American students are skipping school in record numbers, a crisis that is so acute that it became the lead story in The New York Times recently, as well as the subject of the Times’s podcast series, The Daily. The lead story is long on anecdotes, graphs, and other data. It’s also chock full of quotes from experts, but no students are heard from. No teachers either.
Another serious problem with the reporting, in my view, is the lack of context. The reporters place the blame for the epidemic of chronic absenteeism on COVID, making no mention of three other deep-rooted causes, 1) the right wing’s long campaign against ‘government schools,’ which has helped create widespread distrust of many other public institutions; 2) a decades-long obsession with standardized testing that has made many kids feel like numbers, objects to be manipulated; and 3) a mental health crisis among adolescents, caused in part by their heightened anxiety about school shootings, that makes many kids genuinely afraid to go to school.
Let’s start at the top. Ronald Reagan routinely referred disparagingly to public schools as ‘government schools,’ meaning, of course, that they could not be trusted. The MAGA movement has amplified that cry, politicizing education, taking over school board meetings (and actual school boards as well), driving away qualified veteran educators, and causing would-be teachers to decide to find other lines of work. Schools that ban books and restrict discussions are not exactly welcoming environments for young people.
Although the trend to see students in terms of their test scores probably dates back to the 1988 publication of “A Nation at Risk,” George W. Bush and Barack Obama ramped it up, big time. In other words, Democrats and Republicans are equally responsible for the second major cause of absenteeism. Bush’s “No Child Left Behind” and Obama’s “Race to the Top” prioritized student test scores in math and English–at the expense of almost everything else. Most public schools either reduced or eliminated extra-curricular activities like drama, journalism, and music. Recess and free play also went by the wayside, as did ‘non-essential’ courses like foreign languages and social studies. The message to students was clear: the school cares only about my test score, not me….so why bother?
Cause #3: Yes, COVID shut down many public schools, depriving young people of the opportunities to socialize, to get accustomed to being with others and dealing with whatever issues arose, but the rash of widely-publicized school shootings–and government’s failure to address the crisis–have created another legitimate reason for students to opt out of school. I met recently with a high school history teacher, a 17-year veteran, who told me his students regularly practice how to respond to ‘an incursion.’ Mental health challenges are genuine, widespread, and perfectly understandable, he told me.
The next day I met with another teacher, a young woman who is just finishing her 5th year teaching 4th grade in a charter school in Brooklyn. Students at her school have learned what to do if trouble arises. She also said absenteeism is an issue, and she’s certain that it will spike dramatically in a week or two–once the state tests are over. Both teachers are concerned about the quality of incoming teachers–the pool of talent is smaller and less impressive. I infer from their comments that this development is a consequence of the attacks on teaching and teachers–“Who in their right mind would want to teach today?” is the question that hung in the air.
If I were reporting this story, I would do what we did in 2012, talk to young people. This school district on the Mexican border had an abysmal dropout rate, so its new superintendent went out and found kids who had dropped out and asked what it would take to get them to come back. More challenges, he learned, and so he created opportunities for kids to earn college credits while going to high school. A few years later, a bunch of high school seniors received both their HS diplomas and their 2-year community college degrees. Remarkable story, and a win-win-win for everyone. Please click on the link to see what I mean.
Adults concerned about chronic absenteeism ought to be trying to get young people to wantto come to school regularly, not simply ‘to attend school.’ To do that, we need to make schools interesting, challenging, and safe. Stop treating kids as numbers (their standardized test scores). Stop asking “How smart are you?” and ask a different question about each child: ‘How are you smart?”
Here are four specific steps that will bring kids back: 1) Restore the full range of extra-curricular opportunities–because most kids come to school so they can do interesting stuff with their friends! 2) Homeroom in middle and high school should become an extended period, not just a quick five minutes when attendance is taken. Make daily homeroom a pressure-free time when students can catch up with friends, forge new relationships, finish homework, or even take naps. “Home” is the operative word here. 3) Expand course offerings to include some college classes and vocational training opportunities.
Step number 4 deserves its own paragraph! To end chronic absenteeism, make schools safe. The first step toward safety is to acknowledge that school safety is a 3-part concept. Students deserve schools that are physically, emotionally, and intellectually safe. Emotional safety means that bullying and cyber-bullying are not tolerated. Intellectually safe schools celebrate curiosity. In these schools, adults encourage students to admit when they do not understand or are confused, often by modeling that behavior. Intellectually safe schools don’t treat kids as numbers but as growing and changing individuals. (And young people who are treated with respect are unlikely to bring their dad’s AK-47 to school.)
More can be done to bring young people back to school, but concerned local educators can take those four steps to begin the process.
A teacher is standing in front of her class of First Graders, most of them 6-year-olds, a few age five. She holds up a sign:
“Who can read this?”
Almost every hand goes up, and a few children call out the answer.
“That’s very good. I thought that you would know that word. Maybe you recognize the sign because you see it on lots of street corners. It says ‘Stop,’ but now let’s take it apart, letter by letter. The first letter, S, makes a sound. What sound does an S make?”
She then goes through the sounds the other three letters make, the children make the sounds, and they put the word together.
Then she holds up a slightly different sign, one that reads STOPE. She tells them howit is pronounced and explains that, when the letter E follows a vowel, that vowel ‘says its own name.’ She tells them how to pronounce it, and then she writes several words on the blackboard: NICE, HOSE, and CASE. The children sound them out.
That teacher is using a method known as Phonics, more formally called Phonics and Phonemic Awareness as the basis for her instruction. Basically, it recognizes that letters have sounds associated with them, and that those sounds often change when letters are rearranged. She’s teaching her students to decode or decipher words.
Phonics is one of two competing approaches to teaching reading. The other method, Whole Language, stresses recognition of words rather than sounding them out, and using their context, including pictures, to decipher or guess at meaning. The battle over how to teach reading has been going on forever. Should children learn to take words apart, letter by letter, or should they be taught to recognize words–the ‘look-say’ approach?
Back to that classroom: “OK, now let’s see what happens if we move the letters around.”
She holds up this sign:
“Same four letters. Let’s try to read it by sounding out each letter. Start with the first one, where I put the S at the end. What sound does T make?”
The children are delighted when she brings out four more versions of the familiar sign:
For the next ten or fifteen minutes, the children take those words apart, then put the sounds together, eventually reading all the words. OPTS is the most challenging because the children don’t know the word, leading to a discussion about OPTIONS, a noun, and OPT, a verb. The teacher doesn’t move on until she’s sure everyone understands. Perhaps she challenges her students to use those words in conversation during the day, or at home that night.
The supporters of Whole Language caricature Phonics, the method this teacher is using, as an endless series of “cat-hat-rat-sat-bat” drills, a cold and boring approach that drives children away from literature, while extolling Whole Language and its clone, Balanced Literacy, as warm, humanistic, and child-friendly.
As its most prominent gurus, Kenneth Goodman and Yetta Goodman, argued in 1991, “Whole Language classrooms liberate pupils to try new things, to invent spellings, to experiment with new genres, to guess at meanings in their readings, to read and write imperfectly.”
True believers in the Phonics camp point to ‘invented spellings’ and guessing at meanings as proof that Whole Language is a romantic fantasy that fails to give children the skills they will need as adults–while at the same time lying to them by telling them that they can read.
Whole Language advocates are quick to emphasize the limitations of Phonics. English, they point out, is more idiosyncratic than most languages. And they are correct: Just say these three words aloud: anger, ranger, and hanger. According to the rules of Phonics, they should rhyme, but they don’t. Likewise, good and mood should rhyme, but do not. Even Horace Mann, the founder of American public education, was anti-Phonics because of English’s irregularities.
Irregularities aside, however, reading does not ‘come naturally,’ as many Whole Language devotees assume. It must be taught. For this, the research is clear: Phonics and Phonemic Awareness are the bedrock of learning to read. That is, they are the engine, and Whole Language is the chassis. In sum, both approaches are necessary, but the engine–Phonics–is first among equals. And good teachers know this…
Backin the classroom, theteacher holds upanother image:
“Who knows what this sign says? Can anyone use it in a sentence? (Many hands go up.) That’s good.”
After sounding out the two letters and putting the word together, the teacher asks the children, “What happens to GO if we replace the G with S or N?”
She writes SO and NO on the blackboard, next to GO, which the children figure out almost immediately.
“But letters can be tricky things, children. What sound does ‘O’ make in STOP? Keep that in mind.”
She replaces the G with the letter T. Some students automatically rhyme it with GO and SO, pronouncing it ‘TOE.’ Now she explains that in this new word, TO, the letter O has a different sound.
“So we see that the letter O can make different sounds. English is tricky, but we will learn all the tricks. Read this sentence: ‘SO I said NO, you must GO TO the STORE.’”
“Which letter isn’t following the rules?”
They all seem to understand that TO is the exception. She explains that they will have to learn to recognize words like TO if they want to be good readers.
“I warned you that letters were tricky! But there are ways to figure out most letters, rules that work most of the time. But not all the time, because English breaks a lot of its own rules. I promise you we will have fun figuring all this out…”
The current Reading Wars escalated in 1955 when Rudolf Flesch published “Why Johnny Can’t Read,” an all-out attack on ‘Whole Language.’ The world of education ignored him. In 1969 Harvard professor Jeanne Chall’s “Learning to Read: The Great Debate” presented compelling data demonstrating the importance of Phonics, but once again the system shrugged.
Inevitably, the crusade to dominate reading instruction became politicized. Those who supported Phonics were most likely Republicans, conservatives, and perhaps evangelical Christians as well. Television pastor Pat Robertson made teaching Phonics central to his platform when he ran for the Republican presidential nomination in 1988, and political activist Phyllis Schlafly pushed as hard for Phonics-based instruction as she did against the Equal Rights Amendment. “Through the late 1980s and into the 1990s, religious right organizations such as Schlafly’s Eagle Forum and Robertson’s Christian Coalition pushed legislators in Tennessee and elsewhere to enact Phonics instruction in public schools. By the early 1990s, Sing, Spell, Read and Write— the Phonics-based reading program, published by Pearson and promoted by Pat Robertson — was approved for use in a dozen states, including Tennessee, Arkansas and Mississippi,” David Waters notes in an analysis for The Institute for Public Service in Memphis.
If, on the other hand, you believed in Whole Language, you were certainly a liberal, probably a Democrat, and perhaps even an atheist or an agnostic.
Calling these two camps religious cults is not a stretch, because both approaches inspire devotion bordering on fanaticism….and have complete disdain for the other.
That First Grade teacher often takes pages out of the Whole Language playbook to talk about words that don’t follow the rules of Phonics.
One day she writes these sentences on the blackboard: COME HERE! WHERE ARE THE MACHINES?
“OK, kids. On your toes now, because only one of these words follows the rules.”
She asks them to pronounce each word according to the rules they have learned. They do, pronouncing COME with a long O, WHERE with a long E, ARE with a long A, and MACHINES with a long I. Then she pronounces them correctly, cracking up the children.
“I told you English was tricky and sneaky, but we won’t let it beat us!”
To finish the lesson, she writes HERE on the blackboard and asks the children to sound it out, which they do with ease. Then she puts a W in front of HERE and challenges them to sound it out. They rhyme it with HERE. She replaces the W with T, making THERE, and again asks her students to sound it out. WHERE and THERE, she explains, break the rules. They will have to learn to recognize them.
Reading politics reached the Oval Office when George W. Bush became President. In 1999 Congress had appointed a National Reading Panel to study the issue, but the Bush Administration controlled the publication of the results. The panel of scholars issued a 449-page report promoting a balanced reading program that included but should not be dominated by systematic instruction in Phonics. “Phonics should not become the dominant component in a reading program, neither in the amount of time devoted to it nor in the significance attached,” the report concluded.
However, Bush’s political operatives took charge of the Report’s summary–arguably the only section anyone reads. Their summary sent a very different message: Phonics rules! As Waters noted, “the report’s 32-page summary, widely reported by the media and mailed to every school district in the country, focused on Phonics. It used the word ‘Phonics’ 89 times, and the word ‘balanced’ only once.”
The politicization of reading continued in President Bush’s signature legislation, the “No Child Left Behind Act of 2000.” It called for an emphasis on Phonics and ‘scientifically based reading research’ (a term found in the law and accompanying regulations more than 110 times). NCLB spawned “Reading First,” a pro-Phonics federal program that collapsed amidst financial scandals, although, predictably, the Phonics Republicans and the Whole Language Democrats differed as to who was at fault.
At some point our teacher creates a list of other rule-breaking words to learn.These so-called ‘sight words’ include who, to, are, been, because, machine, and police. The list will grow throughout the year.
Then she opens another door. She invites the children to tell the class some words that they want to be able to read, perhaps words they have heard at home or on the street. Words they are curious about. By meeting them where they are and encouraging their curiosity, she’s empowering them. That’s a powerful motivation for young children, a strong sense of mastery.
(That teacher isn’t one person but a mashup of dozens of marvelous teachers I encountered as a reporter, all but one of them women. The man was Johnny Brinson, a First Grade teacher in Washington, DC. Among the women was my own First Grade teacher, Mrs. Peterson, whom I spent a day with when I was in my late 30’s and working for NPR.)
By all rights, teaching all First Graders to read with understanding ought to be a national priority. Set the bar there and then devote whatever resources are necessary to help children get where they want to be.
Sadly, we have not done that. Instead, even though 5-, 6-, and 7-year-old children are ready to learn and eager to be challenged, we have lowered the bar. For the past 20 years or so, our stated national goal has been to have children reading at “Grade Level” when they finish Third Grade. That’s a 2-year lowering of expectations.
So, instead of harnessing the incredible curiosity and energy of our 6-year-olds, we said to them and their teachers, “No rush. Take your time.” That goal was set during the Administration of George W. Bush, and—surprise!!–lowering expectations has not worked. Reading scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) have flatlined: Fourth Graders in 1992 scored 217 on NAEP’s 0-500 scale, and in 2020, the Fourth Graders’ score was 215. But rather than questioning the wisdom of the ‘low expectations’ policy, many politicians and policymakers have chosen to blame the victims–by requiring them to repeat Third Grade. Currently, 18 states and the District of Columbia require retention for students reading below proficiency by the time they complete 3rd grade. Another 10 states, including Texas, New Jersey and Maryland, allow retention but do not require it.
The deep thinkers who decided to delay things also came up with a slogan: “In the first three grades, children learn to read; from then on, they read to learn.” Treating reading as an end, instead of a means to an end, is dangerous nonsense! Children learn to read so they can learn more about the world around them. Both at the same time! Imagine if those same deep thinkers were put in charge of teaching children to walk. They’d have kids walking in place for a year or two (learning to walk), after which they could walk around (walking to get somewhere).
Today’s politicians and policymakers are wildly enthusiastic about what is being called ‘the Science of Reading,’ and there’s a real danger that the pendulum is swinging back to Phonics. As I read the situation, some people see the Science of Reading as a way to make money selling schools stuff that’s ‘guaranteed’ to teach children to read. This is dangerous nonsense. Reading is as much art as science, and phonics is necessary but not sufficient. Rather than spending money on packaged curriculua, states and school districts ought to devote resources to retraining elementary teachers in how to teach reading, because most teacher training institutions ignored phonics, favoring instead a word recognition approach known as Whole Language.
When the year is nearly over, the First Grade teacher asks her children a question: ‘Who are the three or four fastest runners in the class?’ The children call out five or six different names. ‘OK, now who are the three or four best singers in the class?’ Again names are called out. ‘And one more question. Who are the three or four tallest kids in our class?’ More names.
‘I want to tell you why I asked those questions.’ The children look at her expectantly. ‘Some of you are taller than others, some of you can run faster, and some of you can sing better, but that’s just how things are turning out. It’s not because you are better. You’re just different. The same thing is true with reading. All of you are readers, good readers, but some of you can read better than others….because you got lucky at birth, not because you are a better person.”
(She is correct. About 40% of children are ‘born readers,’ able to absorb the basics of Phonics and able to decode and comprehend with ease. Everyone has to learn to read because reading is not a natural act, but some learn faster and more easily than others.)
“All of you are readers now, all of you. And nobody can take that away from you….ever. So please keep on reading, and writing, and thinking, and asking questions.”
Give children a couple of years with teachers like her, and they will be ready for almost anything, because she understands that, to become effective readers, her students need to understand that letters have sounds associated with them, and that most, but clearly not all, words follow certain rules. For her, and for good teachers of reading everywhere, decoding and higher test scores are not the goal; the goals are comprehension, confidence, and enjoyment.
A few days ago in this space I listed the 14 ways to improve public schools that I’ve been blogging about for the past six months or so. However, reactions from thoughtful readers convinced me that I had stopped making suggestions too soon, so here’s a better list, EIGHTEEN simple steps to make our public schools more interesting, more challenging, and–yes–more productive.
1) Looping, which I expanded upon a short time later in Looping (revisited). Looping means a teacher moving up with her or his students. It’s quite common in other countries because it’s been shown to improve both student learning and behavior, for openers.
2)Play. Simply put, kids need to be kids. And for those who are concerned about learning, stop worrying because free play contributes to improved learning.
3) Practice Democracy. If we want children to function well in a democratic society as adults, they need practice. Right now, schools are essentially undemocratic–by design. That’s the worst possible preparation for adulthood. And giving young people more ‘agency’ over their own learning actually works!
4) Business Cards for Teachers. If you are a professional, you carry business cards, which you give out to people you want to stay in contact with. Teachers are professionals! Treat them as such.
5) Involve Outsiders. The vast majority of households do not have children in public schools, and schools need public support. The best advertisement for public education is the kids. Let them strut their stuff!
6) Multiple ‘Talent Nights.’ This is an easy way to make parents feel at home in school. Education is a team sport, and educators need to welcome parents, not treat them as extraneous (or worse).
7) Extended Homeroom. Right now most homeroom periods are short, really just a way for administrators to take attendance. After Covid, kids need more down time. Extending homeroom into a full period provides that.
8) Ask the Right Question. I’ve been pushing this for a long time, but it’s worth repeating: The most important question to ask about all children is ‘How Are They Smart?’ and not ‘How Smart Are They?’ because every child has skills, abilities, and interests that can be tapped into and developed.
9) “Education Grand Rounds.” Teachers need opportunities to watch each other at work so they can improve their own practice.
10) “Making Stuff”. There’s nothing more satisfying than creating something useful. Bring back wood shop!
11) Make the School Safe. Schools need to be physically, emotionally, and intellectually safe. Stop focusing only on physical safety. In intellectually safe schools, it’s cool to be curious, and it’s OK to admit ‘I don’t understand.’ In emotionally safe schools, bullying is not tolerated…and adults and student leaders step up to prevent it.
12) Serve Your Community This is NOT the same as ‘Community Service.’ The distinction makes all the difference.
13) Ban Cell Phones. Completely! That’s right, ban them completely! This is a giant step toward making schools emotionally safe.
15) Change the school day’s opening time for adolescents, who need more sleep and aren’t getting it. This important piece by Dr. Mary Carskadon and Lynne Lamberg (a reader of this blog) is both comprehensive and persuasive. And here’s moreon the issue.
16) Improve school food because better nutrition is a cost-effective way of improving students’ life chances, and because, sadly, for many kids their school meals are the only healthy ones they get. Changing the cafeteria is a good opportunity to Practice Democracy (suggestion #3).
17) Teach reading effectively by avoiding the extremes. Don’t let the ‘Reading Science’ craze push schools into going mad for phonics. Phonics is necessary but not sufficient, because our English language is complex and contradictory. (eg, why don’t ‘anger,’ ‘danger,’ and ‘hanger’ rhyme?) Here’s how to teach reading.
18) Involve classroom teachers in curriculum choices and curriculum design. But ‘involve’ does not mean that individual teachers should unilaterally decide what to teach, just that they shouldn’t be treated as cogs in a machine, told by their districts what to teach, and when to teach it. David Steiner of the Johns Hopkins Institute for Education Policy, told Education Week that “Designing curriculum and teaching curriculum are both very, very demanding skill sets.” He went on: “When Meryl Streep decides whether she’s going to act in a movie, she doesn’t say, ‘No way, I didn’t write the script. She says, ‘Give me the best possible script so that my acting abilities can really shine.’”
What happens next to these 18 proposals? I hope some of you will work with your local school boards to implement these changes. When candidates for school board start ranting about “DEI” or “Critical Race Theory,” I hope you will confront them, because those aren’t real issues; what matters are specific changes that can make schools more interesting, challenging, and effective. Perhaps some of you might even run for your local school board!
With that in mind, I have one final suggestion: Consider adopting as your guiding principle the wisdom of Aristotle: “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.” Applying that to schools and education suggests to me that:
*Because we want children to be able to write well, they need to write often in their classes.
*Because we want them to be comfortable speaking in public, they need to practice that in school.
*Because we want them to work well with others as adults, they ought to be working together on projects, teams, plays, bands, et cetera, in school.
*Because we want them to be successful as adults in a rapidly changing world, they ought to learn at least two languages in school.
*And so forth….
Other changes, especially reducing class size and repairing or replacing dangerously dilapidated facilities, are also called for, but these will cost real money and will require sustained political effort. None of the 18 changes I am suggesting will cost school districts big bucks, but some do involve changes in habits and schedules, which often makes adults uncomfortable. That is, these changes are simple, but that does not mean they will be easy. I believe, however, that they are the path forward, toward schools that are effective and challenging places that children will want to be.
Back in August I began using this space to suggest simple changes that would, I believe, improve public schools significantly. Five months and fourteen suggestions later, it’s now time to wrap this up, not because I’ve run out of ideas but because I’m hoping some readers will take this list of ideas and run with it. Perhaps some of you will work with your local school boards to implement these changes. I hope that, if candidates for school board start ranting about “DEI” or “Critical Race Theory,” you will confront them, because those aren’t real issues; what matters are specific changes that can make schools more interesting, challenging, and effective. Perhaps some of you might even run for your local school board!
With that in mind, I have one final suggestion: Consider adopting as your guiding principle the wisdom of Aristotle: “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.” Applying that to schools and education suggests to me that:
*Because we want children to be able to write well, they need to write often in their classes.
*Because we want them to be comfortable speaking in public, they need to practice that in school.
*Because we want them to work well with others as adults, they ought to be working together on projects, teams, plays, bands, et cetera, in school.
*Because we want them to be successful as adults in a rapidly changing world, they ought to learn at least two languages in school.
*And so forth….
Here, briefly, are the other suggestions: 1) Looping, which I expanded upon a short time later in Looping (revisited). Looping means a teacher moving up with her or his students. It’s quite common in other countries because it’s been shown to improve both student learning and behavior, for openers.
2)Play. Simply put, kids need to be kids. And for those who are concerned about learning, stop worrying because free play contributes to improved learning.
3) Practice Democracy. Apply Aristotle here: If we want children to function well in a democratic society, they need practice. Right now, schools are essentially undemocratic–by design. That’s the worst possible preparation for adulthood. And giving young people more ‘agency’ over their own learning actually works!
4) Business Cards for Teachers. If you are a professional, you carry business cards, which you give out to people you want to stay in contact with. Teachers are professionals! Treat them as such.
5) Involve Outsiders. The vast majority of households do not have children in public schools, and schools need public support. The best advertisement for public education is the kids. Let them strut their stuff!
6) Multiple ‘Talent Nights.’ This is an easy way to make parents feel at home in school. Education is a team sport, and educators need to welcome parents, not treat them as extraneous (or worse).
7) Extended Homeroom. Right now most homeroom periods are short, really just a way for administrators to take attendance. After Covid, kids need more down time. Extending homeroom into a full period provides that.
8) Ask the Right Question. I’ve been pushing this for a long time, but it’s worth repeating: The most important question to ask about all children is ‘How Are They Smart?’ and not ‘How Smart Are They?’ because every child has skills, abilities, and interests that can be tapped into and developed.
9) “Education Grand Rounds.” Teachers need opportunities to watch each other at work so they can improve their own practice.
10) “Making Stuff”. There’s nothing more satisfying than creating something useful. Bring back wood shop!
11) Make the School Safe. Schools need to be physically, emotionally, and intellectually safe. Stop focusing only on physical safety. In intellectually safe schools, it’s cool to be curious, and it’s OK to admit ‘I don’t understand.’ In emotionally safe schools, bullying is not tolerated…and adults and student leaders step up to prevent it.
12) Serve Your Community This is NOT the same as ‘Community Service.’ The distinction makes all the difference.
13) Ban Cell Phones. Completely! That’s right, ban them completely!
Reactions from readers convinced me that I stopped making recommendations too soon, so here are three more:
15) Change the opening time for adolescents, who need more sleep and aren’t getting it. This important piece by Dr. Mary Carskadon and Lynne Lamberg (a reader of this blog) is both comprehensive and persuasive. Here’s more on the issue.
16) Improve school food because better nutrition is a cost-effective way of improving students’ life chances, and because, sadly, for many kids their school meals are the only healthy ones they get. Changing the cafeteria is a good opportunity to Practice Democracy (suggestion #3).
17) Teach reading effectively by avoiding the extremes. Don’t let the ‘Reading Science’ craze push schools into going mad for phonics. Phonics is necessary but not sufficient, because our English language is complex and contradictory. (eg, why don’t ‘anger,’ ‘danger,’ and ‘hanger’ rhyme?)
Other changes, especially reducing class size and repairing or replacing dangerously dilapidated facilities, are also called for, but these will cost real money. None of the 17 changes I am suggesting will cost school districts big bucks, but some do involve changes in habits and schedules, which often makes adults uncomfortable. That is, these changes are simple, but that does not mean they will be easy. I believe, however, that they are the path forward, toward schools that are effective and challenging, places that children will want to be.
Do I mean “Acknowledge the Achievement Gap,” you may be wondering? No, that’s not a misprint. The Opportunity Gap in public education is real, and growing. Making a commitment to closing that gap would, in time, close the Achievement Gap that so many policymakers obsess over.
The Achievement Gap is real, but it is primarily the result of gaps in both Opportunity and Expectations. Start with Opportunities: The playing field in American public education isn’t even close to being level. Black students are twice as likely to go to high-poverty schools as their white peers, and these schools are likely to be in poor physical condition-–think peeling paint, poor ventilation, water fountains that don’t work, etc etc. High poverty schools are harder to staff, meaning high turnover and lots of rookie teachers. Non-white school districts get a lot less money than majority-white districts, generally more than $1500 below the national average, which translates into fewer dollars for school repairs, instructional materials, and staff salaries. Compounding this, students in high-poverty schools are more likely to have behavioral issues and educational needs that are expensive to address.
Unsurprisingly, many in those under-resourced and decrepit schools–faculty, staff, and students– have low expectations…often a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Give students less, and then expect very little of them: that’s the reality for millions of American public school students. No wonder we have an Achievement Gap!
Educators shouldn’t be trying to close the Achievement Gap by coaching, tutoring, and testing. Those so-called ‘strategies’ are counter-productive, because they drive failing students away. We cannot drill our way out of this situation.
American public schools cannot provide adequate housing and health care for their students. Nor can they improve the educational background and income of their students’ parents. But public schools can–and must—attempt to close the gaps in Opportunities and Expectations.
I believe an essential step is adopting a challenging and interesting curriculum, a program that kids will look forward to and that parents will approve of. Three personal favorites are Core Knowledge, an extensive curriculum created by the brilliant E.D. Hirsch Jr; EL Education (formerly known as Expeditionary Learning); and the Comer School Development Program,started by another hero in the world of education and child development , Dr. James Comer of Yale. I urge you to click those hot links to learn more.
(Over the years, a few programs prospered for a while and then faded, such as the Accelerated Schools program pioneered by the great Henry Levin of Teachers College, Columbia.)
School Boards committed to doing the right thing might also consider giving their schools the option to join the Community School movement. They won’t be alone: close to 10,000 schools, nearly 10% of all public schools, have joined this important effort.
You are probably aware that millions of students are skipping school regularly. Many school districts seem to be embracing ‘get tough’ truancy policies. I suggest holding off on harsh or even gentle enforcement tactics and instead asking the kids two simple questions: “Why aren’t you coming to school?” And “What would induce you to return?”
I’m willing to wager that genuine opportunities to learn in positive and welcoming environments will bring kids back. Commit to closing the Opportunity Gap, if you care about all children and the country’s future.
A simple way to improve public schools would be to institute a complete and total ban of all cell phones and so-called smart watches. Banning these ubiquitous devices would improve student mental health, reduce cyberbullying, and make schools safer for the most vulnerable students.
As Education Week reported in October, “A growing number of studies have linked children’s use of smartphones and social media to their deteriorating mental health. For instance, a 2023 systematic review of 50 research articles published in the journal BMC Psychology found that screen time was associated with problems in teens’ mental well-being, and that social media was linked to an increased risk of depression in girls.”
Banning cell phones is also supposed to reduce cyberbullying, which is increasingly prevalent among adolescents in schools. It’s occurring in more than 81% of schools, according to their principals, and it’s getting worse. In 2010, 37.7% of principals reported NO cyberbullying in their schools–none in close to 40% of our schools–but in 2016 (the most recent data), that ‘Never’ number was cut nearly in half, to 19.1 %.
What’s not mentioned in the articles I’ve looked at, another elephant in the room, is cheating. Smartphones and smartwatches make cheating easy as pie. Banning them is a step in the direction of academic integrity.
“Hold on,” some of you may be saying to yourself. “Didn’t I just read that nearly all public schools prohibit students from using cell phones?”
You’re correct: Here’s the most recent data, from the National Center for Education Statistics: “More than three-quarters of schools, 76.9 percent, prohibited non-academic use of cell phones or smartphones during school hours during the 2019-20 school year.” That’s up nearly 7% from 2010.
While this sounds impressive, don’t be misled, because the phrase ‘during school hours’ is slushy/squishy at best. It means that for some unspecified amount of time students were not allowed to use their phones. What most schools, and the entire state of Florida, have done is institute partial bans, followed by bizarre, almost comical steps, like magnetic pouches outside classroom doors, to enforce their rules.
What’s not revealed is how much of the day students can use their phones, because it turns out there are loopholes, lots of them: In some schools, students may use their phones at lunch, in the halls, between classes, in the rest rooms, in study halls, and during extracurricular activities. Oh, and in their classrooms if the teachers say it’s OK.
That’s a ban?
It’s not hard to dig up anecdotal ‘evidence’ from supporters that this policy is working. For example, Brush (CO) School Superintendent Bill Wilson told Education Week, “In between classes, students are talking to students instead of everybody walking with their head down on their phone.”
But the plural of anecdote is not data, and the data tell a very different story: Cyberbullying actually increases when schools ban cell phones! Schools that did NOT allow their students to use cell phones had a reportedly higher rate of daily/weekly cyberbullying.
The incidence nearly doubled! Partial bans seem to make things worse, not better!
I can imagine the collective mind of teenagers, on learning of the ban, declaring, “So you think that keeping us from using our phones will stop us from being mean? Good luck with that!”
What I conclude is that half-hearted, half-way restrictions on cell phones is a half-assed public policy.
What’s required to improve public schools is a complete and total ban. However,recall that at the top of this essay I wrote ‘simple’ and not ‘easy,’ because it will be very difficult to keep these ubiquitous devices out of schools.
For one thing, the negative step (the ban) must be accompanied by some significant positive steps that will, in time, fill the space now spent on phones. I would ask educators and policymakers to consider some of my earlier suggested changes, including Extending the Homeroom Period (#7), Making Stuff (#11), and Serving Your Community (#13). A longer homeroom period will give students more time to get to know each other, while the real work involved in building things and serving one’s community will provide both personal satisfaction and connections with others that no electronic device can begin to deliver.
(The argument that cellphones are an important educational tool for connecting to the internet does not hold today, because most schools either provide or allow laptop computers. Banning cellphones and smartwatches will not restrict educational opportunities.)
The stickiest part will be enforcing a total ban, and here schools might consider embracing step #3, Practice Democracy. As everyone who’s spent time in public schools must acknowledge, schools are anti-democratic by nature and design, and that’s what needs to be confronted. That means telling the truth, by acknowledging openly to students (and the community) that cyberbullying is a real problem, that excessive use of cell phones and social media is harmful, and that some students use the devices to cheat, giving them unfair advantage over their peers.
Then educators must present students with the decision, the fait accompli–no cell phones and no smart watches on campus–and then ask them to help establish both the procedures and the penalties.
Should the first violation result in a warning, or should the device be confiscated? If confiscated, for how long? (Apparently many schools now simply take away the phone and give it back at the end of the day. Day after day….the very definition of toothlessness.) Should there be escalating penalties for repeated violations? Should there be a student court, or at least the involvement of students in the judicial process?
As I said, it won’t be easy, but the rewards of a total ban of smartphones and smartwatches are almost impossible to exaggerate: more open communication, real work, significant connections with others in the school and in the community, and a reduction in bullying.
Michelle Rhee is, of course, the central character in our Frontline film, “The Education of Michelle Rhee,” but I want to tell you more about Adell Cothorne, the former DC principal who appears at the end of our film. She was one of a small handful of DC educators willing to speak on the record about the widespread erasures that occurred during Michelle Rhee’s tenure in Washington–and I think what she has to say is important.
It’s not an exaggeration to say that producer Mike Joseloff, researcher Catherine Rentz and I made hundreds of phone calls to teachers and principals at schools with high erasures rates (with answers almost always changed from ‘wrong’ to ‘right’) on the District’s standardized test, the DC-CAS, and to those in Michelle Rhee’s central office. Many of those we called either hung up the phone, said ‘no comment,’ or ask to go ‘off-the-record.’ I think some changed their phone numbers, and a few managed to disappear from sight.
Why the code of silence? One person explained that she wouldn’t be able to find work in education if she spoke out—and then hung up. Others told much the same story.
So let me tell you more about Adell Cothorne, in her own words.
“I grew up in poverty. I’m a minority, of course, (laughs). (And the daughter of a) teenage mother. So I absolutely understand the value of a strong public school education. It will take you places you’ve never been before.”
Education enabled Adell Cothorne to rise from those unpromising circumstances, and she ended up as an Assistant Principal in Montgomery County, Maryland. For those unfamiliar with the Washington, DC, area, Montgomery County is a wealthy suburb of the Capital with excellent ‘Blue Ribbon’ public schools. It’s one of the top-ranked school districts in the nation.
Adell Cothorne, former principal of Noyes Education Campus
Her idealism burned brightly, and so she applied for a job in Washington, largely, she told Frontline, because of her admiration for Michelle Rhee.
“I still have the Time Magazine with Michelle Rhee on the cover,” Cothorne told Frontline. “I had been following her for a while, and I admired what I saw on the media and the news. And so to have the opportunity to dialogue and sit across from her and then have her say to me, you know, ‘It’s not a matter of when you’re coming to D.C., but where I’m going to put you,’ that was absolute confirmation for me. And I was over the top.”
Rhee installed Cothorne as principal of Noyes Education Campus, a ‘Blue Ribbon’ school that had achieved remarkable gains on the DC-CAS in previous years. In October Cothorne met again with the Chancellor, one-on-one, to discuss her plans for the year. (Rhee’s practice was to meet with every principal to get their written guarantees.)
She told Frontline that meeting, which took place early in school year 2010-2011. “You are to ‘goal set.’ You are to tell her, you know, ‘I will raise math scores by 5%. I will raise reading scores by 6%.’ And so, yes, she and I had that conversation. And I said to her in early October, ‘I’m very comfortable with a 6% gain in math and a 7% gain in reading.’”
JOHN MERROW: But … if you make the commitment for 6%, 7%, is it understood that if you don’t make it you are not going to be around?
ADELL COTHORNE: Yes.
JOHN MERROW: Produce or else?
ADELL COTHORNE: She– yes, she said that to me. Yes.
JOHN MERROW: She said–
ADELL COTHORNE: In a joking fashion, absolutely joking fashion, but she did say, ‘You know, Cothorne, if you don’t make this, don’t be upset if you get a pink slip.’ Those were her words to me. In a joking manner.
JOHN MERROW: Did you take it as a joke?
ADELL COTHORNE: No. (LAUGH) That’s my livelihood. No I did not.
Even as she was making that commitment, Cothorne knew she had a problem. What she had already seen in her new school did not jibe with the test scores that had been recorded. Here’s what she told Frontline:
“As any good administrator should, I visited classrooms and just made my presence known, (and) noticed a disconnect for myself and what was going on in the classroom. The level of instruction, because I’ve worked at Blue Ribbon Schools before, so the level of instruction that I know is needed for a Blue Ribbon School, I was not seeing on a daily ongoing basis. … There’s these huge disconnects. They’re struggling academically. Yet the data that I have been given is showing great gains. But what I see with my own eyes on a daily basis is not a true picture of great gains.”
I asked her to tell me more.
ADELL COTHORNE: Well, for instruction, I saw students who were struggling to read, which is absolutely what does not happen in a Blue Ribbon School. And did not coincide or line up with the data that I had been given as the new principal. I just really saw a lack of instruction across the board. There were only very few instances where I could go into a classroom and feel comfortable that instruction was going on and kids were learning. Wholesale, that was not happening at my school.
JOHN MERROW: It must’ve been upsetting.
ADELL COTHORNE: It was upsetting and it was a little nerve-wracking because I knew (LAUGH) it was my responsibility to raise the achievement of that school.
Her predecessor, Wayne Ryan had led Noyes with great success. In fact, Rhee had promoted him to her central office largely because of his school’s success on the DC-CAS. In 2007, for example, only 44.14% of Noyes’ students had scored at a proficient level in reading, but under Ryan’s leadership that number nearly doubled, to 84.21%, in just two years. Math scores had also nearly doubled, from 34.24% to 62.79.
What Cothorne did not know was that an awful lot of answers had been changed from ‘wrong’ to right,’ on DC-CAS answer sheets from Noyes–and in nearly half of Rhee’s other schools. At Noyes 75% of the classrooms were flagged for high erasure rates. (This problem began in Rhee’s first year, and she learned of it early in her second year. She had been urged to investigate the 2007-2008 erasures but did not, as the film details.)
Cothorne told Frontline that she inadvertently discovered a possible explanation for the discrepancy between the high test scores and the students’ daily performance: Adults were changing answers on the tests. She had stayed late one night and heard noises coming from one classroom.
“So I walked into the room and I saw three staff members. There were test books everywhere, over 200 test books spread out on desks, spread out on tables. One staff member was sitting at a desk and had an eraser. And then there were two other staff members at a round table and they had test books out in front of them.
And one staff member said to me, in a light-hearted sort of way, ‘Oh, Principal, I can’t believe this kid drew a spider on the test and I have to erase it.’ … That was a little strange to me. I mean, the whole situation of all of these test books, over 200 test books being spread out in this room after school hours with three staff members. It’s not the way a testing situation is supposed to happen.”
This was not an isolated incident, Cothorne told Frontline.
JOHN MERROW: Were there any other indications?
ADELL COTHORNE: Yes.
JOHN MERROW: Of– that– teachers or staff members were behaving inappropriately on testing situations?
ADELL COTHORNE: Oh, in testing situations. Yes. … I personally walked into two different classrooms and saw two separate teachers giving instruction, trying to frontload students with information while test books are open and out. So I saw that with my own eyes.
That created a crisis for Cothorne. She felt compelled to report the incident, but her immediate supervisor was Wayne Ryan, her predecessor at Noyes. How could she call him up and accuse his former colleagues of erasing answers, without implying that he may have been part of the scheme? In the end, she told Frontline, she called someone else, who, she says, told her ‘not to worry’ but that was the last she heard from him.
She also told Frontline that one administrator summoned her to his office. She would not reveal his identity but told Frontlne about the conversation.
ADELL COTHORNE: When I was meeting with this higher up– the statement was made to me, ‘You don’t respect the legacy that has been built at Noyes.’ Once again, I processed, and looked at the person and said, ‘Could you repeat that?’ The person again moved closer and said, ‘You don’t respect the legacy that has been built at Noyes.’ And I answered with, ‘You know, I thought I was doing a very good job of looking at instruction and giving support.’ And the person just kind of smirked and set back.
JOHN MERROW: And how did you interpret that?
ADELL COTHORNE: “Be quiet.” That was my interpretation.
(Cothorne would not tell Frontline the name of that administrator, but in court documents that were unsealed the day before our broadcast she names Wayne Ryan as the individual. He was, of course, her predecessor at Noyes and the person she reported to directly at DCPS. Back in May 2011, Cothorne filed a ‘whistleblower’ action with the US Department of Education alleging widespread cheating and, therefore, fraudulent awards of federal funding. However, on the afternoon before our broadcast the Department of Education’s Inspector General reported that she had not found cheating by adults and therefore the Department of Justice would not pursue Cothorne’s case. Her full complaint can be found here (.pdf). In it she names the DCPS officials she says she spoke to. We have not be able to contact those men, and DCPS claims it has no records of phone calls from Cothorne. Cothorne’s attorney says that one call was made on Cothorne’s cell phone and that she has supporting documentation.)
At Noyes, however, she was in charge of the building itself. I asked her to talk about the coming DC-CAS. Here’s our conversation:
JOHN MERROW: You, as principal of the school, had something to say about the DC-CAS and security. And did you do anything to make sure that DC-CAS would be a secure test?
ADELL COTHORNE: Yes. So I did speak with downtown, and– on a regular basis, after I witnessed what I saw earlier in the year, I had ongoing conversations with downtown. “Don’t forget, when DC-CAS comes around, I need extra, you know, monitors. I need some other people besides my staff in the building to ensure that everything is okay.”
And at that point, downtown was more willing to help because the USA Today article had come out, and so Noyes had gotten lots of publicity about an erasure scandal. So when CAS came around in 2011, I did have two extra people from downtown to help monitor to– the test, and then I had another two extra people who helped with, you know, having the test checked in to make sure all the tests came in. We had locks changed on doors so that myself and my assistant principal were the only two people that had the key to the room to get in to testing. No one– the test coordinator did not have it. No one else had the keys.
JOHN MERROW: So are you convinced that that DC-CAS in the spring of your year there, that that was a secure test?
ADELL COTHORNE: I would honestly say that was a secure test.
JOHN MERROW: So you– you’re certain there were no erasures on that test?
ADELL COTHORNE: Now, I cannot be certain because I did not stay at the school 24 hours (LAUGH) a day. But while I was there, and what I saw, I do think it was a secure test.
With heightened security, Noyes’ DC-CAS scores dropped 52 points in reading (from 84.21% in 2009 to 32.40%) and 34 points in math (from 62.79% to 28.17%). In fact, in 2010-2011 Noyes performed below its 2007, pre-Rhee, level.
JOHN MERROW: How do you explain the drop?
ADELL COTHORNE: Those were the true test scores.
JOHN MERROW: I’m sorry?
ADELL COTHORNE: Those were the true test scores, in my opinion. Those were what the students in that school actually were able to produce.
Take note, readers. The decline at Noyes was not an exception among ‘high erasure’ schools. At the 14 schools with erasure rates of 50% or higher, scores declined at 12, often precipitously, after security was tightened. For example, reading scores at Aiton fell from 58.43% in 2007-2008 to 20.80%; in math from 57.87% to 16%. Reading scores at Raymond went from 70% to 42.44%, while its math score dropped from 68% to 45.71%.
By the time the 2010-2011 DC-CAS was administered, everyone knew of the widespread erasures, thanks to USA Today’s brilliant and thorough investigation. Rhee was gone by then, but, under public pressure, Rhee’s successor asked DC’s Inspector General to investigate. He began at Noyes, where he had little success. Cothorne told Frontline, “At first, they tried to interview staff members after school, but then staff members would find a reason not to be interviewed.”
JOHN MERROW: Why would teachers play cat and mouse?
ADELL COTHORNE: That would be speculation, but I guess they had something that they didn’t want to be forthcoming.
Of course, Cothorne expected to be questioned. After all, she had filed a complaint, and Noyes was the epicenter of the story.
JOHN MERROW: Were you interviewed?
ADELL COTHORNE: No, I was not.
JOHN MERROW: Why weren’t you interviewed?
ADELL COTHORNE: Again, my speculation, they didn’t want to hear what I had to say.
The Inspector General spent 17 months but investigated only one school, Noyes. Oddly, he did not examine data from 2007-2008, the year with the largest number of erasures but looked only at Rhee’s second and third years. At Noyes, the IG finally managed to interview 32 school personnel–but not Cothorne–and 23 parents. He reported finding a number of problems with test security but on the issue of Noyes personnel erasing answer sheets, “investigators found no evidence to corroborate these allegations.”
The Inspector General would not agree to an interview with Frontline.
Linda Mathews, the lawyer/journalist who supervised the USA Today investigation, told Frontline that , if one of her reporters had submitted a report like the one compiled by DC’s Inspector General, “I’d fire him on the spot.”
I asked Cothorne if she understood why an administrator or teacher might be tempted to cheat?
ADELL COTHORNE: Absolutely.
JOHN MERROW: Explain.
ADELL COTHORNE: Pressure. There’s pressure from central office to raise test scores. And that pressure is given to principals. And it is very clearly explained to you, not only in D.C., but many other school systems, your job is tied to test scores. Increase test scores. Period.
JOHN MERROW: Did you think there were people who, you know, outside of school, above the school, who knew something was wrong and maybe didn’t want to know?
ADELL COTHORNE: Not that they didn’t want to know, they wanted to keep their jobs. So I think that they knew, and, you know, because of the economic times that we’re in, decided to go along.
JOHN MERROW: Do you think that was widespread?
ADELL COTHORNE: In my opinion, yes.
I ask you to pay special attention to the next section of this piece.
Playing Devil’s Advocate, I suggested that changing a few answers was a victimless crime. She nearly jumped from her chair.
ADELL COTHORNE: No, it’s not a victimless crime. There are many victims. There are thousands of victims. It’s the students that are the victims.
JOHN MERROW: How?
ADELL COTHORNE: Someone is putting forth a picture that you are able to do something that you have no capability of doing. And so you keep moving to these different levels and the next person’s saying, “Oh, Janie can read on a fifth grade level and she can do fifth grade math.”
And Janie gets into your sixth grade middle school class, Janie can’t read, ‘See the dog run down the street.’ Janie can’t do the math. And so Janie becomes frustrated, because you are putting these sixth grade expectations on her and she has first grade ability. So then what happens to Janie? She waits her time, and when she’s 16 she’s out.
Although Cothorne became disillusioned with Michelle Rhee, she suggested that the problem went beyond the Chancellor. To Cothorne, Rhee was swept up in the national obsession with test scores everywhere, created by the 2001 federal No Child Left Behind law.
She described it in these words: “(I)nstruction shuts down in February because you have to do test prep from February until the test. So instruction in many districts was already shaky in the beginning, and now you’re basically shutting down all instruction in February to do all of this test prep. Because for many administrators and many school districts, it’s as important to make sure that kid knows how to take the test than it is, ‘Did they truly learn the content?’ “
Because Cothorne is also the mother of a young child, she also sees education from a parent’s perspective. She talked about that in our interview.
ADELL COTHORNE: My frustration as a parent is that education as a whole has lost the ability of students to be natural learners. No Child Left Behind has put in the caveat that every kid must get it by Tuesday at 2:00, and if you have an IEP, we’ll give you until 2:15. But at 2:15 we’re moving on.
And you’ve got to get it. So children who need a little more processing time, children who may be able to give you the idea, but they have to write a song about it, or they have to create a picture about, (but) … when the rubber meets the road, it’s not about differentiation at the end of the day. That teacher is judged on, ‘What scores did those children get on that test?’
And that test doesn’t look at, ‘Could you sing the information?’ or ‘Could you create a poem?’ It looks at, ‘Could you write a short essay and could you bubble in the right answer?’ So that has been the focus. How do they pass that test? Not ‘Did they learn anything?’ but ‘Are they able to pass numerous tests?’ Because we test all year long.
Adell Cothorne, a dedicated educator who was completing work on her doctorate, resigned her principalship and gave up a reported annual salary of roughly $130,000. She has opened up a bakery, “Cooks ‘n Cakes,” in Ellicott City, Maryland, surely a gamble in these difficult economic times.
I hope it’s a rousing success. When you stop by (to buy), please congratulate her on her courage.
Can April be the cruelest month, as T. S. Eliot declares in his bitterly pessimistic “The Waste Land”? For Eliot, April’s inherent cruelty is — ironically — precisely because of its vitality. April’s burgeoning life force engenders hope in a world that is both dark and hopeless.
But for many public school students and perhaps for teachers as well, the line is literally true: April is the cruelest month of the school calendar. April days that are not devoted to ‘test prep’ are spent on testing itself.
And some of what is going on in this crazy month defies the imagination. For example, critics of testing are having a field day with what they are calling “Pineapplegate.”
A pineapple, a hare and a swift outcry against a handful of confusing questions on this week’s English Language Arts exams have led the state’s education commissioner to scrap a portion of the eighth grade reading test.
The disputed section of the test contained a fable about a talking pineapple that challenged a hare to a race. But students and teachers complained that none of the multiple choice answers to several questions made sense.
In response to the complaints, the New York State Education Commissioner John B. King Jr. concluded the questions were “ambiguous” and will not be counted against students.
“It is important to note that this test section does not incorporate the Common Core and other improvements to test quality currently underway,” Mr. King said in a statement, referring to a new teaching curriculum and standards that are being adopted in New York and other states. “This year’s tests incorporate a small number of Common Core field test questions. Next year’s test will be fully aligned with the Common Core.”
Pearson, a test preparation company, has a $32 million contract with the state to make the exams more rigorous.
State Education Department officials were blind to the feelings of deaf students on this week’s English exams — heartlessly asking them questions about sounds such as the clickety-clack of a woman’s high heels and the rustle of wind blowing on leaves, educators claimed.
One sixth-grade teacher of hearing-impaired kids said they were completely thrown off by a lengthy listening passage rife with references to environmental noises — such as a cupboard door creaking open or the roar of a jet engine.
The kids were then asked to write how a boy who hears those sounds as music in his head is like a typical sixth-grader.
“My kids were looking at us like we had 10 heads. They said they didn’t understand the story,” the teacher said, referring to herself and a sign-language interpreter.
“It was all based on music and sounds in the world they don’t know,” added the perturbed teacher. “They definitely were upset.”
The teacher’s sound criticism was among a host of complaints about the new exams administered to students in Grades 3 to 8 this week, part of a five-year, $32 million deal with the testing company Pearson.
You may have noticed those two stories have one thing in common: Pearson. The giant company is also ‘field-testing’ its questions for next year’s tests — by extending the testing period for young kids this year, sometimes actually doubling the amount of time kids are being tested.
Not to pick on Pearson, but the company is offering $5 Starbucks cards to educators who will fill in its survey … and the opening sentences in the accompanying letter from this education giant contain basic grammatical errors.
In an effort to learn more about the challenges being faced by K-12 educators, would you please spare a few minutes to complete an online survey? It should take less than 15 minutes, and will provide us with very valuable feedback to improve our services and offerings.
The opening phrase, ‘In an effort….by K-12 educators,” modifies the closest noun or pronoun, which is YOU. So Pearson is asking me to fill out the survey so I can learn more?
Pineapples have caused an issue on some state tests.
The second sentence is compound, one subject (it) and two verbs (‘should take’ and ‘will provide’), and the grammatical rule is clear: no comma.
Much of the uproar seems to be coming from teachers, and cynics may suggest that’s because their ox is now being gored; after all, these tests are now being used to grade — and fire — teachers, so of course they are paying closer attention. Perhaps some teachers are late to the party, but so what! They’re here, and teachers like Anthony Cody have been in the forefront all along.
Peggy Robertson, a former public school teacher turned stay-at-home mom, leads the group, which she acknowledges has about 1,427 members — and no money — right now. “We are not against either testing or assessment, just this high stakes testing madness,” she told me. The number of Colorado families who kept their children at home last year was “five times more” than in 2010. It’s still only a few hundred, but Robertson is convinced that the numbers will grow “as more people become aware of the harm these tests are doing.”
There’s also a national effort, one that began in Texas, to slow down the testing express. As of April 23rd, 380 school boards in Texas, representing 1.8 million students, have signed this petition; that’s been rolled into a national petition.
What’s the alternative? This short piece was written by Pasi Sahlberg, the author of Finnish Lessons (Teachers College Press). It may make you think twice about the course we are on.
But it doesn’t follow that we could just ‘blow up’ our increasingly centralized approach and do what Finland does. Ted Kolderie of Education Evolving believes we need a new kind of school, one in which teachers have largely autonomous control. I’ve just finished reading the galleys of a new book, Liberating Teachers, that argues that position persuasively. Currently there are around 60 schools with autonomous teachers, cutting across all sorts of arrangements — district, chartered and independent. Some are union-affiliated, others are not. Urban, suburban and rural, serving students from preschool to age 21.
These schools are invariably small (like schools in Finland) and less reliant on standardized assessments (like Finnish schools).
And now — a final poem for April, Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s lovely sonnet, “How Do I Love Thee?”
I first thought it should be “How Do We Test Thee? Let Me Count the Ways” until I realized that we basically have a ‘one size fits all’ approach to testing. No way to get a sonnet out of that.
So I went back to the drawing board and produced the following (with apologies to EBB):
How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
Is it A? “I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of Being and ideal Grace.”
Or B? “I love thee to the level of everyday’s
Most quiet need, by sun and candle-light.
C? “I love thee freely, as men strive for Right;”
D? “I love thee purely, as they turn from Praise.”
Or “All of the Above?”
Please mark your answer below with a No. 2 pencil, taking care to fill in the box completely without marking the area outside the box. If you do not follow directions, the machine may not be able to read your answer, and you will be marked down accordingly.
Question: You moderate a lot of panel discussions at education meetings, and you have a reputation for doing a pretty good job at it. In fact, some of those appearances are embedded above in this post. Can you pass along some tips to the rest of us?
John: Sure, but why are you asking me now?
Question: Well, you’re not getting any younger, are you?
John: Fair enough. There’s really just one unbreakable commandment for running a worthwhile panel discussion: No opening remarks!
Question: Why not?
John: Because if I ask panelist so-and-so to make a few remarks, I have given up control of the microphone. That means when he or she goes off on a tangent or goes on too long, I cannot interrupt without being rude. But if it’s all Q&A, it’s always my microphone, and I can interrupt without being rude. Remember, it’s supposed to be a ‘discussion,’ not a series of presentations or ‘opening remarks.’ How many of these events have you been to where they never even get to a discussion because each panelist takes 10 or 15 minutes — even though the moderator had told them ‘5 minutes max!’
Tell me more...
Question: What are your other ‘rules’?
John: There are two expressions I try to use as often as possible. One is “I don’t understand,” and the other is “Tell me more.”
Question: Tell me more.
John: That’s cute.
Question: Well, I’m just trying to follow your example.
John: OK. Here’s why. When I hear jargon, even if I understand it, I will say “I don’t understand’ because that forces the panelist to come down to earth and speak in understandable English. He may be thinking that I am pretty stupid, but he will invariably provide a better, clearer explanation. “Tell me more” works on that same principle.
Question: So those are the secrets?
John: Well, there’s more. The moderator has to listen to what people are saying and respond to that. Some moderators seem to feel that it’s their job to ‘balance’ the conversation, giving equal time to everyone. I don’t worry about that. In fact, I often tell panelists that they have to speak up if they want to be heard. Life is unfair, and so are panel discussions.
Question: What else?
John: I always ask panelists ahead of time if there’s a question they want to be asked. If there is, I ask it, because that allows them to say what they would have said if there had been opening remarks. Everyone has a set speech, a shtick, and I want to make it easy for them to get it out there for the audience.
Question: How do you see the moderator’s role?
John: Good question. Kind of like a conductor.
Question: Orchestra or train?
John: Both, I guess. If the panel has been chosen well, then there will be different voices (instruments), and a good conductor will help them create something worth listening to. But a moderator is also driving a train toward a clear destination, greater understanding of the issue. Remember, the operative word is ‘discussion,’ but if you look at most convention programs, these events are usually billed as ‘panels,’ whatever that means. It’s all about having a decent conversation, one that sheds light and holds the audience’s interest.
Question: You feel pretty strongly about this.
John: Sure, because pedagogy matters. We shouldn’t be lecturing when we know that the more interactive and participatory an event is, the more likely it will be interesting to the audience.
Question: Is there an ideal number of panelists?
John: No, but two is too few. I would say that three or four is probably best. I’ve juggled as many as seven, but that’s no fun for anyone.
Question: What about taking questions from the audience?
John: Essential, but here the moderator has to be tough and occasionally rude. A lot of so-called questioners really want to hold forth with their opinions. I always make it clear that I won’t tolerate that, but even so someone always gets up and tries to make a speech. I am always forced to interrupt someone and ask (or demand) ‘What’s your question?’
Question: Your blog is usually about education. In fact, you usually complain about something or other. What’s up with this?
John: I am taking a bold stand against boredom, against lousy pedagogy and stultifying panels. Pretty courageous, huh?
Question: Chances are most people won’t read this far. You OK with that?
John: Well, if even one moderator behaves differently because of this, I will feel I have actually accomplished something.
Question: I suppose you think you’re pretty clever, putting all this information about moderating into Q&A form.
“The educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a Nation and a people.”
Surely everyone recognizes the 5-word phrase. Some of you may have garbled the phrase on occasion — I have — into something like ‘Our schools are drowning in a rising tide of mediocrity.”
But that’s not what “A Nation at Risk” said back in 1983. The report, issued by the National Commission on Excellence in Education, was a call to action on many levels, not an attack on schools and colleges. “Our society and its educational institutions seem to have lost sight of the basic purposes of schooling,” the Report states, immediately after noting that America has been “committing an act of unthinking, unilateral educational disarmament.” (emphasis added) Schools aren’t the villain in “A Nation at Risk;” rather, they are a vehicle for solving the problem.
Suppose that report were to come out now? What sort of tide is eroding our educational foundations? “A rising tide of (fill in the blank)?”
This is a relevant question because sometime in the next few months another National Commission, this one on “Education Equity and Excellence,” will issue its report. This Commission clearly hopes to have the impact of “A Nation at Risk.”
However, the two Commissions could hardly be more different. The 1983 Commission was set up to be independent, while the current one seems to be joined at the hip to the Department of Education.
Consider: Ronald Reagan did not want a Commission to study education because he wanted to abolish the U. S. Department of Education, which had been created by the man he defeated, Jimmy Carter. So Education Secretary Terrel Bell did it on his own.
The current Commission has the blessing of the White House and the Congress.
Secretary Bell asked the President of the University of Utah, David Gardner, to chair the Commission. He knew Gardner and trusted him to oversee the selection of the Commission members. Dr. Gardner then hired Milton Goldberg as Staff Director and they selected 15 members, plus two reliable political conservatives the White House insisted on. They asked the key education associations to nominate five candidates, then chose one from each association. They ignored the teacher unions and selected that year’s Teacher of the Year as a Commissioner. Meanwhile, Secretary Bell stayed on the sidelines, cannily keeping his distance from an effort that his boss was not in favor of.
Unlike Ted Bell, Education Secretary Arne Duncan seems to have been involved from the git-go. He has spoken to the group and recently intervened to extend its deadline. His Department named the co-chairs and all 28 members, who represent every possible constituency in the education establishment: rural, urban, African American, White, Hispanic, Asian-American, Native American, conservative, liberal and so on.
Rather than delicately balancing his Commission to be politically correct, Gardner, a University President, put five other people from higher education on his Commission and famously declared there would be “no litmus test” for Commission members.
Duncan has touched every base, at least once. Well, almost every base — no classroom teachers or school principals serve on Duncan’s Commission.
Gardner included out-of-the-box thinkers like Nobel Laureate Glenn T. Seaborg and Harvard physicist Gerald Holton. Duncan’s Commission is depressingly predictable, with the exception of Netflix founder Reed Hastings. Why no Tim Brown, Deborah Meier, John Seely Brown, Sal Khan, Laurene Powell, Larry Rosenstock or James Comer?
Because the “Risk” commission had no ex officio members, it had limited contact with the Department or the White House. Staff Director Milton Goldberg recalls that Secretary Bell read the 31-page draft report for the first time just one week before its release. (“Golly, it’s short,” was his initial reaction, Goldberg recalls.)
The current Commission has seven ex officio members, including Roberto Rodriguez of the White House and Martha Kanter, who is #2 in the Education Department. Not only that, it appears that the Department’s PR people are on hand at all times. No secrets, no surprises.
The earlier Commission held most of its meetings and hearings around the country. The current Commission held seven of its 12 meetings at the U. S. Department of Education, including the final five.
Given all that, it’s difficult to think of this as an ‘independent’ Commission. End of the day, it’s Arne Duncan’s Commission, established for the express purpose of finding ways to close the ‘resource gap’ in spending on education for poor kids in this country.
That’s a worthy goal, because the spending gap is huge. However, closing it won’t be easy. States are pretty much broke these days, so the money will have to come from Washington.
And that’s a problem, because no one in Washington seems to trust states or local school districts, which, after all, are responsible for the ‘savage inequalities’ in the first place. Because education is not a federal responsibility, Washington can send money and make rules but cannot send in the troops to punish misbehavior. As Michael Casserly, long-time Executive Director of the Council of the Great City Schools, dryly noted in the January meeting, “We haven’t really resolved this question about where state responsibility ends or where their capacity and willingness end, and where the federal government’s willingness and capacity and authority begin.”
There’s some history here. Earlier efforts to equalize spending haven’t worked all that well. The early days of Title One of ESEA saw federal dollars that were supposed to be spent on disadvantaged kids going instead to build swimming pools for suburban kids or for ‘teaching machines’ that gathered dust in locked closets. States and local districts — seemingly by instinct — took the federal money and then cut their own spending by that amount, until the feds made that illegal.
And there’s also the knotty problem of past experience with spending more on poor kids. It hasn’t produced results in Newark, NJ, or Kansas City, or anyplace else as far as I know.
More than a few of the Commissioners see the 15,000 local school boards as an impediment; they are, however, a fact of American political life. It should be noted that the Commissioner who wrote the first draft of the forthcoming report, Matt Miller, is also the author of “First, Let’s Kill All the School Boards,” which appeared in The Atlantic in January/February 2008.
It doesn't seem as if the new commission will match these efforts.
The Commission wants more preschool programs and the most qualified teachers to work in low income districts, and so on, but those are local or state decisions, and most members of the Commission — those speaking up at the meetings — do not seem to trust anyone but Washington.
So if Washington can’t just write checks to close the resource gap because it can’t control states and school districts, what does it do? Several Commissioners spoke approvingly of a more “muscular” federal governmental role in education, but it’s not clear how it would flex those muscles.
End of the day, the Commission’s big goal is to energize public opinion, just as “A Nation at Risk” did.
Read through meeting transcripts (as I have been doing) and you will find lots of discussion about how to sell the public on the big idea of what Co-Chair Edley calls a “collective responsibility to provide a meaningful opportunity for high quality education for each child.”
Shorthand for that: spend more to educate poor kids.
Slogans emerge in the discussion: “Sharing responsibility for every child,” “From nation at risk to nation in peril,” and “Raise the bar and close the gap”
At one point a Department PR man took the microphone offer a suggestion. “In the communication shop, myself and Peter Cunningham, my boss, are always happy to help you guys through this process, to the extent to which you — you know, you’d like our help. But “one nation under-served” would be kind of a way that to kind of capture that, and harken back to sort of patriotic tones and kind of a unifying theme, and the fact that you know, we’re not hitting the mark we should, as a country and international competitiveness. So, I just put that out there.”
What will probably be ‘put out there’ in April will be a document designed to make us morally outraged at the unfairness of it all and, at the same time, convince us that failing to educate all children is going to doom America to second-class status in the world. Expect rhetorical questions like “Would a country that’s serious about education reform spend twice as much on wealthy kids as it does on poor kids?”
I am virtually certain that the new Report will reflect the Administration’s technocratic faith that pulling certain policy levers will produce dramatic change — despite years of evidence to the contrary. (It’s part of ‘a rising tide of predictability’ that inhabits our land, as positions harden and debate and inquiry disappear.)
The real problem is not the Constitution’s limits on the federal role in education. For all its talk of public education as ‘the civil rights issue of our time,” this Administration, like the one before it, simply does not have a powerful vision of what genuine education might be. Full of the same hubris that led to No Child Left Behind, it believes in technical solutions.
Channeling Dr. King, this might be Secretary Duncan’s version of that famous speech: “I have a dream that all children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin or the content of their character but by their scores on standardized tests.”
That’s harsh, I know, but this Commission and this Administration ought to be asking other important rhetorical questions, such as “Would a country that’s serious about education reform devote as much as 20% of classroom time to test preparation and testing?”
or: “Would a nation that believes in the potential of all children spend about $10,000 per child on schooling and then measure the results with a $15 instrument — and swear by the results produced by those cheap tests?”
or: “Would a nation that believes in education develop a ‘reform agenda’ that attacks teachers knowing that, even absent such attacks, 50% of teachers have been leaving the profession in the first five years?”
While I agree with what I expect to be the Commission’s findings (“We haven’t been serious about leveling the playing field in education”), I find it impossible to see this Commission as anything but narrowly political.
More than that, however, I think this Commission represents a missed opportunity to engage American citizens on a more fundamental issue: the education of all our children.
Suppose the Administration had been willing to ask a group of independent thinkers an honest question–and been prepared to deal with whatever answers emerged?
My question would be “Does a rising tide threaten our educational foundations and our very future today? If so, a tide of what?”
I can find evidence for the following: Avarice, regulation, indifference, hostility, testing, and irrelevance.
You can make the case that a rising tide of avarice is a threat. After all, K-12 education is a reliable pot of big bucks, almost $600 billion a year for K-12 alone. That’s why for-profit charter schools are proliferating, why Pearson and McGraw-Hill are expanding voraciously, and why tech companies are banging on the doors of desperate school boards with ‘solutions’ to sell.
Is there a rising tide of hostility, suspicion and finger-pointing? Ask almost any teacher.
The rising tide of testing hasn’t crested. With new emphasis on evaluating all teachers according to student test scores, the high water mark is nowhere in sight.
What about a rising tide of regulation, much of it coming from Washington? Ask principals in Tennessee, who now must spend multiple hours evaluating each teacher and filling in forms to satisfy the state, which is in turn satisfying the U. S. Department’s rules for “Race to the Top.”
A rising tide of irrelevance threatens the entire enterprise. I believe public education is drowning because schools have not adapted to a changed and changing world. Consider: Of the three historical justifications for school, only one applies today. I write about this at length in The Influence of Teachers.
In the past, you had to go to school because the knowledge was stored there. Today, information is everywhere, 24/7, which means that kids need to learn how to formulate questions so they can turn that flood of information into knowledge. But most of our schools are ‘answer factories’ that offer ‘regurgitation education.’
In the past, you went to school to be socialized to get along with kids from different backgrounds, race, religion and gender. Today, however, there are Apps for that. So schools and the adults in them need to help kids understand the power — and limitations — of those Apps and technology in general. After all, kids need to learn that the 14-year-old they’re texting (and sexting?) may actually be a 40 year old sicko. Our kids may be digital natives, but that doesn’t guarantee they are or will become digital citizens. Schools need to fill that vacuum.
Finally, schools back then provided custodial care so your parents could hold down jobs. We still need custodial care, but when schools provide marginal education and fail to harness technology in useful ways, they become dangerous places for some children, and boring places for others. We lose at least 1,000,000 students a year, dropouts who may be hoping to find something more relevant on the street. (And, sorry, raising the dropout age to 18 will not solve the problem.)
Are there existing models of schools that are relevant to America’s future? Can we create incentives to expand those model programs to serve 50,000,000 children and youth?
I believe the answer to both questions is ‘yes.’ But first we have to ask those questions.
Before issuing its report, the Duncan Commission would do well to re-read “A Nation at Risk,” especially the last recommendation.
“The Federal Government has the primary responsibility to identify the national interest in education. It should also help fund and support efforts to protect and promote that interest. It must provide the national leadership to ensure that the Nation’s public and private resources are marshaled to address the issues discussed in this report.” (emphasis in original)
The Merrow Report 
