Hustle and Flow--and Alfie Kohn

When reformers claim that education scholar Alfie Kohn doesn’t live in the real world, I usually mention the intense Japanese focus, in elementary school, on cohesive and cooperative groups. Since Japan is not only in the real world, but one of our chief national competitors, this is generally a conversation-stopper. It’s not that competition is an American thing, per se—witness countless World Cup uprisings—but that our teachers automatically assume that there’s no learning or conduct that can’t be enhanced by a contest or reward. It’s habitual— young educators come pre-programmed to embrace B. F. Skinner, modifying classroom behaviors through a little low-rent psychology.

In my first 15 years as a middle school band teacher, I used all the competitive schemes, including a chairs and challenges system familiar to anyone who’s played in a school instrumental group: Teacher publicly ranks kids by playing ability. Kids challenge each other in teacher-judged playoffs to move up and down the “chair” pecking order. First chair players are designated leaders, getting solos and more interesting parts. Kids at the bottom of the ladder don’t get much beyond the opportunity to go after their classmates. The theory is that all kids will practice more, and thus improve. The reality is that most challenges and chair-hopping occur at the top of the heap; the kids down below slog along listlessly. And then drop out. 

I wish I could say I ended the challenge system because my eyes were opened to its pedagogical inefficiency and questionable morality. Actually, I just got sick of having flute players crying in my office and drummers hiding their competitor's sticks to prevent last-minute cramming before a challenge. No chairs any more, I said. From now on, you’ll have assigned seats.  I sat kids in mixed-ability groups and rotated the melody and harmony parts. If there were solos, anyone could try out, and we voted. Our new goals were pursuing excellence and playing amazing music. 

Almost immediately, several things happened: My band program got larger, as fewer kids quit. The kids with weaker skills improved, sitting next to stronger players and playing more challenging parts. And, in turn, my bands got better, as performance quality was more even across the group—allowing us to choose increasingly difficult and rewarding music. Kids who might have been last chair under the old system didn’t realize they were the weakest link, and signed up for solo festival, building even more personal proficiency.

And, of course, I had some complaints, from parents of former first chairs. The complaints lasted  exactly as long as it took to flush the memory of chairs and challenges out of the system. And from then on—mixed seating was the norm.

That’s another thing I learned from Alfie Kohn. The principle under most competitions is: Cui bono—who benefits? Whose ox will be gored if we stop competing? And whose star might rise? When chairs disappeared from my classroom—when there was no longer a list on the wall rank-ordering my clarinet players for everyone to see—kids were free to concentrate on becoming a music-making community. 

It’s odd that these competitive routines are so entrenched in school music programs. The party line on the benefits of music education is all about creativity, artistic expression and teamwork. Most music teachers, whose own fortunes in music school rose and fell on the chair system, are well aware of how uncomfortable it is to be worried about the person above or below you hawking your mistakes. It’s easy to forget about the power and pleasure of music, lost in guarding your position. 

In all creative arts, the ideal is what Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls “flow”—that place where you stop thinking consciously about performance and are fully lost in the beauty and delight. Veteran jazz musicians depend on flow, a result of their deep knowledge and experience, to trigger inspiring improvisation. Flow doesn’t often happen when you’re 12 years old, but I have witnessed student musicians lose themselves in peak experiences, awestruck after a glorious final massed chord, or closing their eyes to put a little more feeling into a passage. Why would we want to distract them from something as important as that?

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American public schools - still unequal (and racist) after all these years

this has been crossposted on several different blogs

In 1949, Black parents and children filed a law suit against the Board of Education in School District #22 in Clarendon County SC, noting the total inadequacy of facilities which were "unprotected from the elements . . .[with] no appropriate and necessary heating system, running water or adequate lights . . . and [with]an insufficient number of teachers and insufficent class spaces." The white schools were of course more modern and better equipped. That suit led to Briggs v Eliot, one of the cases eventually combined into the landmark Brown v Board of Education case that found schools segregated by race "inherently unequal" and thus unconstitutional even according to the perverse "separate but equal" doctrine of Plessy v Ferguson.

If it sounds like all I am doing is retelling ancient history, consider this: in 1999 the South Caroline Supreme Court remanded a case to trial "based on gross differences in resources in the same still-segregated Clarendoun County schools - now serving the grandchildren of the original plaintiffs - and the predominantly White and wealthier districts."

I am quoting from a new book on education for which I will shortly provide a complete review. But I decided this issue was so important I should address it separately. LET ME BE CLEAR: I am the one describing the results as racist, not the author of the book from which I draw the data.

The book is by Linda Darling-Hammond, the Charles E. Ducommun Professor of Education at Stanford University, one of the most respected scholars of American education, and someone who many in the educational circles in which I run very much wanted to see as Secretary of Education. She was an important adviser to the President while he was a candidate, but was strongly opposed by people such as the alumni of Teach for America because of the questions she has raised about the (lack of) long-term effectiveness of that program.

The title of the book is The Flat World and Education: How America's Committment to Equity Will Determine Our Future. It is well documented, exhaustive in its coverage of material. Darling-Hammond has herself appeared as an expert witness in a number of the more recent lawsuits on the question of equity in schools. Let me briefly continue with the material on South Carolina from which i was drawing, and which appears beginning on p. 112:

In 2005, when Abbeville v. State of South Carolina was heard, 88% of students in plaintiff districts were minority, 86% lived in poverty, and 75% of the schools were rated by the state as "unsatisfactory" or below on the state rating system." Graduation rates rangted between only 33 and 56% across the state.
The testimony was eerily similar to that heard in the same courthouse a half-century earlier, with plaintiffs describing crumbling and overcrowded facilities , lack of equipment, large numbers of uncertified teachers, and teacher turnover caused by salaries and benefits much lower than those in other districts.

.

The issue of inequity has if anything gotten even worse in recent years. One main purpose of federal involvement in education has been to try to provide funds to somewhat offset the inequality of schooling for students in high poverty areas. When the Reagan administration took office, the Federal government was providing 12% of the national spending on public K-12 education. Druing Reagan's first term, when Terrell Bell was Secretary of Education (and A Nation at Risk was published) that dropped to 9.6%. During the second term, when William Bennett ran the department, the percentage dropped to 6.2%.

Meanwhile the inequity of spending within the states had been increasing. And the problems were exacerbated by the Reagan administration's shifting the costs to states not only for education, but "for health care, employment training, housing supports, and other functions." (p. 105). Only in the late 1980s did we see the accumulation of data to allow "tracking of of disparities in instructional resources - teachers, support staff, curriculum, facilities, and professional development" that allowed researches to document the severity and increase of the inequities of inputs.

Understand this - on the conservative side of the educational divide there is an argument that inputs do not matter, that all that matters is results, hence the emphasis on test scores. Yet consider this:

In total, courts in 10 of the 31 states where suits were filed during the 1970s and early 1980s found their state's school finance system to be unconstitutional.

Consider both of those numbers, that 62% of the nation's states saw lawsuits on the constitutionality of how public schools were funded, on grounds often of violation of equal protection, and of those 1/3 - and of the total states 20% - were found to be correct: there was a constitutional violation. Yet, as Darling-Hammond notes, in most states there was little done to rectify the situation.

It is not that money makes no difference. Despite conservative scholars like Eric Hanushek (now at Hoover Institute which is located at but not truly part of Stanford) arguing that the monetary inputs are irrelevant, Ronald Ferguson found something very different: that expenditures properly applied do make a difference.

He found that the single most important measurable cause of increased student learning was teacher experience, measured by teacher performance on a statewide certification exam measuring academic skills and teaching knowledge, along with teacher experience and masters degree. The effects were so strong, and the variations in teacher expertise so great, that after controlling for socioeconomic status, the large disparities in achievement between Blakc and White students were almost entirely accounted for by difference in the qualifications of the their teachers. . . Ferguson found that when regional cost differentials are accounted for, school district operating expenditures exert a significant positive effect on student achievement - an effect that operates primarily through the influence of funding levels on salaries that attract and retain more qualified teachers.
(pp. 106-7)

We are now in a time when we see a push to prepare all students to be "college ready" upon graduation from high school. What is interesting is that we have seen states - South Carolina to be sure, but surprisingly also New York - argue that the state is not required to provide a minimally adequate education: in the case in NY those defending against the law suit argued that the state standards only required an 8th grade education. Lest you think this is ancient history, it took place during the Pataki administration, which actually won on those grounds in the first appellate review, although eventually New York's highest court upheld the the victory at trial that determined there was inequity and ordered the state to change its funding formula to make sure all students receive "a meaningful high school education."

Unfortunately, our current Supreme Court does not accept the arguments of those who seek greater equity of inputs. In a case from Arizona, the Federal District Court and the 9th Circuit both found Arizona out of compliance with their obligation fo provide resources inder The Equal Education Opportunities Act of 1974 to address the educational needs of English language learners. The case started in 1992 in Nogales, and reached SCOTUS in 2009. The state presented the arguments of Hanushek and other conservatives to focus on outputs not inputs, arguments opposed by the 3o current and former presidents of the American Educational Research Association and the National Academy of Education, who argued that, especially with English language learners, that well-crafted considerations of inputs and outputs were mutually reinforcing. In a 5-4 decision written by Justice Alito, the Court remanded for a further examination of whether cricumstances had changed sufficiently to allow the state relief from the original court decision.

Now consider for a moment: 1992 filing and 2009 SCOTUS decision. The state has never complied with the original ruling. The current Superintendent of Public Instruction (disclosure - who was my high school classmate) continues to fight this battle rather than meet the needs of the English Language Learners - who of course are almost always Spanish speaking, and often as discriminated against a minority in parts of the American Southwest as Blacks still are parts of the American South. The impact of the Supreme Court decision will at a minimum further delay addressing the inequity - and violation of law - that caused the original lawsuit.

It is not that the situation has to remain like this. Darling-Hammond examines states that have taken a different approach than this kind of resistance to what is right. Massachusetts had some success, although recent economic problems and periods of Republican governors (Romney) have led to fall backs.l Connecticut has a strong record of meeting educational needs, although there are still some gaps in performance. New Jersey has made major strides. North Carolina, led by the two periods of two terms for Jim Hunt as Governor, very much lifted itself out of the poor educational performance in states of the Old Confederacy.

Simply put, the problem is that absent sufficient resources we cannot use our public schools to lift people up. Schools without resources have less qualified teachers, higher turnover of teachers, less (if any) equipment, out of date books and other instructional material, and often physical plants that give students the clear impression that their education does not matter.

Schools that serve economically distressed populations suffer worst of all, because having funding based on local property values creates even greater problems when property values drop due to loss of employment opportunities and the massive drop in property values caused by the greed and lack of regulation of mortgages in the last administration. States cannot step in to help localities, because most of them are required to balance their budgets.

And the composition of schools in such communities? They are almost always heavily minority, although there are some economically distressed rural communities and some in white ethnic parts of major rust-belt cities.

The issue is not new. Anyone who read Jonathan Kozol's Savage Inequalities: Children in America's Schools, a book written in 1991, understands how deep-seated the problem has been.

We are now approaching 56 years since Brown was decided. We may not segregate our schools by law. We certainly do by economics. And in the process we perpetuate an inequality that is exceedingly racially discriminatory in its effects.

Darling-Hammond argues that we must have an appropriate commitment to educational equity if we are to meet the promise of this nation, perhaps even if we are to survive as a democracy.

As a teacher, I see that our current approach, with its emphasis on test scores at the expense of all else, only further exacerbates the inequality to which so many children of color are already subjected. To meet the "standards' of performances on tests of reading and math, students who lack access to music and art and similar things outside of the school context find them eliminated from their curriculum, while students in middle class schools where such things are readily available through family and community resources have them reinforced in their curriculum.

Something is wrong. Something is out of balance. And those being shortchanged are almost always children of color.

People still argue that spending money on their education is wasted because of their lack of background, or similar such nonsense. That is outright racism.

The inequity of opportunity created by the inequity of resources, whether or not its intention is racial discrimination, has the effect of perpetuating racial inequity. Those who are unwilling to confront are at a minimum quiet accomplices of the continuation of racial discrimination.

American public schools are still unequal, and thus racist in impact, after all these years, after more than half a century since our nation recognized that separate public schools were inherently unequal. It matters not that the separation now is by economic status rather than officially by race. It is still unequal, and insofar as it falls so disproportionally upon children of color, call it by the appropriate adjective - racist.

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if you care about schools, A Pedagogic Creed worth reading

originally posted at Daily Kos

I believe that all reforms which rest simply upon the enactment of law, or the threatening of certain penalties, or upon changes in mechanical or outward arrangements, are transitory and futile.

If the author of those words is correct in his belief, then the entire thrust of American educational policy of the past few decades, since the release of A Nation At Risk in the Reagan administration, is doomed to failure.

If the words sound like those of a contemporary critic of the sanctions No Child Left Behind or of the big stick approach of current Secretary Arne Duncan, then perhaps the author was more prescient than many realize. The words appeared in print on this day in 1897 in School Journal. The piece is titled My Pedagogic Creed and was written by the great American philosopher and Educator John Dewey.

You have the link to read the entire piece. If you are interested in school, students, and education, I suggest that you do. I will offer a few selections and my own observations.

There are five sections to the piece, which when published occupied pages 77-80 of Volume 54 of the publication.

ARTICLE ONE. WHAT EDUCATION IS

ARTICLE TWO. WHAT THE SCHOOL IS

ARTICLE THREE. THE SUBJECT-MATTER OF EDUCATION

ARTICLE FOUR. THE NATURE OF METHOD

ARTICLE FIVE. THE SCHOOL AND SOCIAL PROGRESS

I mentioned that Dewey was a philosopher as well as an educator. Here I think it worth noting that another Dewey, Melville, in his organization of knowledge in the Dewey Decimal System, classified psychology as a subset of philosophy. Anyone intimately involved with the educational process understands that effective pedagogy involves psychological proccesses. Thus it should not surprise you as you read the piece by John Dewey that he often turns towards how a child learns - a psychological process - to explain his pedagogical orientation.

We see this even in the first article, where Dewey - unlike too many educational "reformers" of more recent times, starts with first things: the purpose and nature of education. Perhaps I am unfair to many current "refrormers" but I see them as too focused on the utilitarian approach of economic benefit and the reduction of evaluation to performance on test scores as an external measure. Dewey was first and foremost committed to a democratic societ5y, and his pedagogy reflects that.

This is visible in his opening paragraph:

I believe that all education proceeds by the participation of the individual in the social consciousness of the race. This process begins unconsciously almost at birth, and is continually shaping the individual's powers, saturating his consciousness, forming his habits, training his ideas, and arousing his feelings and emotions. Through this unconscious education the individual gradually comes to share in the intellectual and moral resources which humanity has succeeded in getting together. He becomes an inheritor of the funded capital of civilization. The most formal and technical education in the world cannot safely depart from this general process. It can only organize it; or differentiate it in some particular direction.

The idea of sharing in hte intellectual and moral resources is, to Dewey, a fundamental benefit of a democratic society.

And while the individual has responsibilities within a democratic society, these can best be fulfilled by the development of the child not in isolated learning but through the social situation of interaction with other people. Thus Dewey continues

I believe that the only true education comes through the stimulation of the child's powers by the demands of the social situations in which he finds himself. Through these demands he is stimulated to act as a member of a unity, to emerge from his original narrowness of action and feeling and to conceive of himself from the standpoint of the welfare of the group to which he belongs. Through the responses which others make to his own activities he comes to know what these mean in social terms.

Education is thus both pyschological and social, with the former the basis. And for Dewey, it starts with where the child is:

The child's own instincts and powers furnish the material and give the starting point for all education. Save as the efforts of the educator connect with some activity which the child is carrying on of his own initiative independent of the educator, education becomes reduced to a pressure from without. It may, indeed, give certain external results but cannot truly be called educative. Without insight into the psychological structure and activities of the individual, the educative process will, therefore, be haphazard and arbitrary. If it chances to coincide with the child's activity it will get a leverage; if it does not, it will result in friction, or disintegration, or arrest of the child nature.

Let me make a brief excursus into my own experience as a teacher. I have tuaght from 7th through 12th grades. I have also taught adults in religious school and in the business world. Learning is always more complete, thorough and retained when it connects with the interests of the students, when there is a means of utilizing the new knowledge in immediate application. In a sense, this might lead some to believe that the most effective instruction would, therefore, be individual tutoring. But remember that Dewey also emphasizes the social context of education. Dewey acknowledges that it is possible to emphasize either the psychological or social apart from the other, but that the real value comes from recognizing the organic relationship between the two. He also undertands that the utility of education comes from its ability to be applied not merely in a contemporary context, which is why he seeks to empower the child. He writes

With the advent of democracy and modern industrial conditions, it is impossible to foretell definitely just what civilization will be twenty years from now. Hence it is impossible to prepare the child for any precise set of conditions. To prepare him for the future life means to give him command of himself; it means so to train him that he will have the full and ready use of all his capacities; that his eye and ear and hand may be tools ready to command, that his judgment may be capable of grasping the conditions under which it has to work, and the executive forces be trained to act economically and efficiently. It is impossible to reach this sort of adjustment save as constant regard is had to the individual's own powers, tastes, and interests - say, that is, as education is continually converted into psychological terms. In sum, I believe that the individual who is to be educated is a social individual and that society is an organic union of individuals. If we eliminate the social factor from the child we are left only with an abstraction; if we eliminate the individual factor from society, we are left only with an inert and lifeless mass.

All so far has been from Article One. Allow me to briefly offer some selections from the other sections, starting with What The School Is:

I believe that the school is primarily a social institution. Education being a social process, the school is simply that form of community life in which all those agencies are concentrated that will be most effective in bringing the child to share in the inherited resources of the race, and to use his own powers for social ends.

I believe that education, therefore, is a process of living and not a preparation for future living.

I believe that the school must represent present life - life as real and vital to the child as that which he carries on in the home, in the neighborhood, or on the play-ground.

I believe that education which does not occur through forms of life, forms that are worth living for their own sake, is always a poor substitute for the genuine reality and tends to cramp and to deaden.

I believe that much of present education fails because it neglects this fundamental principle of the school as a form of community life. It conceives the school as a place where certain information is to be given, where certain lessons are to be learned, or where certain habits are to be formed. The value of these is conceived as lying largely in the remote future; the child must do these things for the sake of something else he is to do; they are mere preparation. As a result they do not become a part of the life experience of the child and so are not truly educative.

And the final, provocative paragraph of the section:

I believe that all questions of the grading of the child and his promotion should be determined by reference to the same standard. Examinations are of use only so far as they test the child's fitness for social life and reveal the place in which he can be of most service and where he can receive the most help.

From A THE SUBJECT-MATTER OF EDUCATION, let me offer what may seem most controversial:

I believe that we violate the child's nature and render difficult the best ethical results, by introducing the child too abruptly to a number of special studies, of reading, writing, geography, etc., out of relation to this social life.

I believe, therefore, that the true centre of correlation of the school subjects is not science, nor literature, nor history, nor geography, but the child's own social activities.

Note carefully these words: too abruptly. It is not that Dewey ultimately is opposed to discrete categories or division into subject matter. But the child's mind does not readily make such distinctions. Whereas the principles of each of the domains of human knowledge and endeavor can be learned by the doing of tasks and activities relevant to the immediate context of the child's life. Thus, to take a contemporary issue, it would be foolhardy to attempt to teach as a formal subject the principles of algebra to most 5-8 year olds, and yet the doing of activities that present the opportunity to apply algebraic thinking can lead to a more effective learning of the principles than would be accomplished by discrete and segregated instruction.

Dewey gives many examples of his understanding in this process, including his support of learning things like cooking and sewing, of how the science education of his day was deadly and one might argue very unscientific. Let me note that most children are natural scientists, and we could with proper instruction develop far more passion for and capability in science were we to be working with that natural tendency, even if it meant that their test scores on math reading did not progress as quickly. And yet consider that under NCLB we have ben testing reading and math beginning in the 3rd grade with such punitive sanctions possible that we have excluded the learning of science, of social studies and the like, to the severe detriment of how students perform in these other subjects further up the educational ladder.

In THE NATURE OF THE METHOD, Dewey writes that it

is ultimately reducible to the question of the order of development of the child's powers and interests. The law for presenting and treating material is the law implicit within the child's own nature.

From this he derives 4 principles, which are as follows (I am using Dewey's words, albeit somewhat truncated, which is why they are not in block quotes, but I use italics to indicate the words are not mine):

1. the active side precedes the passive in the development of the child nature; that expression comes before conscious impression; that the muscular development precedes the sensory; that movements come before conscious sensations; consciousness is essentially motor or impulsive; that conscious states tend to project themselves in action.

2. the image is the great instrument of instruction. What a child gets out of any subject presented to him is simply the images which he himself forms with regard to it... if nine-tenths of the energy at present directed towards making the child learn certain things, were spent in seeing to it that the child was forming proper images, the work of instruction would be indefinitely facilitated.

3. interests are the signs and symptoms of growing power... hey represent dawning capacities. Accordingly the constant and careful observation of interests is of the utmost importance for the educator.

4. the emotions are the reflex of actions... to endeavor to stimulate or arouse the emotions apart from their corresponding activities, is to introduce an unhealthy and morbid state of mind...


The final Article is titled THE SCHOOL AND SOCIAL PROGRESS. Dewey begins

I believe that education is the fundamental method of social progress and reform.

That is immediately followed by the quote with which I began.

In a sense, this is the section which might be most controversial. Dewey conceives of a balancing of the individual and the social, or as he puts it, the reconciliation of the individualistic and the institutional ideals. There is of course the question of how that reconciliation is affected, and of who shapes the institutional ideals. Certainly as far back as Plato thinkers have wrestled with how to use education to advance the goals of the larger society. Humanity has never reached a consensus on this, and I sincerely doubt that even within one nation such a consensus is truly achievable. One can note Dewy's belief:, that it is

the community's duty to education is, therefore, its paramount moral duty. By law and punishment, by social agitation and discussion, society can regulate and form itself in a more or less haphazard and chance way. But through education society can formulate its own purposes, can organize its own means and resources, and thus shape itself with definiteness and economy in the direction in which it wishes to move.

But that implies a possible serious struggle over the definition of the very direction in which movement is desired.

Dewey concludes the piece with a series of short statements that might also be viewed as controversial. Consider for example his final three brief statements:

I believe, finally, that the teacher is engaged, not simply in the training of individuals, but in the formation of the proper social life.

I believe that every teacher should realize the dignity of his calling; that he is a social servant set apart for the maintenance of proper social order and the securing of the right social growth.

I believe that in this way the teacher always is the prophet of the true God and the usherer in of the true kingdom of God.

Framing his beliefs in semi-religious terms will certainly raise red flags for many, if for no other reason than it creates the possibility of another dispute, over what the true Kingdom of God is, or of how one conceives of God's will, or similar issues.

But even the idea of "the formation of proper social life" or "the maintenance of proper social order and the securing of the right social growth" are expressions with which many might wish to take issue. They might argue that such expressions could be utilized to maintain an inequitable and unfair social order. That is certainly possible, but only if those expressions were removed from the broader context in which Dewey presents them.

For some who consider themselves conservatives, Dewey is a bete noire, his name a red flag, his approach something to be rejected reflexively and unthinkingly. After all, he was involved with - gasp - development professional associations (aka "unions") for teachers, he had good things to say about aspects of the Soviet Union, and the "progressive" movement in education flowing from his ideas is easy to blame for all they find wrong with American schools.

I would disagree, and not merely because my own orientation as an educator is progressive. The Soviet Union gave us the work of Lev Vygotsky, which has been a huge contribution in understanding how children learn, and thus reshaping how we attempt to teach them. And I would argue that in many ways Dewey is conservative in the best sense of the word. He seeks to conserve the cultural heritage of humanity and society - might I remind the reader of the early appearance in his essay of phrases like "share in the intellectual and moral resources which humanity has succeeded in getting together" and "an inheritor of the funded capital of civilization"? Dewey seeks to broaden access to these. He may insist on starting with where the child is - he begins with the psychological because it is the best way of invoking the natural learning interest of the child and making meaningful the learning upon which he is embarking. But he also insists that there is always a social context. It is worth repeating what he offers as he insists on the organic relationship between the individual psychological and the social aspects of education:

f we eliminate the social factor from the child we are left only with an abstraction; if we eliminate the individual factor from society, we are left only with an inert and lifeless mass.

I wonder how much more productive our discussions about the direction of educational policy might be if the major participants had a better understanding of the history of education in this nation. I certainly think that awareness and UNDERSTANDING of the work of people like Dewey might well improve the process for anyone not coming to the table with predetermined goals that they are determined to impose, regardless of either their cost (monetary, financial, and social as well as pedagogical).

Today is the anniversary of this important statement by Dewey. I have no idea how many will read this posting. I felt it important to remind people of the words and ideas Dewey offered. How they respond is up to them.

Peace.

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Standards vs. Criteria....a distinction worth maintaining?

This is a comment on Ken's post about Alfie Kohn's article on national standards, and Barb's comment. This got to be too long to "fit" into the comments, so I decided to make it a post on its on.

I agree wholeheartedly with Ken's post (and Alfie's thoughts, mostly). And Barb's distinction between standards and standardization is useful, although in a practical sense, I'm not quite sure how national standards would NOT lead to national standardized tests, especially if "accountability" remains the mantra of federal "reform" efforts.

I'd like to introduce another distinction that I haven't seen mentioned in this debate, and that is the distinction between "criteria" and "standards." What's the difference?

The terms are confused by the concept of "criterion-referenced tests," which stipulate that students should be able to DO a particular thing (the "criterion") without regard to the population as a whole. In other words, "criterion-referenced tests" do not use "norms" to determine was is acceptable: they simply set a minimum acceptability based on some predetermined criterion. This makes some limited sense for tests such as those used for employment in certain jobs (able to type at 70 WPM, for example) that require certain specific performance levels for successful performance of the job. (The fact that some people may be great for that job without having that minimal performance level is treated as, well, an accident that can't be avoided if we are to have efficiencies of selection.) Thus, a "criterion" for acceptable performance becomes a "performance standard." This is made even more confusing by the way that percentile measures (i.e. "normed scores") are used as cut-off points for standardized tests, for example in Chicago where 3rd graders must achieve a normed score of 18th percentile (or whatever it is currently) in order to be passed out of third grade. Superficially, this assumes that a certain percentage of students will inevitably FAIL that performance standard (since they are determined by percentiles), but the fact that these percentile scores aren't REALLY determined by the population actually taking the test (but by a previously selected "normative sample) means this simplistic idea that a certain percentage must fail is, in fact, not true.

(Gene Glass helpfully addressed this blurring of the distinction between criteria and standards in his 1977 occasional paper "Standards and Criteria," available here: http://www.wmich.edu/evalctr/pubs/ops/ops10.html, although his primary purpose was to argue that ALL criteria used to determine "passing" scores on a test are arbitrary, rather than the point I wish to make here.)

The distinction I wish to make is between criteria vs. standards as a way of evaluating the quality of a piece of academic work. Elliot Eisner refers to John Dewey's Art as Experience in describing this distinction in his 1995 Phi Delta Kappan article "Standards for American Schools: Help or Hindrance?" (vol 76, no 10; excerpted here and available here). Eisner wrote:

"Standards fix expectations; criteria are guidelines that enable one to search more efficiently for the qualities that might matter in any individual work...To say that by the end of a course students will be able to write a convincing essay on the competing interests of environmentalists and industrialists that marshalls good arguments supported by relevant facts is to identify criteria that can be used to appraise the essay; it is not to provide a standard for measuring it."

The problem with standards (especially as instantiated in standardized tests...which, I've suggested, they inevitably are) is that they lead to "arbitrary" (cp. Glass) numerical determinations of what constitutes acceptable vs. unacceptable work. Such standards, while useful, cannot possibly be applied in such a simple way to complex academic works such as the essay described by Eisner or any other product that wraps multiple skills together. Eisner continues:

"The qualities that define inventive works of any kind are qualities that by definition have both unique and useful features. The particular form those features take and what it is that makes them useful are not necessarily predictable, but sensitive critics--and sensitive teachers--are able to discover such properties in the work." Einser goes on to discuss the variability of human development, and the obvious lack of fit between "cut-offs" for minimal performance on standardized tests and the huge range of competencies visible in any classroom full of children.

While I don't have the time or space here to explore this distinction in greater detail (I refer you to Eisner's excellent article for more), I wanted to say it on the table as one way to gain some perspective on the issue of "standards" and "standardization" and their effects on teachers and schools.

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Education: Debunking the Case for National Standards - Alfie Kohn

originally posted at Daily Kos

Alfie Kohn is one of the most cogent critics of much of what goes on in education. He is well known for his belief that eliminating homework and grades will lead to more and better learning. You can explore many of his ideas at his website.

He has a piece coming out in Education Week, of which he has a slightly expanded version at the website, which you can read in its entirety here. Consider this paragraph from the middle of the piece:

Are all kids entitled to a great education? Of course. But that doesn’t mean all kids should get the same education. High standards don’t require common standards. Uniformity is not the same thing as excellence – or equity. (In fact, one-size-fits-all demands may offer the illusion of fairness, setting back the cause of genuine equity.) To acknowledge these simple truths is to watch the rationale for national standards – or uniform state standards -- collapse into a heap of intellectual rubble.

First let me clarify something. What Kohn is addressing is NOT the US Department of Education mandating a national standard. Rather is an effort being pushed by a number of organizations, starting with the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers, to come up with COMMON standards across all states. This is known as The Common Core State Standards Initiative. A number of people have noted that those most involved in drafting these "standards" do NOT included practicing or recent classroom teachers, have far too many people from testing companies, and are being drafted with little consideration to some basic understanding of the nature of teaching and learning, to wit - that not all students learn all subjects at the same rate.

Kohn offers a number of arguments against the move to national standards. To begin with, if one looks at international comparisons such as Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS), one finds, as Kohn notes

On eighth-grade math and science tests, eight of the 10 top-scoring countries had centralized education systems, but so did nine of the 10 lowest-scoring countries in math and eight of the 10 lowest-scoring countries in science.

That should clearly demonstrate that it is not the existence of national standards that leads to being highly ranked on TIMSS - and here let me note I do not think that TIMSS really provides all that much useful information, and our standing on that and other tests should not be the subject of all the hand-wringing that ensues, but I will explore that further at another time.

Let me offer a few selections from Kohn's pointed prose to give you a sense of the piece, which I strongly encourage you to read in its entirety. I will offer a few comments of my own with each selection, which are not necessarily in the order they appear in Kohn's piece.

a key premise of national standards, as the University of Chicago’s Zalman Usiskin observed, is that “our teachers cannot be trusted to make decisions about which curriculum is best for their schools.”

As a classroom teacher, it seems to me that the lack of input from teachers who collectively deal with the students is one reason the curricular decisions that are made are so often unconnected with students' lives, and which results far too often in bored students who retain little of what they feel is simply being shoved down their throats.

these core standards will inevitably be accompanied by a national standardized test. When asked, during an on-line chat last September, whether that was true, Dane Linn of the National Governors’ Association (a key player in this initiative) didn’t deny it. “Standards alone,” he replied, “will not drive teaching and learning” – meaning, of course, the specific type of teaching and learning that the authorities require.

So of course there will be the imperative of tests to drive the process. That may not be what is being pushed now, but many of those supporting the current standardization effort have made it clear their desire to have some tool to compare schools across states, across the country. If you think current state tests are high stakes . . . .

If you read the FAQ page on the common core standards website, don’t bother looking for words like “exploration,” “intrinsic motivation,” “developmentally appropriate,” or “democracy.” Instead, the very first sentence contains the phrase “success in the global economy,” followed immediately by “America’s competitive edge.”

If these bright new digitally enhanced national standards are more economic than educational in their inspiration, more about winning than learning, devoted more to serving the interests of business than to meeting the needs of kids, then we’ve merely painted a 21st-century façade on a hoary, dreary model of school as employee training. Anyone who recoils from that vision should be doing everything possible to resist a proposal for national standards that embodies it.

Which of course brings me back to what I often raise as the key yet unaddressed question, one to which we lack agreement: what is the purpose of education, of our having public schools? The push that we are seeing from the economic argument insists upon more math and science, even though the vast majority of jobs now being created do NOT require that much of either. Certainly, we want people to have basic skills in language and mathematics. Our recent approaches, even when they raise test scores, are not demonstrating that we are developing those skills. Even as we ratchet up "standards" (as if raising the high jump bar another 6 inches will therefore mean more students will jumpt over it) we are finding both increasing rates of students dropping out and increasing numbers of those heading off to higher education requiring remedial courses.

Even more, this is supposed to be a democratic republic. One might note that No Child Left Behind started with math and reading, never included writing as an important skill to be tested, was supposed to add science, but the scores were not to count for Adequate Yearly Progress - AYP is the stick used to beat up on schools and systems. What's missing? History, civics, the knowledge basic to being a citizen, and not just a cog in an economic system.

Even more, if this ia a democratic republic, should not the process of setting any standards include broad participation of those affected? Instead, as Kohn rightly notes,

a relatively small group of experts will be designing standards, test questions, and curricula for the rest of us based on their personal assumptions about what it means to be well educated.

Kohn later adds this:

to get everyone to apply the same standards, you need top-down control. What happens, then, to educators who disagree with some of the mandates, or with the premise that teaching should be broken into separate disciplines, or with the whole idea of national standards? What are the implications of accepting a system characterized by what Deborah Meier called “centralized power over ideas”?

I recognize I am going beyond fair use, but in this case that is allowed if I included the following verbiage:

Copyright © 2010 by Alfie Kohn. This article may be downloaded, reproduced, and distributed without permission as long as each copy includes this notice along with citation information (i.e., name of the periodical in which it originally appeared, date of publication, and author's name). Permission must be obtained in order to reprint this article in a published work or in order to offer it for sale in any form. Please write to the address indicated on the Contact Us page.

Kohn's conclusion is pretty much to the point:

Yes, we want excellent teaching and learning for all -- although our emphasis should be less on student achievement (read: test scores) than on students’ achievements. Offered a list of standards, we should scrutinize each one but also ask who came up with them and for what purpose. Is there room for discussion and disagreement -- and not just by experts -- regarding what, and how, we’re teaching and how authentic our criteria are for judging success? Or is this a matter of “obey or else,” with tests to enforce compliance?

The standards movement, sad to say, morphed long ago into a push for standardization. The last thing we need is more of the same.

Eve if you do not agree with Kohn, I think the points he raises deserve to be addressed. I find that in this rush to Common Standards there are questions not being asked, there are - yet again in the making of educational policy - voices that are not being heard. That is one reason for my bringing this to your attention.

There is another. Public education should be the concern of all of us. We pay taxes for our public schools, and the vast majority of our students attend public schools, something like more than 9 in 10. Between the Common Core Standards approach and what is being pushed by Arne Duncan with his Race to the Top funding, American public education is being totally reshaped without the changes being vetted by parents, teachers, students, or the American public as a whole. It is being driven by economic concerns, some of which (testing and textbook companies for example) stand to profit handsomely. I can remember a candidate for President saying of the debate on health care that the insurance companies should have a seat at the table, but not all the seats. What is happening to education policy is that there is no debate, the decisions are being made by a relatively small group, and there are no seats, no table, for the vast majority of those who will be affected.

Do you think that is right? I don't. So I wrote this.

Peace.

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Garbage In, Garbage Out: School Lunch Programs in America

As Janet Poppendieck writes in Free for All: Fixing School Food in America, we live in “a new age in which a business model … permeate[s] school food.” Where lunchrooms in the past treated children as lucky recipients, they now view them as customers whose business must be won. Vending machines light up the hallways, usually through an exclusive contractual arrangement between school or school district and a company like Coca-Cola or Pepsi. Fast-food operations like Subway and KFC set up shop in the food court, tempting away all the students with enough money to afford a hoagie or fried chicken strips. Alongside the traditional cafeteria meal are a la carte lines where burgers and French fries (and their unholy cousins, tater tots) glisten with grease under the lamplights, exempted in all their fatty glory from USDA nutritional requirements. Even those children who buy the standard hot meal eat mostly junk: pizza with fries hits all of the major food groups, if you define the groups expansively enough. As Ronald Reagan’s USDA famously taught us, ketchup is, after all, a vegetable.

. . . .

Another central concern of Free for All is school hunger—an ironically persistent problem in an age of plenty and excessive freedom of choice. Schools have largely failed to reduce the stigma that accompanies accepting a free lunch. In many schools, nonpaying children stand in separate lines from their classmates, and in some California schools they are the only students who eat inside in the cafeteria rather than outside in the pay-as-you-go food court, because the trays cannot be taken out of doors. Poppendieck is justifiably outraged by this insensitivity, which segregates children by income and leads some to skip meals so as to avoid cruel jibes from their wealthier friends.

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Does Teach for America Build Civic Engagement?

No.

One reason may be that the TFA experience often doesn't feel that empowering. And the research on civic participation (to simplify a lot) indicates that if you have a disempowering civic experience that will, not surprisingly, turn you off to civic engagement as a tool for social change.

“There’s been a very clear and somewhat naïve consensus among educators, policy folks and scholars that youth activism invariably has these kinds of effects,” Professor McAdam said. “But we’ve got to be much more attentive to differences across these experiences, and not simply assume that if you give a kid some youth service experience it will change them.”

. . .

Last year, 35,000 people applied to Teach for America, 42 percent more than in 2008. Further, at more than 20 colleges and universities, Teach for America was the top recruiter. At Harvard, 13 percent of graduating seniors applied. At Spelman College, in Atlanta, 25 percent did.

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