Practical Theory

Gary Stager wrote this on twitter last night in the context of a conversation about using PISA scores to draw international comparisons:

And it reminded me of something Doug Christensen - former State Education Commissioner of Nebraska - once said to me when I was lucky enough to interview him for a grad school project:

So why do we assess? What is its purpose as an instructional tool? Is Gary right that all assessment is an interruption to the learning process? (And I think he was being outrageous when he said it.)

I'm going to get the slightly cynical reason out of way first. One of the reasons we assess is because schools are about much more than learning. One of the primary reasons for the institution of high school is to act as a sorting system for higher education. If we didn't need to do that, we wouldn't have the grading construct we have today, I think. And then Dr. Christensen's words about how we have created a policy tool out of what was meant as an instructional tool is true, and again, if we were created a system that was purely about student learning, I don't think the high-stakes assessments we have created over the past twenty years in so many states would have been created. (And I agree with Dr. Christensen -- those tests shouldn't be a policy tool.)

So is Gary's outrageous assertion right? Is all assessment an interruption of learning?

No... I don't think so. I think much of the summative assessment we do could be described that way -- especially the way it's used in most schools. But I think formative assessment is a powerful form of learning. I think about all the essays my father shredded with the editing pen before I was allowed to hand them in. I think about all the work teachers do in the editing process in every subject, assessing progress, editing writing, teaching revision, and I am convinced that is very much a vital part of student learning. That's assessment as mentoring, assessment as skill-building, assessment as learning about how to create, revise and present. And that's vital.

So formative assessment, I believe, is absolutely not an interruption of the learning process.

Is summative assessment?

Too often, yes it is merely an interruption. How many times have we seen this in a classroom... a teacher tries to make a final assessment on a project or paper a critical piece of dialogue between student and teacher, but all the student does is whip to the back page to look at the grade, not the comments? If students look only at the grade on a quiz, and do not work on corrections and learn from their mistakes (and from their successes), then the assessment was an interruption of learning. But it doesn't have to be.

Formative assessment lends itself to being a learning tool. Summative assessment requires a teacher's work to make the assessment part of on-going learning.

Perhaps that's the answer -- assessment is not an interruption of learning if and when it can positively and directly influence the current or future learning and work of the student. If it does not, then it was an interruption of learning.

But in this model, I think it's hard to argue for any test such as the PISA or any of the state-wide assessment tools are tools for learning, given that - in the case of the PISA, it is a closed test that students cannot review after taking, and in the case of most of the state tests I know of, students do not receive their results in a timely enough fashion to effectively learn from them. The argument about how well any of these tests can be used as a policy tool is an open debate, although I'd argue that we have to be very, very circumspect about how we use them, but if we can come to the conclusion that they are not learning tools, but rather policy tools, it should force us to question the amount of time (and money) schools and districts are spending on these tests.

At the end, there's something else that Gary's comment brings up that is important when we think about assessment. All assessment is a construct. We attempt, through tests and projects and homeworks to quantify a student's learning. We attempt to assess, but any teacher who ever played with the way they weighted assignments before handing in their grades knows or anyone who remembers when ETS rescaled the SATs one year or when the NY Regents made the Physics test way too hard, there's a lot of space on the margins of any grading / assessment system. That's o.k. as long as we recognize assessments for what they are -- rough attempts to codify that which is very difficult to codify -- what do children learn when they are in our care. If we can use these assessments to further student learning, wonderful, but if we don't -- and too often in summative assessments, standardized or not, we don't -- they do, as Gary suggests, take time away from what matters most -- the time we spend with our students on learning.

Tags: assessment, learning

Thanks to EduCon 2.1 scheduling guru Diana Laufenberg for putting all the write-ups for EduCon sessions into Wordle, so we can see what the focus of the conference will really be about: 



EduCon 2.1 -- January 23-25th.

Hope to see you there.

Tags: educon, educon21

Tonight, I got into a long, heated discussion with a family member who also happens to be a Congressional staffer for a Democratic legislator. Shockingly, the conversation was about education. She is a big fan of Michelle Rhee. I -- as I've written before -- am not.

I don't want to get into the specifics of the argument, but instead, what is troubling me is how effective people like Michelle Rhee are at commandeering the argument. Somehow, even in the debate over who would be Secretary of Education, Joel Klein (who recommended Michelle Rhee for her position in DC) was the "reform" candidate and Linda Darling-Hammond represented the status-quo, despite a lifetime of working to reform schools. Diane Ratvich, over at Bridging Differences, asks the question, "Who Are the Real Reformers?" and she writes:

Nothing is wrong with that. And that's the thing... one comment that set me off tonight was when my family member said, "What I like about Michelle Rhee is that she's making sure that everyone in DC is focused on kids, not teachers." And yes, that is very much the rhetoric that Rhee uses. And sadly, that is as dangerous a false dichotomy as I can imagine.

That's the issue... and that's what made me so upset tonight. We cannot assume that we can divorce student needs from teacher needs. They must be maintained in a delicate balance that assumes rights and responsibilities from both parties. We must be willing, as a nation, as districts, as schools and in our classrooms, to talk to each other, to identify the things we need to make learning happen in our classes. Teachers must feel valued and and safe as must students. We must understand that we cannot browbeat our teachers into teaching any more than we can browbeat our students into learning. But we must also understand the solemn responsibility we have to each other, teachers and students, administrators and parents, to co-create the systems and structures necessary to create the schools we need. It's so easy to demonize each other. It's so easy to say that it's all the fault of bad teachers or lazy students. But it's so hard to find solutions that are sustainable, real and meaningful.

That's why the conversation hurt so much tonight. Because smart people should know that that the way to school reform isn't just by breaking the people in the system down, but also because I know that what I really heard underneath that was frustration that the system has gotten so broken in the first place.

What we have to recognize is just how much back-up we have to do so that we can even begin the real conversation. It starts with respecting the rights and honoring the responsibilities we all share -- teachers, students, parents and administrators -- in creating schools that work.

Tags: rhee, education reform, DC

The School District of Philadelphia has a uniform policy -- K-12, all schools are supposed to have uniforms. At SLA, we have our lab coats and a "dress respectfully" code that, by and large, kids have always really respected. (I believe our official wording is "Dress in a way that would not detract from the learning of others.") It, for me, has been a way to honor the district's policy while honoring the kids' individuality.

Next year, Jakob starts kindergarten -- a fact that I'm not quite willing to admit yet, but that's another post -- and Kat and I have looked at a lot of different options, and we've narrowed it down to two School District of Philadelphia schools that we're waiting to hear back from. Either school would be a fine choice, but one school enforces the uniform policy much more than the other. I am surprised at how upset I am about Jakob having to go to a school where there's a uniform policy that would limit what he wears.

Some of this has to do with my own desire to live in my jeans. I taught for years in jeans at Beacon. Game day was jeans and a tie and blazer, but jeans. Now, I wear a suit three or four days a week, and my students almost never see me in jeans on school days because it's not worth fighting the fight to prove to the outside world that I can be an effective principal even if I don't look like their expectation of what a principal should look like. After all, I still get the "aren't you too young to be principal?" question enough that the suit or the khakis just make it easier.

But as Kat and I were buying holiday gifts for Jakob, and we were thinking about clothes we should and shouldn't buy him based on the uniform policy of the school he might attend next year. It made me sad to think that he'd have to wear what everyone else wears. Jakob at five already has a cool sense of style. I don't want him in collared navy shirts and khaki pants every day. I don't need him to look like every other kid. And I find myself resenting the idea that someone thinks he should. And I admit, it makes me less excited to send him to a school that would want him to.

So what's the larger policy question, then... do we draw a parallel between the way we ask kids to dress and the way we teach them? Is it a stretch to argue that standardized curricula and standardized assessments are easier when you look out onto a classroom and see only a sea of navy and tan? Is it any wonder that the rise in a return to school uniforms in US cities has coincided with No Child Left Behind?

Finally, I'll argue that uniform policies are part of a paternalistic infantilization of children on the part of schools. "Dress respectfully" encourages students to figure it out for themselves. It asks them to understand that school is a serious place that is different than the home, and that students should dress in a way that allows everyone to learn without clothing being a major distraction. But it also allows them to express their individuality in important ways. There's nothing wrong with that. In fact, there's something very right about that. Our schools should be about teaching students to make smart, honorable decisions for themselves and their community. How we choose to express ourselves through our dress is one of those decisions. Our schools should be a place where kids can learn that.

And I still want Jakob to be able to wear his jeans.

Tags: uniforms

There are starting to be some stories breaking about what may be the single greatest crisis facing education and our society -- college. The recent stories in the New York Times about the rising cost of college, the pieces in the Philadelphia Inquirer about scholarships being cut and the poor student-counselor ratio in Philly schools and the inevitable ramification of the credit crisis on student loans suggest that we are headed to a major crisis of higher education.

From the NY Times piece:

There are any number of reasons to be concerned about this. According to Infoplease, the difference in median income between a man with a high school diploma and a bachelor's degree in 2004 was $20,000. But more than that, college represents more than that -- it represents both an academic and economic signpost and we cannot go back to a time in this country when it was an option only for the elite.

And I do mean elite. I worry about this now for the students of SLA, but I also worry about this for Jakob and Theo. In the time since I have been out of college, the cost of private colleges has more than doubled. If we see a similar rise, my alma mater will cost over $100,000 a year, which -- unless education administration sees a dramatic rise in salary (ha!), that will consume the vast majority of my salary... and there could be at least two years when both Jakob and Theo are in college together. And while urban high school principals have never been the top of the pay scale in this country, there are certainly a lot of people who make a lot less than I do.

And the problem is that there isn't a great answer here. The credit crisis will make it harder and harder for students to get loans for college, and the increased costs of college means that even for the ones who get loans will be saddled with masive debt when they do graduate, which isn't a great way to start one's adult life.

I don't know where this ends, honestly. I don't know why we've seen the kind of rise in college tuition that is so out of proportion to the rest of the economics of our country. I don't know how we continue to hold college out as the gatekeeper to a middle-class adulthood, and I don't know how it could be when a generation of kids start their life hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt -- and that's assuming that they can still get the loans.

Tags: college, finance

One of the hardest parts of running EduCon 2.1 is that all of us at SLA feel a fair amount of pressure to put our best foot forward with the sessions we run. That means for folks like Zac and Diana and Marcie and Tim and me who often go out and work with schools or present at conferences, we want to do something we haven't done before. Needless to say, that means we stress ourselves out about what we want to do. Fortunately for me, I keep this here blog as a running record of my thoughts, which means I've got a pretty good place to look if I want to think about presenting my current train of thought. I've been thinking a lot about the ideas I wrote about in Where Does It Live?, and I realized that's something I want to explore a bit more at EduCon. So here's my session:

Where Does It Live: Building Systems And Structures Around What You Believe

• School-Level Reform
  
• Classroom Reform
  
• Systemic Change
  
  The myth of the single teacher, bucking the odds to be that one great teacher in a school may make for a great Hollywood movie, but it rarely -- if ever -- leads to lasting, effective change. We must examine the manner in which our schools and classrooms are set up so that the greatest number of students, teachers and even principals can thrive and learn and feel valued. This session is focused on looking at institutional change, so that attendees can explore what they value and then examine the systems in their districts, schools and classrooms that must change to reflect those values
  

Hope to see you there!

Tags: educon, educon2.1

This year, as we feel the pinch of difficult economic times, we should remember that there are those who still have much, much less. That's why you should join Karl Fisch's Team Shift Happens on Kiva.

Kiva is a micro-lending bank with a mission of helping to end global poverty. From the website:
And in Karl's words:
I contributed my $25 for myself, but then I also bought $25 gift certificates for everyone in my family, and I look forward to dinner table conversations about who we've lent our money to over the next few years.

This could be an amazing school project, a wonderful addition to any "Secret Santa" office holiday spirit, or just a wonderful way to remind ourselves that we are connected to everyone on the planet, no matter where we live.

Thanks, Karl, for inspiring me to do more this holiday season.

Tags: kiva, karl_fisch

I was going to write a long impassioned screed about the latest Time magazine article about Michelle Rhee. But then I saw that Dean Shareski already did, so I thought I'd first link to that.

I'll add a few more points, however, but they deal with the tenor and tone of the conversation right now, both in Rhee's words and in the tone of the article.

I worry about an educational leader who would speak like this to a reporter:

Let's admit that educational ideas are controversial. Let's admit that no one side of this argument has a monopoly on "right." Let's admit that we can work as hard as we want in service of an educational idea, but that we still don't know for sure that we're doing it right way. And let's let that back-of-the-mind doubt humble us, so that we remain open to learn, because in the end that's what we want our students to do.

And to Time Magazine, if you are going to have a reporter write an editorial, call it an editorial, because when you allow reporters to write statements like this without citing any research at all, you undermine your magazine's credibility:

Mixed in with the platitudes there are some very questionable statements. (I'd argue some of the best teachers I've ever seen teach learned how to never be in a hurry. In fact, I'd argue that 'being in a hurry' can often be an impediment to great teaching, because a) that's about you, not the kids, and b) you miss a lot of details when you're in a hurry, and details tend to be important when you teach.) I'm fine with them on the editorial page -- or on a blog -- but not in a piece of reportage. And again, making those statements as blanket truths is reductive -- it makes it seem like the way to great teaching and great schools is just some magic algorithm that everyone knows already but just for some perverse reason is unwilling to implement.

We need fewer know-it-alls in education today. We need thoughtful, humble people who are willing to acknowledge their uncertainty and still do what they believe to be right. We need people who do understand that bludgeoning our way to school improvement probably isn't going to get us there. And we need people who understand, like Tom Sobol once said,

That perspective -- given near the end of a long heroic career in education -- doesn't get you in Time magazine, and it probably doesn't get you meets with both Presidential candidates during election season, but it's what's needed.

I admit... when I saw the headlines earlier this week about another $800 billion for the bailout, I started to get angry. I understood, from talking to friends I trust in the finance world and reading as much as I could get my hands on, that the first bailout was necessary. But the more I read about corporate retreats and corporate jets, the more angry I get about spending $1.8 trillion dollars on the bailout. Somewhere, somehow, the folks running these companies just flat out don't get it.

So here's my proposal -- continue the bailout because we cannot allow these markets to collapse, (and put some intelligent regulation and oversight in, please!) But any company that takes federal bailout money must put a cap on salaries. No one at any company that takes federal monies can make more than the President of the United States.

I think it's fair. That's a $400,000 salary. That's fair. That's livable. (Heck, I'd love to learn how to just get by on $400,000.) And more importantly, it sends a clear message -- the era of greed is over.

I know there are some who say that the market can bear a higher price, and that's what is necessary to get the brilliant minds we need to run these companies, but I'm unimpressed with the folks running them so far, and, honestly, President Obama is, by all accounts, a very smart man.

I know there are those who will feel that this doesn't go far enough -- that the CEOs of AIG and BearStearns should be forced to give back salary back. I think that's a fight we won't win.

This makes sense to me -- if you take bailout money, you pay anyone in your company more money than the highest paid federal employee -- the President of the United States -- and that includes stock options and such -- for the next ten years.

To me, this sends a message to the American people that the executives at these companies are willing to sacrifice like so many Americans are right now. And that's important, since we are bailing them out with enough money to insure every American, fully fund every school or invest in Social Security so that it's there when my generation retires. These are all things we were told that the American government couldn't afford, but now the money is there. It's only right that everyone takes their share of the hit on this one -- and that should certainly include the business folks who oversaw this disaster in the first place.

And if the executives don't want to do that, well, no one is making them take the federal dollars, are they?

Tags: bailout

"We should tolerate flaws in other people in the vain hope that they will tolerate our flaws." -- I don't remember who first told me that, but it made a ton of sense to me.

One of the things that never seems to amaze me is when I talk to teachers and hear them talk about holding students to standards of behavior and work that they would never hold themselves. Ask yourself, in your school, does the teachers with the most draconian lateness policy often show up late to meetings? Does the teacher who makes a big deal about food in the classroom often leave trash all over the faculty room? Do the teachers who have the strictest policies often resist any administrative policies? And how many of us have made it through an hour-long PD session without passing a note or sending an email or daydreaming? And yet, so many schools expect kids to do so five, six, seven times a day. (And how many people -- aside from teachers -- go home from work and then work another three hours at home? And yet, we expect kids to do that every day...)

One of the things I love about SLA is that we try to remember everyone's humanity -- teachers and students. We talk about the things that frustrate us... students handing in stuff late being top of the list for many of us, but when we do, we try to remember how many deadlines we miss ourselves. Remembering the shared humanity of everyone in the building can really lead to putting in place policies that are humane. We must expect our students to work hard, we must expect our students to learn to make deadlines -- we must set the bar as high for our students as we set it for ourselves, but we must also remember to set up structures that help students when, inevitably, they sometimes miss the bar. We should do so if for no other reason than we hope someone does that for us when we fail.

Tags: compassion

The non-SLA sessions for EduCon 2.1 are up on the site! Check out the Conversations page for some incredibly exciting sessions.

I tried to make a list of all the sessions and people I'm excited to see, but really, the post got too long too fast. It's going to mean that people are going to have to make some hard choices, but we are holding to our structure of longer sessions, fewer sessions a day, time in between, and sharing meals so people have time to talk.

There's more to post... more sessions coming... panelists announced... dinners planned, but we've got the first HUGE piece of the content of the conference up, and I couldn't be more pleased.

Hope to see you in Philly... it's going to be an amazing time!

Tags: educon, educon21

Barbara Barreda, ed-tech blogger and principal, lost her house in the California wildfires today. I've been lucky enough to meet Barbara and spend some time with her. She's a wonderfully kind and smart educator, and I can't even imagine what she must be going through.

So Jen Wagner and Clarence Fisher have set up a way for people to help. Read Clarence's post first or just go right to Jen's page for the fund, but if you know Barbara or if you have read her blog and you can spare some money, please do.

If you've benefited from the edu-blogosphere, this is a wonderful way to say thanks by helping out one of the community's wonderful members.

Educators write pretty mission statements. But the problem with so many educational mission statements is that they sound good but bear little resemblance to the real world. This is part of the reason why good ideas get reduced to being called "edu-babble" because the words get invoked but never put into practice, so they lose their meaning.

But ideas have meaning if we let them.

So I have an idea -- whenever we hear or read schools or districts or teachers or administrators make a claim that their school / district / PD session / whatever is about "21st Century Learning" or "Life-Long Learning" or "Project-Based Learning" or whatever claim we may see or read, our first question should be -- "Where Does it Live?"

Educational ideas only have lasting power if they exist within the systems and structures of institutions that claim them. Everything -- every system, every policy, every structure -- in schools represent a pedagogical choice, and we don't take advantage of that. The classes we choose to schedule, the length of the classes, the times they meet -- every possible permutation privileges certain kinds of learning and makes other kinds of learning harder.

So, for example, at SLA, we say that the way we treat each other is based on the ethic of care -- the idea that caring relationships are at the heart of creating healthy learning environments. That idea has to live somewhere or eventually it will get squeezed out or only live within the people who came in already believing it. This is why we have Advisory -- a four year relationship between a group of twenty students and a teacher that ensures that every teacher has a group of kids for whom they are responsible and every students has an adult in the building who will always be their advocate. We had to plan for caring, we couldn't just assume it, and we certainly couldn't just say it.

All schools should be able to point to the places, the systems, the structures that prove that the words we say we believe truly live and are systemized in our schools. If we do this, those edu-bingo words will stop merely being buzzwords and, instead, will give us the rich language we need to teach and learn.

So what does your school claim to believe and where does it live?

The words of my students:
"I feel as if I can really do anything in the world now."
"Lehmann!!! We did it! President Obama!"
"We did it!"

But as President-Elect Obama said, it's not over now. The real work begins tomorrow... o.k., maybe Thursday.





And Theo gets his piece of history too... look at the screenshot of tonight's Philly.com:



And look at upper right hand of the frame. We're so proud.

Tags: politics

[A note -- I used to blog much more about my personal political views when I was a teacher, not a principal. As a principal, I blog much less about my personal beliefs outside of education for a lot of reasons. But in the end, this blog isn't a school blog, it's my personal blog, and I asked myself tonight why I had no ideas to blog about this week, and it's because I, like most of America, have been watching this election so closely. I respect that not everyone thinks that I should write publicly about my political views, and I respect that not everyone shares those views -- and not everyone at SLA shares those views. That's o.k., but I need to write this anyway.]

The McCain commercials that have been airing in Pennsylvania this week have been about fear. I saw my first 527 Reverend Wright ad tonight. I watched McCain surrogate "Joe the Plumber" question Obama's patriotism. And I've been offended and frightened. Offended because I cannot believe that John McCain has been willing to stoop so low, and frightened because it has worked before.

So I watched Obama's speech in Ohio last week. If you can't watch the whole thing, watch the last seven minutes.



And then read this -- My Wife Made Me Canvass for Obama.

And remember, that we as Americans have a choice about our nation. We can make a choice this week to believe in the best that we can be. I believe that this election has the chance to revitalize our political process. I believe that if Obama wins, we will have invited a generation of young people to the political process. I believe that if Obama wins, we will have invigorated people all over the demographic map - people like my mother who has spent hundreds of hours volunteering for the campaign. I believe that these people have worked for Obama because they were inspired by him.

And that's the thing. I want a political who inspires. I am envious when I hear my mother and father talk about what it was like to listen to JFK's inaugural speech. I remember the hope I had for Clinton.

And I remember watching Obama's speech in Philadelphia and thinking that I was hearing something truly different than I had ever heard from a politican in my lifetime.

We have the chance to vote for someone who believes in the best of what we can be. We have the chance to vote for someone who believes that the American Dream must be open to all who are willing to work for it. We have the chance to vote for someone who believes that politicans of either party have an obligation to work for all Americans.

On Tuesday morning, I'm going to take Jakob by the hand, down to my polling place, and I'm going to take him into the ballot booth with me as I vote for Barack Obama. I hope that, years from now, he remembers the moment as a powerful piece of his own and our country's history.

Tags: politics