best of myshortpencil
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Kimberly Swygert / Number
2 Pencil
October 18, 2005

The News-Leader (MO) covers a presentation by an
educator with a radical plan for schools that might be suitable for, oh,
about 1% of the student population:

Just hear me out, educator Bruce Smith told a small crowd Monday at Drury
University. Students should set their own schedule, work at their own pace and
decide, in many ways, what they want to learn. Smith was providing an overview
of the Sudbury schools model,
which emphasizes independence and democracy - with students and teachers being
the governing force and decision makers.

Here we go again. The fetishization of unstructured learning and the assumption
that students today always know enough about what they like to choose anything
at all.

Kimberly
doesn’t get it–at least not in the context of schools for The
21st Century Student. Bruce is essentially right. Students must set their
own schedules, their own pace and their own course of study. But that can’t
possibly work in the atmosphere of today’s public schools where lessons
are boring, focused on slow to moderate learners, delivered at fixed times
in fixed locations at a fixed pace and with the preponderance of incentives
driving students to work no harder than needed to get by. Setting students
free in a learning culture like this guarantees disaster.

But suppose lessons were so compelling students couldn’t wait to see what
happens next. Suppose that rather than being motivated to merely get by, the
faster students learn, the more rewards they get–like finishing two-years worth
of college or graduating with a joint high school and technical diploma. Suppose
students had to master a core curriculum that included basic applied statistics,
marketing, advertising, opinion polling, personal finance, economics, law,
personal health and fitness. Suppose students had to achieve reading
rates twice today’s average, typing rates of 60 wpm and solid math, science
and social studies skills. And suppose students could integrate all this into
the issues, topics and vocational pursuits that most excite and intrigue them,
working year-round if they like, taking vacations when convenient, consulting
with teacher-coaches and attending special seminars and small
learning-reinforcement sessions. That’s the system of education we need to
create. We have the means.

Smith is a former Columbia high school teacher who left public schools because
he thought the system was squashing the natural curiosity in children. The
schools stress independent thinking and de-emphasize standardized testing.
Students are encouraged to follow their passions.

I wonder if "follow" means "learn the facts about," or if
it’s okay to just be independently "interested." One could argue that
being passionate yet uninformed about a topic is worse than being ignorant and
uninterested.

I
agree, but suppose each lesson requires the demonstration of mastery, too.
Before moving beyond the scope of a student’s current inquiry, s/he must pass
tests or complete other work with an 85% or greater degree of acceptance.

Students ages 4-19 are accepted. There are no formal grades. Depending on
state standards, many Sudbury schools do not require standardized testing.

If there are no formal grades, the anti-testing attitude is a given. Grades, and
test scores, imply a set standard to which students are being compared. That
standard might be a set amount of facts learned, or how other students are doing
with the same material, but it’s always there. Except at Sudbury schools, where
their philosophy sounds like it would make any sort of useful comparison
virtually impossible.

I
don’t know how Sudbury does it, but grade levels are a complete contrivance
designed to serve system needs, not student needs. They provide a structure to
the school organization. Students aren’t naturally in one grade or another,
especially with respect to different subjects. At any given time, students are
at fixed points in a journey of acquiring knowledge and skills. Those points may
correlate to a certain part of the school year in a grade level, but this
correlation is completely unnecessary to academic progress except where
instruction must be provided en masse. The absence of grade levels in no way
requires or implies the absence of proof of learning.

After the presentation, Smith fielded audience questions ranging from
student-teacher ratios - although there are no specific ratios, ratios are
much smaller than in the public school system - to how the system deals with
children with special needs.

I wonder if any questions were along the lines of, "What will you do to
ensure that my child learns something in your school? What will you do to ensure
that they learn something that will allow them to support themselves as mature
adults?"

Good
questions.

How does a student know if he’s graduated - one man asked. The crowd laughed.
In order to graduate, students must prepare and defend a thesis over a
six-month period, Smith said.

"Say what? What if my child needs more than six months to explore his
chosen passion? What if he doesn’t express himself well in writing or in speech,
instead choosing interpretive dance? What if his style of learning precludes him
being required to defend anything about it to impartial observers? Didn’t you
say that he gets to decide how quickly his education goes? How dare you set such
an arbitrary and unmoving standard! My child is special and can’t possibly
develop his passionate work of, of, whatever it is, on that sort of schedule!
"

The
student gets to set her pace of learning. In a 21st Century School, her typical
learning pace would be known. If it slows or increases, computer software would
detect that and generate a notice to teachers for intervention and/or closer
monitoring. Having control over one’s pace of learning doesn’t mean one gets to
decide when one graduates.

Kimberly seems to believe that flexibility precludes high standards. Perhaps in
the current educational enterprise. But higher standards and greater skills do
not necessarily require inflexibility. Just the opposite.

And if Sudbury school administrators expect never to hear that, I have some
lovely, inhabitable lakefront property in New Orleans to sell them.

One parent speaks out in support of the school:

"I would say one of the biggest ones is the ability for my daughter to be
able to know herself and make choices and have freedom," Frey said. Frey
is against standardized testing, saying it adds stress at a young age, doesn’t
test children on skills they will need in real life and places an emphasis on
learning how to test, instead of learning.

Because, as we all know, life never requires that you be able to withstand any
sort of test, or live by someone else’s schedule. Making life choices also never
requires the drudgery of learning facts. Life involves no stress, and no
restrictions on freedom, and no knowledge of standardized-test friendly skills
like literacy and numeracy.

Life
requires all that. It also requires freedom, the power to make choices and the
opportunity to succeed and fail. Standardized testing is mostly a necessary
evil. It provides a relatively inexpensive means of ensuring students learn at
least something at school. Sadly, the dominate culture in public schools has
shifted to chasing test scores. It’s professional malpractice. A high quality
curriculum expertly taught will produce all the high scores anyone needs.

Can you imagine how a child who was actually in this system from ages 4 to 19
would do in the real world? The only one I bet would survive would be the
natural scientific geek who - to the horror of the school, I would think - would
insist on being taught rigorous mathematics and chemistry and biology. This
would be the lucky child who understood intuitively that many of the world’s
triumphs and adult successes don’t involve passion and self-knowledge so much as
they involve lots of hard work, stress, and precise calculations.

The
assumption that giving students guided choices and learning flexibility reduces
hard work, stress and precise calculations is a biased and flawed opinion.
Getting students to work harder and more precisely requires expanding choices
and increasing flexibility. To be sure, in 21st Century Schools there will be
interventions when students slack off, though mostly they won’t because it will
be against their own selfish interests–like finishing a year’s worth of
schoolwork in 180 days rather than spreading it over 240 days. But mostly, the
focus will not be on marching in a straight column. It will be on maximizing
each student’s potential for success.

I’m on the Beltway for a Sunday Drive.

Munson Elementary changing tactics on proficiency tests
By TONYA SHIPLEY / Zanesville
(OH) Times Recorder Staff Writer
Originally posted March 8, 2003

This
is an excellent overview of what is happening in education–and what’s wrong
with it.

ZANESVILLE — There is a positive belief in the halls of Munson Elementary
School that this year will be different.

The students, teachers and the administration believe this year their school
will do better on the proficiency tests.

First
problem: The goal is to improve learning, skills and knowledge. Those
improvements should show up in properly written proficiency tests as higher
scores. But educators are short circuiting the process, as demonstrated below,
by going for improvements in scores.

Example: The goal of an unborn chick is to get out of the egg. The chick pecks
away at the egg, getting stronger in the process. If someone decides to help the
chick by breaking the shell open so the chick can get out sooner without doing
the work needed to build strength, the chick dies soon after birth. It’s not
just accomplishing the objective that matters, it’s also the process and the
journey–like taking the scenic route instead of an interstate highway. You have
to have theories of
learning, learning
styles and motivational
styles, with a strong curriculum incorporating core
learning standands, and follow that route. (See, also, Funderstanding).

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Testing began Wednesday and will continue until the final test is given on
Tuesday, March 18. This year the whole school has become more targeted on the
tests since the school, along with McKinley Elementary School, was among 161
Ohio schools which failed to meet federal achievement requirements based on the
No Child Left Behind Act.

Second
problem: Test preparation. If there is one thing students are experts at, it’s
taking tests. They take hundreds of them. Some school districts spend
a month or more preparing for state tests. It’s inconsistent with sound
teaching practices. Tests
measure educational progress, they don’t create it.

"It’s been a real intensive effort to get ready for the test,"
Principal Bob Grayson said.

The process by which the school prepares students for testing has changed in an
effort to improve scores.

Some of the changes are:

• Developing a list of students ranking them into groups of who passed the
tests, those who almost passed the test, and those who did very poorly.
Grayson said a students who were in the group of almost passing, were highly
targeted to get them over the margin into passing, while intervention tactics
were used with the group which tested poorly.

Third
problem: Teachers are using standards not to raise all boats, but to concentrate
on marginal students. Students who "naturally" score in the passing
range are essentially ignored. Minimal, if any effort, is expended in moving
them into the "exceeds standards" range. There’s no payoff for
teachers or school districts. This is not the widely derided practice of teaching
to the middle, this is teaching to the bottom.

They aren’t. If students pass state tests, that’s the standard, regardless of
their potential to do better, and regardless of the consequences for later
learning, notably, the lowering of effort, doing enough to get by, and the
failure to adopt and exercise a focused academic discipline to excel. It’s all
being lost because the students can sense, if they don’t know it already, there
is almost no reward for doing the work to get into the "high pass"
category of exceptional performance. It is not unlikely that this approach to
learning and concentration on the marginal students makes it more difficult for
students to pass state exams.

• The school does off-year testing in grades first, second, third and fifth to
assist them in listing the students.

Scotia-Glenville
does this, too, with Terra
Nova testing. The idea is to detect weaknesses in student learning and fix
them before state exams. The Terra Nova closely tracks NY’s state exams.

Moreover, I did not analyze the test or specific problems. It was unnecessary. I
could tell from her performance on practice problems and unit tests where she
needed help. Which brings up an important point–the results on standardized
practice and state exams don’t reveal anything about the student’s weaknesses
that the classroom teacher shouldn’t already know from grading the student’s
homework and tests, provided the teacher has integrated the content and skills
of state standards into the curriculum.

• The school purchased several published programs which are aligned with the
proficiency test outcomes and state standards.

Ditto,
S-G. I call it teaching by the numbers, like painting by the numbers. At the
end, you get a picture, but students are no better educated by the process than
they are better artists. Take away the numbers and the outline and students are
lost, in both education and art.

• Downloaded several of the previous proficiency tests and used those as
practice tests.

Drill
and kill. This is not education. The time would be more productively spent
working through a rich and challenging curriculum.

• The Ohio Department of Education provided practice books.

NY
recently released access to multiple choice questions from prior exams.
Doubtless, scores will increase, especially if the content and format of
questions does not substantially change from year to year, but I doubt learning
will.

• Extended day program and summer school.

One of the problems students had with the tests were the extended answer
questions. These types of questions aren’t just asking for an answer, but for
the process the students went through to get the answer.

These questions offer multiple points depending on how much of the question a
student completed correctly, but Grayson said students didn’t know how to go
through the logic steps to answer them. Now the teachers are working on working
the steps of problems with the students.

This
kind of work should be integrated with the curriculum. What I’ve seen happening
at S-G is that teachers pretty much teach the way they always have, making the
same kinds of assignments and tests, and then spending a couple of weeks on the
special skills needed for state exams. This is wrong, wrong, wrong. The DBQs,
structured answers, and other skills and content need to be sprinkled in
throughout the course to provide repeated practice over a long period. Cramming
for the exam is not only bad and ineffective practice, it also teaches students
they can succeed by adopting this bad habit.

The way the school thinks about the tests is changing, too.

"We feel that to improve scores in our building it’s a K-6
responsibility," Grayson said.

That
much is true. It’s consistent with learning theories. Avoiding problems
achieving excellence in the 6th grade requires the execution of a plan that
starts in kindergarten.

By doing the off-year testing all students are taking tests at the same time.

Mark Burrier, a sixth grade teacher, noticed a change in attitude among the
students and the school. He said the students are given two and half hours to do
each test and most of the students use all that time, often checking their work
to make sure they are doing it right.

"These kids are working their hearts out. They want to do their best,"
Burrier said.

So far the students feel good about their tests.

"It’s kind of easy. It’s really simple if you think about the questions,"
said Kymm Chandler, 12, a sixth grader.

Out
of the mouths of babes. . . The truth is the learning standards aren’t that
tough. They
can’t be and have everyone pass them. For example, S-G’s special education
students are scoring as "almost passing"–high level 2–even though,
by definition, they are at least 1.5 years behind general education students.
State exams and learning standards are only capable of preventing schools from
graduating students with the deplorable reading, writing and math skills of the
’80s and ’90s. They are not capable of producing academic excellence.
None-the-less, they are a necessary evil in today’s professional-controlled
public schools. At least all students graduate knowing something, being capable
of performing at a moderate degree of competence. But academic excellence is now
governed more by game theory, and the pursuit of passing scores, than by sound
education practices. In my opinion, that’s because a majority of today’s
teachers weren’t all that good at learning when they were in school and college.

Education is still a long way away from being able to teach The
21st Century Student.

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