Education is Your Business

The importance of non-fiction.

This should get your dander up. According to Renaissance Learning's "What Kids Are Reading: The Book-Reading Habits of Students in American Schools, 2010", non-fiction is pretty much nonexistent:

"Nonfiction is largely missing from the most-read lists. Except for a strong showing in the books widely read by struggling readers, especially in grades 4 and 5, nonfiction is mostly absent."

Oh, sure, reading the classics is a rite of passage for school kids. But how much Hawthorne does the average person encounter after school? Most of what we read in our working lives is nonfiction. And yet, we don't do much to teach school kids how to navigate it before graduation. Once again, the school system has decided this is someone else's problem. But it's not. It's everybody's problem.

First, a lot of educational content is nonfiction. Think science, history, math. Kids are exposed to a lot of informational texts, but their reading teachers rarely provide them with the skills to effectively navigate them. Which may explain some of the achievement issues we see reflected in test scores and other assessments. And the performance issues we see in the workplace. That's because kids who don't learn to read informational texts are at a real disadvantage in a working world full of manuals, memos and reports.

What can you do about it? Encourage your child's teacher to encourage non-fiction reading in the classroom. And you can encourage it at home. We give all our nieces and nephews nonfiction books to read -- and the eldest just turned eight. And, of course, we have lots of strategies for non-fiction reading.

Here's one of the best: CRITICAL THINKING: IT'S AS EASY AS WHAT-WHY-HOW. This packet features a collection of materials based on the What-Why-Strategy. What-Why-How is one of our best strategies for helping students with logical arguments, expository and persuasive writing, thesis and support, essay questions, and constructed responses. It's also a terrific nonfiction reading strategy.

Preparing for the working world

Steve's been sharing his thoughts on the National Journal education blog. Here's his suggestion for how colleges can better prepare kids for life after graduation: http://bit.ly/TzIlN.

Also, Pres. Obama's script for today's school address: http://bit.ly/z2Bo6. How is this a bad thing?

The importance of education

Nice commentary from Paul Lamb on KQED on the value of education: http://htxt.it/8TbR.

Charter schools in the news

There was an editorial in the morning's N&O making the case for charter schools as an educational option. (You can read it here.) The gist is that these school are in demand and economical. I noted there wasn't much mentioned about how these schools work (or don't) for the students who attend them. I've long felt, and some research has shown, that *most* charters don't do a better job of educating our kids than our traditional public schools do.

Today, Steve tackles the issue of research and performance in charters on the Eduwonk blog:

I think, by now, most of us who’ve read a lot of research know that almost all of it is fundamentally flawed in one way or another. My favorite “stat-o-the-day” was one I uncovered yesterday for a charter school client. He needed to know what I thought of the Open Court reading program. So I went to the website and, of course, they had a ton of studies showing how great the program was. Then I went to the What Works Clearing House where I found that 30 studies of Open Court had been considered but that none of them had passed the Clearing House’s requirements for a scientifically-based study. From this I conclude (trusting the Clearing House more than Open Court’s publisher) that there is no valid data supporting the use of Open Court.

So here we are in the age of data-driven decision making and we discover that the data we have to work with just drives us crazy – or in the case I just mentioned, requires a choice and a conclusion that is based on lack of data rather than on data itself. I would say the same thing has happened where charter schools are concerned.

However, there are a few things we can be sure of. First of all, charter schools are likely to have more variability than a similar number of randomly selected non-charter schools. This means some will be better, others worse, by any set of standards one applies. Second, charter schools are likely to be less consistent from year to year. They are, after all, newer schools and therefore more likely to change over shorter periods of time. Finally, charter school populations are likely to accrue differently than public school populations. For example, many charter schools grow by moving to new buildings. They also market aggressively in their local communities. Regardless of what people say, they are likely to attract, over time, slightly different mixes of children (even when accounting for race and socio-economics as the CREDO study attempted to do) than their public school counterparts. However, I’ll bet we can all agree that what makes a great charter school – namely, smart, dedicated, well-trained people – is exactly what makes a great school of any kind. In particular, the quality of teaching has been shown in many studies over many years to be the single most important factor in student achievement. So, if charter schools are to succeed, it will be their ability to attract and retain the best people that will make the difference – which is exactly what traditional public schools need to do.

What all this means is that charter schools, as a form of schooling (which you rightly argues is nothing more than a “type of box”) will be harder to study than traditional public schools. However, the fact that we are so many years into the charter school experiment and have, as yet, no conclusive data on their effectiveness relative to traditional public schools, is disappointing to say the least. And I am beginning to sense a palpable frustration among charter school supporters as a result.

Lacking innovation

Here in the business world, innovation is a highly valued commodity. It's the key to competitiveness. Companies that don't evolve in some way or another usually die. But in education, innovation is on life support. There's a great discussion about this going on on the EduWonk blog today that 's worth a read.

ACTION ITEMS:
1. Support schools which have philosophies or approaches that differ greatly from traditional public schools.
2. Support an increase in charter school limits as long as these schools use innovative methods.
3. Encourage your local school district to let a few teacher pilot new practices.

And if you don't want to read the entire thing, just read Steve's response:

Steve Peha Says:
July 13th, 2009 at 2:43 pm

By definition, we need innovation in schools, and if we want significant change, we need significant innovation. That means doing things that have never been done before or, as I will argue below, doing things that have been around for quite a while but have been pushed to the margins by the standards and testing movements.

Here’s an interesting personal metric on how standards and testing have hampered innovation. I started working in classrooms in 1995. By 1997, I felt confident enough to begin creating original “innovations” in my own teaching. I tested each of these original practices in front of multiple grade levels of kids and had them used by teachers other than myself. In a three year period ending around 2000, I created and validated about 100 separate original practices. Then testing and standards hit hard, with NCLB coming shortly thereafter.

Since NCLB started, I have created fewer than 10 original practices. I no longer have classrooms I can work in to validate them because schools simply won’t let someone come in and try something that isn’t “research-based”, and the new practices I create are not allowed to be used anyway — even when they work — because they are not “research-based.” (Even though I have often “researched” them successful in the same schools that won’t let me use them; the irony of “research-based” practice is that at some point someone has to let someone research them BEFORE they are research-based!)

A standardized curriculum and standardized tests have come to mean standardized teaching, And don’t think for a minute that most teachers are using research-based practices to begin with. I’ve worked in literally thousands of classrooms and believe me they’re not. My favorite consulting situation these days is to be in a room of teachers arguing the merits of one practice or another when I know I’m the only one who has read the research on it. Teachers and principals simply don’t pay attention to research and most don’t know what to do with it even when they have it front of them. Teachers aren’t taught to be teachers with research-based methods nor have their talents and beliefs been cultivated in ways that would lead to research being of much value to them.

So innovation bares a double burden as we move forward. First, many people in schools today have corrupted the concept of research to be a self-serving proxy for lack of change. Second, our system of testing and standards makes innovation impractical from the standpoint of teachers and administered worried about keeping their test scores up. Where’s the payoff for innovation in our school system? Nowhere. Even merit pay doesn’t reward innovation directly. (As a side note, I have seen a variety of documents describing teacher quality and never have I seen “innovative” as a noted attribute of successful teaching. Personally, I find this astounding on one level – and completely predictable on another.)

Finally, when most education experts think of innovation, they tend to suggest innovative “structures” like longer school days, or different aggregations of students, or perhaps — as they have in England recently — different structures for school buildings. But the real need for innovation is in instruction and administrative leadership. The ironic thing about these two areas is that they have been highly innovated already. The professional literature in teaching (though not considered research per se), explains in great detail how good practices can achieve spectacular results. A simple visit to Stenhouse, Heinemann, Jossey-Bass, ASCD, etc., will produce a wealth of solutions to even the most complicated educational conundra.

Case in point: Reader’s and Writer’s Workshop. This is probably the world’s the most successful model for literacy instruction — and it’s 30+ years old! Hundreds of wonderful texts exist on this subject. Yet it is used by perhaps 3% of all teachers and is often banned as unholy perversion of classic teaching in about half the districts I’ve worked in. Many people regard it as too innovative or otherwise unsupported by research. It stands out as an innovative simply because, to most teachers, it seems frightening or “too progressive.” But really it’s just a distillation into a system of all the best research on how children learn to read and write. It’s actually old hat. But it comes off to highly conservative fear-driven teachers and ill-prepared semi-paralyzed administrators as risky and unproven. Better to use a publisher-supplied program instead where everyone can teach from the same page on the same day, and all kids can do the same thing the same way. (This is the logic that prevails even though we know that differentiation is the key to leaving no child behind.)

So how will innovation get a foothold? Currently, at least in public schools, it will not. However, we always have innovative schools among us (and we actually have a large number of innovative classrooms filled by teachers who are strong enough to buck the system). For example, take a look at Nancie Atwell’s Center for Teaching and Learning. True innovators like this will fall within the private system; even most charters will tether themselves to the failed ideas of the past (which is exactly why so few do better than their public school counterparts.)

Innovation is anathema to school in its current form. And the more we rely on curriculum standards and standardized testing, the less innovative school will become. So how do we get out of this mess?

The answer is in the generation of new teachers coming into the system. In the next 5-10 years, demographic data suggests that we will turn over 50% or more of our current crop of teachers. That means they will be replaced by new teachers. If we could begin now to have a substantive national dialog (are you listening Arne Duncan?) about changing teacher training, we might at some point in the future produce teachers who are inclined toward innovation, rather than the type of teacher we produce today who is not only poorly prepared but emotionally uncomfortable with stepping outside the boundaries of traditional practice.

Innovation is not only possible, it is being practiced right now. We’re just not looking for it in the right places. We fly at too high a level. Education policy folks, who haven’t spent much time teaching kids, tend to favor structural reforms, when the truth is that we need down on the ground, in the trenches, cultural reform. You can’t have innovation in a system where the people are immune to or afraid of innovation. The big innovation in education will come when we are training educators in innovative ways that prepare them to achieve the results we’ve laid out for 21st century schools.

Making history matter

Steve's thoughts on teaching U.S. history in a standards-driven environment, as posted on the This Week in Education blog today:

When I think about successful content area teaching, I think about three things: (1) The teacher’s passion for and knowledge of the subject; (2) Making things relevant to kids and their lives today; and (3) Giving kids choices to pursue their own unique interests.

Standards, of course, take a bite out of all three – especially in an area like US History.

Most history classes these days are taught via textbook. I have observed this many times and been victim to it myself on several occasions. Personally, I can’t teach from a book at all; spoils my concentration and gets in the way of my rapport with students. But sometimes that’s all they give me to work with. So what do I do? Close the book, put it down, and try to start with whatever might be rattling around in my brain. And if there’s nothing in there on the day’s topic? I resort to inquiry method techniques and we start making lists of meaningful questions. At least then, we may be able to get something out of the textbook by using it as a reference. (Most of the time, however, most textbooks can’t answer the questions kids most want to know.)

The thing I’m most conscious of as I teach history is my own knowledge of and passion for the topic. Without these, my teaching suffers. I hope not too much; and I do have a nice bag of technical tricks up my sleeve to get around my deficiencies. But nothing beats actually knowing the material and having a personal connection to it that you can sell to your kids.

Again, standards can really take the air out of a teacher’s enthusiasm for their favorite topics.

The problem of social promotion

There's a lot of pressure on schools to keep kids moving from grade to grade, year to year. The result isn't a more rigorous curriculum to arms kids with the knowledge they need. No, it's a system of social promotion that ends up hurting everyone, including the very kids some advocates say it helps.

Steve wrote a great essay on this, which he posted on the This Week in Education blog:

A SOLUTION TO THE PROBLEM OF SOCIAL PROMOTION

Clearly, the practice of social promotion causes many problems. Whether it’s an officially sanctioned process, or one that teachers have merely become accustomed to, social promotion undermines student achievement and teacher morale.

But now let’s look at the situation from where a principal or superintendent might sit. What would happen if we instantly combined high expectations and more rigorous curriculum with accurate grading in low-achieving schools? Over 3-5 year’s time we’d see over-crowded elementary schools and near-empty high schools. Logistically, this is a non-starter. Hence, the culture of social promotion has a practical, albeit pernicious, aspect.

Now, logistical reasons are no excuse for such a heinous practice. But this conundrum does bring to mind a very serious and important issue: we can’t structure out way out of reform. Testing, standards, charters, vouchers, and merit pay are all structural reforms. But school, being the slippery beast that it is, defies restructuring.

Our only hope is to teach our way out.

Who's in charge here?

Steve's article from this week's Carrboro Citizen:

Who's minding the school?

By Steve Peha

Do you ever wonder who really runs a given school or district? I do. And I’m in them all the time. For all the sound and fury of testing and standards, what we have achieved is an ineffective accountability system that is at best a pale form of collective wrist slapping, where entire schools must fail for many years before any action is taken — and even then, this action rarely addresses the root causes of failure.

When most people think of accountability in the workplace, I believe they think of personal accountability: How well do I do my job? What does my boss think? What are my responsibilities and how effectively do I deal with them?

But this is not the way it is in the culture of most public school systems.

At the top of the food chain, we often find a superintendent who makes few public statements, rarely takes specific positions on important issues, sets few if any goals and generally leaves the administrative workings of the district to others in the district office.

For their part, assistant superintendents, some of whom have direct management responsibility for principals, also engage in a fair amount of reverse buck passing. Other than “get those test scores up,” meaningful oversight of principals is often minimal.

In many schools where I have worked, principals are typically on their own to do more or less what they want. As long as suspensions are low and teacher grievances even lower, principals often are given wide latitude as to how they run their buildings. Sadly, most fail to take advantage of that to their students’ advantage.

With direct oversight of teachers, principals are the critical fulcrum point in the system. Principals with the skill and the will to make substantive changes can quickly turn around failing schools. But without meaningful personal accountability to their superiors, few principals feel it is worth the risk of upsetting a teacher (or a powerful parent) to do what needs to be done.

Culling the herd

The dialog on teacher quality continues over at the EduWonk blog (read entire post here). Steve's commentary is right on:

There are many aspects of ed reform that are patently senseless but one crucial aspect seems to be positively schizophrenic. On one side, we have years of research and the endorsement of people like Bill Gates to tell us that high quality teachers are the most important determiner of student learning and the key to education reform. On the other side, we have people, mostly teachers, who say that it is absolutely impossible (or at least ridiculously difficult) to figure out which teachers are better than others.

As someone who has worked in hundreds of schools and thousands of classrooms, and who has probably observed in some way or another the work of maybe 10,000 teachers, this seems to me a silly argument. Of course we can tell which teachers are better than others. Relative quality can be determined for almost any person or thing or trait.

One trait we use when working in schools and districts is the likelihood of that a given teacher will change his or her practice. We assess this because it tells us who to focus our training time on. We focus initially on “high change” teachers so we can quickly establish models of practice for other teachers farther on down the line.

To do this, we use two strategies: the standard “early adopter” model for consumer buying patterns and a simple multi-rater feedback system. Using these tools and an informal survey of teachers in workshops and in their classrooms, tells us with great accuracy who the most likely teachers are to benefit from training. Once given the training, these teachers tend to get superior results in many different aspects of their teaching.

Can school be fun?

John Merrow, noted education reporter for PBS' News Hour and other outlets, asked on his blog today "Should school be serious fun? If so, how?"

Here's what Steve wrote back:

Can school be fun? School has to be fun. But the fun cannot be added on – like a party or a field trip or an occasional game. The fun can’t be icing on the cake; it has to be baked in.

For example, when we teach reading and writing using the Reader’s and Writer’s workshop model, the fun just oozes out. It’s fun to share your writing with an audience and to hear what others are writing. It’s fun to read books you like and to talk about them with other readers. And it’s a lot of fun watching your teacher model all the things he wants you to do – and sometimes make mistakes in the process.

What’s not fun? Using a textbook. Doing test prep activities. Having no choices over what you study. Being told again and again that you’re a bad student because you keep getting Ds and Fs because the material you’re studying is way above your grade level and there’s no differentiated instruction going on.

Learning, as a natural human experience, is inherently fun. It’s the traditions of school that take the fun out. It’s the mindless focus on product over process and participation that takes the fun out. It’s discovering that school is not about you that takes the fun out. It’s teachers, who have been robbed of the fun of teaching, that takes the fun out.

Making a difference at school

It's nice to go read to kids or participate in career day, but you've got to do more if you want to actually have an impact.

Making more of a difference in schools, today on The Word Factory blog: http://bit.ly/qyPJY