In This Essay

The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything by Ken Robinson, Ph.D., with Lou Aronica

Alfred Binet, Wikipedia

Lewis Terman, Wikipedia

I have always been aware of ideas of intelligence and, therefore, ideas of Intelligence Quotient (I.Q.).

Unless you count a silly Internet test I took in college, I have never taken an I.Q. test. Often I have wondered what my I.Q. was, assuming as I did that I.Q. was a valid measure of intelligence. Since I did well in my scholastic subjects, I thought I would score high on an I.Q. test and I wanted in my insecurity about my own talents an objective verification of what I wanted to believe about myself but doubted.

When I moved to Ohio for college, I learned from friends that administering I.Q. tests is routine procedure in Ohio. I felt cheated then that Massachusetts did not do the same.

Now, however, having read more about the history of the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scales, I am thankful not to have had my I.Q. measured in this way.

The Frenchman

Modern intelligence testing can trace back to some work done by a Frechman named Alfred Binet. Binet had no formal training in medicine or psychology, but was self-taught. He never held a post as a professor of psychology and this may contribute to his relative obscurity today.

His interest turned to developmental psychology after the birth of his daughters, Madeleine in 1885 and Alice two years later in 1887. His work my have influenced Jean Piaget, the famous child psychologist.

In 1899 Binet joined the Free Society for the Psychological Study of the Child. Five years later, the French Government commissioned the Free Society for the Psychological Study of the Child to create a commission for the education of retarded children and develop a method for identifying developmentally challenged individuals so that they could be given additional educational support.

The result was the Binet-Simon Scale. The original test would not resemble what I think of when I think of an I.Q. test today. A facilitator would go through a series of thirty tasks, from a simple handshake to remembering a string of random digits to making judgments about situations from vague descriptions. At the end, a child’s mental age would be estimated. Binet had determined what tasks children of a certain age should be able to perform by taking a group of children identified as average by their teachers and using them to establish the baseline.

Binet acknowledged the limitations of his scale. His scale was only valid, he said, on children from similar backgrounds and was not intended as a universal scale. He believed that intelligence was not a simple quality and was influenced environment and educational opportunities. He worked for the rest of his life to refine the scale, publishing three versions before his relatively early death at 54.

And the American

The man who is responsible for developing intelligence testing in the United States, who started from the work of Alfred Binet, was Lewis Terman. He took the Binet-Simon Scale as a starting point and adapted it, becoming known as the Stanford-Binet Scale because he was a professor at Stanford at the time he published his work on the Binet-Simon Scale, The Stanford Revision to the Binet-Simon Scale.

Reading about the beliefs of Binet and Terman, I cannot imagine they would have agreed about anything. Terman believed that intelligence was a fixed quality that could atrophy with inadequately stimulating environments or with disuse, but could never be developed beyond an inborn natural limit.

What I find most unsettling in reading about Terman is that he believed in eugenics. He believed that humans should engage in selective breeding for the betterment of the human race. One stated goal for testing was the “curtailing the reproduction of feeble-mindedness and in the elimination of an enormous amount of crime, pauperism, and industrial inefficiency,” (Lewis Terman et al qtd in Wikipedia).

Although he used Binet’s work as a starting point, Terman did not heed Binet’s acknowledgment of limitations of his own scale. While Binet said that results of his test were only valid if they were used on children with comparable backgrounds, Terman sought to write an universal test. After developing his test he administered it to native speakers of Spanish and poor blacks. Rather than use the results to refine his test, to see if the test accurately assessed the intelligence of his non-white subjects, he assumed his test was valid using the results to condemn the intellectual capacity of whole ethnic groups. Terman judged his Hispanic and Black subjects to be mentally inferior and more prone to crime.

Categorizing People: A Cautionary Tale

Terman took Binet’s work, which sought to assess children in order make sure they were all given appropriate instruction so that they could all receive an education, and perverted it. He wrote that the Hispanic and the Black children,

should be segregated in special classes and be given instruction which is concrete and practical. They cannot master [abstractions] but they can often be made effecient workers, able to look out for themselves. There is no possibility at present of convincing society that they should not be allowed to reproduce, although from a eugenic point of view they constitute a grave problem because of their unusually prolific breeding.

–Lewis Terman quoted in The Element, pages 39-40.

I am afraid to think of how persistent this idea still is.

If you doubt that this idea persists, consider the following: the Scholastic Aptitude Test, or SAT, claims to predict preparedness for college. The SAT, which Ken Robinson points out was also developed by a eugenicist (The Element, page 41), has challenged as being unfair to black students, yet it continues to be used. The claims that it can predict success in college have received mixed reviews. Yet it continues to determine who gets into college.

The Lesson

I don’t believe in fixed quotients of intelligence. Evidence shows that with study and practice, individuals can change how they score on standardized tests. But I think that there is an undercurrent of testing not as a tool for assessment and course correction, but rather as an immutable ranking system.

In developing tests and thinking about using tests, we should make sure that we are using them to guide us, that we try to develop them so that they are fair, that we periodically test our tests and question our assumptions and that we recognize the limitations of testing.

Otherwise, we could be snuffing out whole constellations of bright stars.

How do we provide equal access to education when one-third of households do not have Internet access?

In our fervor to embrace technology, we are leaving children behind. We are creating a two classes: the digital haves and the digital have-nots.

The idea of a digital divide had occurred to me before I read Annie Gowen’s article. But the full impact had not occurred to me. I had not thought of how stressful it would be for a child of eleven or twelve to try to juggle getting to and from school when is computer lab is open with getting to and from the library when its computer lab is open.

When I first moved back to Massachusetts after more than six years in Illinois and the Midwest, I lived something of the digital divide myself. My experience illuminates problems the students have.

Siren’s Song

At first I decided to eschew getting Internet at home, in part from budgetary concerns. Although the Internet is a powerful medium for communication and research, while in the Midwest, I had been using the Internet to waste time:

• I spent most of my time just dithering around on the same few websites;
• I spent more time on social media than being social;
• I spent more time on casual games than on learning.

Vast stores of human knowledge and opinion. And I was more interested in playing Bejeweled.

Something Had to Change

I knew something had to give.

I was worried that I would fall into my old habits in Massachusetts if I established Internet access at home from the start. I was worried that I fail to reconnect with old friends. And I was worried that I would fail to make new friends.

The public library system of the Merrimack Valley Library Consortium has many libraries that are open until 9:00pm Monday through Thursday, many with reasonable hours on Saturday and a handful with Sunday hours.

Home. Office.

I decided to make the public libraries my office.

I believe that I was more effective at the libraries than I would have been if I had established Internet access at home immediately. But I still was not very effective. Getting to the library was difficult: if I went home before going to the library, I usually did not want to venture out again; if I went straight to the library without taking any time to relax and unwind from work, I usually wasted time switching gears.

Plus there was the distraction of all those books. Why should I research teacher training programs when there are shelves of poetry to investigate? Why should I read teacher blogs to find out what teaching is like day to day when I could look through art monograms? Why should I write emails when I could be reading great and not-so-great works of fiction?

Failure

I established Internet access at my home after much hemming and hawing.

When I went to the library, I could not focus. Even the quiet that I hoped would help did not. I failed repeatedly to be effective at the library. These failures in spite of having many advantages:

• I have my own car so I could come and go when I pleased;
• I had full control over what I chose to learn;
• I was learning for pleasure, so I was under no deadline other than my desire to slack my thirst for certain subjects;
• I have my own laptop, so I did not need to rely on the public terminals;
• I am a grown man so I did not need permission nor have I a curfew;
• and I meditate, so I should, hypothetically, have better ability to focus than a student;

Struggling Students

Now, strip all those advantages away.

Without Internet access at home, some students are unable to get their homework assignments, participate in discussion boards, or collaborate with their classmates. As we move more our materials for schools online are we preventing our students from learning?

Some teachers, according to Ms. Gowens’s article, are unforgiving. Students who have trouble accessing the computer lab, whose work gets erased because the computer reboots after so many minutes, or whose libraries don’t have the proper software, are getting an inferior education and increased stress.

Is this our generation’s separate and unequal?

I don’t have any good answers on how to reduce or eliminate this problem. I am glad to be aware of it, so when I become a teacher I can try to find ways to compensate.

If you have thoughts on how to bridge the digital divide, leave me a comment below.

This has been the first week that I’ve managed to keep to a form my dedication, made some weeks back, and worked on my Weekly Review several nights rather than just one. I am still overwhelmed by the streams of information that I am trying to swim in. I am learning to manage, though, and I think the quality of the Weekly Reviews is only going to increase in 2010.

These Things Caught My Eye

• Food and Thought
• Of Great Interest
• Whose Great Books?
• Sticks and Stones
• “Innovative” Education
• What is that beautiful building

Food and Thought

• Food and mood by Bina Venkataraman, Boston Globe
• NH panel emphasizes better food choices in schools by Kathy McCormack, Associated Press, as seen on boston.com
• Dairy Groups Fight To Keep Chocolate Milk On Menu by Jeff Brady, All Things Considered, NPR

We have all heard the adage, “You are what you eat.” But it turns out that is true not only in terms of body composition, but of mental and emotional composition as well.

What you eat impacts your mood. And while those cupcakes I had a lunch yesterday may have made me feel better then, if I continue to eat fatty foods, new research suggests that I’ll be much less happy than if I eat a healthier diet. And my brain will function better if I cut the fat.

In order to learn, our children need to eat. In order to learn well, our children need to eat well. I know that some mornings at work I am so hungry that I cannot do much other than think about food. And I remember that I really enjoyed the opportunity to get breakfast before class. Rather than banning children from eating at the beginning of a class, we should encourage them.

As if I needed another social justice cause, I think healthy school breakfasts and lunches just got added to the list.

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Of Great Interest

• “The [Three] Great Interest of Man” by Gretchen Rubin, The Happiness Project

I had never encountered the poem “Evening Without Angels” by Wallace Stevens before reading the post above in The Happiness Project. Gretchen looked for the poem because she remembered the lines of the epigraph by Mario Rossi, that she had attributed to Stevens and his poem. While the poem is intriguing, I am more interested in the quote by Mario Rossi:

“…the great interests of man: air and light, the joy of having a body, the voluptuousness of looking.”

Great literature reminds us of “the joy of having a body”; great art reminds us of “the voluptuousness of looking”; and great music reminds us of “air and light.”

Great literature reminds us of “the joy of having a body” because poetry is a sensual experience for me. Poetry and great novels look to take experiences and ideals and make them tactile, make them real. Great literature gives us access to the interiority of another person, real or imagined, and lets us see the world from their eyes, if only for a minute. You could tell someone that having great riches will not, of itself, make him or her happy, or you could hand him or her a copy of “Richard Cory” by Edwin Arlington Robinson.

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Whose Great Books?

• Creating the Canon by Cynthia Crossen, “Dear Book Lover”, The Wall Street Journal

Once I picked up Harold Bloom’s book, The Western Canon, from the library. I didn’t read more than the first few pages of it and thumb through the list of great works in the appendix. At some point, I am sure that I will read his essays and consider in greater depth his lists.

That seems like a smart thing for a high school English teacher to do, right?

What I liked about Cynthia Crossen’s article was that she was humble. Whereas Harold Bloom wants to create the definitive list for all time, a very quaint and antiquated ideal, one that inspired the first encyclopedias but seems silly now, Cynthia Crossen wants us to read both good and bad books. She quotes Jane Smiley and I think it bears repeating here, as well:

…in order to understand the nature of the novel [as an artform], sometimes the reader has to read novels that don’t work for her and think about why they don’t work.

I do not think the writers that Harold Bloom canonizes are the exclusive holders of culture and excellence in the history of the world. I think about Chimamanda Adiche’s lecture, “The Danger of a Single Story” — which, if you haven’t watched, I encourage you to watch immediately — and how her first stories were about British and American characters because that is all she knew.

We need to include writers from many, if not all, cultures in our school curricula. We cannot use literature to learn about others if we do not read about others.

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Sticks and Stones

• Greg Mortenson on War and Peace interview by Tom Ashbrook, On Point, NPR
• Personal Take on Public Projects in Two Devastated Lands by Janet Maslin, New York Times
• Stones into Schools: Promoting Peace with Books, Not Bombs, in Afghanistan and Pakistan by Greg Mortenson

Greg Mortenson is not a man paying lipservice to the power of education. He is on the ground in dangerous parts of Pakistan and Afghanistan building schools. Tom Ashbrook interviews him and discusses his new book, Stones into Schools.

I have only just learned of Greg Mortenson and I am very interested in reading both of his books, Three Cups of Tea and his new one Stones into Schools. I like the summary of his work that I found in the New York Times review:

His great conviction, expressed to irresistibly inspiring effect in both books, is that the right kind of educational effort can bridge enormous gaps. Although he reiterates this point without describing exactly what the children in Central Asia Institute schools are taught, he is convinced that encouraging literacy is a way to promote trust and understanding.
–Janet Maslin

Right now, until I get into classrooms, I know that I believe in the power of education in an abstract way. I like to think that reading Mike Rose’s book Why School? and Jonathan Kozol’s books such as Letters to a Young Teacher bring me closer to that reality. Now, I’d like to see Greg Mortenson’s reality.

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“Innovative” Education

• In Search of Education Leaders by Bob Herbert, The New York Times

The title of Bob Herbert’s article, “In Search of Education Leaders” intrigued me. But the actual content of the article disappointed me.

Because Americans are falling behind in global standardized test scores, Harvard has decided to innovate in the field of education. For the first time in 75 years, Harvard University is going to offer a new degree: the Education Leadership Doctorate, or Ed.L.D. The stated hope is that students come out of this program ready to reform and reinvigorate the school systems.

Perhaps I am thoroughly jaded, but this sounds like a program that will churn out education consultants. The economic crisis happened because a large number of consultants were designing new financial instruments for the sake of being innovative. I am afraid that we are looking at a crisis in education.

The reform that we need is simple. We need to have small classrooms staffed by competent professionals. We need stable homes for students so that they have a place to study and work.

Simple is never easy.

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What is that beautiful building?

• Refined times by Alex Beam, The Boston Globe
• Boston Athenaeum: Bullish on the bookish, Editorials, Boston Globe
• Old Boston, new ways by Sarah Schweitzer, The Boston Globe

Since the middle of November, I’ve seen several stories about the Boston Athenaeum. I had not previously known that Boston had a somewhat secretive, private library in the heart of Beacon Hill. I imagine that I walked past it, not knowing what it was, when walking around Beacon Hill this summer at Community Boating.

The place sounds amazing. Yet another cultural institution that I want to join. Though, I think if I joined the Athenaeum, I might never be seen again. Heard from, yes, because they have WiFi, but only because of that.

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Running a blog is a job in and of itself. Since starting this blog, my respect for journalists has grown because I have learned how much time it takes to craft a single post.

My essays are pure opinion pieces. I read a book, a poem, an essay, or a news article. Then I think about what I’ve read and then look at my world and see if its relevant, judge if I think others might enjoy reading about my interaction with that work.

And it takes me between two and four hours to write these essays.

Yet I’m hooked. I love writing here because I feel more alive because I am again engaging the world in ways that I haven’t since college. Each essays calls upon me to look at my world and analyze it and reflect upon it.

This is another great gift of literature.

And, yes, I call even bad newspaper essays literature.

These Things Caught My Eye

• Finger, Painting
• Do You Want Factory-Farmed Children?
• When the High Jump Becomes a Pole Vault
• Mommy, Am I Responsible Yet?
• Judging Motives to Evaluate Blame

Finger, Painting

• Art experts find possible new Leonardo drawing, Rob Gillies, boston.com
• Painting Could Be Previously Unknown da Vinci Work, All Things Considered, NPR.
• Fingerprint May Reveal the Handiwork of Leonardo Da Vinci by Dave Itzkoff, Arts Beat, The New York Times.

Known by many names this portrait of a woman in profile may be a Leonardo da Vinci. (Photocredit: Wikimedia Commons)

A painting previously thought to be a 19th-century German work may be an unknown Leonardo da Vinci work.

Da Vinci was said to use his hands and fingers to spread paint on his works. The experts who have examined the work found what seems to be a fingerprint and palm print on the work. Using sophisticated imaging techniques, they have isolated the supposed fingerprint.

It matches known fingerprints of Leonardo da Vinci in 8 points, a respectable match. According to art collector Peter Silverman, the man who first bought the painting for $19,000, a match of 11 points is enough to convict someone.

I have my doubts about this painting. Although I’ve not made an exhaustive study of Leonardo’s catalogue, the supposed work is not in the style that made him famous. A quick Google search turned up only one drawing of a woman in profile. His other portraits of women tend to be show the women in three-dimensions instead of two. Consider Lady with an Ermine and Mona Lisa.

Fun fact about this style of painting. In the Italian nobility, this style of painting was passed from household to household as a sort of primitive dating service. Eligible males would be shown the painting and, if they were interested, would arrange to meet the woman pictured.

Do You Want Factory-Farmed Children?

• Teaching, Farming, and the American Way by Michael Doyle, Science Teacher

It would be, I think, a good deal more accurate to call it an art, for it grows not only out of factual knowledge, but out of cultural tradition; it is learned not only by precept but by example, by apprenticeship; and it requires not merely a competent knowledge of its facts and processes, but also a complex set of attitudes, a certain culturally evolved stance, in the face of the unexpected and the unknown. That is to say, it requires style in the highest and richest sense of that term.
–From “Discipline and Hope” by Wendell Berry

Where do you think the above quote came from? A book about education? This is an blog about education, after all, isn’t it? The quote comes from a book on essays about agriculture and culture.

From the beginning of that quotation, I deleted an important sentence: “The fact is that farming is not a laboratory science, but a science of practice.” What Berry writes is applicable to a wide range of fields. Teaching, counseling, and selling all first come to mind.

I found this quote at a blog I’ve discovered in the past week Science Teacher by Michael Doyle. He uses that quote in arguing that just as we have lost something by handing over our farms to large corporations — so-called “factory farms” — we risk losing something in handing our education over to what may become “factory schools.”

His philosophy of teaching messes well with my own as well as the philosophies of Jonathan Kozol and Mike Rose. He reminds us of the purpose of education, writing “Historically, public education’s priority has been to create a functioning citizenry; the current trend is to produce careerists. The two have critical, but subtle, distinctions. A citizenry that cannot grasp subtle but critical distinctions will ultimately fail as a republic.”

I look forward to exploring more of what he has to say.

When the High Jump Becomes a Pole Vault

• Raising the Bar for Public Education by Signe Wilkinson

I appreciate the editorial cartoons that I’ve seen from Signe Wilkinson. After some investigation, I learned that reprinting her comics here may be an infringement of copyright and will post links to her comics from now on.

Mommy, am I Responsible Yet?

• When Does Responsibility Begin? by Neal Conan, Talk of the Nation, NPR
• What is the Age of Responsibility? by Aaron Greenblatt, Governing Magazine

A lot of our rules on when people are responsible enough to assume tasks are arbitrary: 16 for most to get a driver’s license; 18 to vote, enter into contracts and join the military; 21 to drink alcohol; and 25 to rent a car from most car rental places. Many of these rules came about in a hodgepodge manner.

I know in Massachusetts in general and Boston in particular, with our large student populations, there have been some concerns about the drinking age. The drinking age is 21 because the Federal Government mandates that the drinking age in order for states to receive federal monies for highways. Some groups such as the Amethyst Initiative argue that the high drinking age just promotes binge drinking. Others quote statistics that show once the drinking age was increased incidence of fatal car accidents fell.

Can we judge responsibility for these tasks in an age-based manner? I don’t know that we can, but I don’t know how we could do it any differently. License people to drink alcohol? That would have people up in arms and would not solve any problems. We can get into circular arguments about American versus European attitudes towards responsibility and drinking.

According to neuroscience and cognitive science, the prefrontal cortex — that part of the brain that regulates decision making and self-control — continues to develop until around the age of 30. Should we prohibit the entering into contracts prior 30? Should we prohibit marriage until 30 so that executive function can fully grow and mature? Abuse of drugs including alcohol can inhibit the full maturation of the brain, how do we consider that?

Judging Motives to Evaluate Blame

• How we read each other’s minds by Rebecca Saxe, TED

I love TED Lectures.

I have watched a handful of them and most of them have been fascinating and engaging. The title of this one, however, is inaccurate. The webpage file name is more accurate (”rebecca_saxe_how_brains_make_moral_judgments.html”).

There seems to be a specialized area in the human brain dedicated to the interpretation of people’s motives and assessment of moral responsibility. When we listen to stories of actions, we consider if what the person was thinking and intending when assigning blame.

Rebecca Saxe designed an experiment. She told a story of a woman called Grace who was making coffee for her friend and sweetened it with a white powder. There were three versions of the story:

• In one version of the story, the box was labeled poison, Grace believed it was poison but put it in her friend’s coffee anyway;
• in the second version, the box was labeled poison, Grace believed it was sugar but it turned out to be poison;
• and the final version the box was labeled sugar but turned out to be poison.

Rebecca and her team measured brain activity in this region and saw that the amount of activity corresponded with how much blame the test subjects though Grace deserved in each case.

But what if they used magnetic interference to affect the functioning of that part of the brain? They did that. Watch the presentation to find out if it made a difference.

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.

With all the controversy swirling around President Obama’s Address to Students, I was curious to see what he would say yesterday.

I wanted to form my own opinion of the address. I had avoided reading all of the advance press that I could. I knew there was talk of school boards voting to prevent its presentation in school; I knew conservative talking heads and shouting mouths had condemned the very idea without any advanced copy, had dismissed a political tradition; I knew there were parents who were thinking of keeping their children home as a boycott.

As much as I had anticipated the speech, I was disappointed by his speech. More than disappointed, in fact: the President’s speech made me angry.

To Boycotting Parents

Before I discuss my own reaction to the address, I would like to address any dissenting parents who may be reading this. The act of boycotting this speech I find particularly baffling.

What an opportunity you missed! Let your children watch the speech in school, watch the speech for yourselves after work, and then over dinner sit down — or make the time, as Obama’s mother made for him — and discuss with your children what they heard, what they took away, and how you disagree. Show your kids that you respect and value them.

If you disagree with what the President said, explain to your children why and make an argument for an alternative. If you found that the President’s address was full of propaganda, find instances of it in the speech and point them out to your children. Your children are going to need to think critically in the future and this was an excellent opportunity to help them exercise that skill.

Why School? and the President’s Address

“When was the last time you were moved by a high-level speech about education? I don’t mean by the personal testimonials we hear at graduations or award ceremonies, but by a policy or political speech.”
– Mike Rose from “In Search of a Fresh Language of Schooling” in Why School?, page 25.

As I mentioned in The Marketplace and Ideas, I have been thinking of the purpose of school lately.

Inspired by an interview on Marketplace, I read Mike Rose’s book Why School?, which I intend to review soon. The book questions of the way we think about and discuss schools and the purpose of public education. I have begun rereading it and I continue to think about the purpose of public education.

I agree with Mr. Rose that a robust, healthy public education system is vital to our nation. In fact, I think public education is a civil right. At its best, our school system is our strongest public institution, one with the greatest chance of actually furthering an informed and civil democracy.

My Hope for the Speech

“We need public talk that links education to a more decent, thoughtful, open society. Talk that raises in us as a people the appreciation for deliberation and reflection, or for taking intellectual risks and thinking widely–for the sheer power and pleasure of using our minds, alone or in concert with others. We need a discourse that inspires young people to think gracefully and moves young adults to become teachers and foster such development.”
– Mike Rose, from “In Search of a Fresh Language of Schooling” in Why School?, page 29.

While some elements of that were there in the speech, I found the overall speech weak. The President’s words seemed so divorced from reality; it was simply a high-level policy speech.

A Weak Presence

His words did not light a fire under the students. The only cheer from the crowd that I remember was when Obama asked the crowd to give a round of applause to the Senior Class President who had introduced him.

He did not work the narratives of any student into the body of the speech. Although he dropped the names of three students who struggled against difficult conditions to succeed, that’s all they were, name-dropping in an effort to create the appearance of inspiration. The three students were listed, one after another, in a formulaic way: “I am thinking of {student’s name here} from {town here} who rose above, who overcame {insert challenge here} and who is now going onto college!” He gave more time to J.K. Rowling and Michael Jordan.

Talking about Jordan was effective for me and I imagine for the parents of the students. Michael Jordan does offer an inspiring quote — Jordan said, “I have failed over and over and over again in my life. And that’s why I succeed.” — but his career with the Chicago Bulls spanned 1984 through 1998. Most high school seniors were only 6 or 7 when Jordan retired from the Bulls.

Is it OK to Fail? Or Not?

“These people succeeded because they understood that you can’t let your failures define you — you have to let your failures teach you. You have to let them show you what to do differently the next time. So if you get into trouble, that doesn’t mean you’re a troublemaker, it means you need to try harder to act right. If you get a bad grade, that doesn’t mean you’re stupid, it just means you need to spend more time studying.”
– President Barack Obama, Address to Students, September 8, 2009

What angered me most about Obama’s speech was rhetoric about learning from failures. In this age of high-stakes testing, this age of “objective” metrics, this age of No Child Left Behind, where that schools fail to meet certain metrics are punished by having their resources reduced, there is not space enough to let a child fail. In this age of 25 to 30 kids to a classroom, there is not time enough for a teacher to give a struggling student individual attention.

It is grand to tell a child to take responsibility for his or her education. But how do you expect a child to do that? What skills do the children have to take responsibility for their own education if they have never learned study skills?

Mike Rose points out:

“No one, no one, develops free of local and broader-scale institutions (from sports clinic to the military), social networks, government projects and programs (from transportation infrastructure to school loans), and so on. …it does not diminish the important of individual commitment and effort also to acknowledge the tremendous role played in achievement by the kind, distribution, and accessibility of institutions, programs, and other resources. And these resources, as everybody knows, are not equally available.”
– Mike Rose from “Introduction” in Why School?, page 10.

When I was in high school, my grade was a test grade for the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System, or MCAS. Our results did not matter and even if we failed all of the subjects, we would receive our diplomas.

Now students who repeatedly fail the MCAS are granted not a diploma but a certificate of attendance. What if the MCAS were actually an assessment system, a test administered to judge what needed to be reinforced, what areas students had not achieve competence or mastery but that just offered an assessment of the schools? I think that kids would be able to take more intellectual risks, the type the President thinks we should be taking.

When I went to college, I wanted to double major in the Humanities and the Fine Arts. Although I had no technical training in high school, I could have enrolled in the Bachelor of Fine Arts specialty degree. I received a lot of Bs and Cs in my studio art classes and often heard, “You’ve got good, solid ideas that are worth pursuing but your technical skills in drawing or sculpting are weak.”

Because I was afraid of losing my scholarship, I gave up my art classes. I was afraid to take the risk to become the artist I wanted to become. Despite options that I had, I decided to make an economic decision and change course to be less of a drag on my family. And, I’ll admit, seeing those Bs, Cs, Ds, and Fs in art bruised my ego.

And I am sure students in middle school and high school hesitate and refuse to take risks for a host of reasons, gentle egos and many others. I think of one of the first essays I wrote here, Testing, Assessment, and Feedback. Students failing should not result in stigma and sorting them to the bottom of the pile. If a failure is accompanied by strong feedback and guidance, a person can roar back.

Life Circumstances Don’t Matter

“But at the end of the day, the circumstances of your life — what you look like, where you come from, how much money you have, what you’ve got going on at home — none of that is an excuse for neglecting your homework or having a bad attitude in school.”
– President Barack Obama, Address to Students, September 8, 2009

Poverty and illness, violence in the home and in the neighborhood, working parents or neglect, and even homelessness. These are realities for many people in our nation. These are real challenges. President Obama pays lip service to these challenges being “no excuse for neglecting your homework or having a bad attitude in school.”

Each person’s life has its own hardships. And challenges do need to be overcome but some challenges are much greater than others. But simply stating, “Stay in school because you’re letting yourself and your country down,” is not enough. Obama knows the power of story and narrative, but this speech was lacking in it.

As I said above, he mentioned three students who were college-bound despite their hardship in a formulaic, abstract way. Why didn’t he pull together a grand narrative or interweave a small number of narratives?

Parental and Adult Involvement

I want to get into teaching to help kids learn, to help them learn to think independently, and to turn them on to power of literature to allow them to enter the thoughts and experiences of others and to offer them a vocabulary to talk about their own thoughts and experiences. But I am daunted by the idea that I will have five or six sets of 25, 30, or even 35 kids sitting in my classroom, all with different levels of achievement in reading and writing that I will have to help guide. It is a challenge that I will not shy away from and that I look forward to.

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.