The Green Cup

In case you missed it, TIME did an informative piece on Michelle Rhee, the Chancellor of Education for Washington, D.C.’s, school district. She could be in line to take Margaret Spellings place as Secretary of Education under President Obama.

Rhee is controversial. She seems to have a singular focus on quality of instruction that translates into a personnel policy something like this: Good teachers should stay (and be paid more), bad teachers should go (and I don’t care where).

Rhee offerred D.C. teachers a pay raise that would almost double their salaries and take them to $130,000 a year if they would give up tenure for one year. The trade-off of higher pay for loss of tenure would have been voluntary, on a teacher-by-teacher basis. The teachers’ union voted against it. Rhee has found a way to fire 270 teachers anyway in her 18 months at the helm of DC schools. And 36 principals – including the elementary principal of the school her daughters attend. She’s closed 21 D.C. schools.

Did I mention that Rhee is also controversial because her personality can at times (perhaps most of the time) seems abrasive. She’s reportedly pleasant with students and in a hurry with adults.

Among the innovations in D.C. – the board of education was dissolved, leaving Rhee in charge without an elected board to guide policy (or insert politics). Some call that reform; to other’s it’s more akin to tyranny.

The dilemma in D.C. is classic, and well described in TIME:

She wants to make Washington teachers the highest paid in the country, and in exchange she wants to get rid of the weakest teachers. Where she and the teachers’ union disagree most is on her ability to measure the quality of teachers. Like about half the states, Washington is now tracking whether students’ test scores improve over time under a given teacher. Rhee wants to use that data to decide who gets paid more–and, in combination with classroom evaluation, who keeps the job. But many teachers do not trust her to do this fairly, and the union bristles at the idea of giving up tenure, the exceptional job security that teachers enjoy.

AFT President Randi Weingarten says that Rhee “believes in scorched earth.” He goes on: “I am not saying that D.C.’s school system doesn’t need a lot of help. But I have been part of a lot of reforms, and the one thing I have never seen work is a hierarchical, top-down model.”

One statement in TIME struck me: “The ability to improve test scores is clearly not the only sign of a good teacher. But it is a relatively objective measure in an industry with precious few.” And there lies one key. No Child Left Behind, as it’s currently configured, will eventually disregard improvement as a sign of anything important if teachers and schools don’t achieve complete master with every student. Unless the accountability provisions of NCLB are revised, schools (and, by extension, their teachers) will be punished for failing to meet this goal despite improved test scores.

Another TIME quote that stood out to me:

IN THE VIEW OF RHEE AND REFORMERS like her, the struggle to fix America’s failing school system comes down to a simple question: How do you get the best teachers and principals to work in the worst schools?

And it is a catch-22. A school is a bad school because it doesn’t have good teachers; good teachers won’t go to a bad school because it’s a bad school… That’s a Gordian know that will require a sharp sword.

Rhee has promised to make Washington the highest-performing urban school district in the nation. She may not be able to keep that promise, because she may get tapped for a cabinet position in the Obama Administration before she gets it done…

The irony of it… more and more research is beginning to show that play, not drill and practice or direct instruction, is among the most important determiners of future academic success in young children.

The focus of the research is a cognitive skill called executive function. Back in February I wrote about the relationship between play and executive function. Now Open Education has an interesting blog post on the issue. Their post takes the issue deeper into the classroom and echos Wray Herbert’s question in Newsweek: Will executive function replace IQ as a measure of intelligence?

Personally, I see the potential for some measure of executive function to play a role in defining learning disabilities down the road. We’ll see where the research takes us.

In the meantime, read the Open Education piece…

I just got an email from one of the Title I people at my school and the little elementary school where I currently teach made adequate yearly progress last year. Six more days ’til we get started on next year’s scores…

My friend Hugo Kerr (link courtesy of the International Reading Association) posted a quote from social scientist Daniel Yankelovich to the reading teachers listserv recently describing the McNamara Fallacy.

Robert Strange McNamara (his middle name was his mother’s maiden name) was U.S. Secretary of Defense from 1961 to 1967 under presidents Kennedy and Johnson. And during the Vietnam War he is supposed to have become obsessed with data.

Here’s the Yankelovich quote on McNamara’s approach to (evidently) most things…

The first step is to measure whatever can be easily measured. This is OK as far as it goes. The second step is to disregard that which can’t easily be measured or to give it an arbitrary quantitative value. This is artificial and misleading. The third step is to presume that what can’t be measured easily really isn’t important. This is blindness. The fourth step is to say that what can’t be easily measured really doesn’t exist. This is suicide.

Hugo (a Brit) posted it to the Reading Teachers listserv and commented that this “is precisely what is happening in literacy (and other) ‘education’ in the UK.” Of course, many Americans would say that it’s happening here, too…

One of those Americans is Al Franken. Franken is a comedian and political commentator who is currently running for the Senate in Minnesota. Franken says this: I believe that the No Child Left Behind law must be dramatically reformed or scrapped altogether. I’m for accountability, but I’m not for the deeply-flawed NCLB system.

The danger is that Franken and other opponents of No Child Left Behind’s emphasis on testing will probably win. That, by itself, would be okay. But it seems inevitable that tide of rebellion swelling up against NCLB will result in a move to the opposite extreme.

The problem is that there is nothing wrong with testing. We should keep right on testing. But how we interpret the results and what we do about those interpretations – that should change. The first step really is to measure what can be measured. It’s the rest of the process that’s a problem.

We need an amalgam of different forms of assessment – some sort of a fusion of the hard numbers we’re using now with more subjective factors. But more importantly, we need to decide how to balance an effort to provide fundamental educational services to the various communities represented in NCLB’s focus on disaggregating test data with the search for individual educational excellence and the effort to implement the new curriculum focus that is needed to cope with the 21st Century’s demands. Without that balance what we have is a stagnant curriculum designed to ensure generalized mediocrity.

Albert Einstein reportedly had a sign hanging in his Princeton office that read: “Not everything that counts can be counted and not everything that can be counted counts!” I think we could add to that and say that not everything that counts today will still count tomorrow. That truth makes the enactment of laws about student assessment problematic (which is a fancy word for silly)…

Dr. Steven Paine, who has served as West Virginia State Superintendent of Schools since 2005, spoke to McDowell County teachers today at the Beckley-Raleigh County Convention Center as part of the 21st Century Learning Expo. His message was well received.

Dr. Paine began by talking about the state’s new content standards. West Virginia is instituting a new, more rigorous set of standards – partly in response to a decline on the NAEP among WV students. Dr. Paine described the decline as an “unintended consequence of No Child Left Behind,” which focuses on raising all students to a minimum standard of achievement. He said that while NCLB with its disaggregate approach to accountability might be the single most important piece of civil rights legislation ever passed, there were more important things than making AYP. Simply achieving the goals of NCLB will not prepare students for the 21st Century.

Dr. Paine said that professional development for teachers is an important key to success in the future. He added that while he was not at all interested in paying teachers for test scores, the state needed a new hybrid compensation model for teachers that took professional development, leadership and performance into account.

Dr. Paine’s presentation included a lot of information about education in other countries. Singapore was a focal point. I’ve lived in Singapore. I spent a little more than two years there in the late 80’s and early 90’s with stints in Australian, Malaysia and Thailand thrown in for good measure. I haven’t been to Singapore now in 15 years. But their education system was outstanding even back then. One of the things I appreciated the most about Dr. Paine’s message was that he made it clear that competition with places like Singapore isn’t really the issue. If we educate our students properly for the 21st Century, cooperation with the other countries of the world will benefit us greatly. There were no alarmist overtones to Dr. Paine’s message, and I appreciated that.

I managed to speak with Dr. Paine briefly before he left. It was a pleasant, relaxed conversation as he walked toward the parking lot. The state is fortunate to have someone at the helm for education that is as approachable as him.

I’ve heard Dr. Paine speak before. It’s never been bad by any measure. But today’s presentation was the best I’ve heard. The message that compliance to NCLB is not the guiding light in state education policy was very reassuring to me…

I signed up recently for one last round of tests in Georgia. I’ve talked elsewhere about my certification.

Georgia has a system that allows teachers to add certifications to their license based on a test (and a test alone). As a special education teacher, No Child Left Behind (NCLB) puts a lot of pressure on me to collect certifications. If I teach math to a 6th grader with a learning disability, I have to be “highly qualified” in learning disabilities and in middle school math. If I teach social studies to a 9th grader with a disability, I have to be “highly qualified” in that disability area and in high school social studies.

At the moment there are alternatives to full certification in the different content areas, but eventually “highly qualified” will require full certification in a content area.

I’ve taken a number of tests in Georgia and transferred the certifications I earned there back to my West Virginia license. If you’re interested in doing the same thing, the first step is to get a Georgia license. Start by applying for a Georgia license to teach. The application fee was $20. They’re going to want transcripts. You can find the application here: Certification Forms and Applications

To get a Georgia license of any kind today you have to pass the technology exam. It’s a one hour diagnostic test on Word, Access, Excel, Windows, and the Internet. It was free when I took it. You take it at a Georgia RESA office, by appointment.

Georgia uses its own content area tests, the GACE tests. You can register for a GACE online here: http://www.gapsc.com/TeacherTesting.asp.

After you have the certification you want in Georgia, fill out the paperwork to get it recognized in your own state.

In the past year or so, I’ve gotten certified in Georgia (and then in West Virginia) in elementary education (including preK), middle school math, middle school social studies, reading (preK-adult), and a variety of special education areas (including autism). On my next trip to Georgia I’ll take the tests for high school English and middle school language arts.