Listening to Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity, one would think that American schools are bastions of the hard left, education factories that churn out soft-headed liberal ideologues.  But in Standardized Education: Moving America to the Right, Arthur Lieber makes precisely the opposite argument.  Lieber believes that the country’s recent shift to the right can be traced directly to our school’s infatuation with standardized tests and the right wing values they encompass.

There are two central ideas in Standardized Education that serve as bookends of sorts for Lieber’s argument–he introduces them early on and then returns to them in a more concrete way in the third and final section of the book.  First, he believes that one of the most important jobs of a school is the teaching and learning of empathy, the ability to put yourself in someone else’s shoes.  Second, Lieber asserts that schools must teach critical thinking skills—simply put, students should be sophisticated enough to know when information is misleading so that they can make wise choices and become responsible, active citizens.  These two values (empathy and critical thinking) form the core of Lieber’s educational philosophy.

The problem with the values of empathy and critical thinking, of course, is that they are not easy to quantify–they are not going to show up with a percentile next to them on the next standardized test. Though it would be lovely to be able to brag that your son or daughter is in the 89^th percentile for “bs detection,” critical thinking skills are slippery and do not lend themselves to objective measurement.  But that does not mean they should be dismissed.  Indeed, in the last section of the book Lieber describes how the values of empathy and critical thinking could contribute to the development of a more just, progressive society.  He also goes a step further and describes what this would look like in the classroom.  Teachers have to model empathy and critical thinking, and students have to be offered opportunities to get out of the classroom and into the real world.  It won’t be easy, especially in an era of budget cuts and standardization, for students to be given authentic experiential learning opportunities.  But even though it can be a tough sell in today’s educational environment, Lieber is very persuasive that it’s a goal worth pursuing.

Though Standardized Education is not a lengthy book, it is a nuanced one that avoids some of the good versus evil dichotomies that you so often find in other education books.  The book’s treatment of teachers offers an excellent example of this.  Too often in books about the American educational system teachers are portrayed as either heroic victims of a dysfunctional system or, in the other extreme, as lazy incompetents biding their time until their cushy pension comes due.  For Lieber, though, teachers are just human beings.  Some are poor teachers, teachers who care only about their test scores and have forgotten what it was like to be a student stuck in a classroom filling in mindless worksheets.  Others are creative, bright individuals who manage despite considerable odds to make their classroom a place for high energy learning.  In Lieber’s view, teachers are human beings who have very difficult jobs to do, and some of them have the grace and stamina to do it well, while others do not.

Similarly, Lieber looks upon both Democrats and Republicans with a critical eye in Standardized Education.  Make no mistake about it, Lieber is arguing for an educational system that imbues its students with more progressive values, but he is quick to point out that Democrats as well as Republicans are standing in the way of that happening because of the bipartisan embrace of the almighty standardized tests.  Standardized tests, as evidenced by Bush’s No Child Left Behind program and Obama’s Race to the Top, are the true villains of Lieber’s book.  The problem with standardized tests, he asserts, is that they value number-crunching over the living, breathing students in the classroom, and they embrace a conservative value of competition as the key barometer to a person’s value as a human being.   Standardized tests, then, both reflect and reinforce a morally bankrupt Republican ethos:  Just as conservative Republicanism supports a status quo in which competition allows only for the survival of the fittest (empathy and compassion be damned) so too does an educational climate where standardized tests reign supreme. Taken as a whole, Standardized Education is a meditation on how the American educational system went wrong, but it is also a call to action, a road map for how to transform American schools into places where democratic, progressive values are embraced.

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When you’re a parent, there is plenty to feel guilty about.  My kids don’t eat enough vegetables, I don’t always  keep my cool during temper tantrums (I’m pretty sure there is surveillance footage from the parking lot of Shop N Save to verify this), and there will never be enough money in their college fund to ensure they don’t graduate with a mountain of debt.  But one item on my own parental guilt list that I’ve been dwelling on lately is that we haven’t done a particularly good job introducing our daughters to current events.  When I was growing up, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch was on our breakfast table every morning, and Tom Brokaw was on our television every night at 5:30.  It wasn’t the New York Times or the McNeil-Lehrer News Hour, but it was enough to, almost by osmosis, make me think from a very young age about what was going on in the world outside my neighborhood.  One of my first vivid memories was watching the American hostages being released from Iran on TV.  I was five.

But the way we get news has changed radically since the 1980s.  My husband and I never watch the nightly newscast on NBC, ABC, or CBS, and we stopped having the newspaper delivered a few years back.  We get our news in a very solitary way, reading articles on various websites and then reading longer, more in-depth articles in the New Yorker.  Our daughters (ages 4, 5, and 7) don’t see or read news coverage on a regular basis themselves.  We talk about politics or world events at the dinner table or at family gatherings, but they don’t have daily doses of news in the same way my husband and I did as children.

So, when we had the unusually lucky circumstance last Friday of both my husband being off work and my daughters being off school, we thought it would be a good idea for the girls to see some news firsthand: we headed down to Occupy St. Louis at Kiener Plaza.  My husband and I had followed the spread of the Occupy movement from New York to cities worldwide, and supported the idea of a populist movement from the left.  But we hadn’t seen it for ourselves, so we picked up a case of bottled water and some snacks to donate to the Occupiers and headed down.

On the way, we talked to the girls about what Occupy St. Louis was about and how it was part of a larger movement.  In language we hoped at least our oldest two would understand, we talked about why people would take the time to set up camp in the middle of downtown St. Louis and what exactly it was they were trying to draw attention to.  The girls asked some good questions, “What are taxes?  What do they pay for?” “Who decides how much money people get at their jobs?” and it was humbling to fumble around trying to give clear explanations to them.

Parking was easy, the weather was nice, and when we got down to Kiener Plaza the mood was…serene.  Subdued.  Peaceful.  I wasn’t sure what to expect, but Occupy St. Louis was a far cry from the angry, smelly mob of loud-mouths that certain parts of the blogosphere had written about.  There were a lot of tents set up, and posters and signs were on just about every available pillar.  Most of the occupiers seemed to be meeting in the center of Kiener Plaza and talking calmly about strategies and ideas; they were holding what they called their General Assembly.  No one rushed over to us to ask us why we were there, but there was a welcome table with a couple brochures explaining what the movement was about.  We brought the water and food we were donating to a tent set up to accept donations, and then we walked slowly around the periphery of the plaza, looking at all the posters.  We got pretty bogged down trying to explain a poster about CEO pay to the girls, but they were definitely interested in what was going on.

The internal organization of Occupy St. Louis was impressive—in addition to a welcome table, there was a kitchen/food area, a media/work area, and (as I mentioned before) a tent set up to accept donated items.  The people who were not participating in the General Assembly sat around enjoying the fall day, said hi as we walked by, and made casual conversation.

Kids being kids, my daughters were drawn to the steps by the fountain at Kiener Plaza and immediately began running up and down them and playing.  While they did this my husband and I had a strange, rambling, but pleasant conversation with a man from Oregon who, like us, seemed to be there just to see what was going on.  After a while, we decided to head back to the car and get some ice cream at Crown Candy before heading home.

There was little doubt in my mind that my daughters would remember the ice cream at Crown Candy more than our relatively brief trip to Occupy St. Louis.   But I was pleased that the girls’ first trip to a demonstration was a positive one.  On the news, demonstrations seem loud and scary, but Occupy St. Louis was a model for “peaceful assembly.”  I hoped the images of people sitting, talking earnestly about issues, saying casual hellos to those walking by would stick with them.

But you never really know what lessons your kids will learn from a particular experience, or if they’ll learn any at all.  I doubt my parents were conscious of the fact that I was riveted by the video of the hostages being released back in 1981—they were too busy taking it in themselves.  And so it is with Occupy St. Louis.  I was gratified, though, when I listened in on a conversation my sister had with my oldest daughter later that night.  She was asking my seven year-old what she had remembered from the visit to Occupy St. Louis, and my daughter said, “I remember a poster of a skinny bald guy that said, ‘First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.’  That was cool.”   If my seven year-old can retain the spirit of that famous quote from Gandhi, then our little family field trip to Occupy St. Louis was time incredibly well spent.

The post “Then you win:” A family visit to Occupy St. Louis appeared first on Occasional Planet.

In my last two articles for Occasional Planet, I lambasted two current trends in our country’s educational system: over-reliance on standardized tests and the desire to lengthen the school day and school year.  And, to be honest, lambasting is easy (not to mention fun).  It’s easy to point to something and say, “That’s stupid, here’s why.”  It’s much tougher to come with an alternative that makes sense.  But having been a teacher myself for six years, and now being a parent for seven years, I do have some ideas about reasonable, common sense ways to improve schools.

Smaller class sizes, better learning

No question about it, this is the single most effective way to improve student learning.  I’ve taught classes of sixteen and I’ve taught classes of thirty, and I can tell you unequivocally that the students in my smaller classes learned more.  They received more of a chance to participate in class discussion, I could spend more time with them conferencing about their writing, I was able to contact their parents and give them feedback more often.  In large classes, particularly classes with high numbers of struggling learners, teachers are forced to create lessons that keep things under control and orderly rather than interactive and creative.  It becomes about crowd control, and that doesn’t lead to fun, high quality learning.  It leads to teacher burn-out and bored students.

More support staff, like social workers and counselors

A tremendous amount of my time that I should have spent planning lessons and grading papers when I was a teacher was spent trying to manage my students’ very real, very urgent personal crises.  We had a social worker whom we shared with another middle school–she came only on Tuesdays and Thursdays—so if some emergency came up I (and my fellow classroom teachers) often spent our very scarce planning periods dealing with it.  I remember a winter afternoon I spent with a student named Hernando trying to figure out how to get the gas turned back on at his house (where no one spoke English) so that his family would have heat.  I’m not patting myself on the back here—I was no different than most of my other colleagues in this regard—but I’m just saying that sometimes grading and planning gives way to emergency phone calls home and intense one-on-one conversations with kids who are hurting.  If all schools had enough social workers and counselors to really help their needy students, teachers could teach more effectively, and students would learn more effectively.

Assume good will

Most teachers are professionals who are passionate about student learning, not lazy incompetents who are wallowing in their tenured security and biding their time until retirement.  Similarly, most parents love their kids more than anything else in the world and want desperately for them to succeed and be happy.  Of course a teacher will have a bad day occasionally, and a parent might drop the ball from time to time (I will not bore you with the story of my second grader’s landform diorama drama, but suffice to say it wasn’t my best parenting episode).  But let’s all acknowledge that we’re human beings doing the best we can.  Let’s assume good will and get on with the business of helping children learn to love learning.

Treat teachers as the professionals they are

When I graduated college and started teaching, I never would have guessed that teachers would be demonized the way they are today in some political circles.  Yes, bad, lazy teachers exist, and they should lose their jobs when they show no real improvement.  But most teachers are not like that, and they should be accorded the same respect shown to other professionals.  And part of that respect is pay.  If you want to attract and retain good teachers, you have to pay them well.  Teachers have mortgages, student loans, and kids of their own, and you shouldn’t have to choose between a job you are passionate about and supporting your family well.  Whether right or not, in our society, money denotes respect and prestige.  If society wants to show teachers they are valued, then teachers should be compensated as the highly trained professionals they are.

There is really nothing radical in these four suggestions for improving schools.  I would hazard to predict that if you walked into any faculty lounge or PTO meeting and started a conversation about school reform, all four of these ideas would quickly gain a consensus.  The bigger question might be why, in a time when more lip service than ever is being paid to the importance of education, do we lack the political will to enact even these very basic reforms?

The post What would reasonable school reform look like? appeared first on Occasional Planet.

The “more is always better” approach to instructional time is a  popular and destructive fetish among educational policy makers (and one that goes hand-in-hand with standardized testing, about which I have previously written on this site.)  First, right off the bat, can we debunk the myth that the rest of the world educates its children better because it spends much more time in the classroom?  Proponents of extended school days and longer school years love to point to other countries with more rigorous time requirements.  Do Japanese students go to school for more hours than their American counterparts?  Indeed they do.

But proponents of a more sane school calendar have their own international exemplars to point to.  Finland, for example, consistently scores near the top of the international PISA exams but students there only attend school between twenty and thirty hours a week (depending on the students’ age), have very little homework, and do not have a longer school year (they also take almost no standardized tests). The point is, all such comparisons between American students and their foreign counterparts are inherently tricky—you can cherry pick results enough to support almost any idea for school reform, and often, the testing populations are different enough that such comparisons aren’t valid to start with.

Tried, but not true

Yet, just as politicians and bureacrats have embraced the maxim of “more tests=better schools” (after all, if you weigh the cow more often, she’ll get bigger, right?) so too have they embraced the notion that American students have far too much free time and should be spending more time in school each day and more days in school each year.  In fact, in a political landscape polarized like never before, this is one idea that has true bi-partisan enthusiasm.  Currently, Mayor Rahm Emmanuel is in the process of introducing extended school days in Chicago’s public schools.  But he might do well to look at what happened when the same type of “reform” was implemented in Miami’s schools, which spent $100 million to add an hour onto the school day and 10 extra days onto the school calendar.  Studies concluded that there were no significant benefits in student learning.

But why not?  Why doesn’t more time equal more learning?  The answer is so simple that it might easily be overlooked:  the quality of the instruction is far more important than the quantity.  If students actually spent their time in school involved in interactive lessons that introduced and reinforced academic concepts in interesting, creative ways, then student learning would increase.  Simply toiling away another hour on a mind-numbing worksheet will not magically raise student achievement.  But it may well make them hate school.

What should we do about summer?

After all, another question to ask regarding whether or not to increase the hours students spend in school is: at what cost?  I’m not talking about dollars and cents here, but about the importance of children having time free to spend with their families and just be kids.  I’m not the only one asking this question. “Save Our Summers” organizations have sprouted up in many states, with the mission to “preserve the summer months for outside-the-classroom childhood and family learning experiences.”  Not all education should happen inside the walls of a traditional classroom, and summer vacation allows students, with their parents, to explore individual interests in-depth.   Time off also allows students to (gasp) relax and make their own fun.

Of course, the reality is that many parents don’t have the time to shuttle their kids to a drama workshop or science camp in the summer.  They’re too busy working two part-time jobs to take them on a hike in the woods or to go see a free jazz concert in the park.  And many of these parents live in neighborhoods that are unsafe—sending their children out to ride their bikes and wander the streets is not an option.  For this very reason, many parents support the idea of keeping their kids in school for longer and more days.  At least they’re safe and “doing something.”

This is a real dilemma for parents, but the answer is not to force kids back to the classroom for more and more instructional time.  It’s to offer free, thoughtful, and optional enrichment opportunities for these students that get children active, out into their community, and exploring things in a way they wouldn’t be able to during the regular school year.  Such summer enrichment opportunities would require money, energy, and creativity to develop, and they wouldn’t easily be measured by a tidy little standardized test at the end.

No easy answers

And therein lies the problem.  The appeal of “more days in school, more hours in the school day” is that it’s easy to understand and can be implemented in a straightforward way.  It’s a great applause line in a political speech about what’s wrong with education today.  But a great applause line is not sound educational policy, and American students shouldn’t have to give up part of their childhood because politicians are unwilling to engage in the difficult work of real education reform.

[Editor’s note: This post is  the second in City Mom’s three-part series on education. Other topics in the series are: “Evaluating teachers based on students’ scores is harmful,” and “What reasonable school reform would look like.” ]

The post Education: When more is less appeared first on Occasional Planet.

I taught sixth grade in a local public middle school for six years.  It was a struggling, blue-collar district.  My students’ parents did not have a college education, often worked minimum wage jobs, and at times had unstable home lives.  But it was a great job—the district was racially diverse, my colleagues were terrific, and the parents were generally very supportive.  The students, though sometimes very challenging, had an unguarded charm all their own.

Teaching is tough, and anyone who’s been a student knows there are many bad teachers out there.  In recent years more and more politicians are calling for teachers to be evaluated more stringently based on the standardized test scores of their students, and it’s easy to see the appeal of this.  After all, it’s “hard” data—we can analyze percentiles, look for movement in grade equivalencies, disaggregate by subgroup, and make “objective” assessments of which teachers are failing and which are succeeding.  But anyone who has actually been in the trenches teaching in a classroom can tell you why using standardized tests to evaluate teachers is problematic at best and truly dangerous when taken to the extreme.

Teaching vs. testing

The most obvious problem with relying on standardized tests to evaluate teachers is that it operates on the premise that everything that happens in my classroom can be quantified into a tidy formula that can calculate my success as a teacher (or, in the case of proposed merit pay systems, how much my paycheck should be).  Much of what teachers do all day is valuable work that won’t raise the students’ composite percentile one point.

My students generally did very well on standardized tests, but I can think of many instances when the work I did with a student didn’t have an immediate impact on test scores, but definitely made a difference a couple years down the line.

I had a student named Brandon [not his real name], for example, who came into my sixth grade classroom with an extremely negative attitude towards authority in general and teachers in particular.  I worked every day for nine months for him to feel like I was an ally and wanted him to do well.  He did manage to pick up a book now and then, but the main transformation for Brandon was that by the end of the school, year he felt like school was a place where he was welcome.  In seventh grade, Brandon’s academics really took off; he began actually turning in assignments and mastering the material.  The groundwork for this turnaround was laid in 6^th grade, but it took a while (and the continued hard work of his 7^th grade teachers obviously) for this to happen.

Inciting unhealthy competition among teachers

The more insidious problem with using test scores to evaluate teachers is that it pits teachers against one another and encourages unhealthy competition in precisely the environment where collaboration and cooperation should be flourishing.  At my school, charts were routinely distributed at faculty meetings showing each teachers’ students’ scores on the latest round of benchmark assessments or standardized tests.  This meant public humiliation for the teachers at the bottom of that list, the clear implication being not that your students were struggling but that you as a teacher weren’t cutting it.  None of us wanted to be at the bottom of that list, and it was easy to resent the teachers who were at the top of it.  This obviously bred a competitive environment where teachers were a little reluctant to share fresh ideas and pass along test preparation methods that seemed to actually work.  If you wanted your students to have the top scores so you could earn the professional  kudos that went with that, you went about your work quietly and weren’t quick to collaborate with your colleagues on new lessons.  I can only imagine how much more chillingly competitive things would be if teachers’ salary was based primarily on students’ test scores.

The risk for at-risk students

Finally, in a competitive system where teachers’ evaluations are based in large part on their students’ test scores, it’s the at-risk students who lose the most.  Put simply, it creates an environment where teachers will do anything in their power to get rid of students that will hurt their scores.  This kind of (to put it crudely) “pass the trash” mentality already exists, but if teachers are given a professional incentive to do it, it will become much more widespread.

In the six years that I taught, I had many students who were a drain on my energy and who I knew were not likely to perform well on the end of the year tests.  Often these were also students who disrupted the learning of others.  All teachers have these kinds of kids in their rooms, and the right response, I think, is to not give up on them, but to doggedly work to minimize their negative impact on the class and maximize their potential.  But if my contract renewal depended on my students’ test scores, I would be very tempted to do just about everything in my power to have that student transferred to another teacher, sent to the office a lot, or (what goes on a lot) spend their days sitting in the hallway.  In other words, I’d be tempted to cut my losses with that student and concentrate on the other students.  I doubt that’s the kind of social Darwinism we want going on in our public schools, but that’s exactly what is encouraged by high stakes standardized testing.

Quality, not quantity

Not all efforts to hold teachers accountable for the job they are doing are bad—teachers should be evaluated, and crummy teachers who show inclination toward improvement should be dismissed.  Standardized tests might even be a very small part of such an evaluation.  But the power these tests wield now in the lives of teachers and students is completely out of proportion to their value.  A teacher should be evaluated by administrators, fellow teachers, parents, and students, and there should be a real effort to do the hard business of qualitative rather than merely quantitative evaluation.  Teaching isn’t just a science, after all.  It’s an art, too.  Anyone who’s ever sat in a classroom with an amazing teacher knows that—and it might not show up in her MAP scores.

The post Evaluating teachers based on students’ test scores is harmful. Here’s why. appeared first on Occasional Planet.

There is a widespread misperception that, unless it’s a Catholic school or very expensive private school, to send your children to school in the city of St. Louis is to commit them to a fate of under-resourced classrooms, poorly behaved (even dangerous) classmates, incompetent teachers, and academic underachievement.  But that perception is not reality.  Or at least it’s not the entire reality of the educational options for parents in St. Louis City.

My husband and I both grew up in the county but have been city dwellers now for more than ten years.  Having three children hasn’t lessened our commitment to living here—we still love living close to beautiful parks and gardens and wonderful (free!) museums.  We enjoy our friendly neighbors, unique ethnic restaurants, and racially diverse neighborhood.  Having our children did not make us want to flee to Webster Groves (though census numbers do indicate that many young parents do just that), but it did bring us face to face with the realities of education in St. Louis City.

What we found was surprising.  One of the very best elementary schools in the entire state (outscoring every single other school in the St. Louis area, if test scores happen to be your yardstick for what constitutes a “good school”) was a five minute drive from our house.  It was Kennard Classical Junior Academy, part of St. Louis Public School System’s magnet school program.  It was socioeconomically and racially diverse, had a good curriculum, and (most importantly for us) had a community of parents and teachers who were fiercely committed to its success.  The waitlist is so impossibly long that SLPS, under Superintendent Kelvin Adams, is finally replicating Kennard’s academic program at a second site, Mallinckrodt School.

Charter school options have also grown.  Citygarden Montessori has a committed group of parents and community supporters and is expanding to a new building, Gateway Science Academy has had such a tremendous number of students trying to attend that they also now have a significant waitlist.  The Language Immersion Schools continue to add students (and languages).

Accessing these schools is not always easy.  Some (like Kennard and Mallinkrodt) require students to go through an arduous testing process before your child can “qualify” to go.  And then there’s the nightmare of the SLPS lottery and wait list.  The charter schools all have their own procedures to follow, their own deadlines and procedural intricacies.  But with a lot of persistence (and a little luck), St. Louis City residents may find their child in a school that is not just as good, but often better, than many of the schools in the surrounding public school districts.

This issue of accessibility should not be minimized though.  Investing the time to compare schooling options and figure out which best fit my child’s needs was only the beginning.  Getting my children into the school they now attend took a lot of time and energy—there’s an “inside ballgame” to be played.  You have to know who to call, how to phrase emails, who to complain to when the process starts slipping away.  My situation might not be entirely typical, but I’m not exaggerating when I say that this was the equivalent of a part-time job for me for a number of months.

And therein lies the problem.  The vast majority of parents in St. Louis City do not have the time or resources to spend investigating all these schools and then “working the system” to get their children into the one they prefer.  And they shouldn’t have to.  Maybe they’re working three part-time minimum wage jobs, maybe they are intimidated by cold-calling school bureaucrats, maybe they don’t have the writing skills to email school officials to ask about things like testing or deadlines.  Maybe their life is so chaotic from day to day that deadlines for admission fall through the cracks because they’re too worried about their electricity being shut off.  Or maybe they can even pull it together enough to fill in the application, but the energy it takes to follow-up, and follow-up, and then follow up again is just too much.

Where does the system leave those people?  It leaves them in a terrible lurch.  The sad fact is the amount of educational resources available for the children of the city of St. Louis is not getting any bigger.  In fact, with the advent of charter schools draining money away from the public schools, the economic pie is actually shrinking.  Parents in St. Louis City are chasing after those resources harder than ever.

We are fighting for the crumbs.  As a result, there is more inequality than ever within St. Louis City’s schools.  It may take a lot of time and effort, but your child could end up in an amazing, academically strong school surrounded by teachers who care.  A few of us enjoy this reality.  Or maybe you’ll land in a school where the students are woefully unprepared for academic success and the teachers are inadequate, ground down by the day to day demands of teaching in a place where they don’t feel valued or successful.  That is the reality for all too many St. Louis parents.

It shouldn’t be.  And although I can’t pretend to know exactly what it would take to solve these inequalities, I do have three humble suggestions.  First and most obviously, the pie needs to get bigger.  We need more revenue, more money poured into education in St. Louis City, not less.  Second, we need a more transparent bureaucracy.  Dealing with St. Louis Public School System is an incredibly frustrating experience where it is often difficult to get a straight answer or know what is going on.  Many of the charter schools operate under that same cloak of ambiguity.  It doesn’t seem like too much to ask all the schools that receive tax money, whether public or charter, to be more transparent in how they are run.  Finally, we need more parent advocacy.  Parents in St. Louis need to flex their political muscle, show up for meetings, and talk to each other (and the teachers) about how to make schools better.  And they need to make them better for ALL of St. Louis children, not just their own.

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