#edparents

Twitter has been a tool for education change since long before I discovered that it's more than just a silly kids' plaything. The hashtag -- a search device that allows people to participate in discussions pertaining to a topic area -- has connected huge numbers of people who otherwise would never have known of each other. I've been fascinated with (and grateful for) this tool for almost a year -- since my sister-in-law explained to me what Twitter really is.

While there are hashtags connecting educators interested in a certain kind of education discussion, and general ones that cover many topic areas, I haven't found a hashtag devoted to parents who are interested in advocating for real education change -- as opposed to corporate education reform. There's #edchat, the most popular as far as I can see, which connects huge numbers of educators and others interested in changing education. Then there's other favorites of mine: #passiondriven, #meschools, #edtech, #mathchat all cover their own areas of interest.

I've not found a general hashtag for parent activists interested in connecting with other parents nationwide. We are critical to the fight against corporate education reform and high-stakes testing culture. Parents who advocate for a truly child-centered education for all students need a hashtag to call our own. So I'm making a try at starting a hashtag: #edparents.

Help parents who are dedicated to changing education connect and share information and ideas with each other. Promote and retweet the #edparents hashtag!

Anger, and New Orleans

There isn't enough outrage at what is happening today in the struggle to change public education. Time for anger is here; it's been here for awhile.

When someone stands in front of my school board as they did this past Monday night and talks of the New Orleans school system transformation as a reason to support charter schools, the outrage stands out all over my face; imagine the face of a child who returns to NOLA to find that she is no longer welcome to attend her neighborhood school because it has become a specialized charter, admittance is selective and favoritism is granted to children of Tulane faculty?

In the area of education reform, or "Rhee-form" as I like to call it (after the gloriously hailed former superintendent of the Washington DC school system) you have to consider the source of your information. You have to develop and stay in contact with your own selected touchstones of wisdom and clarity in order to sort truth from nonsense. These are people whose hearts and minds you have come to trust over time and after much scrutiny. I have my own sources: Diane Ravitch, Deborah Meier, Alfie Kohn, Lisa Nielson, Joe Bower, Ken Jones, Chris Lehman, Dan Pink, Ken Robinson, just to mention a very few of the people I depend upon for good sense.

Some might say this is the lazy way, a cowardly device used to maintain the us-vs.-them quality of the education debate. I should be reading and considering every possible proposal for fixing schools because it's not about partisanship -- it's all about the kids, right?

Actually, no. Well, yes, it's all about the kids, but no, I don't need to consider every point of view to figure out what I need to know about what serves them best. Life is too short, for one thing; for another, when you pay close attention to the national debate on education for long enough, you get to see quite clearly where the lines are drawn between what's good and what sucks among all the proposals and theories.

So when the words "charter school" are mentioned, red lights and sirens do go off in my head, and I go on the alert, ready to hear something that will stand dead in the way of good public education for all. In that regard, charters and their advocates never disappoint me.

Back to the guy who stood before my School Board and claimed New Orleans as a victory for the charter movement.

What is Self-Expression?

I have been chewing over a conversation I had with a friend of mine for a couple of years. We were talking about our daughters' dance experiences. Her daughter was learning modern dance, and mine was learning classical ballet. She spoke rhapsodicaly about Alexa, her daughter's dance teacher, who rarely had dance concerts but worked on bringing out the movement artistry in her students, having them learn how to create their own artistry and expression through their bodies.


"Ballet is so much about, you know, the makeup and the costumes, and a particular way to hold your body. But Alexa is a real artist."

Hmmm.

I was troubled by this for a long time. Where does personal expression come in when you only repeat the steps of a centuries-old dance? Where, for that matter, does it come in when you are learning to play the violin, so that you can merely repeat the music Bach or Mozart or Beethoven created? That was their self-expression. Where is mine?

I'll tell you why I think my friend had only half the story. Ballet is the result of centuries of the human's desire for the beauty of movement of the body. The turn-out of the foot is not required of modern dance, but in ballet it is critical. So a dancer is not just following rules. She is mastering something that has the history of movement in its steps, it's leaps, its expression, its interpretation of music.

Is Steve Bowen a friend to education?

Steve Bowen, Maine's Commissioner of Education under our dear darling Governor Paul LePage, is a smart man by all accounts. Friends in Camden say good things about him from the time he was a teacher there. We hear words coming out of his mouth that we like, that seem to be words we have been waiting to hear from an education bureaucrat for...well, forever.

But this is Education we're talking about, and in the USA in 2011, words lose their meaning. Achievement is a good word. Literacy is a nice one, too. Teacher evaluation sounds very responsible, something we should have. Accountability sounds like something taxpayers ought to ask of any government-funded system. Critical Thinking, that's a big one; that's like Polaris, the star we keep looking for so we can follow it anywhere.

The problem is that we live in a time when words about the education of young people have been co-opted. You have to be a detective to understand the intent behind them, and there are certain clues you need to know about in order to determine this.

Take a look at this, from a DOE news release dated September 28, 2011:

*We’re implementing the rigorous Common Core state standards for math and English language arts – standards that clearly lay out what students need to know and be able to do to be prepared for college and careers;

*We have plans to transition to a new generation of modern, computer-based assessments that are aligned with those rigorous standards, test higher-order skills and offer teachers the chance to make assessment useful – using it as a way to identify areas where students need help and to adjust instruction accordingly;

*We’re laying the groundwork for an accountability system that recognizes our educators when they help students grow, provides them with constructive feedback when improvement is needed and allows for a wide variety of improvement strategies – rather than a one-size-fits-all approach; and

*We have schools that are devising an array of model teacher and administrator evaluations that school districts can use – evaluations that provide helpful feedback to the professionals in our schools so they can continue to grow in their jobs.

To me the above is simply bullshit. If I was a kid and I came to understand what the above meant, I would run screaming in the opposite direction. I'd think, “What does any of that have to do with me?” I know that language was not intended for kids, but you'd think that in that whole sweeping, bulleted scheme, above, there'd be something for a kid to latch on to. But there is nothing.

Assessment, Suzuki-style

When I'm seeking a pure solution to a difficult educational problem, I often turn to the Suzuki violin method. It's almost a case of "What Would Suzuki Do?" I have idealized his methods because I trust his heart. He did or said nothing that did not have love of children at its core. So when in doubt, I ask myself, WWSD?

I have the issue of the assessment of learning on my mind, and thinking about how the Suzuki method does it makes it clear what it should be.

About a year ago, at age ten, my daughter had her Suzuki Book One solo recital. It was more than just her demonstration of all she had learned about the violin since she was three. It was many things: a rite of passage, an exercise in endurance, an opportunity to build her self-respect, a day when all her hard work gave her a chance to shine (not to mention a chance for her parents to dissolve into a puddle of love and pride).

As she and I, along with her wonderful teacher, prepared for the recital, my appreciation of the process grew and grew. She had mastered all the songs in Book One, but now she was preparing them for the world. We hung a chart on the wall of all the songs, and put check-marks each time she practiced one, with a special indication when she decided that she had played it with "recital-quality."

As the weeks went by we both grew more and more aware of what she had accomplished. Best of all, she was able to put her personality into the recital, creating funny moments, opportunities for the audience to laugh with her. (She interrupted Allegro just before the final phrase by putting her bow on her head; all the Suzuki students in the audience took pencils we had distributed and put them on their heads, points to the ceiling, as they had done many times in group lesson, and the parents, bewildered, followed suit until the entire audience had pencils on their heads, waiting for Francie to finish the song.) It was her creation, and who she was came shining through.

You always hear people say how hard the violin is. It's true. The violin is very picky about what it needs in order to sound good. When playing the violin, you can't really get a pure tone if you are bowing all crooked or on the fingerboard; you can't get the ringing tones to ring if you don't have your left-hand fingers in precisely the right spot on the fingerboard. If you want to create beauty, you have to master technique.

So one song at a time, one skill at a time, Suzuki teaches technique. In the meantime, you are listening to the songs on your CD, you are attending group violin lessons, and you are tackling each song and each new baby-step of technique. If you are playing Go Tell Aunt Rhodie, Allegro seems very far away; when you get up to Allegro and you see the older students play the Minuets at group violin lesson, you think, "I'm going to play those songs someday -- but when?"

Each little song is an advancement from one technique to the next. You don't play with a complicated division of the bow of Oh Come Little Children until you have mastered the bowings of Lightly Row. But you have not forgotten Lightly Row; you review, review, review. Lightly Row sounds better and better as you advance through each song while continuing to review. And you put yourself into it more and more. (Whoever said to a beginning instrumental music student, "You can express yourself through music" has a lot to answer for. Self-expression doesn't really happen without technique. The first time a child picks up a trombone and blows into it, he thinks, "If this is self-expression, I want no truck with it!")

It is the ideal system of assessment. It grows naturally out of the process of learning. If a child is having trouble remembering to use a low second finger the first time it's called for, the process of learning it is built into the system. You take that measure and repeat, repeat, repeat until your brain is rewired to accommodate that low second finger. Then you go back to the song and repeat the phrase until your second finger knows exactly what to do. Suzuki is not afraid of the dreaded "rote learning." Rote learning, exercises, repetition, is what has to happen if you want to make beautiful music. Suzuki kids understand that.

Other techniques take longer. After her first solo recital, Francie moved very quickly into learning vibrato. It took weeks. First she practiced the muscle movements vibrato requires, without holding the violin. Then she held the violin while practicing those movements. Gradually she put it all together, and created the prettiest vibrato her proud Mom had ever seen: loose, relaxed, effective, and miles ahead of my own!

Now she is preparing for her smaller Book Two half-recital and as she goes back to the first song in the book, Chorus from Judas Maccabeus, a long-bow song that's all about beautiful, sustained, majestic tone. She practices her even vibrato through the entire length of the bow. It sings.

How do you know what a child has learned? How do you know your teaching has resulted in learning? It's hard to look at the public-school classroom through the lens of the Suzuki violin method. For all my understanding of the assessment of violin skills, assessment in the classroom remains a mystery. But my understanding of this method helps me to understand that learning is assessment, and vice-versa. Learning is the process of adding skill onto skill; you get one under your belt, and move on to the next, which requires mastery of all the skills before. When you achieve your goal, whether it is accomplishment of Suzuki Book One, the building of a boat, the completion of a short story, the rebuilding of an engine or the design of a green home, the assessment is the accomplishment.

For all my study of education, this is what I've learned about assessment. How does this view advance our thinking of what happens inside our public schools? We need to completely change how we think about it. How much of it benefits children, and how much just satisfies the need for adults to quantify something that can't be quantified? What's a good score for joyful learning? What's a measurable scale for satisfaction and development of self-respect? For more on these questions; watch this space!

Passion solves problems! List them here. #5: Kids cannot behave themselves.

The final problem solved by passion -- until I think of more -- is about discipline and behavior. As I said in my previous post, adult respect for students, their embracing of who each of them is, is the prerequisite for their learning. Showing this respect and even personal liking for every student is the most effective way to help them build on their strengths, bring out their passions and develop their self-respect. In short, if the learning that students are engaged in is their idea in the first place, supported and encouraged by peers and adults, why would they misbehave?

I can hear the scoffs and laughter from here, so go blow your noses and settle yourselves down. Discipline and behavior issues, classroom management, all these things will ever be with us, if perhaps in a very different way than today. I do require that we imagine a classroom that we may never before have seen. Consider the happiness in that room, and I challenge you to seek it out.

Misbehavior as we currently imagine it should be redefined anyway. Boredom and frustration, indifference and resentment all live within the system that is built to support not kids but bureaucracy (and a bad one at that, if you consider it as responsible for the tests that take the life out of schools). Kids talk when they shouldn't; but if they are involved in collaboration and mutual help, it works. Eating in class is OK too if kids feel they need to and clean up after themselves. Taking a break from the work to go to the restroom or even, heaven forfend, lean up against the hallway wall to talk to a friend from another class for two minutes, is that a crime? The minor misdemeanors of school are at least half kids just being who they are, and the other half because...when kids walk into class now, they leave their spirit and passion (along with their cell phones) at the door.

The scenarios described in this series of blog posts cannot and will not take place as long as we continue as stewards of the industrial model of education. It might take place even if we never get rid of high stakes testing, but it would be a whole lot easier if they went away, replaced by a model of accountability that doesn't stand directly in the way of real learning. So if you have trouble imagining this classroom, and think I am living in a dream world, you might be right -- if you also imagine that it can be overlayed on top of the traditional model of education.

What should schools be held accountable for?

We interrupt this series, "Passion Solves Problems," to bring you the following post. The final problem solved by passion, Behavior and Discipline, will be presented in the next blog post.

I have been slowly absorbing a book of essays called Democratic School Accountability, edited by Ken Jones, a professor of education at the University of Southern Maine. This has been a long time coming for me; assessments and accountability in education have been issues for which I have felt a great yawning lack of interest. Let others worry about it. I just want kids to be happy at school. Test scores, outcome numbers, educational assessments all make my eyes glaze over.

But you can't pretend to know anything about education in America if you don't devote time and attention to the issue of accountability.

These issues yield a rich motherlode of jargon. Assessments, learning outcomes, student achievement, standardized testing, high-stakes testing, test-based accountability are all in the jumble of words we use to judge the job schools are doing. I am going to do my level best, as a lay person, to use these terms appropriately but they fly around my head like houseflies. The more they are used, the less meaning they seem to have, and the more annoying they are. In the end, I hope I will have made the case for breaking through all the jargon and figuring out what we really need to know about how our kids are being educated.

Here's the scoop as I understand it: assessment is the tool we use to measure achievement; accountability is the school's responsibility to report these achievement measures to the community at large. I acknowledge the right we have as a society to know how well our tax dollars are beings spent on education. The problem is that it is nearly universally regarded that the assessments that provide the best accountability are the testing of students.

Since NCLB, accountability has had an added knife-edge: punitive measures imposed on school districts as a result of poor achievement numbers. Schools are being held accountable through these high-stakes tests, and to many, this only makes sense.

But we need to take a look at what high-stakes testing measures, and how that compares to what we as a community value for our kids. We all make judgments on schools based on test scores, even those of us who reject them, since they are the only current measure, so let's take a look at what they are telling us...and what they can't tell us.

Tests measure the most basic of outcomes: the answer to a question, which is either right or wrong. If this sort of assessment was applied to measure the narrowest possible view of education, there might be ways in which it could be made useful. But the narrow view tests give us has become the sole picture of schooling on which we base all our judgments of the system. Using those results as the measure by which we make decisions on whether the school that produced them lives or dies is positively fatal to efforts to create the conditions in which learning can happen. Something else is in the driver's seat; deny it though we might; it is the very pursuit of test-based accountability that has created the ongoing and increasing failure of public schools.

Over the last ten years, schools nationwide have narrowed and contracted the curricula and become test-prep organizations. In doing so, one might imagine test scores in the US would have risen -- but that has not happened. Test scores have stagnated. The institution, in its panic to produce these test results for their survival, have had to rid itself of the very learning experiences that would engage and enrich its students, and even, quite possibly, produced better test results (a nice paradox, is it not? Well, it's my own theory, and most experts probably disagree with me!).

In his book, Ken Jones lays out a system of accountability that would give a healthier and more robust view of how schools are doing. What does he believe schools should be held accountable for?

*The physical and emotional well-being of students;
*The learning of students, and the assessment of that learning;
*Teacher learning and evaluation;
*Equity and access to learning for all;
*The continuous improvement and renewal of the organization.

All the above categories for which our schools should be accountable are reasonable to expect from a system, Jones argues. I'd like to pay particular attention today to the first one.

At first glance it seems an achievable and obvious goal. Schools need to provide a safe place for kids. It is ongoing work that needs vigilance and proactive approaches, but the goal is clear. However, if you think of this job as creating the conditions in which learning can happen, you can see that it is a complex challenge, and one that will be different for every child.

The topic of how to create these conditions is too great for this blog post; my intention is only to show that if a system does not devote time and energy to doing this work, children will not learn, and no test, no matter how well-aligned with curriculum, scientifically designed and professionally administered, will give you a key to how a school needs to improve.

My own focus has always been on giving children the respect they need in order to learn. The respect they are accorded by their teachers turns into self-respect once students realize they are being seen and heard for who they are. I also talk a lot about devoting time and resources to the individual passions, interests, and strengths of children.

It occurs to me now that passion is a process. Coming to an understanding of who each child is becomes a demonstration of the respect the institution has for them. It is this respect that creates the conditions in which learning can take place. Is it testable? No, it is not.

There is simply no way that an institution forced to dedicate itself only to quantifiable outcomes can create an atmosphere in a school where every child is respected for who he or she is.

Another essay in Ken Jones' book, written by Jean Whitney, professor of special education at USM, tells the story of a student named Helen, who is dedicated to becoming a nurse. Shadowing Helen throughout her school day, Whitney witnesses instances where she is very much respected and her needs honored, and instances where teachers and students alike disrespect and disregard her. Her devotion to succeeding in school and becoming a nurse despite a learning disability is very great, but if not for those few individuals who respected her needs and abilities, you can clearly imagine her spiraling downward into total disengagement.

The testing culture we live in now has meant the narrowing of the curriculum, eliminating all but what is perceived to contribute to higher test scores; and the narrowing of our incentive to figure out who these kids are. The struggle to create the conditions in which children can learn is done when it can be fitted in around those goals.

So what is a school district to do? Join the battle to eliminate high-stakes testing, for one; be aware of the damage to children that is caused by test-based accountability, for another. Don't try to deny that this has an impact on your school district. Don't deny that we are entirely focused on "teaching to the test." Acknowledge that the incentives imposed on us from the outside have had a negative impact on the institutions and children in our care. Try to minimize the damage. Figure out how to find the time and resources for each teacher to come to understand who each of his or her children are; bring out their self-respect by showing respect for them.

Show up to school-board meetings. Follow the testing debates. Insist that the focus on test-based accountability be removed. It is the only way to develop the kinds of learning institutions in which all our children can thrive.