated parents were more likely to be labeled “Proficient” and “Advanced.”

This gap in performance was predictable. Students have performed similarly on standardized tests since the national government started administering National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP – sounds like “nape”) in the 1960s. This gap in performance is the well-documented “achievement gap.”

Getting to “universal proficiency” by 2014, therefore, conveyed the expectation that states could close the achievement gap in 12 years. All schools had to show “adequate yearly progress” or “AYP” toward this goal of universal proficiency. If they didn’t, all sorts of penalties ensued. NCLB required standardized tests as the preferred way to track changes in student performance.

Testing Mania

As lofty as this goal was, when the data from these tests were crunched it became clear that NCLB and standardized tests weren’t closing the achievement gap.

Many very smart people decided that the tests were probably not very good measures of what we want students to learn. (Others decided it was probably the teachers’ fault, but let us leave that for another post.)

So, since the tests were to blame, a few powerful organizations set new guidelines about what American kids should be learning, resulting in the Common Core State Standards or CCSS. With little time to vet the standards, states adopted CCSS and implemented them in their schools.

Then, some very lucky private companies were contracted and got a whole lot of money to design new tests to measure whether students were mastering CCSS. Two tests, the PARCC test and the Smarter-Balanced or “SBAC” test were adopted by most states.

This year, our nation’s schoolchildren in grades 3-8 and 10th or 11th had the sad misfortune of “piloting” these new PARCC or SBAC tests while simultaneously phasing out their state’s old standardized tests. The result was dozens of school days (out of a 180-day school year) spent penciling in bubbles on Scantron sheets and/or clicking through items on the computer.

Add together the state standardized tests; the new, and considerably more challenging, SBAC or PARCC test; for most 10th or 11th grade students their AP test and PSAT or SAT test; and, perhaps their ACT or other college-entrance tests and it’s pretty clear that this year we tested the hell out of American schoolchildren.

Opting Out

This year, the number of parents who said “Thanks, but no thanks” (or more accurately, “Take your test and shove it!”)  to standardized tests exploded. 155,000 kids opted out of tests in New York alone.

As an education researcher, I lament the lost data. As a parent, I totally get it.

On the one hand, I know our nation’s children are over-tested. According to education expert, Linda Darling Hammond, we as a nation focus more on testing than any other country in the world. We have too many standardized assessments. Some of them generate meaningful data, but others not so much.

On the other hand, I know standardized tests are a source of information about student academic performance. Schools can use this data, but it’s typically used most by education researchers and the national government to help track (some would say exacerbate) the gap in performance between different segments of the American population.

This summer is really the first time that I have thought about it on a personal level, because this school year my oldest daughter is entering third-grade. That is to say, this school year marks the first time NCLB and yearly testing is a reality for me as a parent.

I also live in New Hampshire where our state’s new “parent trigger law“ allows parents to opt-out of any public school curriculum they deem inappropriate. Though our governor vetoed a bill that would allow parents to opt-out of standardized tests specifically, many of our state’s districts are allowing it. It’s probably only a matter of time before NH’s House and Senate override her veto, so I expect the Opt-Out debate to surface again in NH by winter.

My husband and I take parenting decisions on a case-by-case basis. If I had a child who experienced tremendous anxiety over tests no matter how valiant our efforts were to calm her, I would probably pull her out. In that case, the tests would do more harm than good. I defend parents’ rights to protect their children in these cases.

I also happen to think there is a massive level of hysteria around parents opting their children out of testing right now. I don’t judge them, they have their reasons.Their children might react more strongly to taking a test too, where my child doesn’t seem to register a difference between taking a standardized test and taking the teacher’s weekly spelling challenge. Yet, the hysteria overshadows the advantage of standardized testing, which is their power as a source of information and a diagnostic tool about how their child is learning. 

Finally, I hope that the parent veto rights bill isn’t overused in New Hampshire. I have many misgivings about parents telling schools regularly what should be in the curriculum. Parent vetoes convey a certain level of distrust in our teachers and schools and they are often used to prevent teachers from teaching things that are widely accepted by scientists to be true (e.g. evolution and climate change). 

For all of those reasons, we will have both of our children follow the standardized testing schedule in our district for now.

Opting-in: With Reservations & Just for Now

Even having thought through all of this and made a decision (for this year at least), I will do several things to parent my kids through standardized tests.

First, and most importantly, I will make sure my daughter understand these tests are not high stakes for her and don’t measure her intelligence. Standardized tests are not tests of intelligence, and just to be clear, intelligence tests (IQ) aren’t even tests of fixed intelligence. 

Any standardized test should be treated as a diagnostic tool at most, which can help us identify areas where we can support children’s learning more, and areas where they are already demonstrating mastery of skills and content. So, I’ll try not incite further hysteria in my child when I talk to her about the tests. I hope her teachers and building principals do the same – as far as I can tell they do.

I will definitely be examining the testing results when they are returned, and in this manner the personal and the professional overlap for me since I have the training to make sense of test reports (which don’t make sense to many parents). This information can be useful to parents, teachers and schools, but test makers need to do more in the way of making test results meaningful for all.

I also plan to be very active in the school district to make sure that the standardized testing results are NOT used in a high stakes or inappropriate manner. Standardized test results have been used inappropriately in New Hampshire’s recent past as a result of NCLB, and continue to be used inappropriately in other states now (e.g. as a punitive measure for districts failing to meet AYP or as a measure of teaching quality – both so wrong). NH has a waiver from NCLB so these misuses are unacceptable. 

In short, my children will take the tests for now, because standardized tests are a useful tool when used appropriately, they are no-stakes for my children in New Hampshire, and I can parent my kids through the experience.

Focusing on the “OPT”

But, I have the option to change my mind and opt-out, and therein lies the sentiment that makes me a true geek for democracy and overjoys the social studies teacher still very much alive inside of me.

The Opt-Out movement is a movement, and as such has the power to get more parents involved in very important day-to-day educational decisions. It also has the added benefit of bringing the “public” back into “public education,” because people more so than ever before in recent history, seem to be paying attention to what’s going on in our nation’s schools.

So when the frenzy kicks back in again in the upcoming school year and people are debating who is opting in, who is opting out and who doesn’t really care one way or another… know there is at least one person in the nation who’s happy simply that people are recognizing there’s an “opt” in the discussion.

The children are watching and learning that civic participation in our nation’s schools is a democratic and meaningful act.