For the Greater Glory...On Means, Ends, and Lessons Learned from Robots

There is a Jesuit catchphrase for just about everything. One of the most common in educational circles is AMDG - an abbreviation for a latin phrase which translates to "For the Greater Glory of God". Many Jesuit schools require students to write this in the header of their papers, other schools have signs and posters, our school made it the student e-mail domain.

It's a big deal...

Interlude: What's in a Name?
Two months ago, a group of students decided to form a robot club. Their goal was to have Brebeuf Jesuit participate for the first time in the Indianapolis VEX robotics championships. This event, sponsored by the Mayor's office, offers free registration and robotics kits to any school willing to field a team.

As I was filling out the online registration, i was faced with a huge question: Team Name. I felt the cold sweat breaking out. This was HUGE. We needed something that could capture the spirit of our school, the care-free but driven attitude that made up our team, with just enough nerd-cred to show that we were the real deal. After a few panicked seconds I typed: AMDGeeks.
End Interlude.

This Saturday was the two-day culmination of our Robot Team's hard work. And it was pretty awesome:

Much has been written and will be written about the use of robots and practical "real-world" problem solving (and to be fair, i want to live in a world where building small-scale competitive robots is the "real-world" -- its like pokemon, but with robots). This is what I observed:

1. Problem Identification: What is the scope of the problem? What are resources available?
2. Complex, Strategic Thinking: Given the limitations in time and resources, what will be the best solution
3. Hypothesis Testing: Build it, test it, note the results, modify, try again.
4. Research: Yes, it started with YouTube and Google. But it also included talking to physics teachers, calling in experts in fields from welding to general construction.
5. Cooperation: Each team member had strengths that were drawn upon throughout the tournament. Each team was allied with one or more other robot teams for individual rounds.
6. Empathy, Emotional Control: Students were reading feelings, supporting one another, etc. 

Quite a bit different from your typical testing environment

A collection of corporate sponsors, educators, politicians and student-coaches, some as young as ten years old, were creating an environment that was a celebration of the development of college-preparatory and 21st century skills!

What struck me as I looked in the audience of hundreds of parents, students, teachers, administrators was the lack of teacher-evaluation. Stick with me here, this might be important:

iAspire: one of numerous
Teacher Evaluation Apps

• There was no principal in the stands of the Banker's Life Fieldhouse with an iPad App that allowed her to quickly check off the common core standards that were being met.
• There was no Lexile, no Acuity, no Terra Nova pre-test of cognitive potential.
• The only analytics collected were in service to teams figuring out from one round to the next what was working and not working...how to work with one team in an effort to defeat two more.

Yet, in this environment with all of its chaos and shouting and stress and fun, real learning was taking place. Students from a variety of backgrounds and schools were learning to work together, communicate effectively, and devise complex strategies to achieve a common goal.

• It was a demonstration of student learning and real-world application.
• It was the lived experience of preparation for 21st century skills.
• It was one of the best observable environments for implementation of many of the  common core state standards.

and yet...no evaluations were made and no test score was given.

AMDG, Common Core, and the Fight for Education

Critics of the Common Core State Standards are often painted as lazy educators who do not want their work held up to the scrutiny of science and data. Accusations often imply that any who do not support the CCSS and its integrated regime of corporate testing, textbooks, computer management systems, and teacher evaluation tools must not really want kids to succeed.

The problem that educators face in discussing this issue with politicians and parents are that the CCSS has become the ultimate goal of education -- education's AMDG. Anything that works toward the #CCSS (read, anything that is "COMMON CORE ALIGNED") is automatically GOOD because it works toward the ultimate goal. Anything that criticizes that ultimate goal is automatically EVIL.

This is what leads to the shock and almost dismissive attitude in state legislatures when teacher's try to explain the flaws in the CCSS-Testing regime. Because the CCSS has the mantle of the ultimate goal, the advocates for teachers, whether they are administrators or unions, are hesitant to go directly at the issue and instead beg for more time or increased professional development.

Educators and Parents and Politicians need to step back from the CCSS-Testing megalith and realize that despite the political spin that has deemed it as the ultimate goal -- it is actually a means to an end. In Fact, built within its purpose and rhetoric are the true ultimate goals of education according the CCSS's designers, the true ends: College and Career Readiness, Development of Leadership Potential, Citizenship.

In order to have a discussion about the role of robotics and STEM or times for reflection or appropriate use of lexiles or the need to read non-fiction vs. 18th century literature, teachers and parents and educators must first have a discussion about Goals and Ends for education. We need to discuss education's version of AMDG.

The common core state standards are a politically popular and well-funded MEANS to reach the end. Yet they are discussed as if they are the END itself. Common Core and its implementation (and all of the testing and data and expense that accompanies it) is a path, an interpretation about how to reach the ultimate goals of education. 

One can believe that the Common Core and its associated baggage is not the right direction for a school or state or nation without being against education itself. One can reject a particular MEANS without rejecting an separate END.

CCSS is not AMDG.

Need proof? Watch the robots.

(More on this tomorrow...)

Wishful Thinking and Misdirection: Indiana Common Core Advertisements

It has been an interesting Spring in Indiana. Usually, once election season dies down, I struggle to find good cannon fodder for my #digcit class to rip into outside of the school newspaper... Not so this spring.

The Indiana legislature is considering a bill that seeks to "press the pause button" on the Common Core State Standards. Watching the TV on the morning news, one would wonder why they would do this. A flood of commercials from two or three affiliates of national interest groups (and their deep-pocketed book publishing sponsors) have hit the airwaves demonizing anyone who would question the gospel of the common core.

As with most politically motivated ads, there is a ton of bad logic just waiting for a dissection. I am hoping to post a link to my favorite commercial soon, but two claims that are made are worth some preliminary analysis:

Claim #1:

Bad workforce readiness, the need for remedial education prior to college, and the popularity of reality TV are all a result of poor state standards in Indiana.

Ok, to be fair, I made one of those up.

The commercial does imply a causal link between the outgoing Indiana State Standards and the other two bad outcomes. It doesn't present any evidence or resources that this is the case. It doesn’t even show a statistical relationship between standards and outcomes (correlation). While flipping through my handy chart of logical fallacies, there are a lot of things that are close, but this may just be a case of WISHFUL THINKING.

Wishful thinking (which does fall under the category of "Appeal to Emotion"), is where we make decisions based on what is pleasing to imagine, rather than by evidence or reason (thanks, Wikipedia). It is nice to believe that simply adopting a common set of items to memorize, concepts to learn, and skill sets to practice will solve all of our educational problems. Imagine a world where we adopt the standards, implement a little professional development and *POOF* test scores increase (don’t laugh too hard, I have #edtech mailings promising that). The implication in the commercial is that the only reason why we have not had decent international test scores is that we were teaching Polar Coordinates while the rest of the world was using the much more advance Euclidean Geometry!

It's not that simple.

Think of the complexity between these allegedly "bad standards" and a student, ready for college. There are teachers and their lessons (this is the whipping-person of choice for the union-busting #edreform movement). Student motivation and even attention can be impacted by poverty (one of the factors that actually has some correlating research). The international tests could ask questions that are unrelated to what is being taught (or even what is in the standards themselves).

Standards are a starting link in a very long, complicated chain that is modern education. To imply this level of direct causation is insulting to parents, students, legislators and teachers...It also assumes that the standards are actually better.

Claim #2:
The Common Core State Standards are Better than the Current Indiana Standards

In order to believe that the Common Core has magical curative effects on education, the CCSS should be better than the current Indiana standards. Certainly the commercial implies this.

(Note: A more complicated argument would have been that there is a benefit to standards crossing state borders which is over and above the quality of the standards themselves. A ridiculous argument would claim that all of the for-profit companies making a mint from a market expansion coupled with a reduced need for product variety will happily reinvest those profits to hire back veteran teachers or bring back libraries and extra-curriculars -- it is more likely that they would just make some more Youtube videos)

But, and this is important, they are not better.

The Fordham Institute conducted a comparative analysis of English and Mathematics standards between the two. The "old standards" score a 7/7 for content and rigor in both categories. Regarding English, they pointed out that Indiana standards were "clearer, more thorough, and easier to read", a significant detail when creating a document that will be translated into student learning objectives and assessment items. The Institute's blog puts it bluntly:

"There’s no doubt that Indiana, all by itself, had devised some of the best English (and math) standards in the land; indeed, drafters of the Common Core would have done well to plagiarize even more of the Hoosier State’s fine work." - Chester E. Finn, Fordham Institute*

It is easy to visualize that in the creation of across-the-board standards, some states will improve and some (like Indiana, Massachusetts, and California) will stay the same or take a step backwards. The commercial uses its thirty seconds of airtime to hammer at the idea that the Indiana standards were bad and that it was this "badness" that caused the problems we now face. While that is a much simpler stance to take, it is wrong.

• It is wrong to create commercials that draw false causality and overly simplify complicated matters
• It is wrong to treat education as a political football while accusing others of doing the same.
• It is wrong to feed vague logical fallacies to parents and voters without disclosing information that would help understand the issues at stake better.

Ultimately, whether Indiana adopts the Common Core State Standards or sticks with the Indiana State Standards that were significantly revised in the last decade (yes, the current standards have not even made it through a single K-12 cycle), the state will have independently validated "good" standards. 

But it is important for parents, and voters, and legislators to understand that this is a much more complicated issue than that which is being framed in the public discourse. There are a lot of players with deep pockets who are not completely altruistic in their desire to improve the United States education system. 

• We need to take a moment to understand the issues.
• We need to reflect on the complex connections at play between corporations, State Education Boards, Schools, and classrooms.
• We need to press pause, because the Common Core is only one piece of a much larger puzzle.

Up Next: Putting the Brakes on Innovation - What we know about the PARCC Assessment

* A few notes about the Fordham Institute's analysis: First, they do note that there was room for improvement in both the English and especially the Mathematics standards from Indiana. This fact is referred to on the stand.org's "Myths vs. Facts" website. Corresponding improvements that could be made to strengthen the common core are ignored by that same site. (this website also has an OUTRAGEOUS "but you didn't answer the question" dodge in its Myth #2. Classic Straw Man).  

* Second, not to misrepresent their stance, the Fordham Institute is an advocate of the common core and praises Indiana's adoption of it. The Institute does not claim, as the commercials do, that Indiana's standards were the cause of the Hoosier state's educational ills. They assert among other things that there are benefits in comparing performance across state lines and that there is a huge potential cost saving for all of those poor impoverished publishers and test-makers.

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)

On stopwatches, Fairness & Testscores: We Trained Them Well

Student: "Can you just give me the 'book' answer?"
Me: "We don't use a book in this class"
Student: "You are exasperating."

The @40ishoracle and I have had an running theme for the last few weeks. My approach from the student perspective and hers from the teachers. We have decided to write duelling blogs on the topic of "We have trained them well." Read her reflection on teachers here.

Vignette 1: Missed Opportunities

I want to start with one of my favorite teachers. He is a strong presence in the classroom who creates an environment where students feel comfortable exploring complicated questions of faith, justice, and religion. He is typically recognized by excellent students as one of the strongest teachers they have had.  He sees his calling as one of planting seeds, equipping students with thoughts and skills that may be used years down the road.

During lunch one day, he described a day in his classroom. A student was sharing a reflection, showing a video. The teacher said the context, presentation, and subject matter were visually and emotionally moving. Yet as he looked at the classroom, his students were disengaged. They were not being rude. There was no doodling, or sleeping, or gaming, or surfing. Just a strong detachment from the moment and the opportunity they had been given to experience something profound. It was disappointing for this teacher who has had a rough time with freshman this year.

Vignette 2: Claim Analysis Project

Students use collaborative notetaking to capture ideas
from discussion  complete with comments

One of the primary skills in the Digital Citizenship class (#digcit) is the development of information analysis skills. As the media becomes more and more biased and social media allows us to live in echo chambers of our own making (see the original post on the PLNs or the #theatershooting analysis), it is important for students to be able to dissect news and opinion pieces for grains of truth and boulders of bias.

Assignment: Students took two articles from the first issue of the student newspaper: one news, one op-ed. The students were given five minutes to read one of the articles and reflect on the following:

• do you believe the information given in the article?
• what is it about the article or the context that makes you trust (or distrust) the information?

Students were then put into groups of three to share their reflections. It was at that moment that I began to notice that this lesson was not going to go as planned.

One group, the most vocal and active, sat in a straight line. They were discussing, but clearly not engaged in the assignment. It was a factual exchange of information that scratched the surface. More disturbing was the group of students who sat silently with their heads down staring blankly at the news-article. -- silence.

When I prompted them to interact, "The next step is to share what you three are discussing...you might want to, you know, discuss", one of the students looked at me and said, "I don't understand."

"Did you believe what is being stated in the article?" [Task Comprehension]

"I don't know"

"Ok. What is your gut feeling? Accurate or not?" [Start at the basics and build]

"I'm not sure what you mean. Do you think the article is accurate?"

"Why does that matter? I want to see how you processed the information." [Technically I should have gone with another question, but I was getting a that tickly feeling teachers sometimes get -- this could be important]

"I don't want to be wrong. It is not fair for you to ask us a question that we do not know the answer too. You already know the answer. You are just being mean."

There it was. 

And two other students nodded.

The lesson went...ok. By the end of class, students were able to identify the difference between a CLAIM being made and the DATA or ANALYSIS that might show that a claim is indeed true. But that look of helplessness stuck with me.

A Reflection

This year's Freshmen were in kindergarten one year after I left the public school system. While there were a number of reasons I left (one of which was a starry-eyed dream that I would be a stay-at-home Dad and read comicbooks to my baby all day long), part of it was a growing dissatisfaction with test-culture. I taught remedial English to students who had already failed the state exit exam and where preparing to take it a second, third, or fourth time.

Students in the #digcit class due a sorting activity to
identify best sources for  research

I remember long discussion with my wife (then in medical residency) about the dichotomy of this teaching assignment. If I could teach them to think and communicate effectively, to provide a base-level of understanding, they would have a good shot at passing the exam, but there were years of apathy and a ton of factors beyond my control. However, if I went straight for the test -- drilled vocabulary, taught a formulaic writing system that graders (or auto-graders) would be able to checklist through quickly, taught ways to game the natural flaws in a testing system -- I was pretty sure most of the kids would have a good shot at passing.

I tried it both ways. At the end of the "test prep" semester, I was told by the administration that they wanted me to have a training session with other teachers on how I had taught so many kids so well -- 80% pass rate. That was the writing on the wall for my tenure in public schools

Vignette 3: The Magic Formula

A student working on an essay assignment had gathered all of the information for the paper. As students began writing rough drafts, a number of hands went into the air:
"How many sentences have to be in a paragraph?"
"Does the thesis have to be at the end of the third paragraph?"
"I am writing my outline first. What do you want to read in paragraph two?"

The communication aspect of the essay was lost. This was not informative or persuasive. This was writing by formula. As the questions continued and the answers were clearly not "8 sentences" or "Yes", the students began sharing their experience in other classes and at other schools. They described teachers who set arbitrary minimums as a quick way to encourage depth and critical thinking or a formulaic structure as a surefire ways to pass the standardized test (cold chills went through my spine). What struck me was that students had internalized the rules without understanding the reasoning -- the goal was to think deeply, not to churn out eight complete phrases.

We have trained them well

The mantra for the last few weeks as @40ishoracle and I have been discussing with teachers, students, and our twitter PLNs is, "We have trained them well"

• We have trained students that there is one correct answer
• We have trained students that the one correct answer is known by the teacher and/or the test grader
• We have trained them that there is (usually) a simple formula for determining that answer - a process to solve the problem, a structure for an essay, a list of terms to memorize.

We train them by showing them a video that walks through the steps of solving a problem but does not explain why those steps lead to the solution. We train them when they are taught that a science experiment is following the step-by-step guide of a demonstration. We train them with worksheets, one-answer textbooks questions, and tests...lots of tests.

The stopwatch is not the race. Certainly not the runner. Test Insanity #edchat #antitest - Tutors for kindergartenerswashingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-s…
— JD Ferries-Rowe (@jdferries) September 21, 2012

At the point that parents are hiring tutors to help kids with the testing in Kindergarten, the time has come to revisit the system. One of the businessmen that we work with has recognized this need as well. He puts it succinctly: "We are reaping what we have sown". 15 years ago businesses were calling for graduates who could communicate effectively, work well with teams, and work independently without a heavy hand guiding them each step of the way. 15 years later, the American Associations of College and Universities points out that things have not changed all that much:

1. The ability to work well in teams—especially with people different from yourself
   
2. An understanding of science and technology and how these subjects are used in real-world settings
   
3. The ability to write and speak well
   
4. The ability to think clearly about complex problems
   
5. The ability to analyze a problem to develop workable solutions
   
6. An understanding of global context in which work is now done
   
7. The ability to be creative and innovative in solving problems
   
8. The ability to apply knowledge and skills in new settings
   
9. The ability to understand numbers and statistics
   
10. A strong sense of ethics and integrity 

What has changed is our approach to education. In pursuit of these goals (or in pursuit of unstated goals such as cost-savings or opening the educational marketplace), we have developed a system that substitutes opportunities for reflection and teamwork with additional assessments. These assessments to not promote problem analysis or creative solutions -- they look for formulaic methods that give a single scorable answer.

Just read number 8 and think about the student who called lesson was "unfair".

When Yong Zhao presented to the educators and technologists at the  ISTE12 Keynote, he noted that while America obsesses over global test scores, the rest of the world is busy working on creating innovated geniuses: problem solvers, creators, communicators -- those things that have traditionally kept the U.S ahead of the technology and industry game despite high labor costs, lower population numbers, and bad test scores (remember, the US has never excelled in standardized testing worldwide).

But there is hope:

• Math classes that give the answers to the homework but look to the students' process to arrive at that answer.
• #Flipclass and No-homework programs that de-emphasize content transfer and emphasize the rich interaction that are capable in a classroom the individualizes and provides opportunity for collaboration
• The growing number of #digcit and #byot programs that emphasize processing and problem solving as well as information literacy and communications. As these systems replace push-button training classes, students are exposed to more opportunities to identify and solve problems rather than follow a pre-selected path to a single answer.
• History and Social Studies classes that are rejecting textbook summaries of events in exchange for time spent interpreting and analyzing history through primary source and historical documents.
• Schools with a mission to educate and form the whole person rather than force an unnatural separation by subject areas.

But these hopeful techniques and movements are a gamble. Because if "success" is designated by a score on a standardized test, rather than the development of creativity and innovation, then we run the risk of denigrating the best programs in favor of "test-prep" environments. Worse, we are creating a system that measures students, rewards teachers, and honors school systems for creating students that do not have the skills that we want in either our well-informed citizenry or our innovative workforce.

Its time for the student-based-objective to focus primarily on the student.

Its time to focus on the race and runners and not the stopwatch.

Its time to stop training and start teaching.

Centennial Post - Deciphering The (Lexile ) Numbers - Education as Big Business

Preface: The Score Letter
I think every family with two working adults and multiple school-age children has that table that gathers piles of paper. You know the one that I mean. Our main one (because we have many) is the kitchen island. One stack is generally for comic books and various non-urgent papers, another stack is bills, and my wife has her own stack of "i will go through these as soon as I have a spare moment...say 2020?" papers. My children have followed the example of the parents with stacks of "you may want to look at these" papers (in which every permission slip, late homework notice, etc. invariably ends up). When I got home one night last week, I noticed an official letter on the top stack for my eldest, the ten-year-old Daughter Prime.

The letter described a formal exam taken by all students to determine her LEXILE score. The score, the letter went on to explain, was a measure of reading comprehension that had been validated seven ways from Sunday and had a great many uses for teachers and parents. I could find out more information by going to Lexile.com and reading about the score there.
End Preface

Thoughts on Milestones and Education Reform
As I write this post, my hundredth on the geekreflection site since @40ishoracle and I decided it would be a hoot to share our thoughts with the world, I have been thinking about the changes that have been happening in education in the short time since i set foot in the classroom 15 years ago. Back then, high-stakes testing was not a significant focus of classroom activity nor was it a significant piece of the educational dialogue. In most schools, students were told that it was a measure of what you had learned in class and was not something over which you should stress. Exit exams were in place at the high-school level and classes had been created to prepare or remediate the lowest potential scorers, but it had not affected the students who were likely to pass (note: i spent my first three years of teaching in low-track and test remediation courses -- the youngest teachers often did).

The tide had not yet turned against teachers in the political rhetoric. Our job was still considered professional and difficult and while there was a murmur of anti-union rhetoric starting, it did  not have the venom that is present in today's attacks on teachers. Movies that were made talked about difficult environments and socially ingrained issues (which could include clueless administrators and burned out teachers) but often focused on the need for committed and dedicated adults as a key factor in turning around a troubled school (note: this is still presumed to be true in the sound-bytes of most politicians, just not in any of the legislation that they produce).

Education as a business was beginning to gain some ground with charter schools being touted as the market-based solution to the woes of the most struggling schools. The focus on the profitability of the classroom was limited to textbook publishers and a few very specific educational technology providers, particularly in Math and Science. Today, my mailbox fills up with catalogs promising me improved test scores, pre-packaged curricula that strives to take the wild-card factor of the teacher out of the equation as much as possible, and every kind of metric-based, value-added software on the planet to pre-test, address, student-personalize, and teacher-assess my way to a bright future where we will be competitive with the overseas armies of better standardized testers.

Interlude: A Look into Lexile
My wife, having read the letter, asks me what a lexile of "1377" actually means. I had no idea. So we went to the website. On the website, we learned that:

• The Lexile was not a grade-based equivalent score (you should not use this to see how your student is doing in class or how a school program is doing in preparing your child)
• The Lexile is not a comparative - no data will be released or found on where your child is in comparision to other children of the same age or grade
• The Lexile is an independent measure of comprehension, measured on its patented scale - don't try to use this score to draw any conclusions whatsoever about - well - anything.

In fact, the only thing that we were supposed to use the Lexile score to do was to type it into a database to find Lexile-scored books that would be appropriate for my 10 year old to read.

That's it. Plug the number and get the book list. So that is what we did...
End Interlude.

Choosing Between Two Masters
The disturbing part about the education-as-business model is not that there are people who want to make money off of education. We live in a capitalistic world. If there is a market, someone will make money. The disturbing part is that this system, devoid of any kind of common-sense oversight (dare I say it, "regulation") can easily twist itself into the worst the marketplace has to offer. Think of the millions (low estimate) of dollars being spent by school districts to measure teacher value-add. School districts that are cutting teachers and support staff, raising class sizes, and choosing refurbished netbooks for their students are investing in a resource that has dubious validity in improving actual learning and slightly less dubious validity in improving test scores. Maybe the money should be spend in actually validating a connection between test scores and learning...or test scores and teacher effectiveness...or test scores and -- any connection -- that would at least be some interesting research.

Interlude II: Plugging and Chugging
The Lexile choose-a-book system is relatively simple. Enter the score and press enter. There is even a place to enter some rudimentary information to try to get a book list without the Lexile score (grade level, reading easy/hard, etc.). Once the score is entered, you select categories. My daughter is into post-apocalyptic dystopias (Hunger Games; Among the Hidden), so I chose sci-fi/fantasy. and the results (drumroll please):

The recommendations for a Lexile of 1377. Witchcraft and Eroticism

Well, that was disturbing. After repeated attempts, I could pull nothing but literary criticism. I am not sure if there is age-appropriate lit.crit for a ten year old, but I prefer to think that if it exists, it does not articulate the correlation between sex and science-fiction.

Fotunately, there are some limiters by age as well as Lexile score, so i decided to play around with those as well. I chose to limit the age range between 10-12. As a proud parent, I had to give her a few more years of range.

The good news is that the limiters did erase some of the suggestions. The bad news is that a) my daughter was still stuck firmly in the world of literary criticism (does no one in the 1300 range read fiction?) and many of the titles that I thought a little mature for the pre-teen set were still suggested:

YES MEANS YES: Straight feminism fun with fetishes...

Clearly being a dad has turned me into a prude. I noted the book to download into my wife's Kindle and decided to start over from the beginning. Cleared my cache. Entered 6th Grade, reads above her grade level. The results: lots of lit.crit. I narrowed the categories to fiction only. Those results constituted the type of writing that would drive children of all ages far from reading.

Finally, despondent, I re-entered a lexile range, limited to age 11-12 (i was a little weary), and limited it to straight fiction...no more choice reading for my daughter:

One Book Available

There you have it. One book available. The 208 pages MONSTER MEN by Edgar Rice Burroughs.

Happy reading, dear.
End Interlude

A Twisted Business
This summer, I got to listen to Sal Khan describe the humble beginnings of the Khan Academy: a tutorial for a young, bright relative who was struggling with math. This was before his dream of providing "a world class education to any child, anywhere". This was before Microsoft founders and the Gates Foundation labeled this system a great boon to education.  As I listened to him, the image that I could not shake was that he was sincere and inspiring. That his simple idea and aspirations for a future where money and location did not preclude access to an education, had been perverted by politicians and businessmen who saw the potential to sell a system that could replace teachers.

He specifically responds to critics, saying that the videos make excellent supplements to the relationship between the teacher and student necessary in the best of educational environments. And yet, entire charter schools are set up with Khan-Cubicle formats for learning math. Teachers are threatened subtly and not-so-subtly with replacement by video or replacement by younger teachers -- well, both methods are at least cost effective.

Reflection: This Piper Must be Paid
When I asked librarians about the Lexile, they had all heard of it. All knew that it was a measure of reading comprehension, had some vague memories of it being used to mark books. None of the librarians I talked to recalled using it as an essential instrument in helping students choose books. These librarians had list-servs, colleagues, recommendations from other students, and their own training and experience. They did not need these scores. But that was then...

The same school district that provided this most-excellent diagnostic resource is clustering or eliminating librarian positions. In some cases, schools are fortunate to have a librarian assistant a few days a month. No time to create effective book clubs, setup programs for encouraging reading, or learn enough about a class's context, let alone an individual student's to recommend a good book. Now we use Lexiles.

(note: in direct violation of the spirit of the score, the Lexile is also used by the district as a contributing piece of data to determine who needs additional reading resources. Evidently someone is willing to match the number to a reading level).

• The Lexile system is contracted out to standardized tests in order to provide scores to test-taking school districts - money.
• Publishers work to have their catalogs scored and listed on the ever-important find-a-book list - more money.
• School districts test students independently to give students a lexile score - even more money.

Money that could be spent on books
Money that could be spent on librarians
Money that could be spend on teachers

But politicians want numbers and companies want money.
Its just too bad that the students are the ones who end up paying.

A small fish in a big pond of Fark

This is a post that I have been hesitant to write, because it seems SO self-serving, but enough people on my social networks have asked about the experience and it has gotten me thinking about some larger issues, so there you go. Interested in the article that got picked up by Fark.com? Read on. Just want the rant? skip to the reflection.

My first tweet about it: Wow...just wow.

How the Fark it happened:

The subject of the post has to do with the #theatershooting and some thoughts I had on digital citizenship. You can read it HERE. What I do not detail in the post is that I was on vacation in Northern Michigan at the time of writing, so at 11:00 PM or so (while playing TICKET TO RIDE), I posted (knowing from experience that this pretty much doomed the post to initial low numbers, but ah well).

I didn't look at my email until 7am (comics to be read and all). A friend of mine emailed that he was enthusiastic about the article and wanted to flag it on Fark.com. Here is the thing: I don't really know what happened next. I know that I received another communication that it was going up on the national boards about 2am, which means one or more people with the power to pull the trigger liked what was written or at least thought it worthy of discussion/flaming. :)

Since it had been up for about six hours, I logged in to see if i noticed any spike in numbers. I had more views at that moment than any other post...ever. In fact, it had already doubled my most popular post in the wee hours of the morning between 2am and 8am. *jawdrop*

It was a nice weekend. Numbers were off the scale. There were over a hundred comments on Fark.com and another handful on the post itself (which is rare for my blog). The comments were generally positive and a few reached the level of insightful, supportive, or interesting. There was a little thread degeneration and 2nd amendment grandstanding. There were also a number of people who thought that the post was tl;dr and verbose (in that it used words like verbose :) ) -- in other words, it was a good exercise in the discourse which has been my theme for the summer.

My fark-enthusiast friend told me that it was relatively well received... a lot more positively than most blogs/first time posts, so that was nice to hear. My in-laws began asking me what to do with this new found fame, and I did briefly entertain the idea of follow-ups or trying to create a fark-acceptable voice -- and I cringed internally. It took me a number of years to check my ego in order to be a better teacher, techie, and human being and I could see that door to the worst part of my personality opening a crack. (hence me not even wanting to write this reflection).

The Farking Aftermath (yes, now i'm just having fun)

• My blog almost tripled in numbers. There was a lot of secondary pick-up from other blogs and regeneration sites and analytics does a pretty good job of figuring which hits are spam (interestingly, older posts saw a much higher increase in comment spam than the popular one).
• I picked up a few followers on the blog and a few more followers on twitter.
• A lot of FB friends (and twitter colleagues) were excited to see the post on Fark, which was flattering and cool.
• Numbers on the blog are back to normal. The post that started it all is still the most popular one day-to-day except for the day of a new entry (it has replaced the both "defining BYOT/D" post and "Tweeting about Lord of the Flies" as my constant background noise entry).

Reflection:

It is kind of a thrill and an ego boost to see the kind of numbers that I assume some of the more famous bloggers get regularly (although I am not talking about uber-numbers...wow, its no wonder marketers need Klout or some equivalent to succeed).

But what i realized...(and maybe this is why I am writing this)

I think that we as educators in social media are at risk of falling into the same type of trap that I reference in the posting and to a greater extent in my breakdown of PLNs, confirmation bias and echo chambers in postings over this last summer. 

When I log into #edchat, or #byotchat, #flipclass or #pblchat, etc., I know that I am going to be chatting with hard working, innovative teachers who, for the most part, agree with me in theory if not in the details. We all believe in the importance of individualizing for students and feel that the culture of standardized testing is leading us down the wrong path. We believe that there is a wide gulf between the educators who care for kids, work with them day-to-day and try to instill a love of subject matter and life-long learning from the politicians, corporate education lobbyists and talking heads who seem to have the inside track to hearings on capital hill. 

When we discuss new ideas or ways to get started on a new method of learning, the conversations and links are both thrilling and overwhelming. But when we discuss the state of education, we all do the twitter equivalent of shaking our heads (literally, #smh) or making fun of the powers-that-be. I say this not to diminish the power of the former (it is the new professional development) or to discount the latter (we work in a world with far too little camaraderie and support). I say this because the conversation needs to be held beyond the walls of our various hashtag-PLNs.

We, the committed and engaged educators, have a responsibility to ourselves and our students to take these conversations into the marketplace of ideas. We need to share our perspective and worldview with non-educators. Because if enough people outside of our field begin to weigh-in on the ridiculousness that is being spouted in the name of an ill-conceived measure of progress, we might actually be able to change something.

This one is going around on Facebook right now. Ha!

My suggestions:

1. Be loud and in some cases obnoxious about what is going on in education. When someone brings up an educational idea in conversation, share with that person what the impact of that policy would be. We are the classroom teachers and our opinion matters. 
2. Refuse to be labeled as part of the status quo. My friend (and former debater) @JakeBonifield really drove this one home for me this week. If we allow ourselves to be labeled as defenders of the status quo then we face two problems. First, we lose the ability to share changes that we are making and to contribute to the discussion of problems that we actually face. Second, and more insidious, we get to be written off in the discourse of education as self-interested and protectionist. Look, is it silly to base teacher compensation on a test score that has been shown to have alternate causality well out of the teacher's control? absolutely. But if the only thing people hear from us is "merit pay is bad", then we become the whiners who can be ignored.
3. Begin with Parents and Students. As we have been working on our BYOT program and introducing our concept of digital citizenship to our community, I have been amazed at the acceptance and enthusiasm from parents, alums, and even students. When they hear that we have been looking at the problems of modern culture and its impact on education and working with technologists, experienced educators, and families to address those concerns they are thrilled. And they tell their friends. And the word spreads.
4. Continue the conversation in the general discourse. As we find our voices as reasonable advocates of change that will actually improve education, we need to message that not just on twitter but on newsgroups, sites, and other places where people gather to discuss. Refer interested people to the robust conversation that is taking place on the best educational blogs. (thx. to @dugitman of Downtown Comics for making the next step clear).

Sometime in the last five years and unbeknownst to us, we became the whipping boy for all that was at issue in education. The cultural shift happened fast and sudden and made it so that some of us were unable to respond with logic or reason or even a "seriously?" 

The recovery from that is going to be long and difficult because we, as educators, don't have the money or the influence to get to speak on Capital Hill like the representatives of the Gates Foundation. Change is going to take time because politicians are almost without exception two-faced on the issue: praising specific individual teachers but decrying faceless "bad educators" in the next soundbyte.

But we have our schools, our learning networks, and social media. We can use our voices within the populous to share our expert perspective. We can talk to others about positive changes that we are making and how we are measuring and demonstrating the impact of those changes on our students.

If enough of us do this, then we can begin to break into the channels of the common discourse. We can become the voices that must be heard. We can be invited to share our ideas and visions, our successes and our challenges. We can break through the money-influence barrier that separates us from the politicians who make our lives more difficult.

Heck, we might even get an article on Fark.com.

#bbw12 Day 2: Discovering You are the Red-headed Stepchild + keynote coverage and some not-quite-so-public info

So, this is the day that I was conflicted about with regards to Blackboard World, attending, applying to be an official Blogger (they liked the olive sauce post by the way -- and it was worth it! yummy!). Today was the big keynote with cool announcements and features that Blackboard wants shouted from the rooftops...and while I will be doing some shouting...even some positive shouting :), I want to put this in context:

We are not Blackboard Learn users. We use the newly acquired Blackboard Engage (formerly Edline). Jen and I were asked to come present our use of the LMS within our 1:1 BYOT system. We presented yesterday and it seemed successful...great audience and questions. We even got to make a short promo video for Blackboard, although without the Android w/ a surfboard, it will pale in comparison to the latest Jen&JD Show. We have also worked with some great people MoodleRooms (another Blackboard acquisition) and some great people from Blackboard as we put together the school's new technology plan.

We like Blackboard...but we also like the free and open internet.
We understand the need for an LMS and the potential it has to shape things...but we hate lock-in

...and so with that, my view from the blogger's table:

The keynote begins with an impressive look at the world of Blackboard. I smile when I see the 20,000+ schools under the Blackboard Engage umbrella -- we were a great acquisition for the company which had not been able to make real in-roads into the k-12 market. I am excited to hear how Engage will become a part of the Blackboard community as a whole.

The presentation kicks off with a "I am a digital native" animation that puts some of the youtube infographs to shame in terms of production quality. It  does reinforce the idea that #digitalnative is synonymous with #digitalcitizen and the back channel picked up on that and grumbled a little bit. It's interesting, because based on other RTs and reactions, some people were eating it up. I am not sure if this is due to conflicting idea, differing experiences, or an evolutionary opinion that develops over time.

They come out of the gate with the big announcement. It is called ProjectXP (visions of decades old operating systems cross anyone else's mind? maybe the guys at Moodlerooms who helped work on some of this are big Dungeons&Dragons fans). Its Goal: to integrate the learning communities of 25,000+ campuses, enabling them to share resources, ideas, and connections in a way that is integrated with the LMS...whichever LMS you are using. Now that is ambitious!

The first part of this is to be called xpLore and we got to see the demo from the keynote. Using a search bar, the user can search for keywords and then use some pretty powerful filtering to narrow down by grade, by course, by state or common core standards,  etc. until the right lesson shows up. If that lesson is in the form of a learning object (cute term) such as a quiz, interactive handout, worksheet or the like, it can be imported to the teacher's courseware with a few clicks (I think I counted three).