Parents for Educating Texas

PFET Book Club: NOW YOU SEE IT

One of the most exciting things about writing this blog is that, in an effort to bring change to the Texas public education system - both in how we run it and how we think of it - I am constantly educating myself. I love doing this. I'm sure my family would attest to my twin childhood obsessions of learning new words (did anyone else have the word-of-the-day daily calendar? thank you sweltering, pejorative, and ubiquitous, at least) and finding interesting magazine facts (I informed my sister in jr. high to remove her makeup each night, so she wouldn't get wrinkles). But the links that connect neuroscience findings to our crippled education system are a new education altogether - one that I'm enjoying so much, I think about brain science all the time. Which is weird.

So it's with great delight I introduce our first Book Club book of the school year, Now You See It: How the Brain Science of Attention Will Change the Way We Live and Work by Cathy N. Davidson. Her narrative is built on recent findings of how our brains handle distraction and difference, and how they are key to changing our brains in order to let in new information and new ways of thinking. In other words, to think in a new way, you need to become extremely distracted by something so different from how you presently think, you 'break' the old pattern to clear the way for a new one. Are you asking yourself, what on earth does this have to do with Texas public education? Good. Because it has a lot to do with Texas public education.

What are Texas' gorillas?

The first few pages tell of a recent study performed by two psychologists involving (quite literally) missing the "gorilla in the room." Volunteers were asked to watch a video of some men and women passing a basketball back and forth. They were asked to count how many passes were made during the course of the video. But, in the middle of the video, a woman in a gorilla costume walks right through the action. How many volunteers counting passes missed the gorilla? About half. (Watch the video of the experiment here.) Davidson then uses this study - how our brain has the ability to focus on something so tightly, we miss everything else - to explain why our schools (and workplaces) are unravelling. Could we be so used to what we're doing, so entrenched in our hardwired Hebbian principle ("the more we repeat certain patterns of behavior, the more those behaviors become rapid, then reflexive, then automatic." p. 45) that, when it comes to the much-needed retooling and revolutionizing of our school system, could it be possible we are going about our business, thinking we are concentrating on the problem at hand, but all the while wholly ignoring the gorilla?

With sharp insight, Davidson suggests that distraction could actually be good for us in the way we live now. She says, "We have heard many times that the contemporary era's distractions are bad for us, but are they? All we really know is that our digital age demands a different form of attention than what we've needed before. (p. 17)" She then explains how brain attention works - how we get locked into certain ways of thinking early in life (like, babyhood), and it's very difficult for our brains to break out of those ways of thinking unless we are able to get extremely distracted. Distraction, it turns out, is the key to breaking the old ways to allow new ideas and new ways of thinking. According to Davidson, this is crucial in our present era, when change is occurring more rapidly than any other time in human history. Getting distracted by something flashy and interesting when we should be focusing will allow us to see things in new light and creatively problem-solve. 

If you're wondering how that's possible - how your brain could focus but be distracted at the same time -Davidson advocates teaming up and working with others so one person can focus on specific tasks while another is able to see the big picture. Or, in her own words: "I'll count - you take care of the gorilla."

This prompts me to ask, what gorillas are in our midst? What are we missing here in Texas? In order to find out why education isn't meeting our expectations, we need to break the old ways of thinking.

The new questions then become: what are the 'old' ways of thinking, and how do we break them? I can think of a couple right off the top - we need to understand that our public school system was created for a different age, one that was dominated by the Industrial Revolution. We also need to make sense of how technology plays into education today. Kids seem distracted because they are distracted - in many ways, as Sir Ken Robinson so profoundly points out, we might have narrowed the playing field too much by focusing so intently on only reading and math. This leaves out so many children's gifts and talents, and they get bored (distracted). Right now, we see their distraction as a disorder, but according to the science in the book, we should take notice to what's distracting them. What if we provided them with the right stimulus? What if it is hip-hop music, or architecture, or flying, or fixing cars, that turned them on? How would that change their learning, and how they felt about school?

Reading books like Now You See It expands our vocabulary and understanding of what it means to be educated, and connects us to the science of how we think and learn, which is at the heart of every issue we're facing here in Texas. And when I say, 'how we think and learn' I mean everyone - the parents, the teachers, and the students themselves. Because if we don't educate ourselves in what it means to have a great education, how can we expect that of our children?

Join us next Monday for continued discussion of Now You See It: Bringing Texas classrooms into the 21st Century. 

Book Club: Fires in the Mind Ch. 1-3

"If teachers knew what gave us the driving force to do better, they could apply that, so that everyone could do things to the best of their ability." - Avelina, high school student

The American parent often thinks about a child's inner drive as a direct reflection of themselves: should I be Permissive Parent or Tiger Mother to get my kid to the top? In her new book Fires in the Mind: What Kids Can Tell Us About Motivation and Mastery, author Kathleen Cushman extracts parents' narcissism completely, and instead does what most of us would never think to do: she asks the children themselves what motivates them, how they "got good" at something, and why. She asks 160 teenagers from across the country, what does it take to get really good at something? 

Their answers are more than enlightening; it turns out that our teenagers think a lot more about becoming an expert than we may first assume. I found their attitudes about practice and what it takes to succeed comforting: “’Everything takes practice,’ said Darrius, a Chicago student bent on becoming an artist.”  Cushman writes, "Most of this book's accounts of how students came to excel do not emphasize inborn talent - a disposition, either neurological or temperamental, toward tinkering with things mechanical or making music or art. Instead, they are stories of interest and skill built on opportunity and relationships."

For example, Keila, a high school student in New York City, recalls how she got into designing and creating her own clothes by watching her grandmother. "I loved to watch her sew, and I wanted to learn so I could make the clothes I liked. After school I sat next to her and she showed me how to use the sewing machine and how to use patterns with fabric. Then she would let me try." Eventually, Keila got so good she designed and made her own Halloween costume. "'I could actually wear it outside,' she said, 'and it looked like a store-bought dress!'" 

So many of the young people's interests and expertise lie outside of the classroom. For some, school can be confining, with little room to experiment and delve into the why. "'You want to delve into the reason why you are doing something instead of just blindly following what the teacher tells you to do. If you are getting the answer without really realizing why it's important, it's empty,'" says Micah, from San Antonio. And Samantha says, "'They go too much by the book. They worry about the perfect answer, rather than worrying about if we've learned something.'"

Our modern world is overflowing with tepid information for parents on how to "find your child's passion" and help them "stay motivated" in order to succeed, but most of the suggestions seem trite and overly simplistic. Ask about what your child is learning in school, not her grades or test scores, one website suggests. Help your child organize his homework papers, says another. Surely organizing papers is not the answer to finding a fulfilling life of purpose and expertise? Surely there’s more to it than that?

What I like so much about Fires in the Mind is that it turns modern self-help motivation on its head – instead of generic platitudes of encouragement (which always somehow also wind up inspiring dread), after reading the first three chapters, I began asking myself specific questions about my kids. Instead of worrying that I did not force my oldest son to practice his violin enough this year, Cushman, in her kind-yet-factual prose, encourages me to investigate if my son even likes playing the violin in the first place. (Talk about an a-ha moment.)

In Chapter 2, "Catching the Spark", Cushman leads a discussion exercise centered around the questions, What do you enjoy doing and want to get better at? What first got you interested in trying it? The answer choices she gives are:

• It looked like fun!
• Someone supported and encouraged you at the start.
• The activity had an audience that mattered to you.
• You had a personal interest in getting good at it.

These are worthy questions and answers, and for the first time, I got a clue as to why my son loves blogging and writing stories more than playing the violin. Not only did it look like fun to him, because he loves computers and figuring things out, but I encourage him daily by reading and commenting on it, and the audience – his parents and grandparents - matters to him a great deal.

I like the image of a fire lighting in a child's mind: I picture a dry pile of brush, once lit, smoldering into a smooth and steady flame of deep enjoyment and understanding. Until Fires in the Mind, I had not thought that the very match to strike the passion for my children’s success lies within their own hearts.

 

As always, I’d love to hear your thoughts and comments! Next Monday we will discuss Chapters 4-6. See you then!

 

 

Book Club Preview: FIRES IN THE MIND

Our new Book Club featuring Kathleen Cushman's Fires in the Mind: What Kids Can Tell Us About Motivation and Mastery begins in only two weeks! The first online discussion and reading assignment starts on Monday, May 25 and I want you all to be there, but first you need to go get the book on Amazon - there are both hardback and Kindle versions available.

Why do I think parents need to read this book? Because Cushman's insights into the minds of children are directly applicable to both their education and home life. When we think of how to motivate our children and get them to do their best, we rarely think of asking them how to do it - but Cushman has done just that, performing what author Mike Rose calls "a lovely act of conceptual Jujutsu and instead asks 'What can the kids tell us about motivation?'" We parents can learn a great deal from Ms. Cushman's central question: What does it take to get really good at something?

She discusses how much students want to understand why they are learning what they are learning:

"In Chapter Seven, 'Bringing Practice into the Classroom,' the students do not suggest making direct links between their interests and school subjects. Instead, they remind teachers of the meaning and value they have found in outside-school commitments, and ask them to look for that in school subjects, too. As Micah, in San Antonio, explained:

"'You want to delve into the reason why you are doing something, instead of just blindly following what the teachers tells you to do. If you are getting the answer without really realizing why it's important, it's empty. You are not really learning. You are going to drop that later, because it has no importance to you in your life.' - MICAH"

In another example, Cushman highlights how important it is for kids to learn from experts:

"Watching accomplished people do something well often made these teenagers want to practice even more. Talking to experts in person was even better. As Mike said, 'If I meet a musician I look up to, everything he says is like it was bolded out.'

"So I sent students out to interview people from their communities whom they considered masters in their fields - plumbers, farmers, physicians, church organists, psychologists, engineers, and so on. And as the kids transcribed those interviews, they saw many similarities to their own learning journeys.

"Every expert's story started with a spark of interest that somebody noticed or framed. All had the opportunity to explore that interest further, with someone nearby to encourage, critique, and suggest next steps. Small successes along the way rewarded hours of practice - and with a challenge met, the experts wanted to go further."

How does this conversation - how students get really good at something - relate to our passion for reforming Texas public schools? The correlations are strong.

• From the book jacket: "Fires in the Mind uses the latest research on cognition to help students and teachers together address motivation, practice, and the need for high standards."
• Parents need to shoulder the very important role in their child's education - yes, we rely on teachers and government to provide the structure, but without our support, it's easy for children to become lost in the system.
• Until we realize what is important to learn - until government, administrators, teachers and parents come up with a common understanding of what comprises a quality education, reform efforts will continue to flounder.

I hope you get the book; if you take a peek I bet you'll soon be as excited as I am about reading and doing the exercises together. As Ms. Cushman says at the end of chapter one:

"'Train every day, then you will see,' advised the samurai Musashi four hundred years ago. Ten thousand hours - that roughly corresponds to the time students spend in school during four years of high school and four years of college. What are we asking our youth to practice in the precious time? What fires are we lighting in their minds?"

 

PFET Book Club: Instead of top down, think bottom up

Twitter is taking over my brain. I follow my favorite education writers, publications and thinkers and get so many ideas in a day my head is spinning. (Go here to find out who I'm following!) So, I'd like to make a connection between what we were reading in The Death and Life of the Great American School System this week and the blog post of a public school teacher named Joanne Yatvin I picked up on Twitter via the Washington Post education blog, because they are closely linked. Got that? Good. While Ravitch unearths the problems in this week's reading, eventually realizing she no longer supports the federal and state mandates of testing, accountability and choice, Ms. Yatvin, a classroom veteran, offers up some solutions that are fresh and positive and altogether good for everyone involved, parents and students and teachers and principals.

Both women have come to the conclusion that a bottom-up approach to schools has a chance to save the day.

If you read this week's chapters, Lessons from San Diego, The Business Model in New York City, and NCLB: Measure and Punish, Ms. Ravitch explains in great detail why the top-down accountability approach just doesn't work, using the two examples of San Diego and New York City. She does a great job of pointing out the unintended consequences of rewards and sanctions. Here are the ones I found most interesting:

1. Why are we hiring business leaders with no education experience to run school districts? We have come to assume, with help from the media, that those leading our schools are incapable and that a school system full of children should operate the same as a business. But, as Ms. Ravitch points out, changing a management style from the very top level - a hardnosed business leader, like Alan Bersin, who was hired from the private sector to overhaul the San Diego school system - can have the unintended consequences of alienating the teachers, who have to implement all the changes. As the American Institutes for Research concluded when they evaluated the San Diego sytem, "Teacher buy-in is critical for the success of school reform efforts... teachers who perceived decision making as top-down tended to resist schoolwide reform efforts." Perhaps it is best, then, to fill our education administrations with education experts who are well-versed in schools and learning (and working with teachers), not bottom lines. This could also go for the Texas State Board of Ed, who, last time I checked, was altering curriculum and rewriting history books at the insistence of a dentist and a realtor.
2. Due to the proliferation of NCLB testing, the children of Texas are actually getting a worse education. The first half of the chapter on NCLB is about Texas explicitly. Ravitch shows that, while Texas showed children doing great on the state test, "the gains were not reflected on other measures of academic performance, such as the SAT and NAEP (National Assessment of Education Progress)." And "as teachers spent more time preparing students to take standardized tests, the curriculum was narrowed: Such subjects as science, social studies, and the arts were pushed aside to make time for test preparation."
3. The choice (vouchers) intended to help students get out of failing schools isn't working - although the reasons are unclear. "When offered a chance to leave their failing school and to attend a supposedly better school in another part of town, less than 5 percent - and in some cases, less than 1 percent - of students actually sought to transfer."

The top-down approach is not working - now what to do about it? (That's why you're here, isn't it?) I think we parents are feeling these effects in our classrooms, and the test scores aren't getting any better for it - Texas has actually dropped 10 places in the national average since NCLB has been enacted. I know this is a long post, but bear with me: the article from the Washington Post below deserves a thoughtful read. Let me know what you think about Ms. Yatvin's proposals - I like their creativity, their simplicity, and most of all, they're - according to her - cheap.

This post was written by Joanne Yatvin, a vet­eran public school educator, author and past president of the National Council of Teachers of English. She is now teaching part-time at Portland State University.

By Joanne Yatvin
Having complained long and loud about the misguided school reform schemes that rule the day, I think it’s time for me to step up and offer my own ideas for making schools work. Be warned that my proposals are not only unorthodox, but also teacher-biased, and cheap. Well, at least cheaper than the test-drenched plans now in place and on the horizon.

My version of school reform is based on two premises: (1) poverty and its accoutrements are the major causes of students’ poor academic performance (2) the principals and teachers who live their professional lives in schools are best qualified to make decisions for schools and to implement them.

Convert schools in high-poverty areas to full-time community centers.

By moving as many community services as possible into school buildings and making them available in the evenings and on weekends year round, schools could provide existing social supports to poor families more efficiently and economically and add recreational and self-improvement activities now in short supply.

In restructuring building use, the only adjustment to the daytime program would be the addition of basic health and dental care for students. During evening and weekend hours, however, libraries, gyms and computer labs would be open to all, offering a variety of classes, clubs, arts, and sports. In addition, inexpensive and nutritious family meals could be served in the school lunchroom, financially supported by local charities and food banks.

Turn over the management of high-poverty schools to professional educators.

We need to lure the best principals and teachers into struggling schools by offering them incentives of autonomy, professional advancement, and higher salaries. Under the leadership of a dynamic principal, chosen by the school staff and parents, schools would be empowered to create their own structures, including a principal’s cabinet and grade level instructional teams. Within each team, roles and salaries would be differentiated according to teachers’ expertise, experience, and willingness to take on additional responsibilities.

Evaluate teachers on their own performance, not those of students

I argue that too many factors beyond a teacher’s control affect students’ test scores, even when the school uses a “value added” system. What a student learns—both good and bad—comes as much from home, the street, the state of his or her health, and personal interactions as from the classroom. And each student makes choices about what to work hard at and what to ignore.

Although principals’ views of teachers’ competence are not perfect, having a wise and alert administrator considering what teachers do to help students learn is the only rational way to evaluate them. Not only formal observations should count, but also finding a teacher in the library helping some kids with research, noticing how often a teacher volunteers to do something extra for the school, seeing a teacher eating lunch at her desk while she reads student essays, or catching him on the phone talking to a parent.

Offer early retirement to burned-out teachers and incentives for ineffective younger teachers to resign or transfer to non-teaching positions.

At present, removing an unsuccessful teacher is a long and expensive process. But the problem is not teacher tenure. It is the lack of evidence of failure that makes attempting to remove a teacher look arbitrary or vengeful. The first step is to insure systematic evaluations of all teachers with prompt feedback and offers of assistance. Ultimately, any teacher marked for dismissal should be provided with counseling, a dignified resignation process, and monetary incentives. For both older teachers and their districts the incentives would be financially advantageous, with teachers getting a portion of their retirement benefits and the district getting the chance to hire a new teacher at a much lower salary.

Cut reliance on expensive commercial materials for students while increasing teachers’ professional development opportunities to increase their expertise.

Rather than depending on slick commercial programs and their disposable materials (i.e. workbooks), schools would do better to invest in high quality literature, technology, and reference books for students; and professional books and journals, presentations from local innovators, and university courses for teachers. At the same time, schools could purchase small numbers of a variety of commercial programs in which teachers might find good ideas they could modify and expand upon to fit their students’ needs.

Provide poor children with the background knowledge and support they may have missed at home and in their community.

What makes school difficult for most poor children is not lack of ability but meagerness of social, cultural and literary experiences. What many have missed out on is being read to, having substantive conversations with adults, visiting museums, parks, forests, and beaches, and being members of a civil society. To learn academic content and skills successfully, poor children need a school environment that is not only welcoming and supportive, but also rich in books, hands-on activities, cooperative learning, and exposure to the world outside their home community.

Reduce the number of standardized tests and the time devoted to test preparation

Not only is standardized testing expensive, it also allows tested subjects to crowd out other subjects, and test preparation to become almost a subject in itself. Furthermore, tests influence teaching style, making it shallow and formulaic to fit the limitations of a multiple choice format. Both students and schools would be better served ifstandardized tests were given only every few years and classroom teachers wrote yearly tests that demanded student analysis, judgment, and the synthesis of ideas.

Although I could add more change proposals to my list, these are the basics. I chose to highlight ideas that run counter to much of what is being proposed for school reform today. Since I never know whether to laugh or cry when pundits and policy makers call for more testing, standardization, charter schools, academic rigor (mortis?), ending teacher tenure, and implementing merit pay, I stuck to describing the major features of the good schools I have known and the great ones I still dream of.

 

PFET Book Club: School reform and the slow food movement

Welcome to the first installment of the PFET Book Club! In this post I'll be discussing the first three chapters of Diane Ravitch's fabulous book, The Death and Life of the Great American School System. I'd love for you to join the conversation.

One of the last meals I had in my beloved Brooklyn, in June of 2007, was at a restaurant called Franny's. Just around that time, the slow food movement had begun to grip the whole borough; Franny's was one of the first to follow its tenets of localism, sustainability and quality. And my meal, which was and will remain one of the best I've ever had, was produced with vegetables, grains and meats that were raised within a twenty-mile radius of the city, without pesticides. The sausages, which were lovingly stuffed with the most creative ingredients I'd ever encountered, were made a few feet from my table. Eating the pizza, loaded with cheese also handmade in-house, was a life-changing event. I saw, smelled and tasted immediately why the slow food movement had taken hold: much more than a social construct or a political or ideological stance, the food was amazing. The food was better, noticeably better, than anything else I'd ever had before. Both the wildly inventive chefs and the quality of the ingredients had meshed perfectly to make something that was worthy of my talking about in this much detail nearly four years later! (Why the slow food movement hasn't taken up in North Texas is still a mystery to me and deserves its own blog.)

The first two chapters of The Death and Life of the Great American School System read to me as a call for a slow food movement of our education system (should we call itslow ed? somehow it doesn't sound quite right.). Our school reform, according to Ravitch, has been hijacked by a large, unwieldy bureaucracy obsessed with test scores and accountability comparable to the top-down, one-size-fits-all style of industrialized food. In a race to measure every bit of learning, school officials of both parties have dropped completely the need to improve the quality of the curriculum or the teachers. Instead of improving the breadth and depth of what children are learning, accountability reformers focus relentlessly on the most basic skills in reading and math, relying on test scores to measure the success of everything - from what children are learning to how much teachers should be paid to how much federal money schools should receive. She points out that NCLB (No Child Left Behind) "ignored the importance of knowledge. It promoted a cramped, mechanistic, profoundly anti-intellectual definition of education. In the age of NCLB, knowledge was irrelevant."

Ravitch, an education historian and former assistant secretary of education under President George H.W. Bush, was a one-time supporter of NCLB and the tenets of accountability and choice that it promoted. She admits that, while measurement and business ideals of innovation and efficiency seem like great ideas, when put into practice in the public education system, the results and side-effects distort education's real mission. She has since changed her mind about accountability and choice. "Instead of dealing with rancorous problems like how to teach reading or how to improve testing," she writes, "one can redesign the management and structure of the school system and concentrate on incentives and sanctions. One need not know anything about children or education." Under the NCLB model, the learning taking place is much like a frozen Lean Cuisine; under a more comprehensive, progressive approach, learning becomes more like a farm-to-table meal. Let's take a look at how the slow food movement for education could hash out like Ravitch describes. A progressive education reform would need to be:

• Organic. Ravitch asserts that the quality of the curriculum and teachers ("well educated, not just well trained") is more rewarding for learning than testing and choice. "We must make sure that our schools have a strong, coherent, explicit curriculum that is grounded in the liberal arts and sciences, with plenty of opportunity for children to engage in activities and projects that make learning lively. We must ensure that students gain the knowledge they need to understand political debates, scientific phenomena, and the world they live in. We must be sure they are prepared for the responsibilities of democratic citizenship in a complex society."
• Local. When NCLB asked states to come up with their own standards, they were terrified of specific curriculum goals because of the political implications (think of the fight here in Texas against the perceived "bias" in history and science books). So instead they focused on vague, non-controversial and in the end intangible standards that watered down the curriculum even further: almost by definition the reality of industrialized, overprocessed food. Ravitch calls for states to create a localized curriculum strong in the specific events of history and real texts in English and language arts. "Few states refer to a single significant work of literature that students are expected to read." Teachers rely solely on textbooks "to determine what to teach and test."
• Multidimensional, avoiding monoculture. Under NCLB, reading and math are the focus, to the detriment of literally everything else. "It ignored such important studies as history, civics, literature, science, the arts, and geography." Not to mention recess, lunch, and music, which we have seen shortened in the name of more reading and math. A well-rounded student must have pieces of each of these for a complete education.
• Pure, rejecting genetic engineering. In the slow-food movement, food that has been messed with on a genetic level does not qualify as real food; curriculum and standards that have been messed with so almost all children can pass a high-stakes test does not qualify as a real education. "In this new era, school reform was characterized as accountability, high-stakes testing, data-driven decision making, choice, charter schools, privatization, deregulation, merit pay, and competition among schools. Whatever could not be measured did not count."
• Sustainable. In ecology, this is called the capacity to endure. Ravitch argues that in education, this capacity for our democratic society to endure in both culture and wealth generation has to mean we have curriculum standards. Without a reasonable, specific set of attainable goals for students, "Business leaders continued to grouse that they had to spend large amounts of money to train new workers; the media continued to highlight the mediocre performance of American students on international tests; and colleges continued to report that about a third of their freshman needed remediation in the basic skills of reading, writing and mathematics."

While the slow food metaphor is incomplete and misses many details, I believe we might be able to use some of its ideas to form a progressive education movement here in Texas. I found the first few chapters of GASS energizing and enlightening. Ravitch has masterfully articulated many of the problems that we see every day in our own schools due to NCLB. I can't wait to read on to her specific examples of success and failure in various school districts across the country. For next week, I'll be discussing the next three chapters, Lessons from San Diego, The Business Model in New York City, and NCLB: Measure and Punish, which concludes on page 112. I hope you will join us.

Your input is always welcome! Click on the comments and reactions button below and tell us what you think.

 

Welcome to the PFET Book Club: Why should we care?

This week's reading of Diane Ravitch's The Death and Life of the Great American School System will cover the first three chapters: What I Learned About School Reform, Hijacked!, and The Transformation of District 2, ending at page 46. Next Monday's post will discuss these chapters in detail. Please join me on this great journey to change our public education system together!

Now, as for a book club all about standardized testing, and constantly being begged to write your Congressman, attend the rallies, address the culture at large -- sometimes thinking about all this, on top of my three children and my part-time job and the otherwise total mess of my hectic life makes my throat feel as if it's beginning to tighten. I sit at the kitchen table late into the night, reading all the books and magazines and of course the internet that I can get my hands on, trying to cobble together massive amounts of education information for a semi-intelligent post. The amount of opinion on what to do and how to do it is - well, overwhelming to say the least. In frustration, I sometimes look at my husband and mime pulling out my dyed-red hair and say, why should I care?

Sound familiar?

This is a really important question. Why should we parents care - not just about the school our child attends, but about all the children and all the schools?

One of the books I'm reading over the kitchen table at night is called Measuring Up: What Educational Testing Really Tells Us, by a Harvard Professor of Education and testing expert named Daniel Koretz. In the very first chapter, he expresses his frustration at parents who prod him for easy answers, wanting to find the "best" school for their kids: "If all you want is high average test scores, tell your realtor that you want to buy into the highest-income neighborhood you can manage. That will buy you the highest average test score you can afford." According to Koretz, high test scores are not the entire picture, that there is a lot more to a school - and more to student achievement - than just the numbers on the scorecard. He cites "a high level of student engagement, clear explanations from teachers before students undertook tasks, a level of enthusiastic activity when it was appropriate, and spirited discussion among the students" as other reasons to be interested in a school; these are all things that are more subjective, and must be observed in a classroom setting, rather than data merely reported and read on a piece of paper. This is when, according to Koretz, he loses most parents; they just want the school with the highest test scores. The parents can hardly be blamed, he reasons, because that's what they (we) have been told over and over is most important. (And, thinking about it, a more comprehensive look at a school only makes sense - can you imagine taking a job with a company without considering the others you're working with, and how people work together, and whether or not the employees seem like they're having fun? Can you imagine taking a job only because they make the most money??)

Yet when our children are being evaluated by the state, these social and human aspects of learning are never considered. They're never even mentioned. The only thing that appears to matter to our public schools today is the number on the test - how did they do on the TAKS? Parents are not educated or informed on the meaning of the test, or why some of the numbers shouldn't be trusted, or whether our child was having a bad day, or how to put the test score in perspective when evaluating how our child is doing in total.  According to the state of Texas, the score is all we need to know.

You see, we parents have been asked to focus on one thing, one single thing, to tell us whether or not our school is any good - think of those gigantic, state-funded blue ribbons hanging outside your school's building - and that's how the kids inside did on the test. That's it. (Koretz actually uses Texas as an example of how school systems inflate scores, make the tests super-easy to appear to be improving, and oh yes we'll get to that later in the week.) Koretz asserts there is more to it than that. A school's worth - and whether or not your child is learning anything, retaining anything, or heaven forbid, enjoying himself - is complex and comprises a host of factors, many of them human. Who are the teachers? Do they get the kids excited? Do they have the childrens' attention? Do the kids understand the task at hand?

I said in an earlier post that I wanted to stop the culture of the standardized test, I felt that it was wrong, but I couldn't articulate why. I'm getting there. I am beginning to know why we should stop the test: because our kids are complex and interesting human beings. The public school budget must allow for this. Our kids deserve the arts, music, science, social studies, athletics, clubs - they are all part of what makes a great education, and arguably a great person (we will get to this, too). What our kids know, and how they know it, is much more than a), b), c) or d), and we parents know it.

Why should we care? Because the future depends on us. Now, let's educate ourselves in how the tests work and what they are good for; then we will be ready for action. Diane Ravitch covers a good deal of this material in the first three chapters of her book - get reading and we'll take this up again next Monday.

As always, I look forward to hearing from you! Post your comments below, just click on the comments link!