ASCD Inservice

How Did Test Scores Become King?

Post submitted by guest blogger Gerald Bracey. A longtime champion of accurate analysis of education research and vocal advocate for public education, Bracey died October 20, 2009.

In my article in the November Educational Leadership ("The Big Tests: What Ends Do They Serve?"), I mentioned a 50-year trend toward seeing test scores not just as a necessary tool, but as a sufficient measure to evaluate students, teachers, schools, districts, states, and nations. It's worth considering how we got to this point. 

Criticism of U.S. public schools grew greatly at the start of the Cold War. Two influential critiques were Arthur Bestor's Educational Wastelands: The Retreat from Learning in Public Schools in 1953 and Rudolf Flesch's Why Johnny Can't Read in 1955. In the midst of this hostility, the Soviet Union dropped a bomb, so to speak: Sputnik, the first manmade satellite to orbit the earth. Public shock at being bested by the Russians sparked even more attacks on the U.S. education system. 

These earlier criticisms did not invoke test scores as evidence of the schools' inadequacy, but later critics would. Bobby Kennedy insisted that the effects of 1965's Elementary and Secondary Education Act be evaluated, and the only available instruments were various norm-referenced, standardized tests. Tests took center stage.

In 1977, a College Board panel examined recent declines in SAT scores and blamed the changing population of students taking the test. The media and the public blamed the schools. The 13 indicators of national mediocrity in 1983's A Nation at Risk all referred to test scores. The message was clear: Information coming from teachers and administrators could not be trusted. We needed scientific, precise, objective measures of school outcomes. Tests, it was said, met these criteria. 

Well, if your only tool is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. With only tests as tools for accountability, we've overlooked many other outcomes we should work for in schools. 

What important school outcomes do you think we're ignoring with our laser-like focus on test scores?

What Makes or Breaks a Principal?

Principals often face a paradox, note the October EL authors of "What Makes or Breaks a Principal":

"The bold action needed to improve the school's performance often puts staff relationships at risk."

Complicating matters, typical principal certification programs and professional development often don't educate on professional relationship building. The authors explain how leaders develop three clusters of relational skills and qualities crucial to school leadership:

• Acting as consultants to translate pedagogical knowledge into practice
• Mediating conflict and reaching consensus
• Valuing relationships

Relationship skills can make or break a school leader. How do you stay sharp on these so-called soft skills? How have the relationship skills of school leaders had a positive or negative effect on your school?

The Power of Two

Post submitted by Principals William Sterrett and Matthew Haas.

Because of our frantic schedules, principals often have no meaningful dialogue, in any consistent manner, with a peer. As we describe in our October EL article ("The Power of Two"), the two of us have found a way to make peer-to-peer dialogue happen.

As two young principals from the same school division, we formed a working partnership and meet monthly to discuss issues that confront us and the mechanisms behind our successes. While it took some work and planning to get this tete-a-tete consistently on our calendars, once it was set up, we honored it with care. One of us leads a small elementary school, the other a comprehensive high school, but we've found good instruction in each setting is similar: It involves building positive classroom community, engaging students, tight collaboration, and a sincere desire to see all students succeed. 

Emphasizing cooperation over competition also helps our professional relationship. Charles Warner, a consultant/trainer and active blogger at www.MediaCurmudgeon.com, notes that "if in fact competition brings out the 'beast' in us, then . . . cooperation surely brings out the 'best' in us (see Warner's article on this topic).

We'd like to hear from you: Have you found creative ways to regularly meet with a peer to bolster your leadership?

The Outside-Inside Connection

The Outside-Inside Connection

Challenges you face inside the school are connected and compounded by things happening outside the school. So, says Thomas Hatch ("The Outside-Inside Connection"),

It's not enough for principals to be good administrators of staff and school operations and good instructional leaders--they've also got to be the liaison to those outside the school, acting as "spokesperson, negotiator, and champion of the school's interests."

Leave all these responsibilities up to the principal alone, and you're bound to encounter one of these problems down the road:

• Principal burnout
• Over-attention to external issues alienating the principal from what's going on in the school
• Leaders who leave a school take the power of their networks with them

Hatch says principals must constantly scan the school community for concerns and opportunities for partnerships, and seed school advocacy among community members, all while keeping the big picture of school needs in mind.

Principals, how do you leverage the outside-inside connection at your school?

Why Can't Any High-Poverty School Become High-Performing?

Submitted by guest bloggers Kathleen Budge and William Parrett ("Tough Questions for Tough Times," October 2009 EL) 

If one school can overcome the powerful and pervasive effects of poverty on student achievement, shouldn't any school be able to do the same? 

Yet the vast majority of high-poverty schools in the United States continue long traditions of underperformance. Calling for dramatic turnarounds, Secretary of Education Duncan has recently targeted some 5,000 schools for immediate attention.

Still, hundreds of other schools offer a compelling testament to success—high-poverty, high-performing schools such as Dayton's Bluff Elementary in St. Paul, Minnesota; Lapwai Elementary on the Nez Perce reservation in Northern Idaho; Port Chester Middle on Long Island, New York; Granger High in eastern rural Washington; Taft Elementary in Boise, Idaho; and PS 124, a K-8 school in Queens, New York—each with 60-95 percent of their students receiving free or reduced-price lunch. Check them out.

These schools build and maintain their successes by creating positive relationships among staff and students and focusing their work in three primary domains: building leadership capacity; focusing on student and professional learning; and fostering safe, healthy and supportive learning environments. They have also eliminated the all-too-common practices of setting low expectations for low-income children and blaming students or their families for low performance.

More than 30 years ago, EL published an article by Ron Edmonds ("Effective Schools for the Urban Poor," October 1979), the Harvard professor who inspired the effective schools movement. Edmonds wrote,

Why Creativity Now?

Why Creativity Now? A Conversation with Sir Ken Robinson

In "Why Creativity Now?" creativity expert Sir Ken Robinson dispels the myth that giving precedence to creativity in education will result in unstructured curriculum or initiatives targeted to a select content or students.

Creativity is a disciplined process that produces results: You can't be creative if you don't do something, says Robinson. And along the way, you need to evaluate how well your ideas are working—it's not just about coming up with new ideas, he adds.

A policy for creativity in education needs to be about everybody, just as education for creativity is about the whole curriculum, not just part of it, he says.

The pace of change in our world and economy coupled with the threat of the shrinking scope of curriculum and methods to accommodate standardization make now a perfect time to champion creativity in education.

Robinson says you can assess creativity—it just takes some extra thought. How have you checked progress of students' development of creativity skills?

(This interview also available in audio.)

Accountability vs. 21st Century Skills

Guest post by Terrence Clark, Superintendent, Bethpage Union Free School District, Bethpage, N.Y.

Many educators are eager to move into the post-NCLB world where tests are not the sole measure of a school or a student. The framework developed by the Partnership for 21st Century Skills offers a picture of what such schooling can look like. But particularly in states that haven't yet embraced this framework, we face a challenge: how do we implement the Partnership's goals and ideals while assuring our constituents that we will continue to do well on NCLB assessments?

In Bethpage, N.Y., we have the luxury of good assessment scores, but we felt our students needed and deserved more. We instituted an optional program of voluntary after-school, evening, weekend, and vacation activities (described in my article, "21st Century Scholars," in this month's EL). Our students and teachers were hungry for something relevant and meaningful, and we've seen a burst of creativity from both students and teachers in response to the new programming.

Have you wrestled with the challenge of giving students 21st century opportunities while meeting state accountability standards? Would our approach work in your district?

21st Century Skills: The Challenges Ahead

21st Century Skills: The Challenges Ahead

"The skills students need in the 21st century are not new," authors Andrew J. Rotherham and Daniel Willingham establish at the outset of their article, "21st Century Skills: The Challenges Ahead."

What's new is how central these skills have become to individual or collective success, and that's why, they say, schools must be deliberately designed for 21st century learning.

Students need to be able to practice using skills like critical thinking and information literacy in the context of content knowledge central to a particular subject. Teachers need better training and support to facilitate student-centered approaches to pedagogy. And assessments need to be fine-tuned to evaluate the development of thinking skills (the good news is this can be done, the bad news is it might not be scaleable.)

It's not about skills that are novel, it's about teaching these skills more intentionally and effectively. But without better curriculum, better teaching, and better assessments, these authors warn the 21st Century skills movement will do little to make these critical skills universally well-taught.

How is your school, district, or state approaching these challenges?

Bonus: Rotherham and other experts comment on the P21 movement at the National Journal Online.

The ABC's of the XYZ's

Guest post submitted by Marilee Sprenger, professional development consultant and adjunct professor at Aurora University, Aurora, Ill.

The students who were born into this era of technology have been dubbed "digital natives," and those of us who are trying to catch up and keep up are "digital immigrants." It goes beyond just a name. Baby Boomers (you know who you are!) and Generation Xer's are teaching Generation Y's and Z's. It sounds complicated, but it goes something like this:

Generations Y and Z survive and thrive by being digitally connected. They communicate globally, and most schools don’t provide the stimuli they want. On the other hand, their people skills are questionable as face-to-face communication is not a priority. Some show signs of Internet addiction, ADHD, and depression, possibly as a result of spending up to eight hours per day using some form of technology.

In my article in this month's Educational Leadership ("Focusing the Digital Brain"), I list some ways adults in digital natives' lives can honor their need to be digital and at the same time create engaging activities in which students interact face-to-face with others.

How do you connect with your digital enthusiasts?

What Would Socrates Say?

What Would Socrates Say?

Is Socratic inquiry the life jacket that could save students from drowning in a sea of trivia?

Peter W. Cookson, Jr. ("What Would Socrates Say?") may not think you can Twitter your way to enlightenment, but he does think teachers can blend the best of traditional, intellectual, linear culture with the current digital culture to meet the cognitive and expressive demands of the 21st century.

Specifically, he lays out "four elements of the 21st century mind" as the basis for a Socratic-anchored sea change in education: critical reflection, empirical reasoning, collective intelligence, and metacognition.

Students need the tools to understand the world before they can change it. Cookson's hybrid of Socratic inquiry shaped by immersive technologies dismantles the false dichotomy of learning environments and the "real world."

How do you support 21st century minds in your classroom?

Revisiting Social Responsibility

The all-free, all-online July issue of Educational Leadership revisits EL's May 2009 theme, "Teaching Social Responsibility."

Inside the July EL, you'll find articles on service learning, developing students' good citizenship habits, global ethics curriculum, and character education, and even a video illustrating a unit that integrates the arts and history.

The issue leads off with Stephen Wolk's article suggesting a good book could be the key to inspiring socially responsible students. Wolk offers an extensive list of titles, from picture books to novels, to get your students thinking locally and globally. Check out his list, and tell us what you'd add.

Brain-Friendly Learning for Teachers, or No More PD Root Canals

Sometimes, I scroll the tweets referencing the term "inservice" and wish we'd gone with a different blog name. "Sitting in really dumb inservice," "booored in inservice," and "two more hours of inservice and then freedom!" are pretty common sentiments.

David Sousa's "Brain-Friendly Learning for Teachers" in the free, online June issue of Educational Leadership takes these critiques to heart, er, head, and asks:

As teachers participate in learning activities, how do their brains determine what—if anything—to take away? And how can we use insights into the brain's workings to improve learning activities for teachers?

If you're involved in planning or providing professional development, you'll want to read Sousa's guidelines for aligning PD with how emotions, feedback, past experiences, and meaning affect learning in the adult brain.

Finding the Right Words in Parent-Teacher Conferences

In a bonus, free, online June edition, Educational Leadership revisits teacher learning from different angles. "But What Do I Say?" looks at learning how to conduct parent–teacher conferences—important opportunities to work with students' guardians as part of the school community. Teachers are often unprepared for the variety of situations they'll encounter in conference, the authors say. Syracuse University's semesterlong Parent/Caregiver Conferencing Model program helps pre-and inservice teachers move beyond winging it and develop strong communication skills to connect school and home.

The model borrows from the medical school practice of using standardized patients—actors performing specific symptoms, giving doctors and nurses opportunities to practice their diagnosis and communication skills. At Syracuse, standardized parents perform in a range of specific scenarios—a mother concerned about students bullying her son for his perceived sexuality, parents who disagree with the content of assigned readings, a parent whose autistic child is about to enter an inclusive classroom for the first time, and so on.

While the standardized parents are trained in exactly what to say in the conference, the teachers in the program are not. Their simulated conference is taped, and then, in debriefing, they discuss the interaction as a class and focus on one area to improve in the next rehearsal.

Go to the article to view a video of a simulated conference, and find out what students and directors in the program learned about teacher–caregiver communication, and the guidelines they developed to improve it.

What guides you in conferences with caregivers? What's been the biggest challenge?

Are Noncollege Youth Sidelined?

U.S. high school-age youth who aren't enrolled in traditional college prep classes are not being invited to participate in challenging community service or complex conversations about civic dilemmas, according to Peter Levine's "The Civic Opportunity Gap," in this month's Educational Leadership.

Whopping youth voter turnout was highly touted in the 2008 presidential election, but only 1 in 14 non-college-educated youth turned out at the polls (compared to 1 in 4 with some college credit), Levine notes. Although Levine, director of the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement, points to several causes of this "civic education gap," the different options that public schools present college-bound compared to non-college-bound teens is one culprit, he insists:

Researchers Joseph Kahne and Ellen Middaugh found that, within a given high school, students taking college preparatory courses were more likely than those taking less advanced courses to report that their classes included such experiences as service learning, classroom discussions of issues, field trips, or visiting speakers. When we compare suburban schools to urban and rural schools . . . we find that privileged schools are more likely to offer interactive civic education.

Middle and high school educators: Does your school welcome all students into civic activities and classroom discussion of social problems? Are some kids sidelined into menial volunteer tasks?

Stirring Up Justice

What happens when adults send youth the message that certain social justice issues are off limits? In "Stirring Up Justice," Laurel Schmidt says, "Children may well respond to the discovery that the topic of social justice is off limits by thinking that

• Injustice is a fact of life; there's no point in trying to change human nature.
• Injustice is unfortunate, but getting involved is too discouraging.
• Perhaps the victims brought it on themselves. They deserve it."

Schmidt acknowledges that social justice can be messy, exhausting work, but asks, "Are there some behaviors or conditions that we simply must address, no matter how difficult or unpopular our work will be?"

What behaviors or conditions do you believe schools have a responsibility to address? How has or hasn't your school engaged in these issues?

Schmidt notes that "kids rarely accept injustice as the status quo".

What issues have you seen students get fired up about? How did you respond and why? 

The Window into Green

How can we expect future generations to be able to comprehend and solve environmental problems if we only arm them with "bumper-sticker answers to lapel-pin questions"?

Environmental literacy, says Mike Weilbacher, Executive Director of the Lower Merion Conservancy, has been side-lined by NCLB mandates, a sort of ad hoc, a la carte approach to environmental learning opportunities, and a cultural shift toward indoor leisure activities. 

Educators and policymakers can reverse these trends; tons of data on the benefits of environmental and outdoor education and promising models lead the way to change. Weilbacher says,

As I recount in my article, "The Window into Green", in the May issue of Educational Leadership, a resurgent wave of interest in the environment has been cresting, and it turns out that teaching kids about the environment in the outdoors does them a world of good in other areas too.  
 
The evidence mounts: greener kids are smarter, too. But what are the obstacles to better environmental education? 

One-Size-Doesn't-Fit-ELL

Our guest blogger Judith Rance-Roney describes a personal encounter that illustrates the theme of her article in the April 2009 Educational Leadership. In the article, she points out that adolescent English language learners are a heterogeneous population, and teachers need to craft education plans that address their unique individual needs. Too often, that doesn't happen:

In one of my forays to a nearby school, I sat in on a sheltered math class for English language learners in a district known for its best practice in educating ELLs, many of whom were long-term English learners and native speakers of Spanish. The teacher had plastered the walls with terms, used visuals to illustrate concepts, and used copious amounts of Spanish to scaffold the math learning.

So, here I am in the back of the room observing and taking notes about how teachers are applying best practice introduced in the professional development program. Over to the right in the back with me is a lone student, desk tight in the back corner, flipping the pages of his math textbook and doodling in his notebook, totally oblivious to the activity at the blackboard.

"Oh yeah," the teacher explained afterwards. "That’s Piotr. He came from Poland a few months ago. He doesn't speak any English."

H-E-L-L-O. In this teacher's "No Child Left Behind" practices, Piotr did not even appear at the starting gate.

Have you had a similar experience with a one-size-fits-all mentality when educating adolescent English learners? 

And in response to Rance-Roney's article, Mary Ann Zehr at EdWeek's Learning the Language is looking for examples of schools that mix ELLs with native-English-speaking students but still give the ELLs focused instruction to acquire language skills.

How Are Boston's ELLs Faring Under Sheltered Immersion?

A report released April 8 by the Mauricio Gaston Institute in Boston shows troubling trends in student engagement and achievement among English language learners (ELLs) in Boston's public schools since 2003. A voter referendum in 2002 caused Boston's public schools to switch from transitional bilingual education to sheltered English immersion (in which ELLs are taught in English only) as default instruction.

Among the report's key findings are that the dropout rate for Boston high school students classified as Limited English Proficient nearly doubled from 2003 to 2006. By 2006, high school LEP students had the highest dropout rate of all students compared, although LEP students showed the lowest dropout rates in 2003 when transitional bilingual education was instructional policy. The proportion of LEP students in middle school who dropped out more than tripled.

From the Ballot Box to the Classroom

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*UPDATE* New report shows Boston Students Struggle with English-only Rule

Should state elections decide whether English language learners benefit from bilingual education? In the past 10 years, ballot initiatives in five states attempted to limit bilingual education programs. Supporters of these ballot initiatives argue that native-language instruction hampers ELL students' learning in English and academic subjects. Their opponents say native-language instruction supports language acquisition and content learning while ELLs learn enough English to succeed in all-English classrooms.

"From the Ballot Box to the Classroom," in the April issue of EL, argues against ballot initiatives that limit the range of program options for educating the large and varied ELL population in the U.S.

The authors claim that ballot initiative voters have little information or technical expertise on educating ELL students, and initiative supporters focus their arguments almost entirely on how ELL students learn English, neglecting the broader issue of how students learn language, literacy, and content.

Cast your vote on ballot initiatives legislating ELL education, and tell us what determined your vote in the comments.

The Demographic Imperative

Recently, D.C.-area schools voted to abandon the check-one-box system for identifying student race and ethnicity ("Multiracial Pupils to Be Counted in A New Way"). Although the policy change allows for a more accurate portrait of classrooms transformed by immigration and interracial marriage, changing labels will make it harder to monitor progress of groups that have trailed in school, including black and Hispanic students, according to the Washington Post.

The concern is that a flood of demographic data will complicate schools' ability to make policy and program decisions to serve groups facing education challenges. "This will make our whole education system look different, and nobody will know whether we are going forward or backward," said Gary Orfield, codirector of the Civil Rights Project at the University of California in Los Angeles (to the Post).

"The Demographic Imperative," in the April issue of Educational Leadership on English language learners, clarifies the varied means for determining who ELL students are and how their individual paths to U.S. classrooms might influence their achievement, and it offers some brief reflections on research, policy, and practice that support ELL students. 

How might ELL students be helped or hindered by more nuanced student demographic data?