It’s Time to Think Proactively

ASCD published a blurb entitled: “Recession sparks interest in school personal-finance classes”

The summary said:

More states are considering mandating school courses in personal finance as credit-card debt and foreclosures mount. “The silver lining to our country’s economic conditions just may be that we place a greater emphasis on financial education, which does our country well for many generations,” said Laura Levine, executive director of the JumpStart Coalition for Personal Financial Literacy.

I am so, so tired our our reactive–rather than proactive–approach to life in our country.

After there’s a widespread break-out of E. coli, then the FDA sets more stringent regulations for the factory production and distribution of meat.

After our country is besieged by terrorism, then the TSA tightens security procedures at airports.

After people start foreclosing on their homes and claiming bankcruptcy, then our schools start teaching financial literacy.

Give me a break! We have to wake up and start thinking ahead. Figuring out what our children need to be successful in college, the 21st century workforce, life in their families and communities, and the globalized world is not rocket science. Of course they need to be financially literate. We didn’t need an economic collapse to tell us that.

They also need to understand how to live a healthy lifestyle. And they need emotional intelligence. And the ability to speak multiple languages, think creatively, innovate, solve-problems, set goals and plan backwards to achieve them, understand diverse perspectives, question the legitimacy of information, synthesize information, resolve conflict peacefully and symbiotically–the list goes on.

My point is, we need to deliberately think about the world our children will grow up to assume control of, and we need to structure our schools to prepare them for that world. We can’t wait for national or international crises to make the decision for us.

The Push for National Standards

A report conducted by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, in conjunction with the Kingsbury Center, revealed that a school making adequate progress in one state would be considered failing in another.

This situation is yet another illustration of how I agree with NCLB in theory but not in practice.

I love the idea of creating a vision (i.e., standards), planning assessments that measure achievement of the vision (i.e., standardized tests), and then aligning instruction with the assessments.

However, if states are left to their own devices to create the vision and the assessment, they also have the liberty to dilute expectations for their children (ahem, Mississippi, I’m looking at you).

Creating national standards would also save a lot of money. Just imagine how much each state spends to develop and revise their standards. Then multiply that by 50.

Plus, families are more mobile these days. National standards would ensure more continuity from state to state.

Finally, we would have a clearer and more accurate picture of which states are letting their students slip through the cracks.

The Tampa Tribune says:

“I know that talking about standards can make people nervous,” Education Secretary Arne Duncan said recently.

“But the notion that we have 50 different goal posts doesn’t make sense,” Duncan said. “A high school diploma needs to mean something, no matter where it’s from.”

Every state, he said, needs standards that make kids college- and career-ready and are benchmarked against international standards.

Pre-School to Open in Museum

Wow! I love the idea of placing schools within the community. Literally.

Check out this school in South Dakota.

If only our towns had been designed with services centralized in a single location: a school, public library, retirement center, museum, medical clinic, etc. That way, teachers could more easily contextualize learning for their students.

P.S. They are offering Spanish classes and yoga as well.

Foreign Language Instruction Should Be a Priority

An article in The Washington Post illuminates the benefits of even 30 minutes a week of foreign language instruction at the early elementary level.

I read it and thought, “No duh.”

Think about all the complex and amazing mental processing that goes into learning another language. Second language instruction should be happening as soon as our kids enter school, and our goal should be fluency.

This concept is not new. Look at major European countries and their approach to foreign language instruction. When traveling, I am always so impressed by the sheer number of people I meet from other countries who fluently speak multiple languages. I am often dismayed by how self-centered and egotistical we Americans can be when it comes to learning a foreign language.

The 21st century is an increasily globalized world. Foreign language instruction helps students in myriad ways. It:

1. Broadens their perspective of other cultures and deepens their understanding of the globalized world.
2. Makes them more competitive in the 21st century workforce.
3. Fosters brain development that helps lay the foundation for all other subjects.

It shouldn’t be relegated to 30 minutes with a teacher who teaches from a cart.

The Effect of Nutrition on Intellectual Development

A new study states that nutrition (or lack thereof) in early childhood has lasting implications for intellectual development later in life, even when other factors, such as years of schooling, are accounted for.

I’ve always been convinced that nurture affects IQ more than we give it credit for right now. To truly close the achievement gap, we’ve got to broaden our scope and include pre-natal care, nutrition, and high quality childcare during the critical years from 0-3.

Think about how much the body develops from age 0-3. And the brain is part of the body. I imagine it develops in ways that lay a foundation for future intellectual development. The stronger the foundation, the stronger the development will be.

Differentiating: The Key to Meeting All Students’ Needs

A new study reveals that higher-achieving students are not demonstrating as many gains as lower-achieving students, since the advent of No Child Left Behind. The New York Times explains in an article that as teachers are driven to devote more and more attention to helping lower-performing students catch up, the higher-performing students tend to be neglected, creating a “Robin Hood effect.”

No surprises here. A quote from the article pretty much sums it up: “’This is like sports,’ said Chester E. Finn Jr., the institute’s president, who served in the Education Department under President Ronald Reagan. ‘If the only goal of a sports program is to get people over a three-foot hurdle, why would anybody be coached to get over a four-foot hurdle? They wouldn’t. So those who can already sail over a three-foot hurdle have no incentive to do anything except to sleep late.’”

It reiterates one of the major problems with the factory-model, one-size-fits-all approach to education: we try to move all students along the assembly line at the same pace.

It reiterates the idea that differentiation is crucial in the classroom. Children need to work within their zone of proximal development, so they are continuously challenged and they continuously progress.

This past year, I taught in a multi-age Montessori classroom (ages 6-9). Teaching three grades in one room made differentiating the curriculum a non-negotiable. I taught most of my lessons in small groups or one-on-one. As a result, I had third graders in predominantly first-grade reading groups (they also attended after-school tutorials to help them progress more quickly). I had first graders learning how to multiply four digits by four digits.

Regardless of whether schools are Montessori or traditional, they have to figure out how to let students progress through the curriculum at their own pace. I’m not advocating that we let lower-achieving students move slowly. If students are below-level, they need additional time and teacher attention. However, we also need to let higher-achieving students move to the next level as soon as they are ready.

Stop the Insanity

The New York Times published a bit of an expose yesterday (States’ Data Obscure How Few Finish High School) on the fact that many states fudge their graduation rates (i.e., nudge them up significantly higher than they actually are) in order to avoid sanctions from the federal government (which are doled out under No Child Left Behind). Many states actually have two different graduate rates: one they calculate internally and one they send along to the federal government (and you can guess which one is higher).

In Mississippi, the official graduation rate (as reported to the government) is 87%, while, in reality, it’s more like 63%.

But it’s not just the more rural, low-performing states that are stooping to new lows. It’s also states like California: 67% versus 83%.

The problem is due, in part, to the fact that the government gives states the freedom to determine how they want to calculate their graduate rates. The wily New Mexico decided to base theirs on the number of 12th graders who enrolled at the start of the school year, versus the number who graduated at the end of that year. Brilliant! Let’s ignore anyone who drops out before 12th grade…

States also get to set their own goals around increasing graduation rates. California, who is apparently very invested in improving the opportunities and life choices for their students, set their yearly growth goal at one-tenth of 1 percent.

What a farce!

Unfortunately, it’s not very comical. Something like 30% of the population doesn’t even have the chance to live the American Dream. While I have many problems with NCLB, I fundamentally believe in the idea that no child should slip through the cracks. I believe in setting ambitious, rigorous goals for our nation’s kids.

But something has to be done about the states’ charades. They aren’t just trying to pull the wool over our eyes with graduation rates; they also do it with proficiency rates. For the most part, the only improvement we’re seeing in the proficiency levels of our students is on the states’ own exams. Puh-lease!

How are we going to stop the insanity? To me, the obvious answer (sit down if you’re a huge federalist) is to create national standards with corresponding national assessments. According to the USA today, more than 8 million people moved across state lines in 2006. Doesn’t it make sense to standardize learning expectations for our nation’s youth, given the permeable membrane between the states?

Decreasing Open-Ended Questions Will Decrease Testing Rigor and Therefore Teaching Rigor

An article in the Seattle Times reports that state leaders are looking for ways to decrease the costs associated with administering their state test. According to the editorialized article, the “savings would come primarily from chopping the number of open-ended, thought-provoking questions and delaying some extra features.” Although I object to sullying supposedly objective news reporting with opinion, I happen to agree with the Associated Press that open-ended questions “are time-consuming and costly to grade but are designed to determine how well students understand the material.”

Our tests determine what we teach. That’s one of the main tenets of backwards-planning. We decide which enduring understandings, essential questions, and knowledge/skills we want our students to internalize, and then we design tests that measure their internalization of the end vision.

But in order to succeed within the 21st century knowledge and information economy and in order to be leaders in solving the major crises of our time, students need to be able to do more than bubble in an answer. In multiple-choice questions, the correct answer is always right there on the page, usually hidden among only three other answer choices. Students have a 25% chance of guessing correctly.

Eliminating more rigorous, open-ended questions will very likely decrease the rigor of state tests, and, by the transitive property, decrease the rigor of teaching.

Yes, it’s important to acknowledge that the issue is not simply binary. Multiple-choice does not necessarily equal rigorous, just as open-ended does not necessary equal easy. The very challenging multiple-choice questions from my high school AP tests come to mind, just as a teacher could easily ask “What is the capital of our country?” in an open-ended fashion.

However, any test maker knows that the higher you move up Bloom’s Taxonomy into more rigorous thinking (e.g., analysis, synthesis, and evaluation), the more difficult it is authentically assess students without using open-ended questions. Even college professors and CEOs can attest to the fact that being able to bubble in a correct answer does not mean that students are prepared for success in life beyond high school.

One of the key issues here is alignment. What is our end vision for K-12 public education? What knowledge, skills, and mindsets do children need to graduate with in order to be prepared for life beyond school? Is the vision comprehensive enough? Once we have the vision, we can then ask: Do our assessments measure our vision? Then we can go about the fun business of aligning our instruction (and the very structure of our classrooms and schools) with our assessments.

As a side note, I think it’s also important to question why for-profit companies dominate the testing industry. Why are states dishing out millions of dollars to companies who pay their CEOs upwards of $19,000,000? What a racket.

Benefits of Early Childhood Education

Although this article in the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, Early Education May Make Lifelong Dividends, doesn’t quite make the cut for relevant and poignant journalism due to its lack of cutting-edge information, it does summarize some of the obvious benefits of early childhood education.

I continue to be dumbfounded by the fact that our country doesn’t provide free, quality educational experiences for our children from the minute their families put them in childcare. When I say “educational experiences” I don’t mean strapping toddlers into neatly-aligned desks and making them “do school” at an earlier age. I mean we should provide them with nurturing and stimulating environments that cultivate their independence, curiosity, reasoning skills, sense of trust, language development, and socialization.

Italian educator Maria Montessori placed an enormous emphasis on the young child as a learner and a self-teacher. She explained that children are their own teachers starting from birth. They begin teaching themselves by absorbing the environment. For example, they teach themselves to talk simply by observing and replicating the people around them.

In recent decades, research has proven many of Montessori’s theories about the malleability and sensitivity of the young child’s mind (see Maria Montessori: The Science Behind the Genius). But it seems like common sense; children’s brains grow and develop rapidly as soon as they are born (and even earlier!). We should provide them with educational environments that maximize the developments of their minds.

Yes, it is expensive to provide government-subsidized childcare. But if we, as a nation, can spend $275 million per day on war in Iraq, then we can surely invest in something that can promote peace: our children.

Teaching to the Test

Yes, Linda Darling-Hammond and I disagree about a couple of things, namely our take on Teach For America. But in this article, High-quality standards, a curriculum based on critical thinking can enlighten our students I found myself nodding vehemently, sentence after sentence.

Testing is not the enemy. Any backwards-planner knows you start with the end vision. Then you ask yourself, “How will I measure whether the end vision has been achieved?”

When planning a unit on graphing, for example, I think about what I want students to know, understand, and be able to do by the end of the unit, which would include being able to generate a survey question and create a data collection table, administer the survey and collect data in the table, and create a graph to represent their data.

Then I think about how they will demonstrate what they know, understand, and can do in the form of an assessment. In this case, a performance assessment could be used to measure the vision. Since the assessment is rigorous and aligned to my vision, then it makes perfect sense for me to “teach to the test.” In other words, I need to teach them the specific knowledge and skills that will set them up for success on the final assessment.

In this way, the assessment really does dictate what we teach. “Teaching to the test” becomes problematic when the test only measures lower-level knowledge or specific subjects (which is what has happened under No Child Left Behind). In Texas, for example, science is not assessed until 5th grade. It is quite common for 5th grade science teachers to have to go back and teach all the 1st-5th grade science objectives because the previous four teachers only taught reading and math (the subjects that were tested).

Using assessments to measure progress is not the problem, nor is teaching to the test. The real problem is that the tests are not aligned with the skills our children need for participation in the 21st century.