Feeling Rejuvenated

Why?  I just spent Monday and Tuesday of this week at a state department of education conference for schools that are in formal school improvement who have applied for and won money to use for school improvement coaching.  The money is awesome, they are letting us use it in a way that makes sense for our school.  We just have to attend some dry meetings.  Two days in a huge ballroom sitting in round tables with water pitchers in the middle and fake chandeliers on the ceiling.  Yes, I think you get the picture.  I actually think that I am going to dedicate the rest of my career in education to avoiding "learning situations" that in ballrooms in generic hotels across this great land of ours.  It is a pretty hateful place to try and learn something.  Especially when the learning is looking at a powerpoint and flipping through a notebook.  Page by page.  You get the picture.  Except that the state is empowering us as schools to figure our own ways through the school improvement process which is awesome for me as a leader who definitely has strong views on how to do this.  But I guess that you are not feeling the rejuvenation part yet.

Across town this week, twenty five of our teachers are attending a Responsive Classroom week long training with twenty five other teachers from various division schools.  I finally was freed up to today to attend and I immediately remembered why this is so important.  The social aspect of learning is as important as the academic aspect.  Responsive classroom gets that.  It really does.  The day ended up with our staff in a circle on the floor singing a song and playing a game.  Our assistant superintendent and chief information officer happened to drop by at that very moment and were goaded into joining on the floor.  That is why it is important.  There is a point to all of this and building a community in a school or a school division takes work but it also takes fun and play as well.  

One thought from EduStat University

I attended Edustat University last week in my hometown of Charlottesville, Virginia right down the road from my home at Monticello High School.  Often times, I will attend a big conference and come away with just a few random thoughts.  Well, one thought I came away with is how teachers' professional lives are structured here in our country.  In Tony Wagner's keynote, he spent a bit of time on international comparisons.  America, as we are well aware, is well behind many or most of the industrialized world in terms of student achievement in all academic areas.  We are also well behind in another factor, according to Wagner: teacher planning time.  In Finland, the top performing education nation in the world, allows teachers to meet and plan for about 40% of their paid time.  Now, I am sure that time is well focused and well used, or Finland would not be the best in the world.  But, they can't use the time if it is not there.  In our country, I would hazard to guess based on my limited knowledge that teachers teach (meaning responsible for many children) about 80% of their day have 20% left to plan, meet, and reflect both individually and collaboratively.  We never talk about this issue in this country.  In fact, we tend to highlight successful charter schools where teachers teach at the same 80/20 ratio for even longer days (and have high percentages of burnout).  What about schools that focus on teacher learning as much as it does student learning but holds teachers and administrators to high levels of accountability.  Wouldn't this be "innovation" as well or just another bone thrown to "lazy" teachers who already have two months off in the summer and have those darn unions over protecting them.  Why are we so afraid to learn from more successful structures and innovations in other countries?

Things that may affect student achievement

Link to an American Prospect article which I do not have full access to.  Just reading the heading has me interested.  I always remember from my teaching days in Baltimore in the nineties.  I taught on average about 35 kids every year in my fifth grade class.  On average, probably one of those kids wore glasses consistently.  Visit an upper middle class school and check out a fifth grade class and see how many kids are wearing glasses.  There is probably a difference.

More on Data from Meier

One of my favorite blogs is "Bridging Differences" and Deborah Meier is one of my education heroes.  This latest post of hers delves into some of the issues with data these days.  

More of the Moyers interview of David Simon

From the transcript of the April 17, 2009 interview:

DAVID SIMON: Well, and facts-- one of the themes of THE WIRE really was that statistics will always lie. That I mean statistics can be made to say anything.

BILL MOYERS: Yes, one of my favorite scenes, in Season Four, we get to see the struggling public school system in Baltimore, through the eyes of a former cop who's become a schoolteacher. In this telling scene, he realizes that state testing in the schools is little more than a trick he learned on the police force. It's called "juking the stats." Take a look.

[...]

ASSISTANT PRINCIPAL: So for the time being, all teachers will devote class time to teaching language arts sample questions. Now if you turn to page eleven, please, I have some things I want to go over with you.

ROLAND "PREZ" PRYZBYLEWSKI: I don't get it, all this so we score higher on the state tests? If we're teaching the kids the test questions, what is it assessing in them?

TEACHER: Nothing, it assesses us. The test scores go up, they can say the schools are improving. The scores stay down, they can't.

PREZ: Juking the stats.

TEACHER: Excuse me?

PREZ: Making robberies into larcenies, making rapes disappear. You juke the stats, and major become colonels. I've been here before.

TEACHER: Wherever you go, there you are.

[...]

DAVID SIMON: You show me anything that depicts institutional progress in America, school test scores, crime stats, arrest reports, arrest stats, anything that a politician can run on, anything that somebody can get a promotion on. And as soon as you invent that statistical category, 50 people in that institution will be at work trying to figure out a way to make it look as if progress is actually occurring when actually no progress is. And this comes down to Wall Street. I mean, our entire economic structure fell behind the idea that these mortgage-based securities were actually valuable. And they had absolutely no value. They were toxic. And yet, they were being traded and being hurled about, because somebody could make some short-term profit. In the same way that a police commissioner or a deputy commissioner can get promoted, and a major can become a colonel, and an assistant school superintendent can become a school superintendent, if they make it look like the kids are learning, and that they're solving crime. And that was a front row seat for me as a reporter. Getting to figure out how the crime stats actually didn't represent anything, once they got done with them.

I have been a huge fan of the Wire.  I miss that it will never be on television again and I am not quite sure if we will ever have another show like it.  It may resonate with me personally because of my experience teaching in Baltimore Public Schools in the nineties.  I always felt that the above excerpted scene was always a bit simplistic in my mind.  It may be a defensive posture on my part, because I have played the part of the "assistant principal" many a time, in many a meeting with teachers imploring them to focus on test structure and language with students.  It may also be that I have always felt that the "teaching to the test" line has not always rung true to me.  I have always thought that you should, as an educator, want students to do well on anything that is put in front of them, including the state tests.

That all being said, I do agree with much of what Simon says about stats in general.  Joe Klein, chancellor of New York schools, Arne Duncan, and other big name leaders in american schools throw around stats a lot these days.  Future posts will cover some of the "juking" that is going on, and also a concern about the current focus on merit pay for teachers.  And of course, more Wire stuff.

The Wire- Watch this!

If you love the Wire and miss it, or if you have no idea about it, watch this Bill Moyers video journal.  It is an interview with David Simon.  I have been mulling over the idea of doing some writing about the Wire, this has inspired me.  Watch this and stay tuned.  The interview shows some of the best clips from the five seasons of the show and some great commentary from David Simon, especially in regards to today's headlines.

Expeditionary Learning

I was able to attend the Expeditionary Learning (EL) national conference in Baltimore last Thursday, Friday and Saturday.  It was an amazing learning experience for me.  EL has been around since 1992 and got its start from an idea to transfer some of the learning principles of Outward Bound into classrooms and schools.  It now has a few hundred schools in the national, both regular public and charter.  I have had a personal interest in EL for many years now, but that interest never really went beyond reading books, articles, and looking at their website.  Attending the conference has increased that interest about ten fold.  I tend to be pretty cynical about conferences in general.  They seem like a lot of money, there is a cattle call mentality to them, and I am generally suspicious of people who become, for lack of better words, professional presenters.  This conference was completely different. 

They utilized as many of their design principles as they could in a conference setting and as a result I was more engaged and learned far more than a typical conference.  We were all assigned to a "crew" as in "there are no passengers, we are all crew" which comes from Outward Bound.  We engaged daily with our crew members.  Every session was led by current practitioners, teachers and principals, and I don't think I saw one powerpoint the whole time I was there.  Each session had an agenda and posted learning targets and utilized active learning strategies.  All in all, an amazing experience and for this normally shy guy, I interacted with way more people than I ever would have because of those strategies.  I am going to share more EL thoughts as time goes by but just had to write briefly about this experience joining an adult learning "crew".