I have an imperfect memory from the beginning of a middle school — was it sixth grade? Seventh? — science class. But it stands out singularly in my memory of my schooling.

It was the beginning of the year, perhaps even the first day of school. He called on me. I don’t remember what the question was. But I do remember how I felt.

I sat there, uncomfortable, searching. I felt my body growing tense. I felt first embarassed and then afraid.

“I don’t know,” I said, little more than a whisper.

He smiled. “That’s the correct answer — for now. You don’t know, but you will learn. Why else are you in school?” He turned to the rest of the class, “Does anyone else know?” And then he continued with the lesson.

Until that point in school, things came naturally to me and I remember feeling dread and panic that I didn’t already know something. How can I not know this thing? I felt relief and gratitude.

I don’t know that the teacher knows what a gift he gave me that day. I hope that he knows — that he intentionally asked something we unlikely to know, to remind us why we are in school — but I continue to wish that I could tell him. But I think the greatest gift I can give is to learn from his example and give that gift to my students.

Although I still dislike being wrong, I have carried this lesson with me. I know now that being wrong and being ignorant is not a permanent state.

Echo Bridge, Waban, Massachusetts

The rock looked inviting.

Rocks, as I am sure you know, do not often look inviting. But this one did. Its cold, rough, mossy surface jutted out over the Charles River. It was bathed in sunlight.

I had not been exploring Hemlock Gorge very long, but I wanted to sit. And I wanted to read in the sunlight. What did it matter that I was wearing a business suit and a light trench coat, and had a laptop bag with two books slung across my shoulders? The river spirits wouldn’t care how I was dressed.

The soles of my shoes slipped and I was afraid of falling in. But, settling myself on the rock, I looked out at the river. I felt like child again, in a world of unlimited possibilities.

I pulled Ahead of All Parting from out my bag.

Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels’
hierarchies? and even if one of them pressed me
suddenly against his heart: I would be consumed
in that overwhelming existence. For beauty is nothing
but the beginning of terror, which we still are just able to
   endure,
and we are so awed because it serenely disdains
to annihilate us. Every angel is terrifying.

–Rainer Maria Rilke, from “The First Elegy”, Ahead of All Parting (Stephen Mitchell, trans. and ed.)

The river spirits heard as I sang out the first four of the Rilke’s Duino Elegies in their entirety.

After sitting for a time, I slipped my way off the rock, careful knowing things break. I walked along the river bed, using trees and rocks as handholds, avoiding poison ivy. Looking just at the leaves, I don’t think I would have recognized it. I recognized it more from the vine snaking around the trees, with the roots digging into the bark.

I finally reached the bridge. While doing an errand for a client at the bank on Monday, I had to drive the area where Route 9 meets Route 128. Although I have been to that area, I had never seen the Hemlock Gorge Reservation. Had I not had that errand to run, I may never have. I saw the stonework bridge, with its big barrel spans from the road. When I saw the stairs leading up the side of it, I figured it was a railroad bridge.

Some whim told me to climb up. And I followed it. There were no railroad tracks, nor road. The bridge is a pedestrian walkway.

I stood looking over the Charles River, thinking of poetry, thinking of this bridge as a picturesque setting for a scene in a novel. I looked up to the sky and thought of the opening stanza of the Rilke’s “First Elegy”.

A woman stooped by the stairs on the other side of the bridge. Her red dog with its hoary muzzle trotted over to me. I knelt down. He sniffed my hand, circled me and then presented his head. I petted him while the woman walked over.

“Excuse me, ma’am, does this bridge have a name?”

She smiled. “Yes, this is Echo Bridge.” She told me how it was part of the old Boston aqueduct system, how it had just recently been employed after the recent troubles eastern Massachusetts had with its drinking water. She walked off.

I thought about shouting off the edge of the bridge and seeing if anything happened except scaring a number of birds.

“Oh, I forgot to mention,” she called to me. “There’s a little wooden platform on this side of the bridge. That’s where you’ll get the echo.”

I had explored that platform on my walk. I had thought it strange, but it gave a handsome view of some of the nice mill buildings.

Standing there, I wished I had a volume of the poetry of W.B. Yeats. I wondered if my voice would complete his “Man and the Echo.” I heard my own voice come back to me as I recited two poems by Keats from memory. First, “Ode to a Nightingale” and then one of my newer favorites.

When I have fears that I may cease to be
  Before my pen has glean’d my teeming brain,
Before high piled books, in charactry,
  Hold like rich garners the full ripen’d grain:
When I behold, upon the night’s starr’d face,
  Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance
And think that I may never live to trace
  Their shadows, with the magic hand of chance;
And when I feel, fair creature of an hour,
  That I may never look upon thee more,
Never have relish in the fairy power
  Of unreflecting love;–then on the shore
Of a wide world I stand alone, and think
Till love and fame to nothingness do sink.

–John Keats

In This Essay

“Should Kids Be Bribed to Do Well in School?” by Amanda Ripley, TIME Magazine, Volume 175, Number 15 (April 19, 2010)

On the Surprising Science of Motivation by Dan Pink, TED

Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us by Dan Pink

Punished By Rewards by Alfie Kohn

I stopped dead as I looked at the magazine racks in my local Barnes&Noble about two weeks ago. On the cover, a little girl was sitting at a desk in front of stacks of cash, with bills falling from the desktop to the floor. The title asked: Should Schools Bribe Kids?

I felt revulsion.

Alfie Kohn’s Punished by Rewards was one of the first books on education that I read. Although Kohn’s book focuses strongly on the effect of rewards and incentives in the rearing of children, he also discusses incentives in the workplace. His arguments were compelling and I could see their relevance in my own life. As I wrote in “Racing to the Test”, my pay-for-performance incentive plan doesn’t motivate me.

After reading Alfie Kohn’s work, I saw Dan Pink’s TED Lecture On the Surprising Science of Motivation. His work was congruent with the work of Kohn, though I didn’t see the nuances at first. I’ve watched the video perhaps four or five times now. At first, I focused on his arguments that incentives inhibit creative thinking. Pink also talks about how incentives actually boost performance for production of unit-driven tasks, such as Adam Smith’s example of creating pins or in the reading of a number of books.

Even with these two works in mind, I bought the TIME Magazine. I hoped to find that the work of the economist was one more piece of evidence supporting my conclusions.

The article describes four experiments designed by Roland Fryer Jr., the Harvard economist who wanted to test market forces in learning. The experiments were:

• in New York City, paying fourth- and seventh-graders for earning higher test scores;
• in Washington, D.C., paying sixth-, seventh-, and eighth-graders for certain behaviors, such as attendance;
• in Chicago, paying ninth-graders for earning As, Bs, and Cs;
• and, in Dallas, paying second-graders for each book they read.

And my predictions were mostly right. I thought they would all be failures, but one surprised me.

The schools with pay for performance did boost some test scores but not consistently. And the improved performance on specific tests did not translate to improved performance on the national tests that determine America’s international standing in education. If I were to pay you — well, most of you — right now to solve a second order differential equation, most of you could not do it because most of you have never learned to solve second order differential equations. Paying a student to get a better grade without teaching the student the techniques of how to get a better grade is much the same.

But the one program that seemed to have the most effect was paying second-graders for each book they read. The students earned their money after taking a short quiz on the book. I balked, thinking that such a program would kill a child’s natural inclination to read. Alfie Kohn makes a strong argument for incentives killing internal motivation. He describes a reading incentive program they had when I was a kid. After reading so many books, a child can earn a pizza from Pizza Hut.

And then I remembered something. Something very important that I had forgotten while reading Alfie Kohn’s book. I participated in that Pizza Hut program. I studied literature in high school and college; I love to read for pleasure; and I am well on my way to becoming an English teacher.

As much as I hate to admit it, maybe there is something to these program after all.

PS: You would think Dan Pink was paying me, considering how often I have mentioned him on Literature&Literacy. He’s not, but I like his areas of interest and research. Though I wouldn’t mind if he were to pay me.

A whirlwind of thoughts is twirling through my head, picking up other ideas along the way.

I found his speech was breathtaking. When it came to asking questions, although I was able to think of a question, there was so much to ask. I’m still thinking about it and still thinking of questions I want to ask.

And I want to do justice to his lecture. So, tomorrow I’ll publish a longer piece on it. Subscribe by email to get tomorrow’s essay emailed to you.

Each week, whenever I’m reading The Boston Globe, The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal — almost exclusively online these days — I try to take note of interesting articles to share here.

And each week, I find there is both too much and too little to share.

I feel like my ability to filter which stories will be interesting and which won’t be is not getting any better as the weeks progress. I hope, though, that you are enjoying the pieces that I do choose to share.

And, further, I hope that if you find anything interesting that I missed you’ll share it with me in the comments below.

These Things Caught My Eye

• The Sparrow Takes Flight
• Happy 50th Birthday, Guggenheim!
• The Danger of a Single Story
• Is This the Bar to Raise in Public Education?
• Snow on Rilke
• The Speed of Thought: Forming Words
• Et Tu, Brute?

The Sparrow Takes Flight

October 22nd, 2009 through November 8th, 2009

• The Sparrow at Stoneham Theatre, Stoneham, MA.

A girl returns home after ten years. As she reintegrates into the school, her telekinetic powers appear. Why did she leave? And what does it mean to the community that she has returned?

I saw the opening performance of this play. The staging was excellent. In one scene, when a woman is hanging from the rafters, to show the difference, the actors who were on the ground laid down on the stage.

Pictures played a large role. When the town is gossiping, the actors would gather holding pictures of houses and talk and dance while holding the photographs.

Dance also played a big role in the performance. Emily, the girl with the telekinetic powers, takes flight one night and the actress does a lovely ballet-like dance to express Emily’s joy at being in the air.

If you’re in Massachusetts, do yourself a favor and go see The Sparrow.

Happy 50th Birthday, Guggenheim!

• The 50th Anniversary of the Guggenheim Museum, The Guggenheim Museum Website
• Happy 50th Birthday, Guggenheim!: A Life Magazine Online Gallery
• Brilliance – and wrenching struggles: Guggenheim show captures Kandinsky’s tragic arc by Sebastian Smee, The Boston Globe
• Concerning the Spiritual in Art by Wassily Kandinsky (M.T.H. Sadler, trans.)

Apparently the 50th Anniversary celebrations started in May of this year. I just saw it on Digg on Wednesday night.

As a Bostonian, I have very specific dislike of New York. Well more specifically, a very specific dislike of a very specific baseball team. I have never been to the Guggenheim. This is perhaps something I should soon remedy.

Especially with a retrospective of Wassily Kandinsky’s work. Kandinsky wrote an amazing book, Concerning the Spiritual in Art that I read in college. I’ve been meaning to reread it and with this exhibition, I’m not sure I will find a better time.

The retrospective is setup along the spiraling ramp that most people are familiar with when they think of the Guggenheim. The paintings were hung in chronological order through the various periods of Kandinsky’s life.

The review by Sebastian Smee makes an interesting point that I would like to see. At one point, Kandinsky’s spiritual style seems to die. Around the time he joined the Bauhaus, the spiritual paintings that sought to paint symphonies and feelings, turn into angular graphic design projects. And you see that change as you walk up the ramp.

What happened to him to provoke that change?

The Danger of a Single Story

• The Danger of a Single Story by Chimamanda Adichie, TED Lectures.

I had never heard of Chimamanda Adichie until Wednesday night. I was on TED exploring and her talk was featured on the front page. And I’m glad that it was. I was so moved by it that I embedded it right into this post.

This past summer I met Sandi, a poet, at a writers’ conference. When I first asked her where she was from, she was a little dodgy in answering the question. She explained that if she tells people she was born in Africa they bring all this baggage and all these expectations. By being dodgy about where she was from, she freed me from having those expectations.

Though, I do try to enter situations with as little in the way as possible of preconceived notions. Each of us develops heuristics, mental bridges that allow us to travel quickly without having to go deep into the valley of the unknown, that allow us to assess a situation quickly. We are able to say to ourselves, “OK. I know this, I am familiar with this. Let’s go.”

But in some situations ignorance is power. When using heuristics, we can fall victim to the fallacy of familiarity. One thing that I have found incredibly liberating in my own life is having the strength to say to someone, “You know what, I don’t know the answer. But I am sure I can find it out.” I would rather admit my ignorance than demonstrate it.

Is This the Bar to Raise in Public Education?

• Mass. Panel Calls For Increasing Mandatory School Age by Monica Brady-Myerov, WBUR.
• Law urged to make teens stay in school by James Vaznis, The Boston Globe
• Study Finds High Rate of Imprisonment Among Dropouts by Sam Dillon, The New York Times
• Project Dropout

Tuesday night and Wednesday morning I was thinking about my blog and expanding it to be more useful. I am thinking of adding of Resources Page that will include links to interesting sites and I thought immediately of Project Dropout a joint production of WGBH, Boston’s PBS station, and WBUR, Boston’s NPR station.

Project Dropout was an interesting investigation of the dropout problem in Massachusetts. They spoke not only with administrators and policy wonks, but found actual dropouts and discussed the choices they had made.

Anyone considering dropping out should listen to and read through Project Dropout. Give weight to the reports.

On my drive into work on Wednesday, I heard a segment on WBUR by Monica Brady-Myerov, one of the principal reporters from Project Dropout. She was reporting on a new proposed law that would raise the dropout age in Massachusetts from 16 to 18.

I am not sure how effective this law will be unless a structure is built around it. And I am glad that I am not the only one who is thinking along these lines.

My gut instinct tells me keeping students in school until age 18 is the right way to go if we can address underlying reasons that cause them to drop out and create programs that address their need. – State Representative Martha M. Walz (D-Boston), quoted in “Law urged to make teens stay in school” by James Vaznis, The Boston Globe

I would like to thank Representative Walz. Without addressing the underlying reasons that causing students to dropout, the problem will persist even if the dropout age is raised. If kids do continue to be physically present in the classroom, they could already have dropped out mentally and intellectually, the education equivalent to the living suicides Herman Hesse talks about in Steppenwolf.

The full proposal, which I would like to read if I can a link to it somewhere, recommends that caseworkers be brought into the school to discuss options with children considering dropping out and re-engagement centers to address the concerns of people who have already dropped out.

What I don’t hear is people clamoring for more teachers and smaller class sizes. If a teacher has to address 40 students per class and has five classes per day, that is 200 students each day that filter through the door. If we are going to have to hire people at all for this proposal, no offense to the caseworkers, but I would rather see that money go to hire more teachers.

Snow on Rilke

• Reintroducing Rilke by Moira G. Weigel, The Wall Street Journal
• The Poetry of Rilke: Bilingual Edition by Rainer Maria Rilke (Edward Snow, trans. and ed.)

Although the review was published on my birthday, I did not see this review until this past week.

If I have not said this before, I am amazed at the arts and lifestyle coverage I have discovered in The Wall Street Journal. If I have written it before, my incredulity has only grown.

I am a passionate devotee of the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke.

While I can tell you, for example, that I discovered Elena Ferrante by walking past a row of her books in Barnes&Noble one day and found the cover of The Days of Abandonment intriguing or that I discovered Andre Gide because I was assigned to read The Immoralist in my Modern and Postmodern Philosophy course, I cannot tell you how I came to first discover Rainer Maria Rilke.

If I dig back in my memory, I have faint memories of reading that August Rodin had a poet for a secretary, that August Rodin’s emphasis on Things came to poetry through Rilke. Perhaps I have more to thank my art history professor for than I first realized. Though it is equally possible that I remember those references because I was already reading Rilke when I read those biographical details.

Most of the Rilke I have read has been translated by Stephen Mitchell, but I have read translations from Edward Snow. I have never sat down and compared the two translators.

This book is going to be another survey of his work, poems chosen from his different works but not a translation of his complete works. Which disappoints me: I want to read every poem that Rilke published. “Farrar, Straus and Giroux is publishing what it hopes will become the definitive English-language edition of Rilke’s poetry,” writes Weigel in her review. Her statement here is too broad in light of the limited scope of the collection. How can any survey hope to be the definitive edition?

Certainly I could accept that Snow is aiming for the definitive introduction.

The day after reading this review, I wandered, accidentally, through the poetry section of my local Barnes&Noble. And sitting on the shelf there were four books that called out to me. One I have forgotten already; one was Snow’s new Rilke; one was a collection of lectures that Robert Frost gave; and the last was The Shadow of Sirius a new collection from another favorite poet W.S. Merwin.

More things for me to spend my hard earned money on, gentle readers. There never seems to be an end to new books I wish to read. I cannot even speak to the physicality of the book because I know if I had picked it up I would have been unable to have put it down.

The Speed of Thought: Forming Words

• In Milliseconds, Brain Zips From Thought To Speech by Jon Hamilton, NPR
• Smart People Really Do Think Faster by Jon Hamilton, NPR

Of the two links, I heard the first segment, “In Milliseconds, Brain Zips from Thought to Speech” on the radio on the 18th. But the second link, which I almost find more interesting, I found as a related link at the bottom of the first article on NPR.org.

One area of neuroscience I find particularly interesting is the study of neuroplasticity. The brain continues throughout our lives to change and evolve, to grow new neurons and rewire itself. That is what enables us to continue learning throughout our lifetimes.

This is an exciting time for neuroscience. We are still figuring out what areas of the brain due what. Even as recently as ten or fifteen years ago the idea of neuroplasticity was dismissed, saying that we were born with a finite set of neurons and that was all we ever had.

Beyond just building connections and deepening connections, we can also increase our raw ability to think. We can speed up our brains processing power and we can do it throughout our lives. One researcher, Dr. Richard Haier “says thinking is like running or weightlifting. It helps to have certain genes. But anyone can get stronger or faster by working out.”

Maybe there is something to playing Brain Age after all.

Et Tu, Brute?

• 10 Latin Phrases You Pretend To Understand by Kevin Fleming, Mental_Floss

Caveat lector! Another fun article I found through Digg. Ten common Latin phrases. How many do you know, or think you know, before reading the little blurb under each?

In This Essay

Don Juan DeMarco

Don Juan by George Gordon, Lord Byron

Mozart’s Don Giovanni by Sir Charles Mackerras and the Scottish Chamber Orchestra

I first saw Mozart’s Don Giovanni while studying at an Italian language institute in Rome during the summer of 2004. That summer was my introduction to opera. I saw both Carmen and Don Giovanni. Don Giovanni stuck with me, however.

That first performance piqued my interest, both in opera and the Don Juan legend.

Since moving back to Massachusetts, though I am not sure what triggered it, I have become increasingly more interested in the Don Juan legend. I saw the opera again when the Boston Lyric Opera performed Don Giovanni last season. I purchased a recording of Mozart’s Don Giovanni by the Scottish Chamber Orchestra and have listened to it almost to the exclusion of all else since I bought it. I have reread Molière’s Don Juan. I read Shaw’s Don Juan in Hell as well as Baudelaire’s. I reread most of the first Canto of Byron’s Don Juan, and despite my renewed interest found Byron’s poetry dry. Next I want to read Tirso de Molina’s El Burlador de Sevilla which is thought to be the first written version of the Don Juan legend.

While looking at the works of the Don Juan legend, I stumbled across Don Juan DeMarco. I was intrigued by the description on Wikipedia. I ordered it from the public library and watched it this weekend.

Don Juan DeMarco

“You must not forget, my friend, that the power of your love, the power of the love of Don Juan is eternal, and will not be denied.”
–Dr. Jack Mickler as Don Octavio de Florez

The film follows a young man who claims to be Don Juan DeMarco and Dr. Jack Mickler, the psychiatrist who tries to help him. The young man casts a spell over the whole hospital. Although he is being treated for a delusion disorder, in many exchanges within the film, it is Don Juan who seems sane.

Don Juan DeMarco creates a personal mythology that is adapted from Byron’s Don Juan but is extended. Byron’s Don Juan was initiated into love by a married 23-year old woman when he was only 16-years old, as was Don Juan DeMarco; Byron’s Don Juan was sold into slavery in a sultanate, used as a love slave by one of the sultan’s wives, and was forced to dress in drag to hide, as was Don Juan DeMarco.

Although sharing some elements with Byron’s Don Juan, Don Juan DeMarco’s origin story is distinctly his own. He discusses his initiation into love and how tragedy that ensued. The mythology is elaborate and internally consistent and Dr. Mickler and his supervisor Dr. Showalter discuss how it resembles a tragic Greek myth and how well it fits into Freudian theories.

Sanity and Insanity, Delusion and Truth

The conversation between Dr.s Mickler and Showalter is surreal. We listen to what Don Juan DeMarco says, his penetrating insights into the lives of the people around him, his ability to inspire them to great happiness; then we are presented with these two psychiatrists reducing this man to a series of symptoms. The situation seems even further surreal because we see how Don Juan DeMarco has been able to reignite the passion in Dr. Mickler’s life.

This exchange between Don Juan DeMarco and Dr. Mickler, who he refers to as Don Octavio, shows how lucid Don Juan is.

Mickler What would you say to someone that, erm, that said to you, this is a psychiatric hospital, and that you’re a patient here, and that I am your psychiatrist?

Don Juan I would say that he has a rather limited and uncreative way of looking at the situation. Look, you want to know if I understand that this is a mental hospital? Yes, I understand that. But, then how can I say that you are Don Octavio and I am a guest at your villa, correct?

Mickler Yeah.

Don Juan By seeing beyond what is visible to the eye. Now, there are those, of course, who do not share my perceptions, it’s true. When I say that all my women are dazzling beauties, they object. The nose of this one is too large; the, the hips of another they are too wide perhaps; the breasts of a third, they are too small. But I see these women for how they truly are — glorious, radiant, spectacular, and perfect — because I am not limited by my eyesight.

Women react to me the way that they do, Don Octavio, because they sense that I search out the beauty that dwells within them until it overwhelms everything else. And they cannot avoid their desire, to release that beauty and envelop me in it. So, to answer your question, I see as clear as day that this, great edifice in which we find ourselves, is your villa, it is your home. And as for you, Don Octavio de Florez, you are a great lover like myself. Even though you may have lost your way… and your accent.

In the end, during a deposition, Don Juan DeMarco, who we find out was born as John R. DeMarco in Queens, NY, and raised in Phoenix, AZ, admits that he fell in love with a centerfold. He was Byron’s Don Juan at that time. He thought to himself that she would not accept him as John DeMarco but would believe they were meant to be together if he was Don Juan.

Masks

Perhaps I’ve been thinking of his because I’ve been reading Hermann Hesse’s Steppenwolf and W.B. Yeats’s poetry, but theme explored of the fluid nature of identity explored through imagery of masks and references to masks seen and unseen was profound in Don Juan DeMarco. John DeMarco dons the mask of Don Juan DeMarco; Don Juan DeMarco dons a physical mask; Dr. Mickler dons the mask of Don Octavio to enter Don Juan DeMarco’s delusion and gain his trust; Don Juan questions the mask Dr. Mickler dons of being nothing but a psychiatrist.

Living through Literature

Who hasn’t ever wished to be someone different?

John DeMarco was unsatisfied with himself. Who hasn’t felt the same dissatisfaction? In order to find his own strength, he turned to a figure of literature and adopted those qualities that made him better, that gave him the strength he needed to approach the world. He became truly alive through literature.

John learned to be himself by learning to be Don Juan the same way that children learn to be adults by pretending and playing, by adopting social masks for a while and then discarding them. If you watch the play of children while a group are imagining themselves in a specific circumstance or as specific characters, the play is not free and random. The children play within their own world and need to keep things internally consistent to enjoy the game.

We can retain this into adulthood. We can draw on literary figures to become someone else for a time. There are times that I am feeling insecure or shy and I think, “Don Juan wouldn’t shy away from this.” There are times that I feel afraid and I think, “Luke Skywalker would find the courage and carry on.” There are times that I am not sure how to face the absurdity of the world and I think, “Dr. Rioux of The Plague found meaning in caring for his friends and the ill and the dying.”

Literature provides us a way to recognize ourselves, as I do in Harry Haller from Hermann Hesse’s Steppenwolf. Literature also provides us models of who we want to become. Each of us can find who we want to be in the stories we read.

This is one of the greatest gifts of literature.

In This Essay

“No Child Left Behind and the Spirit of Democratic Education”, Why School? by Mike Rose

Monday Metaphor: Growth, Learning with Impact by John Spencer

“Why Our Standards-Based Grading Sucks”, Learning with Impact by John Spencer

“MCAS scores fall shy of target”, Boston Globe, by James Vaznis

“Charter schools see more attrition”, Boston Globe by James Vaznis

“The next chapter on education reform”, Boston Globe by Gov. Deval Patrick

“Critical thinking? You need knowledge”, Boston Globe by Diane Ravitch

“These test-score jitters are a sign of high standards”, Boston Globe

Ideals and Realities

I had some great conversations about education and public policy with a friend. She would take the pragmatic side of the argument while I would take the idealistic side. While I would speak of sweeping visions of what education should be, she would want specific plans on implementation.

Our arguments usually ended with me saying that so much depended on implementation, that what I thought could really have a great impact, and her saying that no implementation would be perfect and I needed to get my head out of the clouds.

Implementing High Stakes Testing

Last week saw the publication of the test scores for the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System, or MCAS. Part of the Massachusetts Education Reform Act of 1993, this standardized test fulfills the requirements of No Child Left Behind.

Even before the test results were released, I have been thinking about testing and No Child Left Behind as evidenced by my past posts. John Spencer’s video post, Monday Metaphor: Growth was one thing rolling around in my head a few days before the MCAS release.

His next post but one, “Why Our Standards-Based Grading Sucks”, published the day after the MCAS results, the same day I was in the midst of rereading “No Child Left Behind and the Spirit of Democratic Education” in Why School?, ramped up my thinking even more:

• Do we have reasonable expectations for children’s achievement?
• Where do our expectations of academic achievement come from?
• Are the tests we are using sufficient to gauge academic achievement?
• Are there better ways to gauge academic achievement?

Single Modalities, Multiple Modalities

The assessment system being implemented at Mr. Spencer’s school is going to be single modality: a multiple choice test. Those tests are easy to write and easy to administer and easy to analyze. But what kind of feedback do such tests give us about student achievement? These tests only provide an assessment of one type of intellectual and cognitive capacities.

The Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System is a grandiose name. So many years have passed since I took one of the proto-types that I had forgotten its structure. I had assumed it was a simple, straight-forward multiple choice test just like I remember the SATs. But comprehensive may not be ironic in the title. The MCAS uses the following forms of assessment:

• multiple-choice questions
• mathematical short answer questions
• short open-response questions
• long open-response compositions

Unlike straight objective tests, the MCAS in the ideal assesses recall, recognition and synthesis. In reality, the recall and recognition sections also assess the ability of students to form educated guesses.

More of a child’s abilities are measured on tests like these. Think of an analogy to the physical body. Just as you cannot get a complete picture of someone’s fitness and health by testing only their upper body strength, you cannot get a full picture of a child’s academic and intellectual fitness by testing only their ability to recall and recognize and guess.

Asking the Right Questions

“But there are, in fact, a host of procedural and technical problems in developing, administering, scoring, and interpreting such tests. (And there are also concerns about how schools and districts can manipulate them.) ‘In most cases,’ writes measurement specialist Robert Linn, ‘the instruments and technology have not been up to the demands placed on them by high-stakes accountability.’ No wonder, then, that there is a robust debate among testing experts about what, finally, can be deduced from the scores about a student’s or a school’s achievement.”
– Mike Rose from “No Child Left Behind and the Spirit of Democratic Education” in Why School?, pages 45-46.

Are we asking the right questions? I don’t think we are. Much like the recent Town Hall Meetings, if we can even call them that, there is a lot of shouting without a lot of discussion. Rather than delve into the deep, complex questions we are looking for simple solutions.

I applaud the editors of the Boston Globe for their recent editorial “These test-score jitters are a sign of high standards”. They argue that if the MCAS shows we fail to make the No Child Left Behind’s mandate for adequate yearly progress, it is because the test has integrity and has not been dumbed down to artificially inflate our success rate. I hope that this is true. By 2014, No Child Left Behind requires that 100% of students — including 100% of vulnerable populations, English language learners, and special needs students — will be expected to achieve “proficiency” the MCAS.

Is expecting every student to pass really a useful metric? Won’t some critics cry out that if every student passes the test was too easy?

Since we are going to continue to use high-stakes testing, I hope that our government can look at the scores, include the subsets of vulnerable populations, and allocate resources to help boost achievement. Use the MCAS as an assessment of the health of our education system, like a CAT scan so that we know where to focus in and where the illness is most severe.

But at the end of the day, a test score remains a statistical abstraction. If the MCAS is used to gather statistics, then it is an opportunity wasted.

Implementing Charter Schools

Talking about high stakes testing and the performance of our public schools often leads to a discussion of charter schools.

There is a lot of controversy around charter schools in this country. You cannot deny that they take resources away from public schools: even if they don’t take the cream of the crop, which many people including myself believe they do, tax money is taken from the public schools for each student enrolled in a charter school.

I am very confused by the claims about the success of charter schools. Neither side agrees: proponents say that charter schools are an undeniable success; opponents say that charter schools are no better than public schools. I heard of one study that said charter schools performed no better, and in some cases performed worse, than Boston’s public schools. I saw news articles about charter schools outperforming Boston’s public schools.

Gaming the System?

But are we using the correct metrics? Are we looking at only the students that graduate from the schools?

An article in the Boston Globe struck me. James Vaznis tells us that “Fewer than half of the students who enrolled in Boston charter high schools as freshmen over the past five years made it through to graduation, usually departing for other schools, according to a new study,” that was published on September 17.

Many students who left the charter schools re-enrolled in Boston public schools. Critics may claim that the students who left wanted to get an easier diploma. That is possible. That needs to be investigated.

Can a charter school like MATCH Charter Schools really judge itself successful when 25% of its seniors left during the academic year, with “some students [transferring to Boston public schools] just a few weeks before graduation”? What does it mean when a charter school publishes its graduating class’s college acceptance rate if 25% of its seniors dropped out?

Just as we need to be sure that we are using the correct metrics when we are evaluating a child’s achievement, we need to be using the correct metrics in our discussions of public schools versus charter schools. Especially when their is so much talk of expanding the role of charter schools. What if we were to eliminate public schools and look at the statistics of a world of charter schools? We might just find that they perform no better than the system we have now.

When I told my co-worker, Bill, that I wanted to be a teacher, his memory of Mr. K– jumped to his mind. As I listened to him recall Mr. K–, I thought that I could be and hope to be Mr. K– for someone some day. I’ve at least got the right initial. I could see that this man had really moved him.

“I remember,” he said and his eyes lit up, “one history teacher that I had in high school, Mr. K–. He was like a father to me: I fixed him in my memory, the age he was when he was my teacher. I bawled when I learned that he died.”

What Bill said next stunned me.

“I’ll never forget what he said to us.” Bill paused and shook his head. He shifted in his seat and it I could see him calling up the way Mr. K– had carried himself. “Mr. K– looked at us and said, ‘You want to be sponges!’ he said, ‘You want to sit there, receive knowledge as if it were water, and wait for me to squeeze it out of you with some test! C’mon guys, you need to think for yourselves.’”

How relevant in our climate of high-stakes testing and teaching-to-the-test.