The Green Cup

Teaching: Am I in it for the money? What a silly question. Of course I am. I mean, why does anybody work?

I saw an article on teacher pay recently in the Charleston, WV Daily Mail. The headline: Teacher pay more than median income. And, well, in West Virginia teacher pay really is more than the state’s median income. The author, Zack Harold, front loads his article with that comparison (teacher pay v. median income) and points out that when viewed in that light teacher’s in West Virginia are the third best paid in the nation. They average 122% of the state’s median income. Only in New York and Arkansas do teacher see better pay – as compared to their state’s median income.

Harold’s article provides fodder for anyone willing to ask what his point is. He never quite says that teachers in West Virginia should shut up and take what they get. If that’s his point, then putting teacher pay in the context of the New York-West Virginia-Arkansas framework is insightful. Which of these three things is different? New York ranked 15th in median income among US states in 2009; Arkansas ranked 48th (higher than only Mississippi and, you guessed it, West Virginia). Teachers make more than the state’s median income in New York because New York values education and can afford to pay for it. Teacher make more than the state’s median income in Arkansas and West Virginia because the median income is so low in those states that paying teacher a reasonable salary requires paying them more than the median income. That’s a valuable investment in those states when you consider that education is an integral part of the path out of poverty.

People sometimes think of being a teacher as a calling. While individuals may think of it however they please, teaching is a profession. Before I became a teacher I spent ten years in a volunteer service organization – a Christian missions agency, where I raised money and paid them for the privilege or working for them – in places like Thailand, Indonesia, and some of the smaller islands in the Pacific. That was a calling. While teaching might rank high on some scale meant to measure the nobleness of service work, people still expect to be paid for doing it.

I’m in it for the money. Most teachers I know are in it for the money. But I don’t know anyone who’s in it for just the money. If money was my primary concern, I’d sharpen my computer skills a little more and go into search engine optimization, programming, web design, or something else related to IT. I teach because I enjoy impacting lives. I like watching first graders sound out new words and learn to really read. Kindergarten math is exhilarating. And teaching third graders to organize their thoughts so they can write a composition is a fulfilling experience.

After eleven years of college, I don’t think it’s unreasonable for me to expect to be paid relatively well if I’m good at those things. Even in West Virginia…

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If the rumors are true, tomorrow every school-based Title I job in my county’s school district will be posted. And I plan to bid on some of them (maybe all of them). If I happen to be the most senior applicant for one of the positions, I’ll cross that usually impenetrable line between Special Education and Title I to assume a new position in August – possibly (hopefully) at the same school I work at now. Possibly…

If you work in education, you’re probably wondering what cataclysmic event resulted in every Title I teaching position coming open at once. After nine years of direct state control, our newest superintendent (who comes out of a special education background) has decided to restructure our districts approach to Title I. For the past few years we’ve had three primary school-based Title I jobs:

• the Early Literacy Facilitator (ELF) who coached teachers on reading instruction, maintained Title I records, performed some light-weight administrative tasks, perhaps did some DIBELing, and perhaps taught some intervention classes

• The School Improvement Facilitator (SIF) who also did some coaching (in math instruction) and provided support and intervention in the classroom for math instruction

• The Title I teacher who was mostly an interventionist – sometimes working with math and sometimes with reading, sometime in the general ed classroom and sometimes with a pullout model.

Under the new model every school will have a facilitator who deals with, a Title I reading teacher, and a Title I math teacher. I’ve heard that some schools will have more than one reading and/or math person, depending on the size of the school. We’ll see exactly what certifications those jobs require and how many are at which schools when the postings go up.

When I entered public education at the age for 43, becoming a special education teacher was the path of least resistance. The path to certification in that field was straightforward and because of shortages in the field it was possible to work after completing a few minimum requirements and finish your certification after you got hired. Six years later, now certified in a variety of fields, I have to decide what I want with a variety of options on the table.

The incentive to make the move to Title I is reinforced by the fact that Title I teachers next year will have a 215 day contract, while general education and special education teachers will only work 200 days. For me, that means a 7.5% pay bump. As a career changer who moved to public education late in the game, most of the people around me on the pay scale are in their late 20’s. That makes the pay bump hard to ignore.

We’ll see what the jobs look like when they’re posted. While this is largely just a personal post, the interesting thing about considering a Title I job in the current environment is that no one is quite sure what Title I will look like if Congress reauthorizes (and alters) ESEA. And how many Title I jobs will disappear next year if Congress decides that education is a low hanging fruit in the budget fight that looks to be looming? Perhaps I’ll talk about those things sometime soon…

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I found out something recently that made me reevaluate my view of accountability. Let me put down some groundwork…

Accountability is a buzz word that took on increased importance with the passage of No Child Left Behind. The idea was that we would hold schools accountable for the education of children. We were going to set a minimum standard for “mastery” in core subject areas and insist that absolutely every single child be brought up to that level of mastery in the core academic areas – reading, math, social studies and science. Mastery was going to be a bare minimum requirement, not some lofty place in the academic stratosphere. Not every student had to achieve excellence or be distinguished. We just had to get them up to that minimum level of proficiency.

That sounds reasonable. It least it sounds reasonable to laymen. It sounds reasonable to people who have never worked with children with disabilities. It sounds reasonable to people who’ve spent their lives in suburbia and never dealt with a community where 25 percent of the adults don’t have the literacy skills necessary to read a newspaper. It sounds reasonable to people who value education, and who have never spent time in a classroom with kids whose parents really don’t see the point of staying in school after you’re old enough to work.

Yes, it sounds reasonable.

Since that law was enacted, we’ve slowly taken steps toward making schools measure up to that. One year we’ve required that they get 60% of students up to that new bar (mastery, of basic proficiency); the next year we’ve asked them to make it 65% and then 70% the year after that. The exact details have varied from state to state. If they didn’t achieve the goal, we talked about them being a school that did not make AYP (adequate yearly progress).

I’ve been skeptical. Call me a curmudgeon, but I suspect there will always be a handful of kids who don’t demonstrate proficiency on the test (even though they could), and another small group of kids in any given year who don’t achieve proficiency because, well, they aren’t proficient. Why aren’t they proficient? Maybe it’s because they are on a new medicine that clouds their thinking (I was on Phenobarbital for a while in high school as a treatment for my epilepsy). Maybe it’s because a parent died, or because they’ve moved three times during the school year. The life of a child is often bigger than school. I rarely meet educators who sincerely believe that the day will come when their school can get every kid to demonstrate basic mastery on the test that year.

So I was a skeptic. Skepticism is healthy. It’s the foundation of science. I was skeptical about the validity of the tests being used for high stakes, end-of-year testing. And my state has been changing the test. Our current test has been in place two years. It’s probably too early to decided that it really measures what we hope it measures. And I don’t think we’re keeping it (since we’ve adopted the Common Core Standards in some content areas). I could go on and talk about the test’s reliability, but we’ll leave it there.

Here’s the thing… Education has been changing in an effort to move kids toward that target: mastery (or proficiency). The test has changed, approaches to instruction have changed, programs have changed. We have “interventions” now. Technology is much more pervasive than it was a few years ago. Teachers bump into consultants in the hallway and bathe in pools of professional development. We’re trying to reach the target.

I heard this month that mastery is being redefined in my state for this year’s test. Students who achieved mastery last year with a score of X can score X+10 or X+15 this year and will only achieve partial mastery with that improved score on the same test.

In other words, they’re moving the target. I’m sure they’ve done it before, but I didn’t “get it” then.

Suddenly, accountability seems like it’s all just smoke and mirrors to me. It’s one thing for the administrators on up the food chain from me to hold my school’s feet to the fire and tell us that more of our kids have to demonstrate mastery. It’s something else for them to add that they’ve changed their minds about what mastery is.

Now I’m trying to prevent my healthy skepticism from turning into cynicism. Because it really just seems like smoke and mirrors.

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Hyperbole is common in elementary school. Kids tell you that they’re starving, that homework is torture, and that their teacher is a dictator. Hyperbole becomes easy to recognize. You smile at it…

It’s different when you hear hyperbole coming from the mouth of an adult. I recently came across an article in EdWeek on the Common Core Standards initiative. William G. Wraga, a professor of education policy and administration at the Universtiy of Georgia, says that two specific blind spots in the Common Core Standards, could “undermine not only the quality of public education, but also the strength of our democracy.”

I’m not an EdWeek subscriber, so I haven’t been able to read the whole of Wraga’s article. The three-paragraph, 228-word teaser that EdWeek offers is the first thing I’ve read about Common Core Standards that got me sincerely interested in them. Since then I’ve spent a couple of hours sifting through content in the blogosphere.

Here’s what seems obvious:

• The Common Core Standards are being developed in a hurry – a big hurry.
• There is a lack of transparency in the development process. Some critics describe it as secrecy.
• The Common Core Standards are being adopted as part of a scramble for Race to the Top money in hard budgetary times.

Another common complaint from critics is that very few educators are being included in the process of developing the standards. (Of course, that depends on your definition of educator. You can get an idea of my definition of the term here.)

How many states have adopted the Common Core Standards already? The Core Standards website shows 35 states and the District of Columbia as having adopted the standards so far.

It also lists Texas, Alaska, and Virginia simply as “not yet adopted.” But Texas and Alaska declined to participate in the initiative’s effort to write the standards. Virginia withdrew from the initiative in March and decided not to persue Race to the Top funding because, according to Governor Bob McDonnell, the new Common Core Standards would be a step back from Virginia’s already-rigorous Standards of Learning (SOL’s).

Ironically, one of the complaints about the standards is that they don’t place enough stress on students being able to evaluate the credibility of sources.

Perhaps my favorite two complaints are that a) the new standards are far too prescriptive and b) the new standards are so vague that states can adopt them, make no changes and claim to be complying with the new standards. Those two complaints seem mutually exclusive (even though versions of both complaints are relatively common).

Wraga’s EdWeek article complains that the Common Core Standards are “compacted,” that the documents don’t recognize the need for an interdisciplinary curriculum, and that it “disregards the role of schools in preparing students for citizenship.” I suppose that might be a danger to our democracy. I’d be tempted to smile and disregard it as hyperbole if the ASCD hadn’t recognized that same trend in education 15 months ago – and written about it in their May 2009 issue of Educational Leadership.

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If you’re not regularly immersed in the world of educational testing, you may not realize that Depth of Knowledge is a technical term – at least when used in that context. That wasn’t the case until about a decade ago.

Imagine this conversation…

• Bob: John wants be the new British Literature professor at Town College.
• Tom: Hmmm. I’m not sure what I think of that. What’s his depth of knowledge when it comes to Shakespeare?
• Bob: He’s read all the tragedies and histories, and he played the lead role in Richard III for a school performance. But he doesn’t really like the comedies and hasn’t even read most of them…

Before the late 1990′s, the phrase “depth of knowledge” was used to refer to how well acquainted someone was with a subject area. In the late 1990′s Norman L. Webb, a researcher at the University of Wisconsin, began publishing work on how to align assessment items (test questions) with the learning standards they were supposed to measure. He called his alignment system Depth of Knowledge – and the technical term was born. When it is used in relationship to educational testing, writers usually (but not always) capitalize the term.

Webb’s concept might well have languished in the halls of academic obscurity had it not been for the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) law. NCLB requires that annual assessments “measure the depth and breadth of the state academic content standards for a given grade level.” The US Department of Education requires states to use an alignment process to show that assessment questions line up with the state’s content standards.

DOK is a reference to the complexity of mental processing that must occur to answer a question or perform some assessment task – in the context of that grade’s standards.

It’s hard sometimes to get people to understand exactly what DOK measures. One source that sums it up well says that DOK is “a scale of cognitive demand.” And it is applied to the relationship between assessment items (like test questions) and the state standards they are supposed to represent – not to student work. This can best be illustrated by a common example that gets used to explain how DOK does not measure difficulty:

• 4+4 is a DOK 1 question, and it’s easy.
• 4,678,895 + 9,578,885 is still a DOK 1 question, because it only requires that you remember (recall) a simple process for adding numbers. The second problem is more difficult. Still DOK 1, but definitely more difficult.

People leave that discussion thinking “four plus four is a DOK 1 question…. But that’s only true in a context where standards expect that the student has already learned (memorized) the rules involved with adding and in regrouping. If regrouping hasn’t been expressed as a standard for the grade yet, 4+4 may be DOK 1 because the child is recalling a rule, but 16+16 becomes a reasoning process that requires the child to work out on his own how to combine those numbers – and then that second problem gets bumped up to a higher DOK. DOK functions in the context of grade level skills expressed in the standards.

As a result of NCLB, Webb’s Depth of Knowledge (DOK) has become a popular way for states to meet the Federal requirement for aligning assessment with content standards. Over 20 states now used Webb’s DOK system.

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Two years ago I attended a summer teachers’ academy my county was holding and the concept of Depth of Knowledge (DOK) was systematically introduced for the first time (I think). As the day progressed two different speakers held sessions on DOK – and they said different, contradictory things. I left confused, but not too worried by the idea. Since then it’s become clear that my state’s new end-of-year test for students places great emphasis on DOK. So there’s been more training, and the idea has become more important to me.

This past week my school district had this year’s summer teachers’ academy and DOK featured prominently in the academy’s content. In addition to digesting the content at the workshop, I did a little research of my own. It was a good week, and I have a much clearer understanding now of Depth of Knowledge.

The most important thing to understand about DOK is that it is a measurement concept. But more often than not, presentations about DOK begin with a presenter asking what it is (rhetorically) and then not answering that question.

• Question: What is Depth of Knowledge?
• Answer: A measurement concept – like inches, pints, miles per hour, or calories.

Inches measure length. Pints measure volume. Miles per hour is a measure of speed. The calorie is a measure of energy. What does DOK measure? Cognitive processes. But that’s not the answer the presenter usually gives. Instead they begin talking about the cognitive processes themselves – about recall, and about skills and conceptual thinking, and about strategic thinking and multistep processes, and etc.

It’s like someone asking what temperature is. And instead of being told that it was a system of increments for measuring heat, they get a discussion about whether Tuesday qualified as a hot day, and just how sweaty a person has to be before they think it’s hot.

Unless educators really get a grip on the idea that Depth of Knowledge is a conceptual system for measuring cognitive activity they’ll never really get to where they can make much use of the idea. It will puzzle them. They’ll spend their time trying to make DOK a competing system to Bloom’s Taxonomy or trying to decide how it fits with “other” learning theories.

The first step to fully understanding DOK is grasping the fact that it is a simple measurement concept.

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West Virginia teachers are going back to school earlier this year. The goal is simple: get in 180 days of instruction – no matter how much ice and snow comes our way. Will it work? The short answer is no.

Last year was a pretty horrid year, in terms of winter weather. West Virginia law stated that school could not begin until August 26th and had to end by June 8th. Typically, a handful of counties have failed in the past to get in their 180 instructional days during that time – the most rural, rugged, and elevated counties fell a few days short year after year and no one paid much mind to that.

Last year’s blizzards and ice storms were different. They closed pretty much the whole state for days on end. So the state legislature sat to work to fix the school calendar with an eye toward ensuring that kids never miss out on instructional days because of weather again. The resulting legislation (HB 4040) made for a great bill-signing ceremony back in February (while there was still snow on the ground). But it really just passed the buck on to bureaucrats…

The bill basically did two things. First, it struck from the code §18-5-45(e) (which read, “The instructional term shall commence no earlier than the twenty-sixth day of August and terminate no later than the eighth day of June”). Second, it mandated (I just love that word) “an icy conditions and emergencies plan designed to guarantee an instructional term for students of no less than one hundred eighty separate instructional days.”

How do we accomplish that? The state legislature seems to have trusted that smart people somewhere else would figure that out.

As it ended up, the state’s department of education passed on to county superintendents an algorithm of some kind (I haven’t seen it) that required them to look at the last three years and determine the average number of days they’d fallen short of the 180-day goal. They were supposed to then start the current school year that many days earlier (or something like that). Whatever the math involved, this year our kids start back on August 19th instead August 26th.

Here’s the problem. Teachers in West Virginia work a 200-day contract and the new law didn’t change that. My county’s new calendar gives teachers a week-long break for Thanksgiving. Think of it this way: November 22nd, 23rd, and 24th (days on which we’d usually teach) have been moved to August 19th, 20th, and 23rd. And that will only solve the problem if this year’s blizzard comes at Thanksgiving (which is unlikely).

Last year we missed three days for snow in December. On Friday December 18th a snowstorm started during the school day. We sent kids home early. One friend of mine gave up on getting home; she parked her car at a gas station and slept in it and her husband came and got her in a four-wheel drive on Saturday morning. Another teacher at my school parked her car halfway home and tried to walk to a nearby house; she ended up in the hospital.

My point is this. Last year was a bad year. If you take the 19 dates where school was cancelled last year and you overlay them on the school calendar that is about to begin you find that one of them is a holiday, three are Saturdays, and the other 15 days when it snowed last year are school days this year. We had snow on Saturday’s last year, too.

Probably we won’t have as horrible a winter this year as we had last year. Maybe we will get our 180 days in. But despite starting earlier, if we have the same winter weather this year that we had last year we will almost certainly miss the same number of days – and still not have a way to make them up under current law. The new calendar’s only clear impact is that we will start school earlier and we will have a longer break at Thanksgiving.

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I just finished reading an article in the summer issue of Reading Research Quarterly (Vol. 45, Num. 3): Oral Reading Fluency Assessment: Issues of Construct, Criterion, and Consequential Validity. The article raises important question about standard practices in assessing fluency.

Oral reading fluency has been tested for years now on a construct of words correct per minute (wcpm). A child reads a short passage. The teacher makes notes about which words he gets wrong. A score is produced. It was useful, perhaps even revolutionary when it was introduced. The method was endorsed (some would say forced on us) by the Reading First people. And it was a good thing, in many ways. It quantified a child’s progress in reading and made it easier to talk about the child’s progress.

For most of the country, the tool for getting wcpm has been the Dynamic Indicator of Early Basic Literacy Skills, or DIBELS.

The study in RRQ looked at different ways to assess oral reading fluency (including the wcpm method) and tried to determining how good they were at predicting comprehension scores on the Iowa Test of Basic Skills. The authors (Sheila W. Valencia, Antony T. Smith, Anne M. Reece, Min Li, Karen K. Wixson, and Heather Newman, mostly at the University of Washington) used participates in the second, fourth and sixth grades.

If testing oral reading fluency is supposed to help predict later success with comprehension skills, the study drew some useful conclusions. First, using the wcpm method to predict or determine risk (and the need for intervention) creates a significant number of false positives and false negatives. Some kids get put in intervention, even though they don’t really need it. Other kids get left out of intervention, even though they really do need it.

Second, having kids read for three minutes (instead of just one) and determining a wcpm score from that longer sample reduces the error rate in determining which kids are at risk.

Third, testing rate (words per minute) and accuracy (words correct) separately reduces the error rate even more.

Fourth, assessing a child’s prosody (how well they group words together, how well they follow the author’s syntax, how expressive they are) reduces the error rate in determining risk still further.

A final conclusion serves to reiterate a regular theme in education today: no short test of oral reading fluency will be that good a predictor of how well a student will comprehend abstract ideas in the complex plot of a longer piece of text. Complex ideas are difficult to insert into a minute-long passage (or even into three minutes of text). Ultimately, oral reading fluency lays a foundation for comprehension skills that students will exercise well if they’ve also be taught critical thinking skills. In the absence of those critical thinking skills, benchmarking on a wcpm assessment doesn’t give much of an indication as to how well a child can draw conclusions or generalize at the end of a five-page story.

So how does this impact practice? If the goal is to graduate elementary school students into the middle school setting with strong comprehension skills, then for starters it means that teaching critical thinking skills has to be promoted in our instructional practices right along side phonics and vocabulary. It also means changing the way we administer wcpm tests (even if that means tripling the amount of time we devote to DIBELing kids) and coming up with a good test for prosody.

Finally, it means that when we all get together for those meetings where we decide which students go to intervention and which students don’t, the professional judgment of trained educators becomes more important, and the isolated fact that Johnny failed to benchmark on a wcpm test ceases to be quite as much of a determining factor in assessing Johnny’s risk of reading failure.

A final note: If you’re definition of oral reading fluency is simply words correct per minute, you need to revise your definition. It’s more complicated than that…

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The West Virginia State Legislature brought a special session to a close this afternoon. The session was supposed to focus on education reform. While it passed 11 bills, only three had any real focus on public schools.

Four of the bills passed were appropriation measures. Two dealt with election law. Two removed sunset provisions of various laws.

The education bills that made it through the legislature do little. Senate Bill 2006 allows schools some flexibility in the way they set up mandated committees that oversee things like technology and planning. Senate Bill 2009 sets up a pilot program at one individual school in the state with the hope of creating a model to improve academic performance. Senate Bill 2010 creates a pilot project to start alternative schools for elementary and middle school students.

And the other dozen or so ideas that have been in the news?

• Charter school legislation, reduced class size, incentive pay for teachers, and more planning time at the elementary school level all died before the session even started; they were never introduced.
  
• A bill that would have allowed alternatives to the current teacher certifications path died.
  
• A bill that would have changed the way teachers are evaluated and made evaluations an annual requirement for all teachers died.
  
• And a bill that would have given the state’s board of education more authority in counties where it takes over schools from local boards died.

The special session did manage to clear the way for WV Governor Joe Manchin to run for the US Senate seat recently vacated by the death of Robert C. Byrd.

The lack of progress (and/or regress) on educational issues now means that West Virginia will in all probability not be able to meet the requirements of a US Department of Ed Race to the Top application. That’s just as well, as far as I’m concerned. Education can now be considered with more of a view toward what’s best for West Virginia (and less concern over qualifying to funding).

Education can wait for the next governor…

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