Looking Beyond What Works "Just Fine"

Yesterday in Dan Koretz's educational testing course we were talking about test scales: how they're set, what scales do and don't mean, and the misinterpretations often drawn from them. As an example we were looking at the SAT and GRE scales and in passing Dr. Koretz made a comment about the kinds of scores those of us in the class likely earned to be sitting there. I thought about my own scores and general experiences with the SAT and GRE and standardized tests in general, and a reading from another course, Building a Democratic School, came to mind.

In the introduction to her book, The Hardest Questions Aren't on the Test, Linda Nathan describes leading a tour of Boston Arts Academy for leaders from another school. One of the members of the tour talks about resistance to developing small learning communities at their school:

"'They just aren't convinced that small makes a difference in high school. And to be honest, neither are some of us. I went to a big high school and it was just fine.'

To me, this teacher had hit on the essence of what makes changing schools so difficult. Most teachers become teachers because they did well in school. The system worked for them: it worked 'just fine.' How can teachers truly grapple with different approaches than those they experienced as a student?"

This thinking could easily be expanded to include current and aspiring policymakers dealing with education today. It's difficult to get in a position of authority without at some point having success with standardized tests. It's fair to assume that those of us at Harvard, in state and local education departments, and leading organizations like TNTP and TFA have generally done quite well on these tests.

To what extent does this contribute to a blind faith in testing-based accountability? It's often very easy to project your own experiences as common and it's difficult to see the flaws in a system that served you just fine. Finding a way to set aside these experiences and assumptions is vital then to figuring out a system that serves everyone well.

Four Lessons From This Week: January 27

In an effort to hold myself more accountable to my writing, and to reflect more often on my learning, I'm going to try to write at least once a week about what I'm learning. Here's my first attempt. Questions and comments are always appreciated!


Testing Forces Us to Make Choices 
Designing a test inherently involves choosing a subset from a larger domain of knowledge. It's impossible to test everything, even once you've narrowed your curriculum to a set of standards. New York's recent math exams provide an extreme example as half of the test items assessed only a dozen standards. These decisions to narrow what is assessed, coupled with attaching the test to high stakes leads to interesting results:


In Family-School Partnerships, Assumptions Matter
After reading a few perspectives on the importance of parents in education (here, here and here) our class discussed the various roles expected of parents. We generated a list of over 20 roles including protector, advocate, nurturer, disciplinarian, and partner in learning. Then we listed the various efforts to push or support parents in fulfilling these roles. Finally we generated another list of the assumptions these roles and efforts are based upon. These assumptions, some positive, but many negative, can be explicit, but are often subtle and always powerful in shaping our ideas of parent roles. Some assumptions that resonated with me were that parents are literate, that teachers know better than parents, that the deficit is in the home rather than the school, and that parents trust the school. Finding a way past these assumptions to recognize the diverse strengths and needs of parents has to be a prerequisite of a positive home-school relationship.


In Ed Reform, Those Who Forget History...
"Although many groups have entered school politics, especially in the protest movements of the last half century, this pluralism is misleading. The politics of education has not been conducted on a level playing field. Policy elites - people who managed the economy, who had privileged access to the media and to political officials, who controlled foundations, who were educational leaders in the universities and in city and state superintendencies, and who redesigned and led organizations of many kinds - gained a disproportionate authority over educational reform."
- Tinkering Toward Utopia: A Century of Public School Reform, 1995, David Tyack & Larry Cuban



Reaching the Needs of Diverse Learners Can Help Us Reach the Needs of All Students
"The needs of diverse learners who have until now been disenfranchised in a print- centric world can drive us to discover, develop, and apply the astonishing power of new media to expand educational opportunities. Learning is supported and facilitated by the interaction between the learner and the curriculum. When that support and facilitation is missing, “learning disabilities” arise. If the curriculum can be flexibly designed, it can meet more learners where they need to be met. It can challenge and support the vast variety of needs, skills, and interests arrayed in a diverse classroom....

Designs that increase accessibility for individuals with disabilities— those who are typically “in the margins”—tend to yield benefits that make everyone’s experience better."

- The Future is in the Margins, 2000, Anne Meyer, Ed.D., and David Rose, Ed.D., 

Connecting the Dots: What Does it All Mean?

In a way my coursework at Harvard has felt very therapeutic. Just having time to think and reflect on my teaching and education in general has been a positive experience, but at the same time my classes have helped me think about specific aspects of my experience in the classroom.

My course on Teacher Quality helped place my own experiences with training, induction, mentoring, and evaluation into the larger context of national trends in education policy. Leadership, Entrepreneurship and Learning helped me think about missed opportunities for leadership in my own classroom, my schools and New York City's entire school system. Sarah Lawrence Lightfoot's class, Ecology of Education, helped me think about the role my own identity and culture played in my teaching.

As I've read, discussed and reflected upon different areas of education at times it's been frustrating and at other times cathartic. Sometimes I've found it difficult to concentrate on my reading as my mind drifts to my own experiences, but ultimately I've benefited from the opportunity to connect the various challenges of teaching to one another and to the bigger picture of education.

It's fitting then that this last semester one of my classes focuses on the topic that dominated much of my teaching for four years: testing. Testing took over my instruction. Testing loomed over my evaluations and tenure process. Testing cast a shadow over my feelings of self efficacy.

So, it's about time I got to the bottom of it all. What's the point of testing? What can tests tell us and what can't tests tell us? What about the tests we used in New York City in particular? To use the language Dr. Koretz is teaching us, were these tests "valid" or "reliable"? Perhaps if I can answer these questions I can answer some final lingering questions about my time in the classroom.

What I've Learned and What I'm Learning Next

So it's almost February? 2012? Whoops.

December flew by. Finals, a trip home to California and an amazing week in New York City. January hit and I took two intensive courses as part of Harvard's J-term.

The courses were Leadership for Instructional Improvement and Designing Effective School and Community Interventions for At-Risk Children. They were great complements to one another, helping me think about what schools can and cannot do to impact learning. The first class helped me think about what is called the instructional core, the intersecting relationship between a teacher, a student and the content. Any reform that hopes to change schools for the better must keep this core in the center. It's an idea I alluded to in my last post, but one that has gained a lot of clarity thanks to my J-term learning.

The course on interventions for at-risk children taught me a great deal about risk and resilience and the many factors beyond a school's control. This was an important course for me, because its content strikes right at the center of the debate surrounding education reform right now. Can we expect schools to overcome the effects of poverty? Or is ameliorating the effects of poverty a prerequisite to educational success? The answer is more complicated than most people seem willing to accept.

Schools and quality instruction can be powerful factors in building resilience in young people. In fact, the presence of a caring, supportive adult (yes, even a teacher) in a young person's life is the single most powerful factor in developing resilience. That said, there are a lot of factors outside of the classroom that are vital to healthy psychological, social and cognitive development. Schools cannot do this work alone, but neither are they powerless to help children living in poverty. Unfortunately that kind of nuance isn't popular or common in the education reform debate.

Once J-term ended it was time to pick classes for my second and final (!) semester. The kid in a candy metaphor was thrown around a few times when we first got here, and it's all too true. I had about a dozen classes I was interested in for the spring, not including classes offered at the Kennedy School or the Business School.

After a lot of thought I opted to stick to ed school classes, rather than taking a business school class just for the sake of taking a business school class. We've just started our first week of the semester, but I'm already incredibly excited for the learning ahead of me. I'm enrolled in four classes:

Understanding Educational Testing with Dan Koretz
The Why, What and How of School Family Partnerships with Karen Mapp
Building a Democratic School with Linda Nathan
Universal Design for Learning: Meeting the Challenge of Individual Differences with David Rose

Each of my professors is an expert in their field. Each of them have literally written the book on the topic of their course. It's hard not to feel like I'm missing out when I'm only taking four courses, but at the same time I cannot wait to dive into the content of the four classes I am taking.

Hopefully I'll do a little bit better sharing it this semester.