Opting Out vs. Slaying the Dragon--and Mixing Metaphors

A while ago, I started to notice that I was not "liking" the Facebook posts promoting the testing-protest movement in education known as "opt-out." Some of my favorite and most respected colleagues were posting these articles and pictures, and I really wanted to "like" these. I wasn't sure why I hesitated to align myself with this movement (see an excellent overview on The FairTest website).

Then, something despicable happened after the tragic church massacre in Charleston: Ignoring the heart of the matter, ultra-conservative firearms advocates accused the victims of being responsible for their own deaths. These commentators suggested that the murdered parishioners erred in not bringing to Bible study weapons with which they could defend themselves if a murderer showed up.

While this has nothing to do with school testing, it got me thinking about the limitations of approaching something from the wrong direction, of focusing in the wrong place. 

Many of us know we don't like the over-testing and the mis-testing of our kids, the testing that pervades classrooms and has perverted the teaching and learning processes. Holding this opinion, we align ourselves with the opters-out. But I wonder if perhaps we miss some of the deeper understandings not only of what's imposed but of what's at stake. I wonder if knowing more might allow us to change the system, and not just peel off its toxic overlay.

While I sympathize with the parents who opt their children out of testing, I believe that focusing just on that action distracts from an urgent need to re-imagine the content and processes of assessing and documenting student learning. It also takes emotion and energy away from the more fundamental issue: How do we most effectively engage kids to document, analyze, synthesize, and apply learnings that are situated in the real world, in real materials, that are not merely "schoolish?"

I believe that as a boycott, the opt-out movement is too slight, too limited to parents with access to elite media. Educators who themselves engage carelessly in the boycott risk losing jobs and teaching certificates. I appreciate the courageous and articulate parents like Aaryn Belfer who know they are up against something crazy. 

Without a stronger grounding in what's actually wrong with the tests, the opt-out movement emphasizes the time burden of testing and test preparation, not the nature and sheer wrongness of the tests themselves. If you put a toxic glaze on a cake, scraping it off won't reverse the damage to the cake. The cake, our education system, is in danger not just from the time factor, but from the enormous mistakes being made in constructing, administering, and then interpreting results from points of very limited understanding. 

Know your enemy by becoming more informed about the technical features of testing, the math and statistics of it; the politics and economics, as in state legislatures, the U.S. Congress, and the international businesses that use malpractice as a profit center. We need to move beyond simplifying it to "too much," "multiple choice vs. extended answer," "norm-referenced vs. standards-referenced."  Use the resources available on the FairTest website.

Furthermore, be able to speak up about how accountability and more authentic documentation of learning might look and feel. Don't be like the GOP opposition to Obama's health care plan - be able to speak plausibly and enthusiastically about viable alternatives. Consider tools that teachers might use to gauge and report student success as well as the what-do-we-need-to-do-now for a student who may not be catching on. Remember portfolios, simulation, performance and application opportunities? 

Be thoroughly grounded in the FACT that norm-referenced (bell-curve) assessments, by definition, show half of those tested to be below average. Find out how assessments referenced to standards allow everyone to pass if the standards are fairly taught and fairly assessed. Don't rule Common Core out or in before you understand it, and be prepared to discuss how any attempt to improve kids' critical thinking can be subverted by the wrong assessments. I mean, how can you assess divergent thinking via convergent and reductive measures?

Consider this post Part 1 of a challenge to compile factual analysis of the testing process and content and not just polemic materials. I will start searching beyond the FairTest materials for other resources that explain test creation, test structure, and test content. I invite you to do the same, either in comments appended here, comments emailed to me at caroline@sunflowerlexical.com, or links and ideas provided through the contact form on my website, sunflowerlexical.com. 

The current testing epidemic is not merely something to avoid. We need to prepare to slay the dragon, not just hide out from it.

The Denial of Science: Be Very Afraid

About ten days ago, I read an opinion piece in The New York Times entitled Why Republicans Keep Telling Everyone They’re Not Scientists. Here

As I do in the autumn of every year, I had a flu shot a few weeks ago. When a couple I know returned from South Africa in early September, I did not fear catching Ebola from them. When a friend was able to start a new therapy for her advanced breast cancer in late October, I felt happy that she qualified for clinical trials.

Some of us are old enough to remember how our relieved parents took time off work one summer day in 1954 to take us to queue up in a school cafeteria for our first polio shot. Haven’t most of us used our smartphones in the past 24 hours to send or receive a text, talk to someone in another part of the country, check email, or use a net-based app?

Do we have to be scientists to benefit a thousand ways from science every day, to make informed science-based decisions? Do we need to be scientists to take flu or polio shots, to use our mobile phones, to be alert to the predicted tracks of dangerous storm systems, to seek out the best treatments for our cancers, to understand how unlikely it would be to contract Ebola from someone who’d been thousands of miles from any reported cases?

I won’t accept that science is optional, a matter of opinion, I'll-take-my-flu-shot-and-reject-evolution-of-species (without which there could be no flu shots). As an educator, I completely reject the ignorance that drives school districts to cower before parents who demand that the science curriculum be sliced and diced or confused with ignorant and superstitious counter-possibilities.

My last few years as a principal were enlivened by our school district’s DESERT Project. A handful of intrepid science-loving educators landed over $5 million to bring to our teachers and kids engaged, hands-on, inquiry-based, thought-provoking REAL science. Beginning in kindergarten, kids would do science and learn to observe systematically. They’d think and talk about what they were seeing, smelling, touching, hearing, then write and draw in science notebooks, and become immersed in authentic scientific method. They would not just read about science in pre-digested and boring paragraphs as I did through my own years in elementary school.

But then I retired and the Twenty-First Century arrived, accelerating the ascendancy of nonsense over science. I didn’t notice how extreme this had become until a 2013 trip to Australia and New Zealand, where the natural world was persistently described and discussed by scientists, science teachers, and zoo managers without apology or pulled-punches. No, “In my opinion,” or "I hope I'm not offending anyone" buffering, but “this is how it is.” This is the history of volcanic eruption and earthquakes here, this is the evolutionary biology of this animal, this is why our planet is experiencing increasing weather extremes.

Be afraid of how American schools are backing away from science and informed interpretation of natural phenomena. Speak up about anti-science and pseudo-science just as you would about racism.

Another Take on Reading: the Case of Japanese

My recent trip to Japan challenged me in an entirely new way.  As a proficient reader and writer of English, I take alphabetic writing for granted and am comfortable with Roman letters in the languages that use them. Russian and Greek also seem close enough that I believe I could fairly easily learn what the letters represent in the spoken language.

Then there's Japanese. In two weeks, I never knew which of their three linked writing systems I was seeing. I did not learn to recognize a single character in Kanji, Hiragana, or Katakana. So today I turned to Google to find out a little more.

It turns out that the orthography used for beginning reading, Hiragana, has "only" 46 characters. Each Hiragana character is formed with at least three strokes, with seven strokes being the maximum. While there are no reverse letters like b and d, p and q, there are many characters of six and seven strokes that closely resemble one another to an inexperienced reader. And these strokes can curve all over the place and cross each other. Unlike most Western alphabetic orthographies, Hiragana characters represent syllables rather than phonemes.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiragana#Table_of_hiragana

Holy cow! Japanese children can read most or all of the Hiragana (syllabic) characters by the end of kindergarten. Dyslexia is rare.

We have often attributed superior academic achievement of Japanese children to cultural or structural elements of their schooling. I started thinking about the more micro level of the connections among developmental factors (visual vs. auditory cortex of the brain), informal and formal preparation for reading, and the instructional strategies that are used.

Japanese children are introduced to and expected to learn written language content that is very much more visually challenging than the English alphabet. At the same time, the characters represent syllables, a pattern of sound that is more cognitively and acoustically authentic than the more abstract phonemic segments that correspond to English letters.

It makes me wonder if our emphasis on a fairly primitive version of "phonics," based on the artificial segmentation of speech sounds, makes life more difficult for our young readers. The Hiragana system, with its greater load on visual processing and lighter load on auditory perception than English "phonics," raises a question about brain development. Are humans at ages 4 and 5 more "ready" to deal with concrete graphic distinctions than with the much more ephemeral and artificial auditory segments emphasized in English literacy?

We have tended to work preschool children's auditory processing much harder than their visual in our pre-literacy teaching efforts. Is it possible that we are wasting some of their visual learning potential by not looking for more ways to stimulate and challenge a readiness for graphic analysis that may be superior to their auditory discrimination? Or is it possible that we are wasting auditory learning potential by teaching a phonemic level of analysis rather than one based on the more natural acoustic unit of the syllable?

I've always been skeptical of systems that fail to develop areas of strength while over-working areas of weakness. I've opposed so-called phonemic segmentation practice for kindergartners as backwards to the natural sequence of learning, a time-waster for kids under a certain age who may be quite ready to deal with graphic material. Why couldn't they be doing fun and interesting activities (art? science?) that build on a readiness in visual discrimination and analysis rather than forcing them through cognitive tasks more appropriate to where their brains will be at age 7?

I could be all wet. I imagine there's a body of research on all of this, and right now I have way more questions than answers.

How Does Life Become a Book?

One day in January of 2001, a friend of a friend passed my name along to an editor at USA Today. This editor asked me to write a one-thousand word Day in the Life piece to go along with a story they were going to publish about the work of school principals. Eager to expose the inner workings of a job that just kept on getting harder, I agreed.

Within a few weeks, I realized that a thousand words wouldn't even come close to showing what actually happened in a typical day, or even an easy day.That short a format wouldn't have allowed me to summarize or list the hundred conversations, the hundreds of people, the sounds, smells, mishaps, surprises, small and large victories, that never stop happening in a public elementary school. 

By the time I started writing what turned into my memoir Principal: A Personal History, I had put in fifteen years as leader of first one elementary school, and then another, in Tucson, my hometown. I had grown puzzled and frustrated by how much more difficult my job had gotten over that time. You might expect that it would be a simple matter of accumulating experience and then applying the wisdom gained as each new school year came around.

I believe that school leadership is crucial to the success of our democracy, and that if we don't get this sorted out pretty soon, our troubles will grow. My book, Principal, does not provide the answers, but provides for the first time in the current era an inside look at what happens in schools from the perspective of the school leader. The answers to the questions raised, I believe, need to come from informed conversation, one that I hope to start. 

In future posts, I'll include some excerpts, some thoughts about what's not in the book, the occasional rant or thoughtful reflection about current issues, and updates on the process and progress of publication.

Since this is my first experience blogging, I hope you will bear with me as I figure it all out!

Contact me at PrincipalTheBook [at] cox.net to get on my mailing list.