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.

Teaching the (non)Controversy Part II: Information Literacy in the Age of Infowhelm

In Part I we looked at the way that information gathering and viewing has changed in such a way that we need some fundamental changes to how we teach research. To Recap:

1. In the pre-information age, there were gatekeepers through editors, universities, etc. to wide print/publication and distribution. Information was generally vetted through these sources. While these gates still exist, they now compete with self publishing and alternative sources of information that do not filter.
2. As it does in academia, there was a general trend for ideas to come into and fall out of favor based on their popularity and validity. Ideas that fell out of favor had a difficult time coming back in vogue. Ideas, particularly ideas at the fringe of conversations often remain in the social dialog through archives, Google searches, message boards, etc.
3. Competing objectives such as ratings and pageviews have made the desire to have a matter "settled" take a back seat thoroughly examining every opinion and idea on the matter. These ideas, readily available as a result of the archiving of all thought on the internet, can be brought back to the public discourse as needed 

It is in this environment that we must teach our students to find, validate, and report on research.

Interlude: Oh, and Another Thing -- The Wikipedia Conundrum

Where were you the day Wikipedia went dark?

Under the traditional research methodology, Wikipedia stands out as clear violation of the gatekeeper mindset. The crowdsourcing of information stands in stark contrast to the vetted-by-publisher mentality. Thus we spent many years in education pointing out how easy it was to corrupt the system while Wikipedia and millions of users spent the years making the system harder and harder to game. 

In 2006, Thomas Chesney made an empirical analysis of Wikipedia, determining that 

"the experts found Wikipedia’s articles to be more credible than the non–experts. This suggests that the accuracy of Wikipedia is high. However, the results should not be seen as support for Wikipedia as a totally reliable resource as, according to the experts, 13 percent of the articles contain mistakes."

other similar research has put forth increased accuracy claims and comparative claims with more traditional reference and technical resources. There are two important things to draw from this:

• First, our credibility goes down when we criticize Wikipedia as "unreliable" when the students' lived experience is that it is highly reliable for most things.
• Second, we miss out on the opportunity to investigate the weaknesses of Wikipedia (heated political issues, issues with a high degree of interpretation of specific terms or ideas, current events) when we dismiss the platform as a whole.

[End Interlude]

Teaching the (non)Controversy Part I: A Marketplace, Corrupted

In celebration of passing 5,000 page views on my blog (THANK YOU SO MUCH), I thought I would change things up a little by mixing the typical rant up with a problem that I don't necessarily have an answer for yet.

(Please note, I will be writing about "controversy" in this blog. Please take the content of my claim into consideration even if you disagree with the examples)

But first, check out my Pin (Pinterest Board)!:

(ok, in all honesty, I am also trying to figure out a use-case for Pinterest in education as well. According to some of my students I won't get it, because I am a not a girl...ha!)

Interlude 1:

One of our numerous resources

The debate topic a few years ago in Lincoln-Douglas was over mandatory vaccinations. As we clarified issues such as individual autonomy and social responsibility, the topic of Autism kept coming up. As all good coaches and competitors do, we went to the research, eventually focusing on two sources: Autism's False Prophets and The Vaccine Book. One of the fascinating things we learned through these sources, peer reviewed journals, discussion with physicians, etc. was the "controversy" of the link between Autism and Vaccination was non-existent -- there wasn't a link.

Despite other books
Despite celebrity spokes people
Despite air time on evening news programs and screen time on websites

The scientific community had put this "controversy" to rest through the process of epidemiological study, scientific method, and peer review. But if you google this topic, the controversy appears to be live and well.
In fact, the third link (when I looked it up for this blog) refers to a March 2011 study published in a peer-reviewed journal that "sheds new light" -- It actually appears to affirm a number of the issues with the original Autism-Vaccine link claims but studies other areas that could be open for investigation.
[End Interlude]

Thus, the full understanding of this issue (which I do NOT claim to have) would require a careful study of published literature, a grasp of the process of Peer Review and its relationship to the scientific method in assessing the validity (or invalidity) of various hypothesis, and an ability to carefully and closely read information beyond the first few paragraphs and analyze carefully the implications of a statement.

Sounds like 21st Century skills to me.

Teaching the (non)Controversy - What went wrong?

I think there are a  lot of issues that are at play here, not the least of which include strongly held religious beliefs that may come into sharp contrast with commonly accepted scientific theories (see how I just went there with evolution without making it the focus of my essay? #savethedinosaurs). I am not going to focus on that one, but instead want to look at  how the information age has influenced this issue.

First, Back in the pre-PC days, it was difficult to get writing (any writing) in front of a large number of readers. Most academic publishing was controlled by universities and, because of the practice of Peer Review and the necessity to maintain an academic reputation, it was difficult for theories to be published without strong scientific grounding. Thus, if you were researching information in a library, it had likely gone through an editorial process or a full-bore system of Peer Review.

Second, there was a lot less news in those days: fewer channels, no Internet, and no 24/7 news cycle. Additionally, the news was not in intense competition for nielson ratings and page views as a primary driver. With less competition, news agencies could afford to be less sensational.

Third, if you did have an extreme minority opinion and you did want to exercise your 1st amendment right to throw that idea out there, your method of transmission was severely curtailed. The paper flyer you hand out on a street corner lends some opinion on the validity of the thought in most people's minds.

Fast-forward to 2012. There is more information created in a single day than a human being could ingest in his or her entire life. Much of this information is unvetted through either a publisher's editorial department or the formal peer review of academia. The Internet has become the great publishing equalizer, allowing people's opinions to appear as fact and ideas without evidence to exist with the same amount of shiny and pretty (and sometime even more) as venerated news agencies, academic publications, and scholarly research.

In this environment, news agencies are fighting for every precious eyeball. While we like to pretend that we each want more feel-good stories, ratings go up when there is human drama and the best way to initiate this on a news show is to have two or more people yelling at eachother over their heartfelt beliefs. Thus, the creation of "equal time" policies serve the dual purpose of showing "all sides" of an issue while creating a system most likely to create entertaining television. The flaw in this system, of course, is that careful consideration must be made to determine just how big that other side of the issue actually may be.

Form Follows Function in Education (Part I): Rearranging the Media Center

It is the pervading law of all things organic and inorganic,Of all things physical and metaphysical,Of all things human and all things super-human,Of all true manifestations of the head,Of the heart, of the soul,That the life is recognizable in its expression,That form ever follows function. This is the law.[2]

     - Louis Sullivan, “The Tall Building Artistically Considered” (thx Wikipedia)

The above article was written at a time in architecture when the old rules were no longer providing adequate usefulness in the design of a building. Sullivan, inspired by his mentor Wright, adopted this maxim as universal, but in our everyday life, it is not being applied that way. In 1896, the challenge was to ask what would influence the design of a building if tradition was not the template to use? The answer was to shape the building so that it maximized its purpose:

FORM (the shape and design) follows FUNCTION (the purpose) as opposed to the tradition (what came before).

This has been going through my head A LOT this past year as I consider education on big scales and little ones. It has been combined with a corollary that I have, at least in my mind, always attributed to Frank Lloyd Wright: FORM can influence FUNCTION.

A simple illustration: my daughter finally got the skateboard that she had been asking for and spent an entire afternoon with her sisters wearing pads and learning the basics. One day later, after getting ready (a process when factoring in knee and elbow pads, wrist guards, and a helmet) and riding to the park that served as her practice rink (with baby-sister-in-wagon-in-tow) , she was finished in 10 minutes and asking to go home. What had changed her basic desire to skate, her FUNCTION? The weather (FORM) had dropped to near freezing. The structural design had changed so much that it quelled her desire.

Skateboarding: Day 1

I submit that the same is true in education:

Consideration One: The Media Center:

As we prepare to welcome students back from a long deserved break, they will be returning to a library that is the same in size, shape, and furnishing with a few significant differences. We switched the place that held the study carrels with the place that had tables more designed for quiet group work. We removed some of the seating to increase space between the tables.

Libraries are multi-use spaces. There is a need for quiet study and a need for collaboration which occurs amidst the traffic to find books and resources. The same space in which a librarian presents to a class the topic of effective information filtering techniques is being used by students on a break to find and begin reading HUNGER GAMES before the movie comes out. it is a place that is almost the definition of chaotic. And yet, effective libraries are places of order.

Compound this issue with library space that was designed for a school population of around 500 (the school currently has almost 800 students). Increase the pressure by making it a space that was built before collaborative learning was the norm (no small conference rooms) and has been adapted to hold computers and other technology (further reducing multi-use space and creating new traffic patterns). Tensions among students and the library staff had risen a point where neither group was happy and the gains in increasing library use and function in the school were threatened by the sheer number of patrons.

And so we took a step back. We watched how the library was being used. What sections of the library were most likely to become pockets of distraction. Where were students policing themselves and what was the difference?

Ultimately, the changes we made followed a few basic patterns and rules:

Increased space between tables, place away from "quiet zone"

Put places where students were likely to talk in areas that were already high traffic and less conducive to quiet study. In our case this mean placing the group study tables near the computer carts that constantly have a come-and-go traffic pattern. It also placed the laptops nearest to the tables where they were likely to be used the most.

Study carrels were moved farthest away from the entrance 

Keep the most quiet places (the study carrels away from the entrance of the library (it was fascinating to watch students speak at full-volume at the door to the library and gradually quiet down as they went deeper inside. We spent one day quieting students 20 feet from the entrance and watching the impact it made on the overall tone of the library: impressive).

The original "Collaborative Spaces" created in 2010

Separate areas of talking. Noise begets noise. If a group of four students are placed next to another group of four students, they will naturally increase the volume to talk over the white-noise of the other table. The result is dueling volume increases that destroys the collaboration of both tables and others. Putting a plant,a bookshelf or even enough space can keep each pocket isolated enough to continue whispering.

Will these efforts be successful? We are hopeful. We are working to communicate the reasons behind the changes openly and honestly and solicit feedback from the students, who are the main patrons of the space.

The biggest change of all though is one of mindset. We broke from tradition (those study carrels had been in the same place for over 15 years) and instead asked ourselves how the design of the library could best influence the multiple functions that happen within the space.

Had your own experience of FORM and FUNCTION? 

Feel free to drop a comment, share the page, or tweet me at @jdferries. 

Feedback is always appreciated. 

In the next post, I’m going to try to apply the same concept to some more abstract parts of education: Flipped classrooms and Social Media.

Library gets an upgrade

Looking pretty state if the art.