New Jersey's Going to Test its Teachers

A Facebook friend posted  this link about education reform efforts in New Jersey.  Governor Christie "unveiled a tough-love reform package that will make classroom achievement — not seniority or tenure — the basis for pay hikes and career advancement in Garden State public schools."  


One of the things the article mentions is that teachers of kindergarten through fifth grade will actually have to pass tests in reading and math in order to be certified.  I am sure there is going to be quite the backlash about this.  No one wants to say that their teachers don't need to be smart or knowledgeable, but the argument will be that elementary school teachers need not be experts on higher-level math;  rather, they need to know how to teach basic concepts.  It will go along the lines that an elementary school teacher doesn't need to pass a calculus exam, for example.  


I'll be honest:  I am on the fence about this one.  


Why?  Simple: we don't yet know the level of the tests.  Too easy and it's just a hoop.  Too difficult, and we fall into the argument above.  I definitely believe in testing our teachers.  But New Jersey already requires the Praxis.  See here.  What will this proposed new exam do differently?


The same anti-content argument is often given for high school math teachers who are getting their masters' degrees:  Why do they need to take graduate-level math courses?  Why not take courses on pedagogy in high school content areas such as Algebra 2?  


I happen to agree that we need more education courses that focus on "how" to teach.  Conferences and workshops are expensive and most teachers don't get to go to them with any regularity.  Why not incorporate that type of dynamic learning-how-to-teach with more frequency and depth than most programs presently offer?  Great point.  But I still want teachers know fundamentally know their material.  


So, let's separate these issues.  


First:  Ideally, all teachers would have content-area expertise.  But if you're working with a finite number of courses that fit within a degree program, the "one or the other" decision is often the issue.  


Second:  If I have to choose, I'd rather have a competent teacher who has a proficient knowledge of the material he or she is actually teaching, and expertise on how to actually teach it, as compared to a teacher who knows the material and took x, y, or z upper-level classes, but who would have benefited more from a more practical methods, practicum, or workshop-style class.  


Elementary school kids are in comprehensive classrooms most of the time:  they have one teacher for all subjects.  It simply is not practical to expect the teachers to have graduate-level knowledge of history, reading, math, and science.  They do, however, need to know how to reach kids with the most basic of concepts -- stuff we as adults take for granted is often quite difficult to teach.


And let's not forget, we don't yet know what level of competency New Jersey elementary school teachers will be expected to have.  Kindergarten teachers may not need to pass calculus tests, after all.  But a functional literacy would be nice, and I don't think we should stop with math and reading.  We need to test the four basics: reading, math, science, and social studies.  Quite frankly, I have seen dishearteningly many elementary school teachers who don't have even that.  The teachers can't competently teach fractions because they barely understand them themselves.  I have neighbors whose daughter routinely brought home letters from her teacher to her parents, and the letters were rife with grammatical errors.  I do not think it's too much to ask for an elementary school teacher to know when and how to use an apostrophe, or the difference between "there" and "their" (nevermind "they're"!).  


So, where do I stand?  I support competency testing.  I like New Jersey's approach, and it will be interesting to see what level of knowledge the teacher-candidates are required to have.  I am also very curious about how this will affect their current Praxis requirements, and whether it will be redundant.  It is imperative that our teachers are literate, and too many are not. But I also think that we need more "how to teach," and if it comes at the expense of upper-level content-area work, well, for today, that's a trade-off I will take.  


On a personal note, I had to take a basic skills test to get my teaching certification in Alabama.  I was offended by the ridiculous level of the questions.  Things along the lines of "Read this memo from a manager to a group of employees."  At the bottom of the memo it would say "Be sure when moving inventory that you do not use the red cart."*  Then the question would ask "Which piece of equipment should an employee not use when taking inventory?"  The test was a waste of my time, and to paraphrase Billy Madison, I was stupider for having had to sit through it.  But people failed.  And that is scary.


*I made this question up completely.  But it is similar in style and difficulty to the questions I was asked.  

Question 2: Can you give a specific example where something didn't work?

Question 2: Can you give a specific example where something that the board required didn't work, but the board didn't know about it? (this question is paraphrased.)

Answer: Off the top of my head, no, and if I had a student example I would be barred from sharing it for reasons of confidentiality. But wait. Yes, there is an example. We have this procedure called RTI. I've alternately heard it called Response to Intervention and here in our school system, Response to Instruction. The idea is that you have a student who is struggling, who needs help, and you as the teacher go to the counselor or the administrators and ask, "what can we do?"

And instead of being given the help you need to help this student, you're given a procedure that you have to follow where, if you're any good as a teacher at all, you've already done steps 1-3 on your own. Steps 1-3 give specific types and examples of interventions you can take. Call home, offer tutoring, extend time, monitor homework, modify assignments, etc., etc. But now there's this line drawn in the sand, and in order to "document" that you're trying to help this student, you have to go back to step 1? You're a good teacher, and that's why you're here. You've been trained and you've done this for years, and you've already made all the modifications and done all the little interventions and realized that they are not working. So you ask for help and now, to formalize the process, instead of being able to sign off that you've tried those interventions, you're told to start from scratch for two or three weeks and let's see how they work and then go to the next step.

WHAT THE HECK?!?! You're a good teacher! You don't go to the administration every time a kid isn't doing his or her homework, you work through the countless little things in your bag of tricks to get the kid back on track! Now you've reached a point where you say, "look, we need Suzy Q and Junior to be successful, and we need to do more," and you're actually told to step a few paces backwards? And the clock is ticking, and these students are falling farther and farther off course.

No, that doesn't make sense. And the board needs to know it. Why can't we as teachers do something along the lines of signing an affidavit that we have already tried the following interventions, believe we are now at step (blank) of the process, and are seeking increased support? We are all here because we want to help our students succeed and this RTI procedure, while it purports to do that in a formal, documentable manner, actually does quite the opposite when you get down to the nitty-gritty: it imposes an unnecessary wait period, and unnecessary redundancies that only harm the student in question.

So, there you have it. RTI is an example of something that can be fixed with a little common sense and -- again -- a little input from teachers on what is, and is not, working. It is broken, yes, but it is precisely the kind of thing that candid input "from the troops" would identify and be able to solve virtually instantly.

Question 1: How can a school board know that its system is meeting its goals?

I said I would blog about the questions. I intend to number them so you can find the posts easily, but I don't know that this is the order in which I was asked the questions.

Question: How can a school board know that the school system is meeting its goals?

Answer: Go to the people to whom you have given the responsibility to work towards the goals, and ask them. That is to say, ask the teachers. Talk with them openly about what the goals are. Help teachers to understand what it is that the board/system is hoping to achieve. When you say "increase rigor," or "increase standards," what, specifically, do you want to achieve? What, as a school board, are you expecting teachers to do towards meeting this goal? And what are teachers seeing as the top-down expectations trickle down -- how does the goal affect their daily classroom, and what do they see as working (and not) towards meeting the goal? Teachers can tell you this information in an instant, if you'd let them. Just ask. Make sure you give them a forum to be heard without fear of retaliation if they say something isn't working. You'll get your answer, and you'll also get a lot of information as to how to move forward, refining both the goal and the process of achieving it.

Quite frankly, when you run a company, you run the big picture. It's like an outline. Imagine back in junior high when you learned how to write an outline for a paper. The school board is the title. The superintendent and assistant superintendents are headers and subheaders. Principals and assistant principals are As, Bs, and Cs. But it's the teachers who fill in the details of the outline, the 1, 2, 3 line items under each sub-sub header. If you want to know if you're making your point -- or reaching your goals -- you don't read the title or the chapter titles or the section titles. You read the actual text -- looking to the facts -- and see if it does, in fact, support the titled claims.

Okay, off that analogy. Seriously, though, soooooo much of education is top-down "you will do this," and no one ever asks the teachers, "Does this make sense? How does it affect your day-to-day? What can we do to make it better?" If you want to know if you're meeting your goal, ask the teachers who are charged with making it happen. It seems to me that this logic is true of any business and this is one way in which education is actually similar to business.

To that end, here is something I wish I had said at the board meeting: Any teacher who is worth anything knows that there is the letter of the law and the spirit of the law. Good teachers, great teachers, and amazing teachers all know that you can "play by the rules" while still bending them. And those are the teachers who get results, and who administrators and on up all love. It's not being deceptive or devious, but it's quietly saying, "okay, we need to do x, y, or z ... and I can do that this way instead of that way, and it will work a lot better." But ask any of those teachers what they do to get those results and more often than not, you won't get a specific answer about how they bent the rules.

(If you're wondering why, it's quite simple. Why make waves -- or worse, be told "no," when the fact is that you're being judged on your results, and your method is getting results that people are happy with? It's really a case of what they don't know won't hurt you -- because an idiot manager/administrator may decide that to their mind, your method isn't as good as their method, and then you're back to square one. One thing that many administrators love to do is to micromanage, and the best way to avoid being micromanaged is to avoid giving any information.)

Update:  I was told that I sound a little off-the-deep-end, break-all-the-rules-crazy here.  That's not what I mean at all, and to be perfectly clear, I am not a rule breaker.  You can't defend your actions as right if you started out by breaking a rule, and you come before your bosses already "in trouble."  That's not at all what I am talking about:  I'm talking about saying that the directive calls for [blank], and the pattern seems to be to get there [this way], but I think I could do a better job doing it [this other way].  Here's an example:  School A wants to increase standardized test scores for math.  The administration asks the math teachers to regularly use test questions in the style of the particular standardized test.  Most teachers take time out of their teaching to give "benchmark" exams, with questions that mimic the style of the standardized tests, in addition to their own tests and quizzes.  Teacher A says, "this is unnecessary, it teaches to the test, and giving these extra assessments actually wastes precious time.  I'm going to give the same style questions -- or heck, even the same questions -- as part of my homework assignments and regularly-scheduled quizzes and tests."  Result:  We spend a little bit of class time every day going over the homework questions and discussing how to break them down, kids are familiar with the style of question and not intimidated by them on tests and quizzes, they've had meaningful feedback on each question and the teacher's had a chance to incorporate formative changes because the questions came a little at a time, and we gain almost a full day of instructional time by not giving that additional "benchmark" assessment.  By the time it comes down to actually discussing real preparation for the standardized test, the students don't consider it to be nearly as daunting as they might have otherwise.  Bent the rules, but didn't break them, and the results are arguably better.  Back to the regular post.

So, most teachers won't be specific or talk about not-quite-following-the-mantra-but-following-it-closely-enough-to-ask-forgiveness-if-I-have-to. That's a shame. Because the thing is, everything in education is nebulous. Why not embrace these teachers who are, for all practical purposes, following the rules and the latest "you will do this" edict, but who are making the necessary little bends and tweaks to make it work? Why don't we acknowledge that on a classroom level, you have to make things work for your students, and let's ask these teachers what they are doing? How, exactly, are they interpreting the latest edicts to make things work so well? Instead of this culture of fear -- and make no mistake about it, teachers are quite afraid, for a litany of reasons, to be called out for breaking the rules -- why not grab hold of these rule-benders and take what they are doing, and what is working, and let other teachers (newer, less experienced, less successful) learn from them?

Heck, I have taught at four different schools and something as massive as special education was never done the same way twice, nevermind all the rest of the federal and state requirements! If Washington can't even decide what it wants or how to define it, I see no harm in saying "this is how we, in our room/school/system interpreted this requirement, and look how great we are doing!" But of course, that takes a strong administrator and a strong systemwide leadership. Defend what you believe in, what is right, and what works? It's often so much easier to follow in lockstep.

So to answer the question - if you want to know how you're doing, ask the teachers. Give them an opportunity for candid, consequence-free commentary. Let them tell you plainly what they think about your expectations, how they affect daily classroom life, what is working and what is not. Standards should be set, but how to get there needs to be a fluid, constantly-evolving process -- and quite frankly, meeting standards is a bottom-up, not top-down process.

We Need to Increase Standards

"We need to raise our standards."

"We need to increase our expectations."

If I hear those claims one more time, my brain might explode.

It is all the rage right now to say that in order to improve our schools, we need to raise our expectations, increase our standards, etc., etc. But I have yet to hear anyone -- any. one. -- explain in precise terms how they propose to do it. It is all rhetoric. Filler. Fluff. Smoke. Political jargon. It sounds great, doesn't it? "Our kids will do better if we just expect more out of them. We are failing our kids ..." oh my gosh, it goes on and on.

Here's the thing: NO ONE can (will?) define what they mean by increasing standards. Forget how to measure whether we are achieving it -- no one can define what, exactly, they want to begin with! I seriously don't know if anyone has even thought that far. I listen to education stuff all the time, and it hurts my head after a while, to think that all these -- often brilliant -- people with something to say have never thought past this simple concept. You can't solve a problem if you don't first clearly define the problem. How can we measure if we are achieving a goal if we don't have a precise description of what that goal really means?

Do we want to increase our test scores? What do we mean when we say that?

Do we want to increase the number of students who pass?

Do we want to raise the passing score?

Do we want more kids to pass at a higher level?

Do we want to increase the actual rigor of the questions on the tests we are using?

What? WHAT DOES INCREASING EXPECTATIONS MEAN?!?!

(I realize there are some who would say that it is all of the above, and that is fine, but I don't hear people saying this.)

Higher standards, schmier standards, until you define first what the standards currently are, and then, how you want to change them. Anyone with half a brain knows that you need a clearly defined problem before you can start contemplating approaches to solving it. We don't have that yet. And yet the politicians and the educrats are throwing out the battle cry and people are waving flags and cheering them on without any understanding of -- well, really, of anything.

The emperor has no clothes, folks. Won't someone (else, besides me) please say it?!

A Little Background

I said I would do this blog, and I promptly fell off the earth. It's not for a lack of stuff to talk about; quite the contrary, I dream about posts, even, I have so much I want to say! Still, I haven't given my best effort to making time to sit down at my desk to write. Here, today, I promise to do better.

And with that, let me get started.

A little background: My local school board is among the few in Alabama that is elected (as opposed to appointed). My specific district had a long-standing incumbent who was great. Well liked, highly regarded, and had her act together. I voted for her. So, while I have long thought I wanted to run for school board, running against her would have been foolish. Fast forward to about six weeks ago, and she has announced her retirement. Local ordinance provides that when a board member can't complete his or her term, the school board is to publicize the position and accept applications from the public. I applied.

It turns out that EIGHT of us applied, which was unprecedented. To help make their decision, and to keep the process as transparent as possible, the school board called a public meeting at which each of the eight candidates would speak. We were each given two minutes to talk, and then the board members asked us questions. (I should say that we were all taken to another room and brought in one at a time, so we could only hear ourselves and the people who spoke after us. It was a pretty fair way to handle things.)

I don't have terribly deep roots in my town -- as with many small towns, there are lots of folks who go back generations. But I have begun to know people, and let me say this: we LOVE our little town. So I attended the meeting not knowing at all what to expect, but realizing that to many people with deep roots, I was probably a wildcard unknown.

I think I handled the interview pretty well. There were a few questions where, looking back, I may have missed the point the interviewers were trying to make, but nonetheless I think I answered everything well. I don't regret anything I said, but in some cases I wish I had said more. I felt good about how I did.

When the interview process was over, the board voted. It took a few rounds to establish a new board member. I did not get even a single vote, but I was not the only one who garnered no votes. I was proud of what I had said, and glad I gave it a shot. Well, when the meeting was over, quite a few complete strangers sought me out to talk with me. They appreciated what I had to say, they were impressed with what I had to say, they regretted that the board hadn't given me a chance. I left the meeting and headed home to my family feeling quite on top of the world. No, I didn't get the board position, but perhaps I had started the ball rolling to get my name out there, and perhaps, to make a difference.

Over the next few posts I am going to address the questions the board asked me, and share my answers with you. I hope they'll give a good insight into how I feel about public education, and what I think we need to do -- and can often do easily -- to right our course here in this country.