Egocentric Thinking or What’s the Trouble with Belief?

I decided to mess around with making a video for my students as I begin to teach research methods to graduate students. In this course I push ideas such as clarity of thinking, accuracy in both thinking and in how one relies on source material, precision in thought processes, relevance of information to one’s argument, the depth and breadth of one’s investigation of both the relevant literature and the methodological approach one takes as a researcher, the logical development of the argument, the significance of the argument and, finally, whether or not one has been fair to all sides of a given position–this last point is not to argue that one cannot take a stand, rather that one must at the very least acknowledge alternative stances and, if one wishes, pick them apart.

This YouTube video will serve as an introduction to the class in which we discuss issues related to the difference between belief and rigorous research. I sort of like what I made here. I think it serves as a good introduction to the topic, but, then, I am the creator and am a bit biased.

My university is insisting that we all teach using technology to a greater extent in order to look good for an accreditation review upcoming in 2010. So there you have it.

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NCLB Causes Harm to Children Putting the Nation at Risk

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David Berliner and Sharon Nichols, both well respected educational researchers, claim that NCLB is causing substantial harm to children, to schools, to teachers and to administrators of those schools that has the chilling effect of placing the Nation at Risk.

Limiting their remarks to only the high-stakes testing requirements of NCLB, Berliner and Nichols said:

The stakes are high when students’ standardized-test performance results in grade retention or failure to graduate from high school. The stakes are high when teachers and administrators can lose their jobs or, conversely, receive large bonuses for student scores, or when humiliation or praise for teachers and schools occurs in the press as a result of test scores. This federal law requires such high-stakes testing in all states.

More than 30 years ago, the eminent social scientist Donald T. Campbell warned about the perils of measuring effectiveness via a single, highly consequential indicator: “The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decisionmaking,” he said, “the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor.” High-stakes testing is exactly the kind of process Campbell worried about, since important judgments about student, teacher, and school effectiveness often are based on a single test score. This exaggerated reliance on scores for making judgments creates conditions that promote corruption and distortion. In fact, the overvaluation of this single indicator of school success often compromises the validity of the test scores themselves. Thus, the scores we end up praising and condemning in the press and our legislatures are actually untrustworthy, perhaps even worthless.

Campbell’s law is ubiquitous, and shows up in many human endeavors. Businesses, for example, regularly become corrupt as particular indicators are deemed important in judging success or failure. If stock prices are the indicator of a company’s success, for example, then companies like Enron, Qwest, Adelphia, and WorldCom manipulate that indicator to make sure they look good. Lives and companies are destroyed as a result. That particular indicator of business success became untrustworthy as both it and the people who worked with it were corrupted.

Similarly, when the number of criminal cases closed is the indicator chosen to judge the success of a police department, two things generally happen: More trials are brought against people who may be innocent or, with a promise of lighter sentences, deals are made with accused criminals to get them to confess to crimes they didn’t commit.

When the indicators of success and failure in a profession take on too much value, they invariably are corrupted. Those of us in the academic world know that when researchers are judged primarily by their publication records, they have occasionally fabricated or manipulated data. This is just another instance of Campbell’s law in action.

We have documented hundreds of examples of the ways in which high-stakes testing corrupts American education in a new book, Collateral Damage. Using Campbell’s law as a framework, we found examples of administrators and teachers who have cheated on standardized tests. Educators, acting just like other humans do, manipulate the indicators used to judge their success or failure when their reputations, employment, or significant salary bonuses are related to those indicators.

clipped from www.edweek.org In his 2007 State of the Union address, President Bush claimed success for the federal No Child Left Behind Act. “Students are performing better in reading and math, and minority students are closing the achievement gap,” he said But, as with Iraq, a substantial body of evidence challenges his claim. We believe that this federal law, now in its sixth year, puts American public school students in serious jeopardy. Extensive reviews of empirical and theoretical work, along with conversations with hundreds of educators across the country, have convinced us that if Congress does not act in this session to fundamentally transform the law’s accountability provision, young people and their educators will suffer serious and long-term consequences. We note in passing that only people who have no contact with children could write legislation demanding that every child reach a high level of performance in three subjects, thereby denying that individual differences exist.

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Gallup Poll Results Indicate Majority of Americans Support some form of Gun Control

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The most recent Gallup Poll (done before VT) indicates that the majority of Americans favor a combination of new legislation and stricter enforcement of existing gun control laws. The poll also indicates that only a minority of American homes (43%) indicate gun ownership, the majority of those households are in the South or rural areas of the United States. But why should I speak when the clip does a better job…

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Teaching for Achievement or Teaching for Understanding?

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I sat through an active presentation by Steven Turner in which he asked whether teaching for achievement or teaching for understanding is appropriate in public schools. In the current climate many of the participants at this session agreed that teaching for achievement as an isolated concept equates to teaching skills appropriate for testing with little or no evidence of transferability or sustainability. We also tended to agree that teaching for understanding led to students developing critical thinking, reflection, rigorous sense of internalization of knowledge. One participant argued that teaching for achievement meant teaching to a predetermined, external set of standards while teaching for understanding had no predetermined borders but is broadly focused on relevant issues and knowledge. What also developed from this discussion was a consensus that if one teaches for understanding this does not negate the need to teach the necessary skills required for particular understanding. The two are not mutually exclusive. Furthermore, the great irony is that when children are taught with understanding as the goal of the process test scores rise in a direct relationship to student engagement. If, however, children are taught only for achievement their test scores are erratic and, perhaps more importantly, students become resistant to school and schooling. Turner’s work is worthy of a second look and some follow-up studies as well.

In a second session, Steven J. Thornton and Keith C. Barton presented a paper entitled Why history education is impossible without social studies. This work suggests that teaching history as a separate academic discipline is impossible without relating the history being taught to the other social studies, areas of study that include economics, political science, sociology, psychology, anthropology, geography and the like. I was drawn to the session not only because of Thornton’s work, but by the title of their paper. I have been thinking about how to effectively link the social studies to teaching history as many social studies educators are doing but I simply assumed that history serves as the underlying foundation for the rest of the social studies. Thornton and Barton suggest a different relationship, one that understands history as the factual exemplar for the theoretical concepts endemic to the rest of the social studies. An example they gave is the American Revolution. One cannot understand the revolution without understanding the concept from political science of representation or the concept from economics of taxation. While a gross oversimplification, the point they are making is that political science and economics provide us with theoretical constructions while the narrative of the revolution transforms those abstractions into narrative reality. History, in this sense, is the exemplar that provides students with concrete examples of weighty though abstract concepts. I really liked this take on the problem raised.

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So You Want Evidence Based Education?

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This week the American Educational Research Association is holding its annual meeting in Chicago. This important conference brings together researchers and teachers from all areas of the spectrum of education and, as such, is one of the more exciting places to be as a professional educator. In this post I am going to summarize some of the more important points I heard today.

David Berliner spoke about the state of education in the United States today as a political space in which the ENDS of education have been taken away from professional educators and the MEANS of education have been corrupted by the reduction of knowing to a single test-score number. As test scores become the ENDS of education, primarily due to NCLB, then the MEANS of education become teaching to the test. When knowledge as an END is replaced by test scores then the only thing worth knowing is “is that going to be on the test?”

Another speaker argued that there is simply too much policy, policy layered upon policy upon policy. Fossilized reforms are something like geological layers as legislators fail to review either old policy prior to passage of new policy or evidence in support of policy legislation in the first place. The result is a web (more like a rabbit warren) of overlapping policies and legislation that boggles even the least capable minds.

Perhaps my favorite speaker argued that we do not live in an age of educational uncertainty. Quite the contrary, NCLB has placed a strangle hold on certainty. Schools are certain as to what programs count and what to teach in order to avoid the degradation of being labeled low performing. The problem is not certainty but faulty logic. NCLB is based on a confused logical structure where knowledge is reduced to test scores, schools are expected to solve social problems, and reading and math instruction are scripted and uniform across irregular contexts. This speaker called not for evidence based teaching as NCLB does, rather he argued that there ought to be EVIDENCE BASED LEGISLATION. I suggested to a colleague sitting next to me that perhaps those that pass the laws ought to be subject to the consequences of their own legislation. Congress ought to be forced to sit for say the 12th grade test. It was also suggested that no legislation be passed that does harm to anyone.

Finally, a speaker argued that education cannot be reduced to a model that corresponds in any way to producing widgets in a factory. By that logic FedX Delivers–Teachers Teach holds supreme. The fact is, however, that teachers do not exist, only teachers in a context exist and only in that context can teachers navigate through the murky waters that make up the classroom. Teaching is not something that can be planned except in broad brush terms if only because the unexpected is bound to happen at any moment of the day. Teachers are not tutor technicians preparing their students for tests. In the end, high stakes testing is blocking effective implementation of curriculum that encourages students to solve problems, to think about difficult problems, to rigorously reflect on ideas and concepts, and to remain curious about the world in which we all live. American educators for years have been critical of the centralization of European and Asian educational systems. The irony is that Europe and Asian nations are becoming decentralized as the United States moves toward a centralized national system of education.

I expect to be NCLB’d out by the end of the week. More to come later.

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Problems for the No Child Left Behind Act

I have attached an important paper the addresses issues of the pressure placed on students by NCLB high stakes testing requirements. Among the findings is that high-stakes testing pressure leads to increased school drop-out rates and that there is no credible evidence that points to increases in NAEP test scores in 4th and 8th graders. It is worth the read in spite of its length.

The time has come to rethink the harm being done to children in United States public schools as a direct result of this administration’s education policy. Based on the “Miracle in Texas,” another failed educational policy, NCLB is destroying a generation of children. Let sanity prevail.

read more | digg story

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Fail Now or Fail Later–Such a Choice?

This post recently appeared on the National Education Association’s web site. It is worth a close look.

NCLB AYP: Fail Now or Fail Later
Study Predicts Most Great Lakes Schools Will Be ‘Failing’ by 2014

Most schools in the Great Lakes region will labeled “failing” by 2014,
according to a study released by the Great Lakes Center for
Educational Research and the Education Policy Studies Laboratory at Arizona State University.

“The Impact of the Adequate Yearly Progress Requirement of the Federal No Child Left Behind Act on the Great Lakes Region,” (PDF, 551KB, 70 pages) is
the first multi-state research to use actual state data to predict how
schools will fare under the No Child Left Behind law’s current Adequate
Yearly Progress (AYP) requirements.

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Violence and NCLB

Nel Noddings once wrote, “Education should be emancipatory, not predatory.” Colman McCarthy (2006) writes, “Tests represent fear-based learning, not desire-based learning.” Here then is the problem: If the current trend in American education is, in fact, fear-based and, thereby predatory, how can we think about moving the classroom in the direction of emancipation and a desire-based curriculum?

I find the Hillocks (2002) informative on this point. It is not that testing is, in itself, an evil that we must tolerate. What is problematic is the way in which testing is used in the United States. Several points can be mentioned:

1. Current testing does not necessarily test what is purported to be taught. In other words, tests do not align well with curriculum.
2. The purpose of testing is not well understood, even by those who are responsible for the selection and administration of the tests. The simple fact is that large scale testing is appropriate when looking at general trends but when used to identify and isolate individual students or schools they are being misused at the deepest levels.

Furthermore, Applebee (1996) argues that curriculum is best understood as a conversation that is locally engaged in and must include multiple stakeholders such as the school community, parents, teachers, administrators, students, and others that have an interest in the development of young people within a community. By imposing external curriculum schools move away from their role as democratic institutions that have as an underlying purpose to develop democratic, critical thinking among the children they serve. Imposed curriculum, furthermore, removes motivation and interest on the part of students and, often, their teachers as well changing the curriculum from one that is based on desire to one based on fear.

Freire (1970) asks us to ask this important question when beginning to analyze the actions of those in power as they develop programs that effect the rest of us: Whose interests are being served by the actions or programs suggested or enacted into law? In the case of high-stakes testing as the principle outcome of the process of education the interests of test developers and publishers are clearly being served by this billion dollar industry. But, are the interests of students, teachers and the community as a whole being served? I argue that they are not if for no other reason than the despotism of the test undermines democratic institutions by modeling an undemocratic approach to teaching and learning the result of which is not lost on students or their teachers. In the end, those of us asking the critical questions are caught up in the futility of attempting to challenge the system that produces legislation in a democratic republic that is, at its core, undemocratic.

Widespread evidence points to schools and school districts cheating on reported scores. Other evidence points to states that revise their state assessments in order to appear to comply with No Child Left Behind. Still more evidence points to misrepresentation of the data reported by the Department of Education and President Bush designed to make NCLB appear to be the cause of progress made in gains reported but when subjected to disaggregation of the data shows that NCLB may not have had any impact on rising scores. Further evidence points to higher dropout rates since the inception of NCLB. Overall the evidence developed by neutral investigators tends toward the negative. Not surprisingly, evidence from conservative and religious right sources consistently sing the praises of NCLB but I question their impartiality. Work that I have reported on shows clearly that the impact of high-stakes testing on teaching has a negative impact when teachers do not consistently reflect on their own teaching practice (Passman, 2001).

It is important that sanity be restored to American education. Reducing the process of education to a single test score does violence to students that can least afford it. Failing to properly fund public education does violence to urban and rural communities that can least afford it (Kozol, 1992). Thinking that we can improve education by creating fear among teachers and their students is short sighted and, in a democracy, unthinkable.

References

Applebee, A. N. (1996). Curriculum as conversation: Transforming traditions of teaching and learning. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Freire, P. (1970). Pedagogy of the oppressed (Revised ed.). New York: Continuum.

Hillocks, G. (2002). The testing trap : how state writing assessments control learning. New York: Teachers College Press.

Kozol, J. (1992). Savage inequalities: Children in America’s schools. New York: Harper.

McCarthy, C. (2006). Test-driven teaching isn’t character-driven, March 19, 2007, from http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0607-26.htm

Passman, R. (2001). Experience with student-centered teaching and learning in high-stakes assessment environments. Education, 122(1), 189-199.

 

 

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NCLB and Images of Teachers and Teaching

In a recent article in the Harvard Educational Review, Cochran-Smith & Lytle (2006) offer a well reasoned critique of NCLB. They analyze both the language of the act itself as well as the language of the tools used to implement the act published by the U.S. Department of Education. Cochran-Smith & Lytle explore in depth what they refer to as three images of teaching or, even more specifically, the “central common conceptions symbolic of basic attitudes and orientations about teachers and teaching that are explicit or implicit in NCLB (p. 668).” This article argues that NCLB is disingenuous toward teachers leaving them void of active agency as contributors to their own professional practice. The argument is further supported as they point to multiple instances where NCLB oversimplifies the processes of teacher learning and teacher practice because the act relies on a reductionist view of teaching and learning. NCLB focuses on a transmission model of teaching and learning at the expense of all other methods and models, this in spite of the fact that the past 30 years have pointed us in more constructivist approaches to classroom practice.

Cochran-Smith & Lytle also argue that NCLB has multiple detrimental effects on schools, students, teachers, administrators, the communities served by schools, and the nation as a whole. They argue that NCLB undermines the broad democratic purpose of education in our nation. Public schooling, since the late 19th century, has been, at least in part, dedicated to the development of a productive, contributing citizen; active members of the body politic. They argue that NCLB, by removing democratic initiative and decision making from local and state authorities, effectively removes decision making from the classroom. The imposition of a top-down system of regulations for public schooling flies in the face of democratic principles, hence NCLB undermines democratic principles by teaching teachers and their students that following orders is more important than thinking about the source or legitimacy of those orders.

Cochran-Smith & Lytle also remark on the effect NCLB has had on narrowing the curriculum by privileging reading and math at the expense of social studies, science and the arts. What is more disturbing is that when considering reading NCLB only considers the technical aspects of the reading process and then only follows a single model for the transmission of reading skills to students. There is no effort to address competing models, for reading for aesthetic pleasure, or for reading for content and information. Some studies have found that better than 71% of American schools have dropped social studies, science, and the arts from their curriculum and that the majority of these schools are those that are historically under-served in terms of both money and staff.

I am appalled by the problems that NCLB has created. I suspect that they are far more serious in both the short and long term than the problems the act purports to correct. I will be spending some time over the next few weeks thinking deeply about the issues presented by NCLB. I will address questions such as whose interests are really being served by NCLB. I will deconstruct the language of the act and the supporting documents that are designed to support the implementation of the act. As I do this I will be looking seriously at work by David Berliner (1985, 2002) and his colleagues and Walt Haney (2000) as well as a number of other researchers. I believe this is an important debate and invite broad discussion.

References

Amrein, A. L., & Berliner, D. C. (2002, March 28). High-stakes testing, uncertainty, and student learning. Retrieved July 19, 2002, from http://epaa.asu.edu/epaa/v10n18/

Berliner, D. C., & Biddle, B. J. (1995). The manufactured crisis: Myths, fraud, and the attack on America’s public schools. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.

Cochran-Smith, M., & Lytle, S. L. (2006). Troubling images of teaching in No Child Left Behind. Harvard Educational Review, 76(4), 668-697.

Haney, W. (2000, Aug 19). The myth of the Texas miracle in Education. Retrieved July 22, 2002, from http://epaa.asu.edu/epaa/v8n41/

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NCLB and Highly Qualified Teachers

Over the next few weeks I want to explore some of the implications of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) especially as NCLB impacts attitudes directly engaged with teaching and the image of teachers in general. NCLB is deeply problematic at many levels, not the least of which are the many tensions that are explicit within the language of the act itself. In this post, I want to explore the notion that highly qualified teachers, as defined by language in NCLB, are those with content area knowledge that can give their knowledge to their students.

The notion that content knowledge can be transmitted from teacher to student is one that professionals from many disciplines over the past 30 years have dismissed as being far too narrow and simplistic to be of any significant value for serious classroom consideration. Both teaching and learning are socially constructed, dependent on local knowledge, customs, and ideas, and deeply embedded in class, status and other cultural issues. Learning is not a matter of absorbing what another tells us, rather it is a complex pattern of acquisition of new and important ideas, finding parallels to one’s own prior knowledge, experimenting with ways of integrating that knowledge into new and meaningful constructions, and finally making the newly integrated knowledge public—only to repeat the entire process over and over again. In this sense, learning is a messy, contextualized process that is dependent on well informed and well educated teachers.

NCLB, however, defines highly qualified teachers as those that have content knowledge they can give to their students—to transmit their wealth of knowledge and experience to their students regardless of context, culture or other mitigating factors. This can and will be done by applying scientifically based methods (SBM) to the classroom because SBM is what works. In short, NCLB takes the position that just about anyone with adequate content knowledge can teach what they know to others if they are provided with the appropriate SBM to apply, sort of like a salve to an itch, in the classroom. This view understands students as a disease for which the cure is the SBM applied to them by content savvy teachers. The problem is that there is no SBM, no unbiased research to support this position. What little research there is that supports the NCLB position comes from think tanks that support NCLB. Relying on these results is a bit like parents relying on a study that points to benefits of delayed toilet training funded by the manufacturer of Pampers! Biased funders of what passes for research do not present reliable, trustworthy findings.

Classroom teaching is a complex, fluid experience as any experienced teacher will relate. The act of teaching is not guided by a single size fits all approach anymore than it is fair to assume that everyone would be pleased to sit down to a meal of fried grasshoppers. Teachers are adept at making quick and necessary adjustments to their teaching because they are constantly making informal judgments about the progress of their students in the classroom. Teachers gain this expertise in two ways. First, through professional training in schools that emphasize pedagogy, lead to effective practicum, clinical and student teaching experiences and finally to on the job experience. Secondly, teachers seek advanced degrees to improve their understanding of teaching and learning so as to be more effective in the classroom. Experienced teachers know, both practically and instinctively to be wary of those that introduce the absolutely perfect program, the one guaranteed to fix everything. They have seen it all before. They know that what works varies from day to day, class to class, year to year. What I did in my 1^st period English class may or may not work in my 4^th period repeat of the same content material. If I am not aware of that then I will fail my students in both the short and long terms. NCLB makes no room for this kind of reflection.

Just as an aside, I have been wondering lately why those who most ardently support NCLB and SBM tend to reject science when it comes to evidence supporting evolution? It seems curious that science is such a fickle partner!

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Lies, More Lies, and Damned Lies–Oh Yes, No Child Left Behind?

More results from NCLB are in and, not surprisingly, the results point to an administration that overtly chooses to place a positive spin on those results even when no such connection can be asserted. The administration, and specifically President Bush, has been singing the praises of the NCLB legislation as the most recent scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) show increases (although not necessarily significant increases) in reading and math among 9 and 13 year old school children.

President Bush likes to cite the “long-term-trend” NAEP as proof that the No Child Left Behind Act is working. The gains are significant only for 9- and 13-year-olds in math and 9-year-olds in reading. What’s more, the gains fall into a five-year testing window, and only two of those years occurred after the law took effect.

Although the results for 9-year-olds on the reading test are positive, researchers say they can’t be linked to the law. The testing window extends back to 1999—three years before President Bush signed the NCLB legislation into law and even before he was president.

The president displays a profound misunderstanding of the way in which statistics are interpreted. His view is not uncommon among the vast majority of the population with little or no training in statistical analysis. But, Mr. Bush has advisers that are fully capable of making appropriate inferences based on the numbers they see and they choose to adopt a populist stance, one that turns in their own favor, because they know that the audience they are trying to reach are as ignorant about the meaning of the numbers as is their boss. Clearly, this administration operates under the assumption that a lie told often enough soon looses its status as a lie and becomes the truth. Shame on the rest of us for falling victim to these lies.

Education Week

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High-Stakes Testing Doesn’t Increase Student Achievement

Reported by the NEA (National Education Association) with regard to a study prepared by Nichols, Glass, and Berliner, the NEA states the following:

Using several analyses of National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) test data from 25 states, a link between pressures associated with high-stakes testing and student achievement could not be established. The results of this research suggest that increases in testing pressure are related to increased retention in grade and drop-out rates.

The study, High-Stakes Testing and Student Achievement: Problems for the No Child Left Behind Act,” was conducted by Sharon L. Nichols, Gene V. Glass, and David C. Berliner of the Education Policy Studies Laboratory at the Arizona State University College of Education.

The executive summary is available here. The full report (PDF, 118 pages) is available at the Education Policy Studies Laboratory Web site. September 2005

It is certainly worth reading the executive summary if not the full report from EPSU.

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Really Cool Action Research

A colleague and I are working with two classroom teachers in Chicago as they introduce their 1st and 2nd grade bilingual students to Color Coded Reading.  CCR is a strategy that focuses on students developing higher order questions, especially synthesis and evaluation questions, that relate to text being read.  The practice works for both content area text and narrative text making it one of the more flexible reading strategies.  More of this project to come in the next few weeks.  For now, let me say I am having a ball collecting data on this project.  I must be a really good geek to think that data collection is fun.

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