Author: Sam

I write books and talk about stuff.

This is Your Brain on Test Scores

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There are two seemingly unrelated columns in today’s Opinion page of the New York Times that provide a crisp summary of where we stand in our current thinking about school reform — and where we need to go.

The first is a piece about charter schools in New York City, in which the editors reference “a national study finding that only 17 percent of charter schools offered students a better education, as measured by test scores, and that an astounding 37 percent offered a worse one.”

This is not the first time the Times has uncritically conflated something as comprehensive as “a better education” with something as singular as student reading and math scores. I imagine it won’t be the last. But it is, thankfully, a funhouse-mirror brand of “business thinking” that is on its death bed. Indeed, it hasn’t characterized actual business thinking for decades — ever since Robert Kaplan’s notion of the balanced scorecard first demonstrated the danger of focusing too narrowly on net income as a metric of overall success.

As I have said repeatedly, reading and math scores are valuable — and overvalued. Even KIPP, the poster child for exponential test score growth in high-poverty environments, recognized this when, a year ago, it shared the results of its own study that showed just a 33% college completion rate for its graduates. Since that time, as Paul Tough reports in his new book, KIPP has rightfully sought to round out its own portrait of a successful graduate by identifying a set of actual skills and habits its young people can use to successfully navigate the awaiting worlds of college, career and citizenship.

Ironically, neuroscientist David Eagleman calls for a similarly comprehensive vision on the same Op-Ed page. Writing about President Obama’s recent decision to invest in a multiyear effort to map the human brain, Eagleman makes a series of statements the Times editors would be wise to apply to their own thinking about school reform. “You can’t pull a piece of circuitry out of your smartphone and expect the phone to function,” he writes. “Looking at the brain from a distance isn’t much use, nor is zooming in to a single neuron. A new kind of science is required, one that can track and analyze the activity of billions of neurons simultaneously.”

What excites Eagleman is the potential to understand the brain as a system, and not just as a series of isolated parts. “While we have improved our ability to diagnose problems,” he writes, “we have yet to understand how to remedy them.”

The same can be said for our efforts to diagnose which school provides the “better education.” Now we just need to courage to admit it.

How Do You Design a Healthy School?

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(This article originally appeared in Education Week.)

What if every school used our founding principles as a nation as its design principles for learning? How would schools need to change? And what would we unleash as a result?

This is one of the riddles at the center of the 10-part video series, A Year at Mission Hill. And although we’re just two chapters in, I’m starting to see an early pattern – and a dialectical pair of design principles at the center of it all.

First, it’s clear that just as the United States sprang from a shared vision of liberty, schools like Mission Hill spring from a shared commitment to individual freedom and autonomy. As a “pilot school” nestled within the larger structure of Boston Public Schools, Mission Hill has the institutional freedom to chart its own course around key issues like governance, curriculum, staffing, hiring, and budget. Its teachers (who are unionized) have great individual latitude in how they plan their lessons and assess their students. Its students are constantly placed in positions to exercise self-regulation and self-control (no hall passes here). And its aspirational habits of mind (which the school believes characterize a well-educated person) are designed to help young people develop the skills and self-confidence required to ask tough questions, discover meaningful patterns, develop empathy and compassion, imagine useful alternatives, and set appropriate priorities – both in school and in life.

What might this design principle look like elsewhere? Site-based autonomy seems important. So does the school having a clear vision of its ideal graduate – and not just in terms of what that person knows how to do, but how that person habitually lives his or her life. Giving children opportunities to practice decision-making is a must. And finally, there is the straw that stirs the drink – assembling a staff of highly skilled, highly collaborative educators, whose heightened expertise can justify a heightened level of autonomy, and whose understanding of learning and growth runs much deeper than academics alone.

But there’s an equally pressing, seemingly contradictory design principle that’s also at work, one that relates to an equally pressing human desire – for structure, safety and a sense of order to the world.  

These two universal needs – for freedom on one hand, and structure on the other – are what we must balance in order to create healthy, high-functioning learning environments of the sort we see at Mission Hill. And it won’t work if we forget a basic truism about organizations: that simple structures lead to complex thoughts, whereas complex structures lead to simple thoughts.

At Mission Hill, the simple structures in place are precisely (and ironically) the ones that help people develop the fullest sense of individual autonomy: the habits of mind that provide a North Star for everything the school does; the clearly defined expectations among staff and students about how people are treated and what is expected of them; the explicit rules about how decisions get made, and who gets to make them, and when, and why; and the individual-classroom and whole-school rituals that keep bringing people together to, as Mission Hill’s mission statement puts it, spend time with each other “even when it might seem wasteful hearing each other out.”

In my years as an educator, I have witnessed scores of schools that choose, consciously or unconsciously, to value one of these needs at the expense of the other. But what schools like Mission Hill remind us is that we do not need to choose. It is possible – indeed, essential – to find the right organizational balance between individual freedom and group structure. The challenge comes in finding the right mix of ingredients. And the opportunity before us is to find a way to get many more chefs in the kitchen – teachers, organizations, communities – each in search of a recipe they can call their own.

How to Tell a Good Learning Story

Posted on | by Sam | 5 Comments on How to Tell a Good Learning Story

(This article originally appeared in Education Week).

Last week, at the New Teacher Center’s 15thannual conference in San Jose, I urged more than 700 educators to start telling their own stories about teaching and learning, and to stop letting outside forces pigeonhole public perceptions of the work that they do

The talk went well (view the Prezi below and decide for yourself), but I worried afterwards that all I’d done was suggest a compelling path forward – and provide little else.

A friend in the crowd confirmed this. “Everyone loved the ideas,” she told me collegially, “but I’m not sure anyone understands how to tell their story more effectively now than they did before.”

I think that’s right. So let me do here what I didn’t do there – by offering some specific suggestions about how to provide a more hopeful, solution-oriented lens to our work.

Decouple and Recouple: Let’s face it: most education coverage is boring. That’s because we’re always doing one of two things: we’re either reporting on reports, or we’re trying to explicate promising practices. The result of this is a sea of stories about education that are heavy on the facts and the how-tos – and light on the personal narratives and the professional inspiration.

This “emotion gap” presents us all with a huge opportunity, as long as we realize that a great story needs to do two things well: it must touch us, and it must teach us something new.

In the modern world, we don’t have to touch and teach in a single video or article. Instead, we can decouple the inspiration from the edification – and then recouple them online.

As an example, consider what we’re doing with A Year at Mission Hill. Every other week until June, we’ll release a new 5-minute video that tracks a year in the life of a great public school. The purpose of these videos is to help you feel the power of a healthy school culture by letting you observe how it unfolds and develops over time. Invariably, you’ll see lots of promising practices in the course of the series – teachers co-constructing curricula, children developing higher-order thinking skills, etc. – but any explanations of how to do these things well have been decoupled from the story itself, and then recoupled online via a rich set of wraparound resources for anyone that wants to go deeper and initiate similar efforts in their own school.

We should do more of this in education: elevate the stories of the people in our schools – the children, their teachers, and the larger community that supports them – and then look for the ideas underpinning that work and flesh them out separately.

Serialize and Sustain: Before there was ever a single copy of Bleak House, there were the twenty monthly installments Charles Dickens published across 1852 and 1853. Point being: the appeal of serializing a story goes back a lot farther than “Must See TV.”  It is, in short, a great way to build and sustain an audience, and to create enough breathing space to let a set of characters develop and deepen over time.

For some reason, however, the idea of serializing our own stories about education never seems to have taken root (and no, a three-part series reporting on a new report doesn’t count). But it should: indeed, there is no other way to capture the scope of that nonlinear journey of personal transformation that is at the heart of powerful learning.

What if we told more stories about teachers and students and classrooms and schools in this way? Would we find better ways to build an audience, reflect the complexity of modern schooling, and inspire a better set of questions to guide our work. Again, A Year at Mission Hill is planning to find out; other schools and communities should do the same.

Reshare and Repurpose: A great story can and should serve multiple purposes. Case in point: the charter school in DC that contracted with a local filmmaker to produce a 20-minute video about their school.

First, this school decided that rather than produce a general overview video (“Welcome to . . . We are . . .”), they would select an illustrative sliver of their work and use that as the viewer’s point of entry to understand who they are and what they value. Because this school is a member of the Expeditionary Learning network, they chose to have the filmmaker follow its Kindergarten class through a three-month learning process that would culminate in a public presentation of their work.

Next, the filmmaker focused in on a few individuals who could be the human faces of the story: the classroom teacher and two of her students. Others were featured, of course, but these were the people through whose eyes we were allowed to see the work unfold. The goal, in other words, was to touch us as much as it was to teach us.

And finally, this school realized that a video like this could serve multiple purposes at once (it’s being finalized right now for a Spring 2013 release): it could be used to help parents at open houses understand what makes the school special; it could be used in fundraising efforts as a sort of visual calling card; and it could be used to spark larger community conversations about teaching and learning (plans are underway for a public screening and subsequent live radio conversation about the state of teaching and learning in DC).

Clearly, this school understands something the rest of us need to understand as well – that the stories we tell must have an appeal beyond just our own internal audience, or our own distinct community. After all, as John Merrow recently pointed out, 80% of American households do not have school-age children.

How will the opinions of those “inadvertent viewers” be shaped in the months and years ahead? How will we restore a balance to what we value in children and each other? And how can we make sure that the stories of 2013 are about more than just content, conflict, and catastrophe?

I believe these three design principles are a good start. What do you think?

Painted On Canvas

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If you haven’t heard of Gregory Porter and you love jazz music, check him out. And if you want to hear a beautiful song that sums up everything that matters about teaching and learning, take a listen to his song, “Painted On Canvas,” and read his lyrics below.

We are like children
We’re painted on canvases
Picking up shades as we go
We start off with gesso
brushed on by people we know
Watch your technique as you go
Step back and admire my view
Can I use the colors I choose?
Do I have some say what you use?
Can I get some greens and some blues?
We’re made by the pigment of paint that is put upon
Our stories are told by our hues
Like Motley and Bearden
These masters of peace and life
Layers of colors and time
Step back and admire my view
Can I use the colors I choose?
Do I have some say what you use?
Can I get some greens with my blues?

We’re just like children, like children, like children . . .

Has Testing Reached A Tipping Point?

Posted on | by Sam | 3 Comments on Has Testing Reached A Tipping Point?

(This article also appeared on the SmartBlog on Education.)

It wasn’t that long ago that suggesting America’s schools had become test-obsessed was a lonely endeavor.  Although organizations like FairTest and campaigns like Time Out From Testinghave been decrying the flawed logic behind high-stakes tests for years, the reality is that for the past decade, many of us kept our complaints reserved for the privacy of the parking lot

People vented. Policymakers nodded. And absent any real noise, the tests continued.

In 2008, however, the election of Barack Obama seemed to augur a new era. All along the campaign trail, the Illinois Senator suggested a clear understanding of the ways a single measure of success can distort an entire system and narrow the learning opportunities for children. Then he made history by becoming the nation’s 44th president – and unveiling a series of education policies that further entrenched America’s reliance on reading and math scores as a proxy for whole-school evaluation.

Again, the people vented. But this time, policymakers have been unable to ignore a groundswell of noise and resistance, leading many to wonder: Has a tipping point been reached? Are we witnessing the early signs of a sea change in how we think about the best ways to measure student learning and growth?

Consider three separate data points as evidence: Maryland, where the superintendent of the state’s largest district of schools has called for a three-year moratorium on standardized tests; Washington, where one school’s decision to boycott its state tests has spread to other schools and communities; and Texas, where a proposed Senate bill would significantly reduce the number of state standardized tests students must pass to graduate.

In all three places – and many more across the country – what’s changed is a growing willingness to publicly acknowledge what FairTest has argued for years: that tests do not align well with the latest research into how people learn; that they prevent adults from measuring higher-level thinking in children; and, most importantly, that there are better ways to evaluate student learning and growth.

The breadth of these mini-rebellions – from the Pacific Northwest to the Lone Star State – suggests that the unwillingness of the Obama administration to plot a new course for the country has awakened a latent frustration among educators, who are desperate to see systems that value more than incremental academic growth. As Montgomery County Superintendent Joshua Starr put it, policymakers need to “stop the insanity” of evaluating teachers via a formula that is based on “bad science.” Starr’s critique was echoed by Seattle teacher Jesse Hagopian. “We’ve been raising our voices about this deeply flawed test for a long time,” he said. But now that the district is using it for evaluations, “we’ve drawn our line in the sand.” And then there’s Texas education commissioner Robert Scott, who has decried the ways student testing had become a “perversion of its original intent,” and promised he would do whatever he could to “reel it back” in the future.

To be sure, the American test obsession still has a firm hold on our collective psyche, and with Common Core assessments around the corner, we’re a long ways off from the Finnish model – in which there are no national tests and all student assessments are devised and administered locally by teachers. But what seems equally clear is that a new sort of idea virus is gaining strength in education circles. And as Malcolm Gladwell explained in The Tipping Point, “Ideas and products and messages and behaviors spread just like viruses do. When we’re trying to make an idea or attitude or product tip, we’re trying to change our audience in some small yet critical respect: we’re trying to infect them, sweep them up in our epidemic, convert them from hostility to acceptance.”

To convert their opponents from hostility to acceptance, educators will need to clarify more than what they’re against; they’ll also need to propose specific and realistic alternatives. Josh Starr is off to a good start: he proposes creating assessments for Common Core-aligned curriculum by crowdsourcing their development and letting teachers design them – rather than the private companies. And the good news is there are other big ideas out there, and other places where effective alternatives to standardized testing already exist.

Perhaps, then, 2013 will finally be the year that educators end a decade of test obsession – and bring the noise.

A Different Story About Public Education

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I know we’re already one month into 2013, but think back to last year for a second:

What were the most talked about education stories of 2012?

I’m guessing your list looks something like this – Common Core. The Chicago Teacher Strike. Newtown. And what worries me is that no matter what other stories you recalled – from Michelle Rhee to the Dropout Crisis to Race to the Top – they’re all likely to fit into one of the following categories: content, conflict, or catastrophe.

Continue reading . . .

“Standardization” is not a dirty word

Posted on | by Sam | 2 Comments on “Standardization” is not a dirty word

The reviews are in — in 2013, inequality is out, and equality is in.

“Each time we gather to inaugurate a president,” President Obama began on Monday morning, “we bear witness to the enduring strength of our Constitution. We affirm the promise of our democracy. We recall that what binds this nation together is not the colors of our skin or the tenets of our faith or the origins of our names.

“What makes us exceptional, what makes us America is our allegiance to an idea articulated in a declaration made more than two centuries ago. We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal. That they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, and among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Today we continue a never ending journey to bridge the meaning of those words with the realities of our time. For history tells us that while these truths may be self-evident, they’ve never been self-executing. That while freedom is a gift from God, it must be secured by his people here on earth.”

Those of us who work to improve American public education no doubt heard his words through a certain lens. Indeed, public education has always been — and remains — unequal, inequitable, and incomplete (as I have written here, here and here). Unless we start behaving differently, so it will remain.

If you want illuminating statistics about the extent of this inequality, check out this video from the National Civil Rights Museum. And if you want something to chew on, consider this: standardization, as a word, is not actually “dirty” in and of itself. Indeed, standardization is a useful way to ensure quality control across a system.

The problem is this: here in the United States, the thing we have chosen to make uniform in order to ensure quality control are content standards. (I’m not opposed to content standards per se, though it seems somewhat anachronistic at this particular point in human history.) By contrast, in Finland, they chose to standardize two other things: school funding, and teacher preparation.

What would happen if we followed suit? Might we put ourselves in a better position to fulfill the lofty aspirations of Obama’s second inaugural address?