Indiana Education Politics: Explanations &Predictions Part II

Glenda Ritz, Educator
in the Lion's Den

Part I: overview and explanations can be found here

Predictions: Politics as the 300 Pound Gorilla

The problem that faces Indiana education now is that we have a non-politician, Democrat, classroom teacher against a political machine that is in-power, looking for payback, and willing to believe that this was at worst a fluke and at best the emotional reaction of people responding to whiny teachers who struck at the right moment.

Governor-elect Pence has already gone on record with the position that voters, because they elected a Republican legislative body, are in support of the educational direction of Indiana despite the ouster of the head educator. While this blind-spot makes for a great topic of discussion in an information literacy or digital citizenship class, it should be frustrating for voters who want to see reform of the #edreform agenda.

Prediction #1: Going Nuclear on Indiana State Teachers Association

Since it is easy to blame this kind of organized response on the organization, ISTA is in the cross-hairs of a super-majority Republican congress. Expect to see legislation in the next term that goes after the union at its heart: member's dues. This one shouldn't be too surprising given the anti-union sentiment around the country and particularly in red states. I would expect to see a bill that makes unions unable to deduct dues (willing or not) from teacher paychecks.

This will not dismantle the union, and certainly the right spin ("Are you going to let politicians take away your voice just when you have found it?") will help. But the point is that a union-busting response takes attention away from the matters-at-hand:

• We are over-testing our students to the detriment of developing skills that are in demand.
• We are using unscientific and uncontrolled data to draw conclusions about what is going on in the classroom
• We are allowing systems, machines, programs, and numbers to replace the relationship between the student, the teacher, and the learning

Impact: Unknown. I think ultimately, the union will be a distraction that will allow those who are so inclined, to dismiss all of these issues as political rhetoric. If teachers are allowed to be characterized as simply protecting their undeserved jobs, we've already lost a crucial moment.

Prediction #2: Shifting the power away from the State Superintendent's office

The governor already has a number of mechanisms that share power with the position. This includes the legislature, Education Roundtable, and the State Board of Education, a policy making body with 10 voting members, nine of which are appointed by the Governor (the State Superintendent is number 10). I would expect to see more and more power shift away from one office and into another. There are few legislative or constitutional protections to stand in the way of an #edreform agenda. The protections that are there can be stripped away. Stopping this move would require the ability to navigate bureaucracy, form strong coalitions, and work backroom magic -- it would take a politician, not a career educator.

Impact: Significant. Without protection in writing or political skill, power will flow away from this office quickly. Soundbites and interviews only go so far. What is necessary to change Indiana's test-prep ship is going to be dialog and conversation, legislation proposed and marked-up, and debated on its merits. We need a strong office to carry this banner.

Prediction #3: Remove the Superintendent of Public Instruction from the Ballot

This can't happen right away. There is too much scrutiny right now. But after a few years of being stonewalled by the legislature and reduced to a shadow of office by the executive branch, it will not take much for the political spin machine to show how much more effective the position could be if it were appointed by the Governor.

Impact: Like prediction #1, this is a political play that would serve to undercut the issues that matter. I have no doubt that a good Governor can appoint a good educator to the role. But if we are caught up in the drama of this move, we will lose sight of the fact that this change was not about politics...it was about policy.

Changing the Future -- Using 21st Century Skills to Counter the Political Machines

Ultimately, I believe that few politicians care about the details of education. They care about education in general but leave the details to people they consider to be experts.They want to be able to talk about great teachers (remember, on the individual level, teachers are loved. its only collectively that we become lazy and evil), good students (potential workers) who graduate ready to face the world, and innovative classrooms, preferably with some kind of glowing apple in each child’s hand.

Politicians do care a lot about saving face and making sure that they maintain political control and power. Seen in this light, stripping the unions of easy funding, shifting power away from a political opponent, and then making sure this embarrassment never happens again makes a lot of sense. Our job, as teachers and parents, friends and family who were able to make yourself heard on November 6th, is to convince your legislators and Governor that this vote had little to do with politics and everything to do with making a choice about how we want to see learning in our classrooms.

Interestingly, the same 21st century skills that the test-prep culture drains from our classrooms hold the key to conveying this message to the statehouse:
1. Effective Communication: We need to communicate with the politicians who are in office. We need to write letters describing what is going on in the classroom. We need to share stories, and infographics, pictures and video clips. We need to explain that voting against treating students like test scores is something that conservatives should support. We need to show that voting against the lackluster electronic wolf of test-prep dressed in an individualization-sheep’s clothing is a winning political stance.

2. Collaboration: We need to find our allies in people to whom politicians listen -- I suggest businessmen. As we tell our classroom stories, we need to tell them to businessmen. We need to share with them the trade off between 17 question pre-tests and projects that encourage brainstorming, teamwork, and collaboration. We need to show the lack of critical thinking that is involved in any bubble-filling assessment. Most importantly, we need to explain in no uncertain terms that teachers are not afraid of tough and critical evaluation -- we just want to be evaluated on those things that we a) can control and that b) impact actual learning.

3. Research and Information Processing: We need to provide innovative solutions that counter the #edreform rhetoric. We need to give examples of schools that thrive despite rejecting an obsession with evaluation. We need to show how innovation in empowering students, effectively using technology to engage in real experiences, and learning in a safe and caring environment can have real impact on developing the skills that matter to colleges and employers.

4. Effective Use of Social Media: We need to get people talking about this new vision for education: A vision where we spend more time focused on learning and less time assessing memorization; A vision where teacher’s are evaluated by qualified and invested administrators who care for students and teachers and demand excellence in the context of a trusted relationship; A vision where students are treated as individuals with thoughts and feelings and needs and interests -- not just deficiencies to be re-drilled and tested again. As we share this message, we need to get this message back to the politicians from multiple people from all walks of life.

Ultimately, the solution is one of policy not politics. But until we are able to make the conversation non-political -- because the evidence is overwhelming and because it is not a weapon that politicians use to beat eachother -- then we are at risk of losing this precious opportnuity for want of political manuvering.

Tuesday was a good night for classroom teachers -- but in order to make it a great start for Indiana students, we have to accept that Tuesday was just the beginning of our work.

Indiana Education Politics: Explanations & Predictions, Part I

I'll preface this by saying that I am stripping out sources from this article, particularly the predictions section (which I will post in part II). I don't feel comfortable naming people who talked to me as a friend and I don't want them in hot water with politicians. I’m aware this hurts the overall credibility, so apply grains of salt as needed.

Tuesday night was a great night for classroom teachers.

Glenda Ritz, a veteran classroom teacher and financial underdog, was able to oust Tony Bennett, a nationally known advocate of the #edreform movement that is characterized by high-stakes testing of students, evaluation of teachers based in part on those same tests, and school choice in the form of one of the strongest voucher programs in the nation.

As I watched the early results and continued watching through the night, the various local political pundits were scrambling. Despite their claims of social media savvy and clear understanding of the minds of Hoosier voters, not a single one seemed able to explain what was happening or why. They went to stalwart cliche's involving words like "grassroots" or "union-influence" depending on the side of the aisle from which they were stammering.

It was a lot of fun.

Now it is two days later. Educators: You had a win, and it was the first when you’ve had in a long time. That victory is going to leave a bitter taste in your mouth if you think that this battle is over or that you can go back to teaching your students, secure in your Tuesday night victory. I hate to say it, but your work has just begun.

Interlude: Setting the Context

Parents: Does this make you feel informed?

The other night, Undivided Middle, my 8 year old, brought a stack of papers home to review.
This is a frustrating time as a parent. The majority of the week's "work" does not look like traditional homework as pre-test-craze adults might remember it. There were few pages with spelling words or math problems. Few red X's that could be discussed with the child to begin remediation.

The majority of the work consists of printed pages with a single column on the left hand side. The column is numbered 1-17 and next to each number is a circle (good) or an "X" (bad) -- 3 Xs is a C+. 4 is a D. On the left hand side of this paper is a list of key words, presumably the content or skills that were tested by this mysterious computer program with a hyphenated name. The words might be "Setting" or "Plot" or "Simple Division". -- There are no problems to work through. There is nothing to correct. There IS an expectation that we, as parents, sign the sheets so that we can acknowledge that our child has been adequately tested and that her knowledge (or lack thereof) is well documented and communicated.

Welcome to modern education.
End Interlude

I have talked about these issues a lot, most recently discussing parents getting tutors for their kindergarten children and analytics/data experts admitting that the field is in its predictive infancy and not the great evaluator that is claimed by charter-school/textbook sponsored educational reformers. While Indiana is not as bad as some other states (a friend of mine describe 40+ days of standardized testing complete with audits from state officials - cringe), the entire enterprise of education is now dictated by A-F ratings for schools, standardized outcomes on assessments, dehumnaizing software that "individualizes" for students while removing that messy contact with other human beings, and using the disparate systems to pass judgement on the effectiveness of individual educators without much care toward the impact of poverty, parents, or other causality.

When I was able to meet Tony Bennett at a parent education meeting, he was open to discussing teacher evaluation by student test score, but ultimately ended the discussion with "well, we have to do something" -- it was an odd acknowledgment that there were flaws while simultaneously holding onto this particular idea as the last hope.

What happened? An Outsider's Explanation

Bennett had more name recognition, more money, and was a republican incumbent in a Republican state. Simply, this was no contest. And for the better part of the election season, that is how Ritz played it.

There were no TV commercials. Few ads in general. Just a teacher visiting schools. Meanwhile, Bennett played a completely positive in-the-spotlight campaign right out of the front-runner playbook.

What I noticed was that about two weeks before election day, teachers began flipping profile pictures to the "Ritz4edu" logo. The other thing that I noticed was that teachers were talking about what was happening in the classroom. They were sharing the pressure of a looming school letter grade that led administrators to remove project that encouraged collaboration or critical thinking -- those things aren't on the standardized test. They shared the evaluation systems that looked less at how a teacher interacted with a struggling student and more about whether the state standards of the day were written on the board. They shared the obscure use of single-data-points to draw conclusions about students as if they were scores in a video game and not snapshots of the responses of a human being.

They shared with friends and family, people who had kids in school and people who's kids went to school before test-prep had become the watchword.

...and people listened.

The conservative pundit on WTHR quickly fell to an attack on the Indiana teacher's union. "They want this bad," he grimaced. But this wasn't a movement of union drones -- public and private teachers, union supporters and people who had burned by the unions' classic last-hired/first-fired policies, even conservative teachers -- it was a compelling stand. Because of the timing of this move and its truly grassroots, social media nature, there was neither the time nor the inclination to bring more outside money to bear. Even news stations who were all too willing to proclaim the number of tweets-per-minute the election generated seemed absolutely unaware that this ground campaign was being conducted.

When the final numbers came in, it was clear that this was not just a teacher revolt (although, to be fair, if there were THAT many teachers, we would not have any issues with class size). People who voted for Romney, and Pence, and maybe even Murdock were splitting off the ticket to vote for Ritz.

Tuesday night was a great night for classroom teachers.

But three days have passed...

(Part two will be posted tomorrow with predictions, warnings, and a call to action)

#savethedinosaurs - What NYC DOE's attack on the Terrible Lizards reveals about Education

UPDATE: The New York DOE has backed off of its banned words list, relegating my #savethedinosaurs campaign to pithy quotes of the past. But feel free to read on for some nice hypothetical discussion. -- adding a few updates from social media comments too.

If you haven't followed, heard about, or laughed out loud at the latest educational gaff from a Department of Education, you can read about it in a CBS news report or any number of blogs like this one. In short, the New York City DOE has proposed a list of 50 words (and concepts) that should not be used on standardized test for fear of their potential to be upsetting or create an unpleasant testing environment.

I sat on this for a few days...ok, I tweeted about it, but i refrained from blogging for a few reasons. First, I was infinitely hopeful that NYC DOE would back off of the statement (They haven't. Originally, they were attempting the "but Florida does it too" defense that is so popular among my seven year old's Sunday school class). Second, there are much better general education writers out there (looking at you, Answer Sheet), and I wasn't sure if my voice had much to add to the discussion. Third, I was really struggling on the best format: I considered a McSweeney's style letter to the Dinosaur, a classic rant decrying the downfall of education due to big government short-sightedness, etc.

So why write?

1. I think #savethedinosaurs is a meme that really needs to take off
2. One thing that i haven't seen written yet is the intersection between this testing mandate and our current reliance on testing as an evaluation tool for schools, teachers, and students alike.

For lack of a witty subheading -- Seriously?

I am not going to include the full list in this post (the links above do a good job of listing), but I am willing to call out some things that I haven't seen mentioned yet (or at least not enough).

Extremely Sensitive: The initial claim is one of sensitivity -- not creating an unpleasant testing environment (Florida generally avoids the use of "hurricanes" for fear of PTSD triggers).Yet there are a number of items on the list that seem to be following this guideline in only the most general of terms:

• Birthday celebrations (and birthdays)
• Computers in the home (acceptable in a school or library setting)

While I understand that there are religions that do not celebrate another-year-around-the-sun days, I am hard-pressed to find evidence of a birthday-related question triggering a stress-event that skewed a test (in fact, the only mention of this situation during my search was in reference to the NYC Banned Word list). It is common in our society today to base policy on the hypothetical rather than the actual (closely related to Generalization from Fictional Evidence, but if you know what the actual fallacy is, please let me know in the comments). 

While I understand the need to be boy-scout-level prepared in as many situations as possible, we do ourselves a disservice to create general policy to cover every situation...better to create a general policy that, through care and sensitivity, can allow exceptions (the Jesuits refer to this hallmark of effective education as cura personalis -- an understanding of student context, caring adults who are able to be flexible in the moment, etc. (Note: this is not en vogue in education practice today).

Not-So-Hidden Agenda

• Bodily functions
• Celebrities
• Junk food

There is always a risk when we mix assessment instruments with social-norm change goals. Again, I have trouble visualizing the PTSD moment from being asked to answer a question about hotdogs and potato chips (or the ever-popular porkrinds). At the point that we move away from the sensitivity claim, it seems that we have a number of items that are taboo because in an ideal world, we wouldn't have to deal with them (celebrity culture, overweight children due to malnutrition and overeating, fart jokes, etc.).

This becomes a slippery slope. Have we as parents and/or educators abdicated our duty of what should and should not be open for analysis and discussion? Arguably some of these "social" issues would be better served by some analysis and critical thinking. 


Note: one discussion in the Teacher Resource Center, points out that it could be even more insidious -- how difficult does it become to criticize the government when you can't discuss natural disasters (#FEMAFail), Politics, or War. Far from creating the informed citizenry, this list specifically encourages us to avoid assessing the ability to critique the government.

Good Test Practice: Even some of the legitimate test-avoidant topics:

• In-depth discussions of sports that require prior knowledge

are not really there because of cultural awareness/sensitivity. They are there because calling on specialized knowledge in a general question is a bad idea. So is writing a multiple choice question with one answer that is particularly long or a fill-in-the-blank that has the answer embedded in the question. Rather than giving a comprehensive list of words.verboten, the NYC DOE would be better off making the statement "write a good test".

Aside: this particular topic led to an excellent dinner table conversation hypothesizing "bad questions" based on this concept. My favorite was the ten-year-old's analysis that a question referring to pre-cellphone responses (contacting someone, emergencies, etc) would be impossible for most kids to answer.

On Backward Design - The hidden curriculum message in banning the Dinosaurs

Early in my teaching career, there was a battle being waged over the amount of standardized content that was appropriate in a classroom. Should every English teacher set his own reading list? are there a few must-reads and some flexibility in the rest? Is each book and each unit designed as a whole? -- While this argument has been settled in some schools, it is one of those classic discussions that appears to cycle about every 3-5 years.

As Wiggins and McTighe's Understanding by Design (sorry, no KINDLE link) took off in schools, the system began to weigh in on how we shape assessments and understand what is taught in the classroom. It is a popular framework, but by no means universal. In way-to-brief summary:

1. Identify the outcomes for the individual learner.
2. Identify the evidence that would constitute acceptable demonstration (mastery, etc.) of those outcomes -- commonly, this is the assessment instrument
3. Design lessons, activities, and experiences that lead to effective demonstration.

• In its most negative interpretation, this is "teaching to the test".
• In its most positive reponse, it is retorted "of course. If the objectives are sounds and the assessment is good, why wouldn't you?

But what if the assessment is not good?

The corollary of this mindset is that there is little-to-no reason to teach content that is not going to be assessed, because it is extraneous to the outcomes being worked toward.

• Why teach a lesson on junk food and nutrition if it will not be assessed?
• Why address issues of social injustice if there will be no questions about poverty, homelessness, or even computers that are owned by a family instead of the library?
• Why teach evolution if it has been banned from the assessment?

Teachers have been told (particularly in NYC) in no uncertain terms that the results of these test-scores are direct reflections on their ability as teachers and that this ability will be publicly pronounced in the virtual town square for all to see and comment upon. At the point that I have been told, specifically, that this content will not be a part of high-stakes assessment, the only responsibility I have to teach this content is my prerogative as a good educator -- and the DOE and legislatures have done a pretty good job of telling me, again and again, that this is not enough.

And so we are now to prepare students for a test that does not encourage critical thinking, does not ask for analysis of topics which may be deemed controversial or uncomfortable, and which puts forth a multi-faceted social agenda.

This goes beyond critical correctness.

And the dinosaurs will not the only casualties.

--
As always, if you made it this far, I appreciate your thoughts, comments, likes, +1s and retweets. If you are so inclined to share, please include the #savethedinosaurs hashtag, because I think that would be cool :)