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Tag Archives: Common Core
The California Context: How the CA Reading Wars Got Resolved: A Personal Story
Too many children in the United States do not learn to read well in their early years, and that failure damages them in their future school careers. Yet the research and evidence on how best to teach beginning reading is largely settled. (For a summary of foundational reading research and best practice, see the section below "The Role of Foundational Reading Skills.") There is no excuse for any youngsters beyond a very small number to fail to learn to read. Our most successful districts incorporate these ideas in instruction, but we still have a major problem in this country. Many less successful districts do not use this evidence-based approach, and a growing number have adopted alternative, discredited strategies such as "balanced literacy" programs that teach beginning readers to sound out only the first letter of a word (rather than all the letters) and use context clues to guess what the word is. Many of the students in these schools and districts never learn to decode properly and, as a result, are destined to remain weak readers. This situation is much like the case of military doctors who fail to put into practice the lessons learned in recent wars on how to minimize battlefield deaths from injuries.
I devoted a substantial part of my educational career to advocate for improved reading instruction based on the most potent research. I founded a group to promulgate these ideas (CORE) and wrote a book on the subject. The following is the story of that effort.
The Rise of Whole Language
Back in the 1970s when I was a member of the California State Board of Education, I wrote a pamphlet on reading instruction with JoEllen Taylor from Far West (now WestEd) entitled Planning an Effective Reading Program and published by them. We integrated using a skills approach to teach decoding and phonics with literature and writing-based strategies—a consensus that was blown apart in the late 1980s by the whole language movement's opposition to phonics instruction.
During my tenure as California's superintendent of public instruction, in the late '80s we developed the Reading and Literature Framework, which stressed the importance of students being well read and encountering and discussing rich, varied literature. The framework mentioned phonics, but as it turned out not forcefully enough to withstand the whole language movement, which was then gathering steam.
The proponents of whole language believe that teaching skills such as phonics hurts children. Instead, they advocate an alternative approach that stresses reading together and using pictures, syntax, and context to guess the meaning of words instead of learning how letters map to sounds to sound out the words on a page in a linguistically justified sequence of instruction. When they do use word attack skills they suggest students sound out the first letter and then use context to guess the word. They provide "leveled readers" that are not designed to practice letter/sound correspondences students have learned and don't distinguish between the sequence of letter/sound correspondences already taught and the more complex ones still to be addressed. Since English is complex linguistically such a strategy leaves many children confused and frustrated. Their position is based on the mistaken belief that learning to read is like learning to speak—a natural, unconscious process that is hindered by organized skill instruction. It isn't.
I had seen the deleterious effects of this approach 20 years before when it became widespread in the '60s as part of the free school movement. As a fourth- and fifth-grade teacher, I noticed that many of my entering students were never taught to read. Sitting them on a couch and giving them a book to read just didn't cut it.
Because of my work with JoEllen Taylor, I made the mistake of assuming that stressing the importance of literature and rich content would not detract from the necessity of teaching phonics. At the time, I had not yet even heard of the whole language movement and was not aware of its growing strength among educators so I was oblivious to the need to include in the framework very clear and detailed guidance about the importance of phonics.
Jeanne Chall had published the definitive study on teaching children to read, which demonstrated that teaching phonics produced much better readers than the looser strategy being pushed by an unfounded belief system like whole language. I had met and respected Jeanne, and when she saw a draft of the framework she called and warned me that people would use it to stop teaching phonics. I didn't believe her and assured her that educators would never make such a ridiculous mistake. It turned out she was right and I was wrong because that's exactly what happened. The framework was hijacked by the whole language movement.
It took a few years to realize what had happened. In one of his more destructive acts, Governor George Deukmejian eliminated the testing program in California in 1990, after a long campaign against me personally and public education in general. The long-standing California Assessment Program (CAP) was one of the best in the nation. We only tested at three grades. We used matrix sampling, which meant that each child only took a portion of the test. This allowed more thorough questions in less testing time and avoided the negative consequences of attaching tests to accountability. The current well-regarded National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) is patterned after CAP.
In the '80s, CAP scores, including reading, were improving substantially—proof that our efforts were working. Reading scores leveled off at the end of the decade, but we didn't yet detect a trend to worry about. The governor claimed he abolished the program as a cost-cutting measure, but no one believed him. The result was a calamity. We were flying blind precisely when whole language started to significantly impair reading instruction. Thus, we made no course correction.
Persuasive Reading Research
In my years as superintendent, I had to think about a broad array of educational issues. When I left office in 1993, I felt it would be a welcome change to concentrate on just one educational area and get deeply involved in it. I picked beginning reading because I felt responsible for the way our framework was used by the whole language movement with such damaging results. So I started reading in depth and talking to experts about how children learn to read. In 1990, Marilyn Adams had published her groundbreaking work, Beginning to Read: Thinking and Learning about Print. It was based on extensive research confirming and extending Jeanne Chall's previous work on the processes children need to master to learn to read. I had not had time to read Marilyn's book because of an all-encompassing political conflict with the governor and legal proceedings stemming from that fight, but now tackled the book. The tome was hard for me to understand. I had to read it three times before I could comprehend all of what she was saying. Luckily, I knew Marilyn, and over the course of many phone calls, she graciously played the role of tutor, answering all my questions.
She then invited me to the 1995 meeting of the Society for the Scientific Study of Reading, which had been formed two years before. At the meeting Marilyn introduced me to the top reading researchers in the country. For several years Reid Lyon, who was head of the Behavior and Development branch of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, had made large grants to a network of research projects investigating why some children learn to read so easily and why others have great difficulty. The studies delved into how children learn to read, identified the difficulties many encounter, provided a broader definition of requisite foundational skills, and confirmed the importance of an organized, structured program for teaching beginning readers.
For those who are interested, what follows is a short description of their research: why, contrary to the claims of whole language advocates, most children do not learn to read naturally in the same way they learn to speak (especially in English, which is linguistically complex) and why children need to be taught in an organized fashion.
The Role of Foundational Reading Skills
First, these researchers examined speaking since print represents spoken words. When we listen to someone speak, a stream of sounds like the phonemes /m/ and /a/ /n/ all run together and we hear the word man. We have been programmed to recognize this sequence of sounds as a word and immediately connect that spoken cluster of sounds to the concept or meaning underlying it. For the process to be rapid, we have learned not to pay attention to or even discern the individual phonemes that make up a word but to perceive groups of these sounds as words. The process is very fast, unconscious, and efficient; otherwise we wouldn't be able to concentrate on the meaning of what the speaker is saying.
Initially, reading for understanding depends on recognizing the symbols on a page set off with spaces as a word that's part of our speaking vocabulary—sounding out the letters in the word until it is recognized as if it were being spoken (assuring that students are familiar with the meaning of the word being decoded at the start is crucial especially for English-language learners and low-income children). Later, meaning also comes from more sophisticated strategies that require recognizing syllables and morphemes, navigating complex syntax and text structures, extensively developing vocabulary, connecting to what you know and drawing inferences, and extending meaning by writing or discussing what you read.
So reading initially is a double code. The printed word stands for the spoken sounds of the word, which in turn represent the meaning behind that spoken word. Luckily, English uses the alphabetic system to represent spoken words in print. That system was invented eons ago by some unsung geniuses who figured out that spoken words in a language are made up of a limited number of discrete sounds (about 44 in English), which allowed for millions of potential combinations or words to represent concepts. Crucially, these prodigies also determined that one could represent those sounds by symbols (letters or combinations of letters), which when decoded and combined would generate the spoken word. The catch was how to make the process as rapid, automatic, and unconscious as speech so that a reader could concentrate on thinking about what was being read. Complicating the task of understanding what one reads is evidence that comprehending meaning suffers if more than about five percent of the words are not known automatically. The same is true of speech. It doesn't take many words that you don't hear or don't understand to stop you from comprehending what's being said.
The research community, relying on the latest brain research, discovered how good readers do it. The secret is to develop a growing corpus of automatically recognized words so that a word instantly pops into your head by just looking at it. Then students can read material with large numbers of automatically recognized words and keep growing their lexicon by reading new text, sounding out or decoding (eventually assisted by pattern recognition, as explained below) the few previously unencountered printed words found there.
What did these researchers discover about how people learn to automatically recognize a word? One of the most important findings was that both sounds (phonemes) and symbols (graphemes, or letters and letter combinations) were crucial to rapid retrieval of words. Hearing-impaired children, for example, usually read several grades below expected levels because their information about a word is limited to its letters. When they are taught to substitute signing for the sound information they reach grade level.
To make use of the full bundle of necessary information for rapid retrieval, a student must initially read through the whole word (sounding it out), which requires attending to all of the letters, connecting the letters and letter combinations to the sounds they represent, blending the sounds together, and linking the sounds to the meaning of the word in the context. When this process is successfully repeated several times, the student forms a neural model of that specific word in the brain that gets automatically activated upon seeing the word in print. The sounds of the word are stored in one part of the brain, the symbols connected to those sounds in another, and both are connected to the meaning stored in the frontal cortex. After a student has analyzed and correctly read a word several times, a neural model with all the information necessary for rapid retrieval is formed. (Some reading-disabled youngsters need focused interventions to succeed because they have brain-processing issues that make creating these connections or retrieving the information difficult.)
Thus, the royal road to master beginning reading is to develop the decoding tool—the ability to sound out words thoroughly so that they can eventually be stored and retrieved rapidly. As more and more words become automatic, students can read increasingly difficult text.
After a time, when students have mastered enough letter/sound correspondences, pattern recognition speeds up the decoding process. For example, if a student has learned to automatically recognize the word weight, by using analogy the student can more easily read and create a neural model for the word freight. This can only take place after the spelling pattern eight and its corresponding sounds were initially sounded out, practiced several times, and stored in permanent memory.
A critical piece of eye research demonstrated that effective readers see every letter in a word as they scan it, which activates the exact spelling and associated sounds stored in memory. I'm getting older now and sometimes catch myself misreading an i for an e in a word, which changes the meaning and makes me stop but proves I'm seeing each letter.
When teachers shortchange the process by teaching students guessing strategies such as looking only at the first letter and using context to "infer" what the word is, the full package of information never gets stored and quick retrieval is hampered the next time the student encounters the word (unless after guessing, the student uses phonics to sound out the word and confirm it's correct and then has enough practice to store the word—a process the whole language advocates discourage). Repeating the guessing strategy each time a word is encountered is far too cumbersome and error prone for efficient reading.
Most importantly, guessing from context, even if given the first letter of a word, doesn't work that well. In our Consortium on Reaching Excellence trainings (more about CORE later) we show a paragraph from Jack London's Call of the Wild, with every fifth word redacted except for the first letter. We then ask teachers who believe context can help them decode words to read the passage. In hundreds of trainings, not one person could read and understand the excerpt until, finally, one teacher read the entire passage fluently. I was amazed and asked her how she did it. It turns out she has a photographic memory and had stored the passage in her brain from previous readings. It is important to note that context clues are useful to determine if a word has been correctly decoded and makes sense in the context. There are also occasions when context clues can help readers figure out a word that is not yet in their vocabulary, but context strategies can't replace decoding. Finally, students need enough flexibility in decoding to try out various potential solutions to generating and combining sounds until they hit on a word that makes sense. For example, trying to break a word into syllables in different ways with different vowel sounds—"Is it re•cent or rec•ent?"
Alternatively, memorization strategies don't work either. If students try to memorize the unique configuration of each word they quickly are overwhelmed. There are just too many words in English for that approach to be successful, and children who rely on memorizing words without learning phonics flame out quickly.
As a caution, when educators use the word decoding, they may be referring to two distinct ideas, which is confusing. First, there is the automatic recognition of words that are stored for rapid and unconscious retrieval. Second, there is the conscious, effortful process of sounding out the word that must occur several times before it becomes automatic.
So why is this latter process difficult to master for many students? One complicating factor with learning to read in English is the linguistic complexity of the language. Learning to read in Spanish is much easier than learning to read in English because Spanish is almost completely transparent—there is nearly a one-to-one correspondence between the 22 phonemes in the Spanish spoken in the Americas and the 29 letters that represent those sounds. What you see is what you get. English, on the other hand, is all over the map reflecting the various historical contributions to the language—Anglo-Saxon, Danish, Norman French, Spanish, and so on, each with different linguistic patterns.
As a result, there are 44 sounds in English but only 26 letters, so some sounds are spelled with letter combinations. A student has to decide whether to look at one letter or a combination to generate the correct sound. Second, in English, unlike Spanish and other more transparent languages, there are many individual letters that stand for more than one sound. The letter a, for example, represents different sounds in the words cake, hat, and along. Conversely, many sounds are represented in several ways such as the long-a sound, which is spelled a in basin, a with silent e in late, ai in paid, ay in day, and so on. This lack of regularity confuses many children when they are first learning to read. Many get so frustrated they give up.
One major breakthrough in teaching reading in English was to structure the sequence of initial instruction to make it more like the transparent languages so that children aren't overwhelmed by the multiple ways sounds are represented in English—that is, make it more like Spanish. Beginning instruction should focus on the highest-frequency sound/spelling correspondences (single consonants and short vowels) and avoid multiple representations of sounds until students begin to understand how the alphabetic system works and get the hang of sounding out words. Then the less frequent and more complex combinations can be added without causing as much confusion.
That's why experienced researchers and practitioners advocate a sequenced rolling out of sound/spellings—from simple to complex—and teaching children how to read through, or sound out words thoroughly so the words are stored and can be automatically retrieved. It takes some time and practice for most children to master this skill, while others learn it without much effort. To support beginning readers, teachers must also provide reading materials that are made up primarily of words containing the sound/spelling relationships they have taught (decodable text). The materials should also include some irregular high-frequency words such as was and of, which must be memorized with the help of explicit instruction. Carefully selecting materials for decoding practice avoids overwhelming students with multiple sound/spellings they have not yet encountered.
Learning to sound out words in late kindergarten and early first grade—the tool a student needs to become automatic with a growing number of words—depends on the acquisition of several key precursor concepts and skills. Students must know print concepts (e.g., English text is read from left to right), be fluent in recognizing letters, be able to name letters and connect them with sounds, and extremely important, be able to hear the discrete sounds in spoken words (phonemic awareness), beginning, ending, and medial. In this last task, students must unlearn what has become second nature in understanding speech—they have learned to ignore the discrete sounds in words and just hear the whole word. Now we are asking them to reinstate their ability to hear the discrete sounds. For some that takes a bit of work. In fact, many adults, including teachers, have difficulty identifying the discrete sounds in words. For example, how many sounds do you hear in the word French? (There are five: /f/ /r/ /e/ /n/ /ch/.)
Most students can identify beginning sounds by mid-kindergarten and ending and medial sounds by the conclusion of kindergarten. Playing sound games especially with kids who haven't developed these abilities can help them master the technique. Many finally nail the skill of hearing discrete sounds as they learn to match sounds with letters in the course of phonics instruction.
Researchers also found that if students fail to master decoding by late kindergarten to mid–first grade to sound out and recognize simple words they haven't seen, their chances of ever becoming on-grade readers rapidly diminish. Since they don't have a workable method for automatically recognizing a growing number of words, they fall further and further behind. Many become confused or frustrated with the complexities of English and eventually give up or become alienated from reading. That is why Response to Instruction (RtI) strategies are found to be so effective. Good initial reading instruction teaches most to decode early, and the teacher intervenes rapidly when a student is not catching on. Giving students "the gift of time" by waiting to assist under the mistaken belief that they will eventually understand the process when they are more "developmentally ready" condemns large numbers of faltering readers to a lifetime of grief. Of course, teaching phonics and decoding must be accompanied by a rich oral language, literature, writing, discussing, and vocabulary development program as described in the California ELA/ELD Framework, explicated below.
One of the more unfortunate developments currently is the tendency in many schools and districts to ignore the significant number of students not mastering beginning reading because of the absence of a research-based beginning reading program and then assigning them to intervention groups when they are not making progress. A much better strategy is to teach them well initially and support those students who are confused immediately and not wait until the damage is done and they have become frustrated.
In later grades, students are taught how to decode multisyllabic words by recognizing syllable types and division patterns; using prefixes, suffixes, and knowledge of root words; and identifying larger patterns, or chunks, encountered in similar words already learned to help them decode new words. For more about multisyllabic word instruction and assessment, see Word ID: Assessment Across the Content Areas.
Also children should receive fluency instruction, if needed, to smooth out and speed up their oral reading. All these efforts should be accompanied by extensive reading of good stories and literature by and to kids, discussing stories, a good spelling or encoding program aligned with the sound/spelling instructional sequence, assigned writing, and the buildup of content knowledge.
Three Important Decisions
Reading researchers were reporting on exciting stuff, which explained a great deal about how best to teach our children. What they were saying was powerful, but it was presented in fairly esoteric technical language. I thought there might be a needed role for a translator—to put the research findings in a form that practitioners could readily understand and to work with schools to promulgate their ideas. So I made three important decisions. I started the Consortium on Reading Excellence (CORE) with Linda Diamond, Sheila Mandel, Ann Cunningham, and Ruth Nathan to work with teachers and administrators on incorporating this powerful research into practice. I also I wrote a succinct book published in 1996, Teaching Our Children to Read: The Role of Skills in a Comprehensive Reading Program. Here is the dedication:
This book is dedicated to those teachers, researchers, and leaders who have kept their common sense and are beseeching the educational community to reach an effective, working consensus on how best to teach our children to read. I hope the information provided here—which summarizes and highlights a tremendous amount of research and thinking by the leading experts in the literacy field—will help them achieve this laudable goal.
The third decision was to lobby at the state level for policies reflecting this new research. After leaving the state superintendent's office, I teamed up with Marion Joseph, a true force of nature, who had become convinced that the whole language movement was ruining the teaching of reading to California's children. I met Marion in 1965 when I was working for Pat Brown, then California governor, and she was working with Wilson Riles, then state superintendent. We became close (she always said she viewed me as her younger brother) but fell out when I ran against her boss in 1982. After I won, she withdrew from education and we lost contact. When I was the subject of a lawsuit brought by the state, she came to see me to find out if there was anything she could do to help. After the Language Arts Framework was disseminated, Marion noticed her granddaughter was not learning to read. After hearing gobbledygook from the teacher, she checked with her extensive school contacts. Marion was horrified at what she discovered about how reading instruction was being conducted under the influence of whole language.
Together we started lobbying key people in the state to change direction. The legislature, the new superintendent Delaine Eastin, Governor Wilson, and subsequently Governor Gray Davis got behind the effort. Marion was appointed to the State Board of Education, along with other phonics advocates, the legislature passed phonics bills and appropriated funds for professional development, and new textbooks were eventually adopted that were based on the new compelling research. An engrossing account of this effort was written by the well-respected Nicholas Lemann, published in The Atlantic magazine in 1997. The article captures how heated the controversy was during that decade.
The research findings on teaching reading I discovered in 1995, incorporated in my book which was used to start CORE, were the basis for the lobbying effort in California and were eventually enshrined in the 2000 National Reading Panel report, which was developed by some of the country's leading reading experts. The panel reviewed more than 100,000 studies and recommended the explicit and systematic teaching of phonemic awareness and phonics, a guided oral reading strategy, and fluency and comprehension strategies. A recent neuroscience research project from Stanford confirmed the earlier findings that supported the role of phonics and decoding. For a current summary of the latest research, see Linnea Ehri's article in the 2014 issue of Scientific Studies of Reading. The Power of RTI and Reading Profiles: A Blueprint for Solving Reading Problems by Louise Spear-Swerling and Essentials of Assessing, Preventing, and Overcoming Reading Difficulties by David Kilpatrick are among the best research-based books on how to teach children to read and explain some current misguided reading approaches that are still in widespread use. For an article featuring top educators affirming that almost all students can learn to read if they are initially taught correctly, see Liana Heitin's post in Education Week.
For a useful compendium on research-based reading instruction and strategies, see Honig, Diamond, and Gutlohn's Teaching Reading Sourcebook, Updated Second Edition, and its companion book, Assessing Reading: Multiple Measures, 2nd Edition. Both books were produced by CORE, where I am president. The Sourcebook was one of only 10 publications endorsed by the National Council on Teacher Quality to cover beginning reading adequately. Of the 10, it was the fourth most used publication for preservice teachers.
The same ideas were incorporated in the recently developed Common Core State Standards and in the new California ELA/ELD Framework based on those standards, which also stressed wide reading and the importance of a systematic buildup of content knowledge in the major disciplines. For a useful executive summary on the California ELA/ELD standards, go to this website.
Here is a short quote from a 2014 article authored by Jo Ann Isken, Carol Jago, and myself, which explains the ideas behind the framework:
The outer ring of the graphic [a symbol used in the framework] identifies the overarching goals of ELA/ELD literacy and instruction. By the time California's students complete high school, they should have developed readiness for college, career, and we added civic life; attained the capacities of literate individuals; become broadly literate; and acquired the skills for living and learning in the twenty-first century.
California has grounded the framework in these broader purposes of the language arts. We want students to be able to understand complex text and ideas as well as reason, analyze, persuade, and problem solve. We also wish them to encounter a rich liberal arts education—learning about the world, civic life, and the human heart, being well-read, and helping them reach their potential. We would like our youngsters to encounter a significant representation of the best classic and contemporary literature including novels, biographies, essays and plays as well as coherent content informational text in science, history, and the humanities. We would like them to experience the joy of reading engrossing stories and fascinating material.
The developers of the ELD standards made a crucial decision from the start. They designed the standards to aid the large number of English-language learners in mastering the California Common Core Standards, which greatly facilitated the integration of the two sets of standards. They organized the ELD standards around five overarching themes—foundational skills, language, written and oral expression, content knowledge, and meaning-making strategies such as drawing inferences and making connections. The integrated ELA/ELD Framework adopted this architecture. All five themes work together to develop student comprehension.
The first strand is foundational skills. To understand the ideas in a text, the reader needs to automatically recognize almost all the words. For words already in the reader's speaking vocabulary, that is the role of foundational skills—to teach them a process for becoming automatic with a growing number of words. Foundational skills address how to teach them these skills and include phonics, word attack skills (learning how to sound out new words, handle multisyllabic words, and recognize word structures such as prefixes, suffixes, and root words), and fluency instruction. The foundational skills in the California framework are summarized in an extremely well written resource guide by Hallie Yopp, one of the authors of the framework.
The second theme, language, deals with the crucial topic of vocabulary, text structure and syntax, and academic language—all critical to understanding text. Academic texts in English contain a large number of words that appear infrequently but are essential to understanding. To successfully complete high school, students need to understand approximately 65,000 words, although some words are members of the same word family. Consequently, from the outset, there must be a rich vocabulary development strand coupled with an extensive independent reading program. This is particularly crucial for the large numbers of low-income or ELL students who start school knowing far fewer words than their middle-class and English-speaking peers. For a valuable resource, see the Vocabulary Handbook and CORE's Word Intelligence, which is a vocabulary program for middle-grade students. In addition, as material and sentence structure become more complex and demanding in upper elementary, students must learn to handle challenging elements such as complex sentences with multiple dependent clauses. Finally, different disciplines such as history and science organize information in different ways and students need help in navigating these varied text structures.
The fourth theme deals with the vital role content knowledge plays in comprehension and the importance of a systematic buildup of disciplinary and cultural knowledge through organized class work and independent reading. See the vast work on this subject at Core Knowledge and "For Reading, Knowledge Matters More Than Strategies, Some Experts Say." See also "Why Reading to Learn Is Seldom Taught." And, finally, meaning making addresses the meta-cognitive skills of self-monitoring, drawing inferences, and thinking about what is being read.
For ELD students, the frameworks recommend that these strands be integrated into the regular instruction program (integrated instruction) and that schools provide a designated time for supportive instruction tailored to the language needs of the students (designated instruction).
Similar to math, English language arts shifts to a more active instructional program including book discussions, projects, research, and making arguments and taking positions in both writing and speaking.
I believe we have reached a broad-based consensus in California on the elements of good reading instruction and how best to deal with our large numbers of second-language learners. The frameworks are widely supported by educators and policymakers, although there are still too many schools and classrooms that have not yet incorporated the breadth of what these well-researched documents are recommending.
Phillips, M. M. (2016, Jan 7). Military Doctors Fault Pentagon on Battlefield Casualty Care. The Wall Street Journal. http://www.wsj.com/articles/military-doctors-fault-pentagon-over-battlefield-casualty-care-1452194963
Chall, J. S. (1983). Stages of Reading Development. New York: McGraw-Hill.
Adams, M. J. (1996). Beginning to Read: Thinking and Learning about Print. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Gutlohn, L., & Bessellieu, F. (2014). Word ID: Assessment Across the Content Areas. Novato, CA: Arena Press. http://www.wordidassessment.com
Honig, B. (1996). Teaching Our Children to Read: The Role of Skills in a Comprehensive Reading Program. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin. https://us.corwin.com/en-us/nam/teaching-our-children-to-read/book7412
Lemann, N. (1997, Nov). The Reading Wars. The Atlantic. http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1997/11/the-reading-wars/376990/
National Reading Panel, & National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. (2000). Report of the National Reading Panel: Teaching Children to Read: An Evidence-Based Assessment of the Scientific Research Literature on Reading and Its Implications for Reading Instruction: Reports of the subgroups. Washington, D.C.: National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, National Institutes of Health. https://www.nichd.nih.gov/publications/pubs/nrp/pages/smallbook.aspx
Yoncheva, Y. N., Wise, J., & McCandliss, B. (2015). Hemispheric Specialization for Visual Words Is Shaped by Attention to Sublexical Units During Initial Learning. Brain and Language. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0093934X15000772
Ehri, L. C. (2014). Orthographic Mapping in the Acquisition of Sight Word Reading, Spelling Memory, and Vocabulary Learning. Scientific Studies of Reading. http://eric.ed.gov/?q=%22%22&ff1=subVocabulary+Development&id=EJ1027413
Kilpatrick, D. (2015). Essentials of Assessing, Preventing, and Overcoming Reading Difficulties (Essentials of Psychological Assessment). Hoboken, NJ: Wiley.
Heitin, L. (2015, Jun 12). Can Most Kindergartners Really Tackle 'Emergent-Reader Texts?' Coaches Say Yes. http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/curriculum/2015/06/can_kindergartners_tackle_emer.html?utm_source=feedblitz&utm_medium=FeedBlitzRss&utm_campaign=curriculummatters
Honig, B., Diamond, L., & Gutlohn, L. (2013). Teaching Reading Sourcebook, Updated Second Edition. Novato, CA: Arena Press. http://www.corelearn.com/Products/Publications/ – Teaching-Reading-Sourcebook-Updated-2nd-Edition
Diamond, L., & Thorsnes, B. J. (Eds.). Assessing Reading: Multiple Measures. 2nd Edition. Novato, CA: Arena Press. http://www.corelearn.com/Products/Publications/ – Assessing-Reading-Multiple-Measures-2nd-Edition
National Council on Teacher Quality. (2014). Standard 2: Early Reading: What Consumers Need to Know About Teacher Preparation. http://www.nctq.org/dmsView/Teacher_Prep_Review_2014_Std2
California Department of Education. (2015, Jul). English Language Arts/English Language Development Framework for California Public Schools: K–12. http://www.cde.ca.gov/ci/rl/cf/elaeldfrmwrksbeadopted.asp
Slowik, H. Y., & Brynelson, N. (2015). Executive Summary: English Language Arts/English Language Development Framework for California Public Schools: K–12. California Department of Education. http://www.scoe.net/castandards/
Isken, J. A., Honig, B., & Jago, C. (2015, Oct 15). California's Recently Adopted English Language Arts/English Language Development Framework: Translating the Common Core State Standards to a Coherent and Sequenced Curriculum for All Students. California Department of Education. http://www.cde.ca.gov/ci/rl/cf/documents/elaeldfwsummaryoct15.pdf
Yopp, H. (2015). Resource Guide to the Foundational Skills of the California Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts and Literacy in History/Social Studies, Science, and Technical Subjects. California Department of Education. http://www.cde.ca.gov/search/searchresults.asp?cx=001779225245372747843%3Agpfwm5rhxiw&output=xml_no_dtd&filter=1&num=20&start=0&q=Resource+Guide+to+the+Foundational+Skills+of+the+California+Common+Core+State+Standards+for+English+
Diamond, L., & Gutlohn, L. (2006). Vocabulary Handbook. Baltimore, MD: Paul H. Brookes. http://www.corelearn.com/Products/Publications/ – Vocabulary-Handbook
Word Intelligence. http://www.wordintelligence.net/
This entry was posted in Build-and-Support, California Context, Common Core, Curriculum and Instruction and tagged Accountability, Common Core, ELA/ELD, Reading Instruction, Teacher Tenure on April 26, 2016 by BillHonig.
The California Context: CA Policymakers and Educators Shift from Test-and-Punish to Build-and-Support
Photo Credit: Lukasz Stefanski / Shutterstock.com
California, under the leadership of Governor Jerry Brown, State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Torlakson, Michael Kirst, president of the State Board of Education, and the legislature, and backed by almost the entire educational establishment and advocacy groups in the state, including the teacher unions, has embraced the long-range and comprehensive Build-and-Support strategy. California's approach is based on valid, reliable school improvement research and patterned after the practices and policies of high-performing states such as Massachusetts. All California stakeholders agree that educational performance in the state must improve substantially and that it will take 10–15 years of concerted effort to successfully implement the more demanding instructional program envisioned by the Common Core State Standards (CCSS). The specifics of the California strategy follow.
Ensuring Adequate Funding Levels
Early in his term, Governor Brown sponsored Proposition 30, a tax increase initiative that temporarily raised income tax rates on top earners and provided for a ¼-cent sales tax increase. It passed. Those funds and the economic recovery in the state allowed the governor, working with the state legislature, to increase per-pupil funding for K–12 by about 40% during his first term. The hefty increase was designed to make up for the precipitous drop in support caused by the recession. The governor and the legislature also revamped the educational funding system under the Local Control Funding Program (LCFP). It now gives districts more flexibility in how to manage their funds and to provide additional resources for high-risk students.
Adopting a Rigorous, Standards-Based Liberal Arts Curriculum
After widespread discussions, the State Board of Education (SBE) in California approved the Common Core State Standards (CCSS), the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS), the English Language Arts (ELA) Standards, and the English Language Development (ELD) Standards. The later two were both later integrated into the ELA/ELD Framework. It also signed on to the CCSS-aligned Smarter Balanced Assessment Program (SBAC). California policymakers were careful to emphasize that the primary purpose of the assessments was to feed back information to improve instruction, not for high-stakes consequences. At the same time, they eliminated a cluster of existing state tests. The SBE, backed by the political establishment, postponed testing until the new SBAC tests were ready and refused to submit to federal pressure requiring that testing be tied to teacher evaluations. The state legislature also gave the SBE two years to devise a new accountability system.
Delivering High-Quality Instruction
Recognizing the need for additional support, the SBE authorized the development of frameworks to advise teachers and districts on how best to translate the standards into curriculum and instruction, deliver effective professional development, build collaborative teams, and adopt instructional materials consistent with the standards.
Science Framework for California Public Schools (Draft)
These frameworks have been widely supported in the state. The California Department of Education, county offices, districts, educational organizations, newly created networks of schools and districts, and especially the state teacher unions have been aggressively pursuing the implementation of the more active and deeper instruction envisioned by the CCSS. The California Teachers Association has been in the forefront of standards implementation efforts and has formed partnerships with Stanford and other educational entities to that end.
In 2012, State Superintendent Tom Torlakson formed a prestigious commission chaired by Linda Darling-Hammond and Chris Steinhauser. Darling-Hammond is one of the most respected school improvement researchers in the country, and Steinhauser is superintendent of the Long Beach Unified School District, which was designated one of the top school districts in the world. The commission produced Greatness by Design, a superb policy document that provides the blueprint for a Build-and-Support strategy in the state. In 2015, it followed up with A Blueprint for Great Schools: Version 2.0. These documents have had a major influence on practice in California, as has the expert advice of Michael Fullan.
In addition, the governor and the legislature invested almost $2 billion specifically for supporting the CCSS implementation and associated curricular and assessment changes and another $500 million for similar purposes in the 2015 budget. That latest allocation also included attracting, training, inducting, and supporting new teachers as one of the primary goals of the item, consistent with the recommendations of Greatness by Design, although there is still much to be done to revitalize the teaching profession.
Creating Useful and Fair Accountability Systems
In California, political and educational leaders proposed and the legislature enacted a plan to develop a new assessment and accountability system using multiple measures of student performance. The primary goal of the new system is to feed back information that will support local improvement efforts and not to punish schools and teachers. State leaders also created a new entity, the California Collaborative for Educational Excellence, to support and review the CCSS and LCFP implementation and organize site visits and support for struggling schools.
Most districts have been hard at work on the day-to-day business of implementing the Common Core State Standards. In addition, two effective networks of districts have been collaborating on the CCSS implementation. One network, CORE Districts, is composed of some of the largest districts in the state; the other is the California Collaborative on District Reform. CORE Districts obtained a federal waiver to develop its own broader assessment system (although it had to agree to test-based teacher evaluation, which each district will soon be able to ignore under the new Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA).
A potent informal network funded by foundation support, the Consortium for the Implementation of the Common Core State Standards, was formed with representatives from major educational and government entities, districts, county education offices, teacher groups, the research community, higher education, and advocacy groups. It has helped on such key issues as implementation planning, coordinating the work of support providers, communication, technology, understanding the state mathematics and ELA/ELD frameworks, accountability, and new teacher policies. Its first publication, Leadership Planning Guide California, was intended to assist districts and schools in addressing the implementation of the CCSS. In 2015, the consortium produced user-friendly summaries of the math and ELA/ELD frameworks.
Resisting High-Stakes Testing
Moreover, almost every educational group has joined the political and educational leadership and the legislature to successfully resist federal demands for excessive high-stakes testing and accountability and not-ready-for-prime-time student and teacher evaluation schemes. The one exception has been the CORE Districts, which sought a waiver from severe No Child Left Behind (NCLB) penalties and were forced to accept test-driven teacher evaluation as the price for the waiver. Many of the districts are now struggling with implementing those evaluations, which have caused disharmony within the districts. In addition, although many in management continue to support such measures as test-driven teacher evaluation, their numbers are decreasing in the face of the Build-and-Support agenda being promoted by educational leaders across the state. Finally, the presidents and chancellors of the four higher education segments all signed a letter pledging support for the Common Core State Standards.
A brief summary of California's approach is available in a slide presentation by Michael Kirst and an article in CALmatters, "A Stanford Professor's High-Stakes Plan to Save California Schools." See also Jeff Bryant's 2015 interview of me in Salon and his follow-up article on California as a potential role model for the country. Lastly, see Charles Kerchner's blog post, "Can the 'California Way' Turn Around Underperforming Schools?"
How California Avoided the Push-Back Against the Common Core
There is widespread backing for Common Core in the state thanks to these efforts, particularly the tempered rolling out of the CCSS, the postponing of testing and accountability to allow time for implementation, and the divorcing of accountability from evaluations. The resistance to the CCSS that has erupted in other states from abrupt implementation and tying the standards themselves to high-stakes accountability has not occurred in California. The study Leveraging the Common Core to Support College and Career Readiness in California reports finding widespread excitement among high school teachers for the promise of the more active instruction offered by the CCSS.
In 2015, a poll by Children Now found 67% support among the general public in California for the CCSS. Interestingly, if respondents were asked only about the ideas behind the standards, without mentioning the name Common Core, support rose to between 85% and 93%. The findings were similar for parents who had children in public schools, and for those employed in the education field, 82% expressed support for the standards.
Build-and-Support Is Working in California
In 2013, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan praised a few cherry-picked states that had followed the administration's proposed reforms and improved their National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) results. Duncan failed to mention the larger number of states that had also implemented the policies but did not grow and experienced lackluster results overall. In a glaring case of omission, Duncan never acknowledged California's reform efforts, which, although resisting many of the federal reform policies, topped the nation in growth in eighth-grade scores.
That trend has continued. From 2009 to 2015, California was first in growth, along with Washington, DC, in eighth-grade scaled reading score growth—up six points from 2009 compared to the national growth rate of one point. California was among the four-highest states in eighth-grade growth in mathematics—up five points from 2009 compared to a national decline of one point. California did not fare as well on NAEP fourth-grade scores. They have remained low with flat growth, mirroring the rest of the nation.
Added note: 2017 NAEP results have accelerated this trend, though there is still much work to do.
NAEP 8th and 4th Grade Reading and Math Average Scaled Score Growth for 2009-2017  California has the most second language students, the most diversity, and high levels of low income children compared to other states. Top growth scores nationally for 8th grade reading, 4th grade reading, 8th grade math. Weak growth for 4th grade math.
Reading: 8th grade: First in the nation. California growth +10 and now within 2 points of the national average. National growth +3 https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/reading_2017/#states/scores?grade=8
4th grade: Tied for 2nd nationally California growth +6  and now within 6 points of the national average. National growth +1 https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/reading_2017/#states/scores?grade=4
Math: 8th grade: Tied for 2nd nationally. California growth +6, Now within 5 points of the national average. National growth 0. https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/math_2017/#states/scores?grade=8
4th grade: Tied for 15th in growth +1. 7 points behind nationally. National growth 0. https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/math_2017/#states/scores?grade=4
Gaps have actually narrowed in the state. White student scores have not grown as fast as Hispanic and Black children.
Black: 8th grade +5; 4th grade +1
Two California Urban Districts under the Federal Trial Urban District Assessment (TUDA) program showed top gains in NAEP.
LA: 8th grade reading average score growth 2009-2017. +11.  1st in nation. https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/reading_2017/#/districts/scores?grade=8
4th grade reading: +10;  1st in nation (Tied DC)
8th grade math:  +8 (Tied for 3rd)
4th grade reading: +9.  (tied for 2nd nationally)
8th grade math:  +3 (tied for 7th)
Another set of data from the Urban Institute app which adjusts NAEP scores for language, poverty, race, and special ed. And whether the adjustments are accurate or not,  comparisons using the same standards are legit. http://apps.urban.org/features/naep/
One caveat is that the intervals on the ranks are still being scaled which might change
rank growth somewhat but the overall picture will remain very similar.
I took off the age control but let the others stay. (If you look at the website be sure to refresh after looking at math to allow you to click from math to reading and when you do remember to put off the age control) These data are ranks based on average scores, and if you mouse over the state it shows the growth in rankings. It is apparent that California has made large jumps in rankings this year from the past few years. (Florida has not grown as much but is at the top or near the top nationally in all the rankings—whether from state policy or district independent efforts needs to be determined)
In 8th grade reading we are now 14th in the country up from the low 40's as recently as 2013. In 4th grade reading we are 19th in the country up from the high 30's in 2015.
In 8th grade math we are 22nd up from the low 40's as recently as 2013.In 4th grade math (our weakest area where we need to undertake considerable work) we are 37th up from the low 40's in 2011 and 2015.
Some confirmation is provided by our most recent state testing, the SBAC. 11th grade reading scores. 60% now reach the "proficient" level—a level consistent with 4yr college work and the NAEP proficiency level which compares favorably to the other SBAC states that are much less diverse. To me, getting 60% of our diverse students to that level is impressive and a tribute to the hard work of our educational practitioners and policy direction. On the other hand, the state is much weaker in SBAC math performance at 11th grade (although improving) and math will be a major area of subsequent improvement efforts.
In addition, from 2010 to 2015, the Golden State improved its high school graduation from 74.7 to 82.3, an increase of 7.6 points, which is significantly greater than the improvement in the national rate. Despite having one of the most diverse student bodies in the nation, the state graduation rate is now higher than the national average. California Latino and African-American students progressed even faster. The rate of Latinos has increased 15% since 2010 to 78.5%; African-American students increased 11% to 70.8. Finally, in 2015, 43.4% of graduates completed all the necessary coursework to meet the minimum admissions requirements for the University of California and the California State University systems, a substantial jump from the 36.3% meeting the requirements in 2010.
Even though California scores have been increasing on NAEP, at least at the eighth-grade level, student achievement must improve substantially in the next decade. The first Smarter Balanced assessments based on the Common Core State Standards were given in 2015 and formed the base year for determining growth rates and improvements.
Preliminarily, SBAC reported four levels—standard exceeded, standard met, standard nearly met, and standard not met. It is important to understand what "standard" means. It was established to be comparable to the NAEP proficiency standards, which predict success in a four-year college credit-bearing course. Massachusetts, whose students score among those in the top countries worldwide, is the only state in which just over 50% of its students score proficient on NAEP.
The number of students in California meeting or exceeding the standard on the SBAC test at 11th grade is one indication of how many students are being adequately prepared for both four-year colleges and community colleges where students transfer to four-year colleges after two years or to one of the more demanding career tech pathways.
The 2015 scores in the 11th grade were decent in English language arts—58% of students reached the four-year college-bound level. The scores were low in mathematics—only 28% reached or exceeded the college-bound standard. This may be due to the shift in instruction called for by the CCSS or the greater language demands of the math test, or the test may have been too dependent on Intermediate algebra, which is not appropriate for many career paths. Researchers are currently examining the discrepancy between student performance in math and reading.
At elementary and middle grades, the percentage of students meeting the on-track to a four-year college standard was generally in the mid-30% in math and mid-40% in reading. The achievement gaps between low-income children or children of color and their higher-income or Caucasian peers increased from previous tests. This is most likely due to the fact that the new SBAC assesses deeper learning and provides a more accurate picture of actual performance.
Meeting the Challenges of Diversity and Underfunding
California has one of the most diverse groups of K–12 students in the nation: 54% Hispanic/Latino; 25% white; 12% Asian, Pacific Islander, or Filipino; 6% African-American; 3% mixed race; and 0.6% Native American. Its English-language learner (ELL) population is 25%, the largest in the nation. The states with the next largest ELL populations are Texas with 15%, Florida with 10%, and New York with 9%. Our state also ranks high in poverty levels.
Importantly, California spends significantly less per pupil than other states. In 2014–2015, it ranked 42nd after adjusting for cost of living, and it is significantly behind other states in additional support measures that affect school quality as well.
Yet, compared to the 12 other states that took the SBAC, California ranked in the middle of 11th-grade scores for both reading and math. None of the other states are as diverse. In the lower grades, however, California was either at the bottom or near the bottom. Unquestionably, much work is to be done in the state, but the Build-and-Support policy framework being pursued offers the best chance of substantial improvement during the next decade.
Career Tech Pathways
Many of us in California have one major problem with the Common Core State Standards, which is how the SBAC standards were set and how the CCSS in general are portrayed in the media. Although the literature maintains that the goal is "career and college readiness," as I explained above, the high school standards are actually primarily aimed at preparing students for four-year colleges or alternative career paths that demand the highest educational levels. This is particularly true of third-year high school courses in mathematics.
Many have questioned whether intermediate algebra (made more demanding by Common Core Standards) is an appropriate course for those preparing to be dental hygienists or to be trained in precision manufacturing. For those tech/prep students, rigorous substitutes such as statistics and quantitative reasoning or embedding these subjects in career tech application courses seems to be a better alternative. In fact, many states have pursued this direction. For example, Texas just recently changed its requirements.
The Charles A. Dana Center in Texas recently examined 34 career paths—from accounting to visual communication—to determine which math skills were needed. Most careers only demanded the use of the math learned through eighth grade that can be applied in complex and unique situations. See also "Programs of Study & Mathematics Alignment" on the Dana Center's website. It presents an analysis of the mathematical demands for nursing, communications, criminal justice, and social work.
Currently, about 40% of students nationally reach the levels needed for succeeding in a credit-bearing four-year college course. We should definitely be trying to increase that number, and the Common Core State Standards are valuable for that goal. Yet even for the college bound some flexibility is warranted. The University of California's Board of Admissions and Relations with Schools (BOARS) establishes the courses that count for college admission, and the state university and community college systems follow its lead. Recently the BOARS committee approved some substitutions for intermediate algebra http://senate.universityofcalifornia.edu/_files/committees/boars/documents/BOARSStatementonStatway.pdf and the community colleges are considering changes along these lines.
But that still leaves a large number of students who could profit from rigorous tech-prep pathways yet are usually neglected in a system that is primarily geared for the four-year college bound. California has lagged behind some other states showing leadership in developing these pathways such as Illinois, but it is now devoting resources and attention to this problem.
Robert Schwartz, of Harvard University's Graduate School of Education, has been one of the major national proponents of improving the pathways for the non–four-year college bound. See his Pathways to Prosperity: Meeting the Challenge of Preparing Young Americans for the 21st Century and Career Pathways: A Route to Upward Mobility, a paper he coauthored with Nancy Hoffman. The Thomas B. Fordham Institute also has been promoting alternative pathways. See the papers and video presentations from its Education for Upward Mobility Conference that are devoted to the issue. David Conley and Linda Darling-Hammond have also been champions of this approach. See the handouts on the California Department of Education web page that summarize their work. For a California perspective, see Career Technical Education Pathways Initiative, and for a national perspective, see The State of Career Technical Education. See also the fall 2014 online issue of American Educator, which is devoted to this topic.
Pamela Burdman has authored three excellent reports on mathematics college placement issues in California sponsored by the Policy Analysis for California Education (PACE) as well as a short article on the inaccuracies of college placement exams. A compendium of research from a conference on this subject can be found at a LearningWorks conference on the future of college math placement. The conference focused on three main issues:
Are there alternative paths to college other than the usual mathematics sequence that ends in intermediate algebra such as statistics or quantitative reasoning?
Is relying on a placement test an accurate and fair way to force students into remedial classes based on Algebra 2, which many will not pass. Are there better alternatives? Placement tests provide only a tiny percentage improvement on the predictions generated by merely relying on transcripts but do result in high levels of misplacement.
Are there more successful ways to teach the remedial classes?
In 2016, a major report by the Center for Community College Student Engagement made similar points about the deficiencies in our system of remediation, and a summary of the research demonstrates the defects of community college placement exams that 87% of community college students are forced to take.
Some extremely effective groups have been formed to support alternatives for the college bound and programs that offer rigorous preparation for the tech/prep bound. Among them are Linked Learning and ConnectEd. See also the High Tech High charter organization, which is devoted to school/career integration with an emphasis on project-based learning, and the many career academies that over the past two decades have been providing successful career preparation in important fields such as health, business, and manufacturing.
California has invested one-and-a-half-billion dollars in collaborative tech/prep grants aimed at two-year community college pathways to careers or four-year colleges or apprenticeships. This has been accomplished under the leadership of Governor Brown and the state legislature, with the full support of State Superintendent of Public Education Tom Torlakson. The investments have been made over the past few years and are slated to continue for the next few years.
Although some civil rights advocates are reluctant to support the premise that it is an unattainable goal for all students to become prepared for four-year institutions of higher learning, we are doing a disservice to many youngsters by only concentrating on that pathway. Many students who could succeed in a rigorous alternative route will falter under a four-year college prep sequence. These substitute pathways are a far cry from the old vocational education, which often became a dumping ground for low-performing students and devolved into tracking for minority and low-income students. One policy goal should be to maximize the number of students who qualify, attend, and graduate from four-year colleges, but we should also attend to the needs of those students who could profit from a rigorous tech/prep pathway.
The jury is still out on whether our large, diverse state will successfully implement the ambitious instructional program envisioned by the Common Core Standards over the next decade by following a Build-and-Support approach. So far, so good.
7/30/2016. Michael Petrilli has edited a just-released book Education for Upward Mobility (2016). This work contains essays under three headings. First, Transcending Poverty through Education, Work, and Personal Responsibility which includes chapters on the "Success Sequence" (graduate high-school, obtain a full-time job, and wait to have children until 21), tech-prep pathways, certification, and apprenticeship. Second, Multiple Pathways in High School: Tracking Revisited? which includes chapters on small schools of choice, college-prep high schools for the poor, and high-quality career and technical education. Finally, there is a section, The Early Years with chapters on the importance of the first five years, the centrality of knowledge acquisition in the elementary years, and issues of tracking in middle schools. Many of these authors support the main points in the article above.
7/30/2016 Two reports from the Education Commission of the States on what states require for early reading. California doesn't do as much as many other states. Although our ELA/ELD framework is solid, we are missing some of the other infrastructure. http://www.ecs.org/50-state-comparison-k-3-quality/; http://www.ecs.org/companion-report-50-state-comparison-k-3-quality/
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CORE Districts. http://coredistricts.org/
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Lin, J. (2016, Jun 4). A Stanford Professor's High-Stakes Plan to Save California Schools. https://calmatters.org/articles/a-stanford-professor-disrupts-california-schools/
Bryant, J. (2015, Apr 14). Common Core Consequences: What Currently Passes for "Reform" Has Caused Considerable Collateral damage to Schools and Teachers. http://www.salon.com/2015/04/14/common_core_consequences_what_currently_passes_for_reform_has_caused_considerable_collateral_damage_to_schools_and_teachers/
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Venezia, A., & Lewis, J. (2015, Aug). Leveraging the Common Core to Support College and Career Readiness in California. Education Insights Center. California State University, Sacramento. http://edinsightscenter.org/Publications/ctl/ArticleView/mid/421/articleId/1007/Leveraging-the-Common-Core-for-College-and-Career-Readiness-in-California
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Kerchener, C. T. (2015, Nov 23). Tax Proposals Would Lift California's Low School Funding. http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/on_california/2015/11/tax_proposals_would_lift_californias_low_school_funding.html
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Smarter Balance Results by State: 2014–2015.http://edsource.org/smarter-balanced-results/state.html and McCrea, D. (2015, Nov. 20). Personal letter to author.
Schulzke, E. (2015, Dec 12). How Much Math Do College-Bound Students Really Need? http://www.deseretnews.com/article/865643586/As-math-standards-nudge-upward-is-it-time-for-a-national-dialogue-on-how-much-math-high-schoolers.html
Fechter, J. (2014, Jan 31). State Nixes Algebra 2 for Most Students, Offers Other Math Options. http://www.mysanantonio.com/news/education/article/State-nixes-Algebra-2-for-most-students-offers-5194326.php
The Charles A. Dana Center. (2013, Jul). What Students Need to Know: Mathematics Concept Inventories for Community College Workforce Education Programs. The University of Texas at Austin. http://www.utdanacenter.org/higher-education/higher-education-resources/policy-resources/programs-of-study-mathematics-alignment/
The Charles A. Dana Center. Programs of Study & Mathematics Alignment. The University of Texas at Austin. http://www.utdanacenter.org/higher-education/higher-education-resources/policy-resources/programs-of-study-mathematics-alignment/
UC Board of Admissions and Relations with Schools. (2015, Jan 16). Statement on Approval of Statway. University of California. http://senate.universityofcalifornia.edu/committees/boars/documents/BOARSStatementonStatway.pdf See also UC Board of Admissions and Relations with Schools. (2013, Jul). Statement on Basic Math for All Admitted UC Students. http://senate.universityofcalifornia.edu/committees/boars/BOARSStatementonMathforAllStudentsJuly2013.pdf
Walton, I. (2013, Jun). Alternatives to Traditional Intermediate Algebra. Academic Senate for California Community Colleges. http://www.asccc.org/content/alternatives-traditional-intermediate-algebra
Symonds, W. C., Schwartz, R., & Ferguson, R. F. (2011). Pathways to Prosperity: Meeting the Challenge of Preparing Young Americans for the 21st Century. Cambridge, MA: Pathways to Prosperity Project, Harvard University Graduate School of Education. https://dash.harvard.edu/handle/1/4740480
Schwartz, R., & Hoffman, N. (2014, Dec 2). Career Pathways: A Route to Upward Mobility. edex.s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/Schwartz-Hoffman%20Paper-KLM%20(1).pdf
Thomas B. Fordham Institute. (2014, Dec 2). Education for Upward Mobility. http://edexcellence.net/publications/education-for-upward-mobility The papers from this conference have been published in a 2015 book edited by Michael Petrilli, Education for Upward Mobility, and a second video conference on the book was held in 2016. http://edexcellence.us6.list-manage.com/track/click?u=628bd73f1e90c900ee5ef4166&id=7894a573bc&e=ebbe04a807
California Department of Education. PSAA Meeting Webcast Archive 2014. Meeting Handouts. http://www.cde.ca.gov/ta/ac/pa/psaawebcastarchive14.asp#dec2014handouts
California Community Colleges Chancellor's Office. (2013, Aug). Career Technical Education Pathways Initiative. http://californiacommunitycolleges.cccco.edu/Portals/0/reportsTB/REPORT_CTEPathwaysInitiative_082613_FINAL.pdf
Advance CTE. The State of Career Technical Education. http://www.careertech.org/state-CTE
American Federation of Teachers. (2014, Fall). American Educator. http://www.aft.org/ae/fall2014
Burdman, P. (2015). Publications. Policy Analysis for California Education (PACE). http://edpolicyinca.org/authors/pamela-burdman
Burdman, P. (2015, Nov 5). Math Placement Tests Deserve More Scrutiny. http://edsource.org/2015/math-placement-tests-deserve-more-scrutiny/90132?utm_source=Nov.+6+newsletter+John&utm_campaign=Daily+email&utm_medium=email
Learning Works. (2015, Nov 10). Testing and Beyond: A Summit on the Future of College Math Placement. http://www.learningworksca.org/testing-and-beyond-conference-nov-10th-2015-oakland-california/
Center for Community College Student Engagement. (2016). Expectations Meet Reality: The Underprepared Student and Community Colleges. The University of Texas at Austin, College of Education, Department of Educational Administration, Program in Higher Education Leadership. http://www.ccsse.org/nr2016/
Belfield, C., & Crosta, P. M. (2012, Feb). Predicting Success in College: The Importance of Placement Tests and High School Transcripts. Columbia University Teachers College Community College Research Center. http://ccrc.tc.columbia.edu/publications/predicting-success-placement-tests-transcripts.html
Linked Learning Alliance. http://www.linkedlearning.org/
The California Center for College and Career (ConnectEd). www.connectedcalifornia.org
High Tech High. www.hightechhigh.org
Leal, F. (2016, Jan 26). $1.5 Billion Helping Career Pathways Take Off in California's High Schools. http://edsource.org/2016/1-5-billion-helping-career-pathways-take-off-in-californias-high-schools/93950
This entry was posted in Build-and-Support, California Context, Common Core, Conventional School Reforms, High--Stakes Testing, School Evaluation, Teacher Evaluation, Test-and-Punish and tagged Accountability, Common Core, ELA/ELD, High-Stakes Testing, Teacher Evaluation, Technology, Test-Based Accountability, Top Performers on April 26, 2016 by BillHonig.
How Top Performers Build-and-Support: Exemplary Models
Exemplary Models
Build-and-Support strategies not only have been based on extensive research but have proved to significantly improve performance in those districts, states and provinces, and nations that have followed their ideas.
There are examples of stellar districts that have achieved successful results by following Build-and-Support ideas. These include Long Beach, Garden Grove, Sanger, Whittier High School, Elk Grove, the High-Tech High School Summit, and the Aspire charter school networks, all in California; Montgomery County, Maryland; and Union City, New Jersey. All have pursued this more comprehensive, positive approach for years and place in the top ranks of international assessments. Conversely, Dallas, Texas, and Newark, New Jersey, are examples of the damage caused by a full "reform" strategy and its failure to produce results.
Sanger's journey—from a low-performing, high-poverty district suffering from substantial labor strife to a high-performing district where teachers and administrators have forged a close working relationship—demonstrates the power of the Build-and-Support strategy. Ironically, as a prime example of the deleterious effect of federal policy, in 2014 Sanger accepted a federal waiver under duress to avoid the severe penalties of NCLB (imposed by the feds even though Sanger grew faster than almost every other district in the state). However, district leaders then became worried that forced implementation of a test-driven evaluation would reverse its successful collaboration efforts. The problem should be solved in 2016 when the new ESSA measure becomes operative and when required high-stakes evaluation of teachers can no longer be mandated.
Similarly, Long Beach Unified School District, identified as one of the three top school jurisdictions in the country and among the top 20 in the world, has been building professional capacity around a strong, core curriculum for several decades with significant results. According to its superintendent, Chris Steinhauser, Long Beach's success stems from its attention to human and social capital development, including clinical experiences for new teachers; treating educators, parents, and community members with respect and trust; providing extensive coaching support for teachers and principals; orienting the district administrators to support schools; building teams at schools; implementing a strong liberal arts curriculum with a districtwide focus; developing cooperation with colleges and community organizations; and continuing a shared focus by all on instructional and curricular quality. Again, Long Beach has had consistent leadership for the past two decades under Carl Cohn (1992–2002) and Superintendent Steinhauser (2002–present). Long Beach has pursued educational improvement by developing a districtwide strategy that engages all teachers and schools in the effort as opposed to a punitive approach aimed at the lowest-performing schools. For why this is important, see Fiske and Ladd's comments. Finally, Long Beach has struck the right balance between school and teacher autonomy and district leadership, which is crucial in allowing each school to implement improvement efforts in its own way while adhering to an overall district strategy. For a perceptive article on this issue, see Larry Cuban's blog.
Another example is Garden Grove, which has one of the largest percentage of English-language learners in large districts in California yet has improved performance substantially in the last 15 years. Under the exemplary leadership of Laura Schwalm, superintendent from 1999 to 2013, and Gabriela Mafi since 2013, the district, among other Build-and-Support measures, has developed a robust human resources development program with two aspects. First, the district finds and keeps the best teachers by developing effective systems of recruiting, proper placement, inducting, granting tenure, and compensation. Second, it builds the capacity of current staff by comprehensive professional development, creates effective school site teams, and offers career advancement pathways that allow our best teachers a hybrid teaching and leadership role and the possibility of higher earnings.
These successful jurisdictions don't ignore accountability. But effective accountability must not rely solely or primarily on test scores. It should be designed around providing useful, timely feedback that will assist school, district, and local community efforts in improving instruction and student performance. And it should assiduously avoid causing the type of extensive collateral damage we have seen under high-stakes testing: narrowing the curriculum, discouraging cooperation, and emphasizing looking good on tests rather than providing quality instruction.
This more supportive philosophy guides the accountability system being developed in California and many other states. The state will be establishing an integrated hybrid of state and local indicators such as graduation rates, college preparation, career preparation, passing advanced placement courses, curriculum breadth and depth, student and teacher engagement, school climate, student suspensions or teacher absences, reclassification rates for English-language learners, and implementation and team-building efforts. The main locus of accountability is the school and district with local community participation, under the assumption and trust that the professionals in the school, not the federal government or the state, will be the driving force for improvement if they have the support they need. For an up-to-date report on these broader accountability ideas, see a 2016 paper by Linda Darling-Hammond and colleagues, Pathways to New Accountability Through the Every Student Succeeds Act. In addition, see a 2016 report by Cook-Harvey and Stosich of the Stanford Learning Policy Institute, Redesigning School Accountability and Support: Progress in Pioneering States.
Data based on reasonable student testing and just-in-time student assessment are helpful when such data provide information back to the teachers, schools, and local communities to assist their continuous improvement efforts. California is a member of the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium (SBAC) and administered the first state assessments in 2015. However, results won't be used for accountability purposes until enough data are available for growth measures and potential targets can be validated. The state also wants to give teachers a chance to implement the curricular changes envisioned by the Common Core State Standards (CCSS). However, as mentioned above, these end-of-year, broad-scale tests should be only one part of a broader accountability system and need to be combined with more sophisticated, accurate, and authentic measures of student performance such as end-of-course and periodic assessments, passing competency-based measures such as certificates, performances, portfolios, and projects.
Furthermore, state and district policy should recognize that negative fallout from testing is minimized if tests are not used primarily for formal, high-stakes teacher or school evaluations or to assess school progress toward impossible goals established by political entities that are far removed from the facts on the ground. Test results are most useful when viewed as one aspect of the main driver of improvement—a broad, collaborative, well-resourced effort to improve school, student, and teacher performance over the long haul.
There will be schools that struggle and need assistance. Site visits and support need to be organized, as envisioned by the new California Collaborative for Educational Excellence. The group will offer help, support, and site visits to struggling schools. For a national proposal along these lines, see Marc Tucker's blog post "ESEA Reauthorization and Accountability: A Chance to Do It Right."
Successful jurisdictions do not neglect the problem of incompetent teachers. It turns out that giving low-performing teachers a chance to improve is more effective when the efforts are part of a cooperative endeavor to improve instruction. First, many low-performing teachers will improve with helpful support. Second, low performers cannot easily hide in their classrooms if a concerted team effort is under way. For many, the exposure pushes them to improve or resign. California districts such as Long Beach, San Jose, and Garden Grove, as well as places such as Montgomery County, Maryland, and Massachusetts, are examples of jurisdictions that have embedded teacher evaluations in a broader instructional improvement effort, obtained union and teacher support, and used peer review techniques. They have found that this approach has proved more successful in dismissing or counseling out the worst teachers who cannot or will not improve, with considerably less collateral damage than the traditional method that relies entirely on a negative, high-pressure strategy.
A 2016 Aspen Institute report, Teacher Evaluation and Support Systems: A Roadmap for Improvement, chronicles exemplary practices in the nation exemplifying this more supportive approach.
Nations and States
What have the most successful nations and states done to improve student performance?
On the world stage, high-performing Finland had a mediocre system two decades ago. It initiated a long-term positive engagement strategy and revitalization of the teaching force and now substantially outscores Norway, which has a similar population and demographics but is stuck in a test-driven accountability mode. Finnish Lessons 2.0: What Can the World Learn from Educational Change in Finland? is one of the best books on the topic. The author is Pasi Sahlberg, one of the primary leaders of the reforms.
William Doyle spent a year on a Fulbright scholarship studying the Finnish success story. He writes of a fantastic school in rural Finland and conversations with one of its top teacher educators. He contrasts the Finnish attention to revitalizing the teaching profession to the prevailing conventional "reform" strategy in this country:
[I]n the U.S., instead of control, competition, stress, standardized testing, screen-based schools and loosened teacher qualifications, try warmth, collaboration, and highly professionalized, teacher-led encouragement and assessment.
I should note, however, that Finland has stalled or declined in recent Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) and Trends in Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) tests. For a contrary view of Finland's rise and recent stall or decline, see The Real Finnish Lessons: The True Story of an Education Superpower. The author attributes Finland's past successes not to its education initiatives, but to the prominence teachers always enjoyed in that country as nation builders, the determination of families stemming from Finland's recent industrialization, and traditional teaching methods. The author further argues that the abatement of these factors is causing Finland's test results to decline. This report was prepared by a conservative think tank in England created by Margaret Thatcher, comparable to our Hoover Institution. The author doesn't think much of student or teacher collaboration. But there has been a raft of studies showing that collaboration among teachers and improving social capital and the prestige of the profession do make a significant difference. It will be interesting to see the analysis of this contrarian position.
In Canada, the province of Ontario has followed the same successful trajectory—revitalizing the teaching profession, creating effective professional learning communities at each school around teaching a vigorous curriculum, and using the capacity-building approach. The result was a substantial improvement in student performance. Poland has undergone a similar transformation using team building and continuous improvement strategies to boost performance. Also, Poland has chalked up enviable progress, as described in Amanda Ripley's book The Smartest Kids in the World: And How They Got That Way. (Ripley visited three foreign countries for examples of world-class educational efforts—it's a shame she didn't visit comparable examples—in the US, for example, Massachusetts.) Many Asian countries such as Japan, Korea, and Singapore and the city of Shanghai are among the highest performers in the world. All have been implementing continuous improvement strategies for decades. See, for example, Developing Shanghai's Teachers. On the flip side, Chile and Sweden adopted wholesale charter and voucher approaches and suffered severe negative consequences.
There are many success stories closer to home, but, unfortunately, they are the exception not the rule. Massachusetts is a poster child for why Build-and Support works. Over the past 20 years, the state has consistently pursued the comprehensive positive approach engaging, not vilifying, educators. It placed instruction at the core of its reforms, built capacity around improving classrooms and schools, upgraded the quality of the teaching force, and substantially increased funding. The Commonwealth carefully avoided most of the extreme reform approaches such as widespread charterization, attacking unions and weakening due process protections, and adopting punitive measures. Most importantly, Massachusetts has stayed the course for nearly two decades.
Specifically, in 1993 under the leadership of Commissioner of Education David Driscoll, the Bay State approved standards and curricular frameworks, developed an assessment system geared toward instructional improvement based on those standards and frameworks, organized professional development around the documents, raised requirements for graduation, installed rigorous charter school evaluations for approval, and initiated more stringent requirements and support for incoming teachers. Policymakers in Massachusetts also insisted that teachers earn a master's degree over the course of their careers. (For a comparison with Finnish initiatives, see Lisa Hansel's post "Seeking Confirmation" on the Core Knowledge blog.)
As a result, Massachusetts scores number one in our national NAEP scores by a wide margin. In international assessments it ranks right near the top in math and science, and at the top in mathematics in growth and performance level. Yes, it is home to numerous universities with high-level candidates who pursue teaching careers, a well-educated population, and a history of educational excellence, but such benefits aren't enough to explain its phenomenal world-class performance. Why the Massachusetts model has not become the guide for national and other states' improvement efforts, as Marshall Smith suggested several years ago, is bewildering.
Ravitch, D. (2015, Jun 23). Mike Miles Resigns as Dallas Superintendent. http://dianeravitch.net/2015/06/23/breaking-news-mike-miles-resigns-as-dallas-superintendent/
David, J. L., & Talbert, J. E. (2012). Turning Around a High-Poverty School District: Learning from Sanger Unified's Success. http://web.stanford.edu/group/suse-crc/cgi-bin/drupal/publications/report
Amadolare, S. (2014, Feb 27). Which Is Worse? A California District Makes a Tough Choice Between No Child Left Behind and Obama Education Policies. http://hechingerreport.org/which-is-worse-a-california-district-makes-a-tough-choice-between-no-child-left-behind-and-obama-education-policies/
Long Beach Unified School District. About Long Beach Unified School District. http://www.lbschools.net/District/
Mongeau, L. (2016, Feb 2). How One California City Saved Its Schools. http://hechingerreport.org/how-one-california-city-saved-its-schools/
Steinhauser, C. (2015). Personal conversation with author. See also Freedberg, L. (2016, Feb 22). State Must Adopt Guidelines for Parent Engagement in Schools. http://edsource.org/2016/report-state-must-adopt-guidelines-for-parent-engagement-in-schools/95124?utm_source=Feb.+23+daily+digest+–+Michael&utm_campaign=Daily+email&utm_medium=email
Cuban, L. (2016, Feb 17). Reflecting on School Reforms: Scaling Up versus Short, Happy Life or Hanging In. https://larrycuban.wordpress.com/2016/02/17/reflecting-on-school-reforms-scaling-up-versus-short-happy-life-or-hanging-in/
Knudsen, J. (2013, Sep). You'll Never Be Better Than Your Teachers: The Garden Grove Approach to Human Capital Development. http://www.cacollaborative.org/publications
Darling-Hammond, L., Bae, S., Cook-Harvey, C.M., Lam, L., Mercer, C., Podolsky, A., & Stosich, E. (2016, Apr). Pathways to New Accountability Through the Every Student Succeeds Act. Learning Policy Institute. https://learningpolicyinstitute.org/our-work/publications-resources/pathways-new-accountability-every-student-succeeds-act/
Cook-Harvey, C. M., & Stosich E. L. (2016, Apr 5). Redesigning School Accountability and Support: Progress in Pioneering States. Stanford Center for Opportunity Policy in Education. https://edpolicy.stanford.edu/publications/pubs/1406
Tucker, M. (2015, Dec 3). ESEA Reauthorization and Accountability: A Chance to Do It Right. http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/top_performers/2015/12/esea_reauthorization_and_accountability_a_chance_to_do_it_right.html
Brown, C., Partelow, L., & Konoske-Graf, A. (2016, Mar 16). Educator Evaluation: A Case Study of Massachusetts' Approach. https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/education/report/2016/03/16/133038/educator-evaluation/
Thompson, J. (2015, Mar 30). John Thompson: A Teacher Proposes a Different Framework for Accountability. https://educationpost.org/john-thompson-a-teacher-proposes-a-different-framework-for-accountability/
The Aspen Institute. (2016, Mar). Teacher Evaluation and Support Systems: A Roadmap for Improvement. http://www.aspendrl.org/
Hancock, L. (2011, Sep). Why Are Finland's Schools Successful? Smithsonian Magazine. http://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/why-are-finlands-schools-successful-49859555/?no-ist=
Sahlberg, P. (2015). Finnish Lessons 2.0: What Can the World Learn from Educational Change in Finland? New York: Teacher's College Press.
Doyle, W. (2016, Feb 18). How Finland Broke Every Rule—and Created a Top School System. http://hechingerreport.org/how-finland-broke-every-rule-and-created-a-top-school-system/
Sahlgren, G. H. (2015, Apr). Real Finnish Lessons: The True Story of an Education Superpower. Centre for Policy Studies. http://www.cps.org.uk/publications/reports/real-finnish-lessons-the-true-story-of-an-education-superpower/
Ripley, A. (2014). The Smartest Kids in the World: And How They Got That Way. New York: Simon & Schuster.
Tucker, M. (2016, Feb 29). Asian Countries Take the U.S. to School. The Atlantic. http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2016/02/us-asia-education-differences/471564/
Zhang, M., Ding, X., & Xu, J. (2016, Jan). Developing Shanghai's Teachers. http://www.ncee.org/developing-shanghais-teachers/
Alliance for Excellent Education. David Driscoll. http://all4ed.org/people/david-driscoll/
Chang, K. (2013, Sep 2). Expecting the Best Yields Results in Massachusetts. The New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/03/science/expecting-the-best-yields-results-in-massachusetts.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0 See also Khadaroo, S. T. (2012, Sep 5). Is Top-Ranked Massachusetts Messing with Education Success? The Christian Science Monitor. http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Education/2012/0905/Is-top-ranked-Massachusetts-messing-with-education-success
Hansel, L. (2015, Jul 9). Seeking Confirmation. http://blog.coreknowledge.org/2015/07/09/seeking-confirmation/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+TheCoreKnowledgeBlog+%28The+Core+Knowledge+Blog%29
Carnoy, M., García, E., & Khavenson, T. (2015, Oct 30). Bringing It Back Home: Why State Comparisons Are More Useful Than International Comparisons for Improving U.S. Education Policy. Economic Policy Institute. http://www.epi.org/publication/bringing-it-back-home-why-state-comparisons-are-more-useful-than-international-comparisons-for-improving-u-s-education-policy/
This entry was posted in Build-and-Support, Charter Schools, Common Core, High--Stakes Testing, School Evaluation, Teacher Evaluation and tagged Accountability, Charter Schools, Common Core, Continuous Improvement, High-Stakes Testing, Professional Learning, School Evaluation, Teacher Evaluation, Teacher Tenure, Top Performers on April 26, 2016 by BillHonig.
How Top Performers Build-and-Support: Lessons Learned from Successful Districts
When we examine assessments of educational outcomes, it is important to be aware of a potential trap articulated by social science statistical research. The fact that there are common measures in successful districts does not necessarily mean that a low-performing district will experience similar improvements if it adopts those measures. Each district, city, state, and nation has some special circumstances, and there may be prerequisites or unique tweaks required before the approaches will work in a new context. Moreover, the process of implementing new policy initiatives and maintaining a comprehensive, strategic view that interweaves various improvement proposals may be more important than the individual measures themselves. Yet there are some essential initiatives that every successful district has employed.
Components of Successful Strategies
Virtually every world-class district has adopted policies that actively engage teachers and administrators, build social capital, and develop collaboration and teamwork. These districts also put systems in place to ensure continuous improvement centered on building craft knowledge and becoming more proficient at delivering a demanding, broad-based liberal arts curriculum. They have a robust human resources development program with two aspects. First, the districts find and keep the best teachers by developing effective systems of recruiting, proper placement, inducting, granting tenure, and compensation. Second, they build the capacity of current staff through comprehensive professional development, create effective school site teams, and offer career advancement pathways that allow our best teachers a hybrid teaching and leadership role and the possibility of higher earnings. Successful districts also have implemented a pre-K or early education program and extensive extracurricular involvement of students. Researchers in both education and business recommend these methods as essential to success. In addition, while successful jurisdictions have carefully avoided the punitive approaches advocated by conventional reformers, most low-performing districts have succumbed to that agenda and thereby neglected the more effective, positive Build-and-Support approach.
A second major point is that just as teachers must become proficient in the many dimensions of teaching (as delineated in the companion article Provide High-Quality Instruction), districts must become adept in many aspects of leadership and support. Crucially, districts have to integrate improving teaching and learning a demanding curriculum into all their initiatives so that each effort pulls in a common direction. As important, they must shift from a superficial checklist-compliance approach to an approach that provides real support for schools and teachers.
Transforming the Central Office
University of Washington professor Meredith Honig (no relation) and her team at the Center for the Study of Teaching and Policy published a significant report on how districts can reorient their administration to a school support approach. Their recommendations are based on the most valid and reliable research and the experience of our top-performing districts. The document delineated five components of successful district improvement efforts:
The Five Dimensions of Central Office Transformation
Dimension 1: Learning-focused partnerships with school principals to deepen principals' instructional leadership practice.
Dimension 2: Assistance to the central office–principal partnerships.
Dimension 3: Reorganizing and re-culturing of each central office unit, to support the central office–principal partnerships and teaching and learning improvement.
Dimension 4: Stewardship of the overall central office transformation process.
Dimension 5: Use of evidence throughout the central office to support continual improvement of work practices and relationships with schools.
Michael Fullan, professor emeritus of the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto, advises districts to address the entire school system using a small but powerful set of integrated initiatives. He cautions against an overly complex, by-the-book compliance orientation. Another helpful document on district effectiveness is the Common Core Leadership Planning Guide. It was developed in conjunction with some key policymakers, researchers, and educational and community leaders in California. The guide lists 10 areas that school districts should examine:
instructional materials and resources (both print and electronic)
capacity building and leadership
student learning feedback and assessment
alignment of fiscal and human resources—the recruiting, induction, assisting, and providing career advancement for teachers and other staff
support programs that bolster implementation
communication with stakeholders (including parents and community)
transition to higher education and careers
technology support for instruction, data, and assessment
A very comprehensive inventory, indeed.
Improving System Performance
The documents I've cited reflect the strategies pursued by the most successful districts in this country and around the globe—districts that avoided the more negative Test-and-Punish methods in favor of a Build-and-Support strategy. These districts respect and encourage their teachers and pay them decently. They placed instruction and teaching at the center of their improvement efforts and turned schools into learning institutions. These districts have a long-term strategic plan for building the knowledge and capacity of the staff and continuous improvement. They create positive working conditions that allow on-site collaborative teams to thrive. These districts use the most effective instructional materials. They have reoriented management (especially principals and teacher leaders) and provided time, knowledge, and resources to assist these efforts.
Improvement initiatives in the US come none too soon. According to the article "Want to Close the Achievement Gap? Close the Teaching Gap," on the whole, our teachers spend more time in the classroom than their counterparts in top-performing countries, significantly less time collaborating with other teachers on how best to improve instruction, and work in a much less supportive school atmosphere. See also Dana Goldstein's recent book, The Teacher Wars: A History of America's Embattled Profession, and the National Center for Education and the Economy's 2016 publication Beyond PD: Teacher Professional Learning in High-Performing Systems. Conversely, staffs in the most successful countries and districts in Asia, Europe, and North America spend less time teaching and invest the difference in working with one another to improve instruction. Consequently, they get better results.
Revitalizing the Teaching Force
These top performers have also substantially upgraded the quality of and respect for the teaching force by attracting new teachers from the top tier of college students, training and paying them well, supporting them in their school careers, and offering career advancement for the best practitioners who remain in the classroom and help other teachers as mentors. As an example see Joel Knudson's You'll Never Be Better Than Your Teachers: The Garden Grove Approach to Human Capital Development. Mentoring improves the performance of both the mentor and the teacher being helped.
Building a cooperative and supportive atmosphere was found to be essential for attracting and retaining these high-quality professionals. Two major national efforts along these lines have been initiated: Deans for Impact and the Collaboration for Effective Educator Development, Accountability and Reform (CEEDAR). See also a report on the importance of a long-term strategy for revitalizing the teaching profession.
Another key objective for districts is determining the best way to select, train, and support principals to lead continuous improvement efforts at their schools. On-site leadership is critical in building the systems that connect teaching, curriculum, and instruction, continuously improving all three, and increasing the degree of engagement of teachers, students, parents, and the wider community—all of whom shape the school climate. For a perceptive two-part series on how best to train principals to lead such a capacity-building effort currently under way in four states, see Marc Tucker's "Organizations in Which Teachers Can Do Their Best Work." For a comprehensive report on principal training, see The School Principal as Leader: Guiding Schools to Better Teaching and Learning and 2015 standards for educational leaders.
Mehta, J. (2016, Jan 8). Why "Queen Bees" and "Wannabees" Is Not the Right Way to Think About Global Education. http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/learning_deeply/2016/01/why_queen_bees_and_wannabes_is_not_the_right_way_to_think_about_global_education.html?utm_source=feedblitz&utm_medium=FeedBlitzRss&utm_campaign=learningdeeply
Knudson, J. (2013, Sep). You'll Never Be Better Than Your Teachers; The Garden Grove Approach to Human Capital Development. http://www.cacollaborative.org/publications
Kirp D. L. (2016, Feb 13). How New York Made Pre-K a Success. The New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/14/opinion/sunday/how-new-york-made-pre-k-a-success.html See also Farran, D. C. (2016, Feb 25). We Need More Evidence in Order to Create Effective Pre-K Programs. http://www.brookings.edu/research/reports/2016/02/25-need-more-evidence-create-effective-prek-programs-farran Some experts have raised questions about the research base supporting early education and whether there should be massive expansion of the program. For example, see Kirp D. L. (2015, Oct 3). Does Pre-K Make Any Difference? The New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/04/opinion/sunday/does-pre-k-make-any-difference.html and Frey, S. (2016, Feb 28). Groups Want Early Ed Block Grant Pulled From This Year's State Budget. http://edsource.org/2016/groups-want-early-ed-block-grant-pulled-from-this-years-state-budget/95285?utm_source=Feb.+29+daily+digest+-+Erin&utm_campaign=Daily+email&utm_medium=email
Early Learning. http://www2.ed.gov/about/inits/ed/earlylearning/index.html
Kronholz, J. (2012, Winter). Academic Value of Non-Academics. http://educationnext.org/academic-value-of-non-academics/
Honig, M. I., Copland, M. A., Rainey, L., Lorton, J. A., & Newton, M. (2010, Apr). Central Office Transformation for District-wide Teaching and Learning Improvement: Executive Summary. Center for the Study of Teaching and Policy. University of Washington. http://www.wallacefoundation.org/knowledge-center/school-leadership/district-policy-and-practice/pages/central-office-transformation-district-wide-teaching-and-learning.aspx
Fullan, M. (2015, Jul). California's Golden Opportunity. LCAP's Theory of Action: Problems and Corrections. The Stuart Foundation. http://www.michaelfullan.ca/california-release-a-golden-opportunity/
Consortium for the Implementation of the Common Core State Standards. (2013, Oct). Leadership Planning Guide California: Common Core State Standards and Assessments Implementation. California County Superintendents Educational Service Association. http://www.scoe.net/castandards/Pages/default.aspx
Darling-Hammond, L. (2014-2015, Winter). Want to Close the Achievement Gap? Close the Teaching Gap. American Educator. http://www.aft.org/ae/winter2014-2015/darling-hammond.
Goldstein, D. (2015). The Teacher Wars: A History of America's Embattled Profession. New York: Anchor. See also Goldstein, D. (2015, Spring). Quieting the Teacher Wars. What History Reveals About an Embattled Profession. American Educator. http://www.aft.org/ae/spring2015/goldstein
Jensen, B., Sonnemann, J., Roberts-Hull, K., & Hunter, A. (2016). Beyond PD: Teacher Professional Learning in High-Performing Systems. http://www.ncee.org/beyondpd/
Knudson, J. (2013, Sep). You'll Never Be Better Than Your Teachers; The Garden Grove Approach to Human Capital Development. California Collaborative on District Reform. http://www.cacollaborative.org/publications
Kirby, A. (2016, Mar 7). Teacher Mentorship Improves Performance on Both Sides. https://www.cabinetreport.com/human-resources/teacher-mentorship-improves-performance-on-both-sides
Deans for Impact. http://deansforimpact.org/ See also Deans for Impact. From Chaos to Coherence: A Policy Agenda for Accessing and Using Outcomes Data in Educator Preparation. http://www.deansforimpact.org/policy_brief.html
Collaboration for Effective Educator Development, Accountability and Reform (CEEDAR). http://www.ceedar.org/
Richardson, J. (2015, Nov 9). Looking Abroad for Answers at Home. http://www.learningfirst.org/looking-abroad-answers-home
Hull, S. J. (2015, Oct 14). Principals Matter—and They Need the Right Start. http://www.learningfirst.org/principals-matter-and-they-need-right-start?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+LFA+%28Public+School+Insights%3A+What+is+WORKING+in+our+Public+Schools%29
Tucker, M. (2015, Aug 13). Organizations in Which Teachers Can Do Their Best Work: Part I. http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/top_performers/2015/08/organizations_in_which_teachers_can_do_their_best_work_part_i.html See also Tucker, M. (2015, Aug 20) Organizations in Which Teachers Can Do Their Best Work: Part II. http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/top_performers/2015/08/organizations_in_which_teachers_can_do_their_best_work_part_ii.html
The Wallace Foundation (2013). The School Principal as Leader: Guiding Schools to Better Teaching and Learning. http://www.wallacefoundation.org/knowledge-center/Pages/The-School-Principal-as-Leader-Guiding-Schools-to-Better-Teaching-and-Learning.aspx
This entry was posted in Build-and-Support, Common Core and tagged Accountability, Common Core, Continuous Improvement, Professional Learning, Teacher Tenure, Technology, Top Performers on April 26, 2016 by BillHonig.
How Top Performers Build-and-Support: Provide an Engaging Broad-Based Liberal Arts Curriculum
This entry was posted in Build-and-Support, Common Core, Conventional School Reforms, Curriculum and Instruction, Privatization and tagged Common Core, Continuous Improvement, ELA/ELD, High-Stakes Testing, Math Instruction, Privatization, Reading Instruction, Technology, Test-Based Accountability on April 26, 2016 by BillHonig.
Why Conventional School "Reforms" Have Failed: Four Nostrums of Conventional School Reform
The reform movement has failed to produce results overall, and reputable evaluations have shown that individual reform measures also proved to be ineffective. Turnaround schools, charter schools, incentive schemes, or test-based school and teacher accountability have had either nonexistent or trivial effects. In his book Visible Learning, John Hattie writes that even when reforms produced small gains, they fall far below the improvements brought about by validated initiatives. In this article, I examine four other nostrums of reform.
Major Problems with Teach for America (TFA)
Teach for America (TFA) attracts bright, motivated graduates from our top colleges who agree to teach in public or charter schools for two years. They receive just five weeks of training and then are thrown into schools to sink or swim. Not surprisingly, many flounder and, at the end of their two-year commitment, leave the classroom in large numbers. By the end of five years, large numbers have left teaching. You cannot build a profession on a two-year commitment with minimal training.
Gary Rubenstein is a former TFA teacher. For a devastating, ongoing critique of TFA's practices, see his blog. In another alumni critique, Andrew Gerst offers suggestions for improvement based on the Aspire charter management organization training model. Aspire has a one-year internship, which results in large numbers of neophytes performing well in their second year and staying in the profession. Both critics claim that TFA is unwilling to spend its considerable profits to fix flagrant deficiencies. Many former TFA teachers, now dissident apostates, have written about major flaws with the program. See also an interview with Daniel Katz who recommends that his students not consider Teach for America. The organization has been addressing some of these issues. TFA has a small pilot that requires a longer commitment and provides an initial year's internship, is beginning to invest more heavily in first year coaching, and is allowing local TFA regions to institute changes in the model.
One of Rubinstein's most powerful points is that although many TFA teachers leave at the end of two years, some stay in education and wind up as unseasoned principals and superintendents. Despite the teachers' limited backgrounds in education and minimal experience, good political connections enable them to move into these important positions. Many of these young TFA veterans prove to be disasters as administrators. In part, this is due to their unwillingness to learn from competent educators and their ignorance of educational best practice. Of course, it did not help matters that they often were cast as knights in shining armor coming to save inept over-the-hill educators.
Mathematica conducted an evaluation of a small number of high school TFA teachers and found essentially no advantage in hiring them. The analysis found no difference in reading scores and only a negligible difference in math. A recent report on elementary TFA teachers also found no effects and revealed that most were planning to leave the profession quickly. In addition, their view of the training received had fallen compared to that of participants in previous years. For a critical review of the report, see Vasquez Heilig's blog.
Barbara Veltri is a former TFA trainer. She wrote a disparaging analysis of TFA's practices claiming, among other deficiencies, that a large number of TFA teachers are especially ill equipped to teach math. Katie Osgood adds to the discussion by describing how TFA's heavy indoctrination of teachers hampers their classroom effectiveness. The hundreds of millions of dollars spent on the program and its infrastructure could have been invested in supporting new teachers who wanted to make education a career and who were willing to get the proper training. Finally, Julian Heilig and Jameson Brewer have produced several podcasts titled Truth for America detailing the shortcomings of TFA by former TFA teachers.
Teach for America has turned into a massive financial enterprise—with assets worth nearly $500 million and managers earning absurdly high salaries. In 2013, its two co-CEOs received $382,000 and $342,000, respectively, and TFA founder Wendy Kopp received $156,000 for an eight-hour workweek during that same year. TFA obtains large federal and state grants as well as funding from conservative foundations that seem eager to replace competent experienced teachers with cheap raw recruits. For providing these low-cost replacements, TFA charges districts a hefty sum. In 2013, it received grants of $74 million in "government grants" and charged districts an additional $32 million in "service fees." Not bad for a supposedly charitable nonprofit organization staffed by raw recruits, many of whom will be gone in two years. Fortunately, the word is getting out about TFA. Its enrollments are down, and districts are starting to eliminate the program.
In 1969 I was part of a similar federally funded project called Teacher Corps, which truly was a solid program. Our cycle had 40 people from different walks of life and different ethnic/racial backgrounds. We were 10 African-Americans, 10 Asian-Americans, 10 Hispanics, and 10 whites. The major difference between Teacher Corps and Teach for America's program was that we did not limit our commitment to two years, and a respected school of education at San Francisco State University managed the program. We were given extensive training, not only in the summer before we started as interns, but for one full year after that. The education I received both at the college and on-site in the schools was excellent. No sink or swim. The Aspire charter school network has a similar internship program as do some of our best performing public school districts.
In promoting itself, Teach for America has used rhetoric closely aligned with the narrative used by some of the more extreme members of the "reform movement." Its leaders have the unfortunate habit of claiming that public schools and teachers are inept and have nothing of value to teach TFA, and that only its recruits can save America's failing schools. This is how the organization attempts to energize and motivate its trainees—by tearing down the existing structure. We got some of that in Teacher Corps, but were very quickly disabused of this arrogant attitude when it turned out that our supervising teachers in the schools actually knew what they were doing. We learned a great deal from them.
Many Teach for America teachers who chose to stay in education have become stellar professionals. Many others have left under duress after two years or to take more lucrative jobs in the corporate sector. But it is absolutely indefensible to build up your own organization by castigating public schools, allowing your teachers to replace qualified veteran teachers because they are cheaper, and allying yourself with extreme reformers who are bent on privatizing public education.
How About Merit Pay?
Merit pay sounds like a good idea. Pay our best teachers more and teachers will strive harder and stay in the profession longer. Unfortunately, just about every study has found that merit pay does not improve student or teacher performance. A few evaluations have reported gains from merit pay, but the increases were negligible. Merit pay schemes cause considerable collateral damage by forcing teachers to compete against each other, instead of encouraging and rewarding team-building and collaboration. Often merit pay proposals also use ill-conceived mechanisms for determining who gets rewarded. The result is that a significant number of deserving teachers get overlooked, while low-performing teachers get rewarded. Ironically, the extra money is not what motivates most teachers; they would rather be part of an effective group effort.
At any rate, there is a much better way to reward our best teachers and keep them in the profession—career ladders. Let our most proficient educators earn more money, but we should require them to mentor existing or new teachers and take on instructional development or leadership roles in addition to their classroom duties. They would earn more pay, but instead of merit pay's something-for-nothing approach, they would contribute their talents to the continuous improvement efforts at the school. See the report written by Catherine F. Natale and her colleagues, Creating Sustainable Teacher Career Pathways: A 21st Century Imperative. Why pay our best teachers stipends without receiving additional help from them? Most teachers strongly oppose merit pay, but few have objections to paying our best practitioners for taking on additional responsibilities. In fact, there is already a strong precedent for career ladder strategies. In secondary schools, department chairs receive a stipend when assuming additional duties.
Is Test-Based Retention Effective?
Similar problems occur when test results have high-stakes consequences for students. Comparable to using test performance for teacher evaluations and merit pay, single application tests should not be used to decide whether a third grader gets promoted to fourth. As discussed in the companion article Have High-Stakes Testing and Privatization Been Effective?, performance on a standardized test isn't sufficiently accurate, and there are much better ways to determine student progress. It might be acceptable to use the information from once-a-year test results as one piece of data (albeit a very weak source of information) to ascertain what a student knows and to fashion appropriate instruction or intervention. But relying primarily on a broad-scale assessment to determine a high-stakes decision such as promotion is especially dangerous and unfair.
Many states that have adopted retention schemes offer students alternative methods to avoid being retained. Even so, holding students back is still an unsound policy. Sadly, many districts have lately been forced to adopt retention policies under state legislation authored by conservative governors and legislatures, many of whom are at the beck and call of the right-wing American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). These harsh legislative mandates were passed under the guise of ending "social promotion." This flies in the face of 30 years of research that has shown this strategy does not work and causes substantial harm to those children held back. These policies are tantamount to educational malpractice—research condemns them as academically, emotionally, and socially harmful to the student retained and to the class he or she is placed in. Retention is also very expensive—costing about $11,000 per student for one additional year of schooling. The money could be spent on far more effective approaches. See also David Berliner and Gene Glass's 50 Myths & Lies That Threaten America's Public Schools and the Education Week article "Should 3rd Grade Be the Pivot Point for Early Reading?" Thankfully, some states are now retreating from such an ill-advised policy after witnessing its disastrous results. However, Nevada just adopted a retention scheme.
This valid and reliable research has found that when compared to the performance of students who are held back, the performance, graduation rates, and emotional health of similar struggling students who are promoted are all appreciably higher. The retention strategy often is based on noneducators' unsound assumption that first-, second-, and third-grade students fail because they are not trying hard enough, and if they are held back or threatened with retention, they will exert more effort. The fact is that these students do not lack motivation. I have yet to encounter a child who doesn't possess an intense desire to learn how to read. But I have witnessed the pain caused to youngsters who are separated from classmates and made to feel like failures because of misguided policies.
Two reports that studied retention found improvement in performance in later years. But, as critics of the reports and the report writers themselves point out, what the studies actually showed was that intensive intervention will lower failure rates. They never compared intensive intervention for comparable students not held back with intensive intervention and retention, which of course is the issue.
Virtually all cases of reading failure stem from a deficiency in initial reading instruction and the lack of proper intervention, even in kindergarten. There really is no excuse for not implementing the powerful knowledge about how to teach youngsters to read. Successful reading instruction and timely intervention will teach almost every student to read, and for those still having problems, support in the next grades will be much more fruitful than retaining those students. In addition, most retention plans concentrate policy on the third grade, which is several years too late. For a review of this research covering best first teaching practices and timely intervention, see the white paper on foundational skills in the California ELA/ELD framework and an article by Linnea Ehri summarizing what is known about beginning reading. Struggling students should not pay the price for a school's failure to provide evidence-based instruction and early intervention. See also David Kilpatrick's Essentials of Assessing, Preventing, and Overcoming Reading Difficulties and Louise Spear-Swerling's The Power of RTI and Reading Profiles: A Blueprint for Solving Reading Problems.
Further, all too often the retained student encounters the same instruction in the new class that the student received previously, thus producing little improvement. Then too, placing a resentful, older, and usually male student in a third-grade class when he is chronologically and socially ready for fourth grade, isolated from friends, and labeled a failure is a recipe for a problem-plagued year.
Forced retention of elementary students is a cruel and mean-spirited policy. What is frustrating for educators is that this politically imposed "solution" to reading difficulties hardly ever helps struggling students but does cause tremendous damage to those children and the school. It is another example of a highly touted "reform" that ignores a compelling body of research, adopts a simple but wrong solution to a complex problem, fails to pursue what does work, and then blames the victim.
How destructive this "reform" could be was brought home to me personally a decade ago. I will never forget the poignant conversation I had with a retained first grader. I was at the park with my three-year-old granddaughter, Annika. While she was playing, I struck up a conversation with a boy who was amazingly skillful on the monkey bars and who turned out to be quite engaging—overall, a great kid. In the course of our chat, I asked him how old he was (since he was so physically coordinated) and what grade he was in. He was old enough for second grade but had been retained in first. This was his previous teacher's recommendation as the best approach for helping his struggles with reading. All of a sudden, these strong emotions emerged as he started to talk about being held back, his sadness over being cut off from his friends, his anger at what had been done to him and not knowing why they did it, and his sense of personal failure.
All this surfaced during a 15-minute conversation. I did talk to his grandparents who were with him at the park and counseled them to raise the issue with the parents, but they seemed reluctant to challenge the teacher or the school on the issue. What has never left me was how mature and outgoing this child was—even while suffering from a profound sadness from what had happened to him. And I was struck by how the people in the system, while thinking they were doing something helpful, had in fact caused him tremendous humiliation and anguish for naught by following such a benighted policy. What also bothered me enormously was that he was made to pay for the school's mistakes. The school did not know how best to teach him to read, did not have support systems in place to help him other than holding him back, and placed misguided faith in the efficacy of retention. It reminded me of the doctors hundreds of years ago who caused patients substantial harm by bleeding them, under the mistaken belief that such a practice was beneficial.
A similar heartbreaking story unfolded for thousands of children in Mississippi who were held back when the governor sponsored legislation for strict retention but never funded support for early intervention.
Is Technology Innovation Key to School Improvement?
Many reform advocates tout technology as a critical disruptive element that will enable schools to perform better at less cost. Many opponents of conventional market-driven reform strategies initially worried that the movement to incorporate more technology in schools or to replace teachers with computers was just a ploy to sell unneeded devices or an invitation to corporate America to privatize education by replacing public schools with low-cost corporate schools. The experience in many states gives credence to these concerns. The terrible results from virtual charter schools, discussed at the end of this article and in the companion article Charter Schools Are Not the Key to Improving Public Education, are clearly a cautionary tale. For a 306-page handbook on the corporate takeover of our schools, see American Revolution 2.0: How Education Innovation Is Going to Revitalize America and Transform the US Economy.
A second objection to the use of technology to improve schools is based on Clayton Christensen's disruptive innovation, one of the theories promoted by reformers. Christensen's innovation has wreaked havoc on many neighborhood community schools without actually improving student or teacher performance. Critics argue that massive disruption does not seem appropriate for important public institutions like our schools. Jill Lapore seriously questions Christensen's research in "The Disruption Machine: What the Gospel of Innovation Gets Wrong."
Finally, the critics of technology express concerns that standards, test production and grading, and newly required materials and training are all being proposed in order to create huge new markets for the private sector. I am less apprehensive about this point. There is plenty of room for a vibrant public school sector to use the expertise of private and charitable entities in its pursuit of an effective Build-and-Support strategy. Proprietary instructional materials can supplement open-source materials. For an excellent example of the growing open-source material segment, visit the ISKME website. For an article about open-source materials, see "Free Online Content Helps Teachers Meet Common Core Demands." See also the Common Sense Media website for reviews of digital and other educational materials or the tips for blended learning.
The more active curriculum envisioned by the Common Core standards and the Next Generation Science standards could profit from digitally delivered activities that are sophisticated, dynamic, and engaging. For example, a digital platform offers students the chance to investigate an epidemic in another country using online synchronous collaboration, access digital content that explains why the Industrial Revolution started in England, or participate in virtual science labs with simulations and graphic modeling. Relevant materials could be organized for these activities, thus avoiding open-ended Internet searches that are often overwhelming and unproductive for students.
Further, Universal Design for Learning (UDL) principles developed by the Center for Applied Special Technology (CAST) demonstrate how technology has the potential to provide all students with access to rich, effective curricula, including those with physical disabilities, learning differences, or limited proficiency in English.
For information about web tools, see the links provided by EdTechReview. Adaptive technology can drive instructional improvement by giving students immediate feedback, adjusting content and the amount of scaffolding to their individual needs, and organizing and reporting student performance data to help teachers track growth in important standards in real time. See, for example, the GOORU site.
One exciting development in the educational technology sector is the growing interest in gamification, or the use of game-design mechanics and principles to motivate and engage students. The Joan Ganz Cooney Center is at the forefront of research in this field. For a list of 100 websites in this area, see "Play to Learn: 100 Great Sites on Gamification" and The Game Believes in You, a recent book on the subject by Greg Toppo. See also the article "Frontiers of Digital Learning Probed by Researchers" and "Can Digital Games Improve Our Schools?," a nuanced perceptive article by John Thompson.
Two books offer a critical analysis of eLearning games and digital simulation, questioning whether virtual activities actually produce results or work for all children. Our past experience with other supposedly "breakthrough" innovations suggests that the most appropriate approach is to avoid going overboard and to insist on balance.
Some educators and parents are worried about student privacy issues, but with proper prohibitions against selling data and restricting its use to feedback to teachers, those fears can be minimized. The potential power of these initiatives is too important to ignore.
Finally, there is the push for blended learning and performance-based instruction using technology. In blended-learning settings, a student works with a teacher and digital devices. In proper balance and if done right, blended learning could greatly enhance the curriculum. For an example, see Blackboard K–12. However, as widely documented, blended learning can be misused. For an international cautionary note, see a recent report that recommends a balanced approach after finding that too much technology in the classroom actually lowered student performance.
The jury is still out on whether technology innovation will improve instruction or suffer the same fate as previous technological fixes such as hyped teaching machines several decades ago, which turned out to be a huge fiasco.
As mentioned previously, virtual or online charter schools have had major problems in performance. Investigations have revealed some high-profile scams and exploitation. A 2015 report produced by the Center on Reinventing Public Education (CRPE), Mathematica Policy Research, and the Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO) found that virtual charters result in the loss of a full year's worth of instruction—a disastrous result. Both Samuelsohn and Stober have questioning the value of virtual schools have been published by many different sources.
Unquestionably, some technology advocates go too far and envision a future where machines and software replace expensive teachers and eliminate the social aspects of learning under the guidance of a competent, caring teacher. So far, that nightmare has not been realized.
Several major issues need to be more fully explored. One major question is how different students profit or fail to profit from technological solutions. Some youngsters have no problem with digital learning, while others become easily flummoxed or bored. Another concern is how to avoid overindulgence in unproductive games, prevent the hampering of social development, and escape the tendency to replace robust traditional instructional activities with low-level computer-based busywork.
Summing Up: The Failure of Conventional Reform
The ineffectiveness of current federal and state policies based on conventional reformers' agendas should not have been surprising. Fifty years ago, W. E. Deming warned of the negative side effects of an overreliance on evaluation strategies and incentive schemes. Fear tends to make employees disengage, narrow their efforts, or game the system so they appear compliant. It diverts attention from and decreases motivation for collaborative teams and local structures that allow for continuous improvement. This ruinous situation is well known in the social sciences, articulated as Campbell's law.
As Diane Ravitch explains:
The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor.
That is exactly what has occurred far too often in our educational system during the past decade under policies pursued by conventional "reformers." Knowledgeable educators predicted that these initiatives would fail, but their warnings were ignored. As foretold, high-stakes, test-driven accountability has resulted in narrowing the curriculum, gaming the system or cheating, using unproven and unfair reward and punishment tools (such as the recent teacher evaluation debacles in many states), and encouraging superficial teaching to the test to the detriment of deeper learning. It has diverted attention from, de-emphasized, or belittled the policies that actually produce substantial results. No wonder the results have been disappointing.
More importantly, punitive management techniques and demonization of teachers and schools have not only eroded support for the institution of public education but have created widespread alienation among teachers.
This is why recent polls found that teachers in the US score among the highest on scales of liking their profession but among the lowest on satisfaction with their working environment, the very opposite of the engaged professionals we need to perform effectively in the difficult circumstances encountered in schools across the country. For example, a recent survey of 30,000 teachers by the American Federation of Teachers found high stress levels among teaching staff:
Only one in five educators feels respected by government officials or the media.
Fourteen percent of educators strongly agree with the statement that they trust their administrator or supervisor.
More than 75% say they do not have enough staff to get the work done.
Seventy-eight percent say they are often physically and emotionally exhausted at the end of the day.
Eighty-seven percent say the demands of their job are at least sometimes interfering with their family life
A MetLife survey found that in the face of ill-conceived reforms and political and societal censure, the percentage of teachers who were "very satisfied" dropped dramatically from 62% in 2008 to 39% in 2012. See also Jeff Bryant's blog post "We Won't Get Great Teachers by Treating Them Badly."
Worse yet, the Test-and-Punish regime has convinced many teachers to leave the profession, a costly decision for schools and students, as reported in Revolving Door of Teachers Costs Schools Billions Every Year. High-stakes testing is one of the major causes of the wholesale flight of teachers from harsh "reform states" to more supportive jurisdictions. There are serious shortages of teachers in states such as North Carolina, Utah, Indiana, and Kansas. England has suffered similar effects from a Test-and-Punish regime.
Ironically, these studies also show that teachers yearn to break out of the traditional isolated culture of most schools and work together with their colleagues in an effort to become better at what they do. We should give them the chance to enlist in this crucial effort.
Broad swaths of the public have begun to turn against Test-and-Punish and privatization strategies; it is time for our political and opinion leaders to follow suit. The reaction to Arne Duncan's resignation on October 1, 2015, as national secretary of education is instructive. Of the 228 comments written in response to a New York Times article reporting the event, it was hard to find even one supporting the aggressive policies the Obama administration had pursued. The comments were uniformly negative and angry—accusing the administration of devastating public education and providing the least effective educational leaders in recent history.
A statement by the Network for Public Education captures the spirit of the commentators:
The policies of the US Department of Education [under Duncan's (and Obama's) watch] have inflicted immeasurable harm on American public education. The blind faith in standardized testing as the most meaningful measure of students, teachers, principals, and schools has distorted the true meaning of education and demoralized educators. Punitive policies have created teacher shortages across the nation, as well as a precipitous decline in the number of people preparing to become teachers. The Race to the Top preference for privately managed charter schools over public schools has encouraged privatization of a vitally important public responsibility.
As I stated in the conclusion to the introductory remarks on this website: Public education has always been central to the continued health of our democracy and our way of life. So-called reformers have foisted a set of initiatives on our schools based on an outmoded management philosophy and a flawed analysis of what it takes to improve education. These policies ignore history, research, and experience, which is why our best schools and districts have studiously avoided them. The reformers' proposals not only thwart the measures actually needed to improve our schools but their initiatives threaten to put the whole enterprise of public education at risk. We need an immediate course correction to follow the lead of our most successful schools and districts in creating effective learning communities at each school and, finally, building the educational profession that this country deserves.
9/1/2016 A new report by the US Department of Education finds teacher incentive schemes ineffective. https://www.cabinetreport.com/curriculum-instruction/teacher-bonus-pay-barely-moves-the-dial-on-test-scores
7/30/2016 On-line Algebra students fare worse than those taught by a face-to-face teacher. http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/DigitalEducation/2016/07/online_algebra_worse_for_high-performing_students.html?r=1556213501
7/30/2016 Larry Cuban questions whether the hype on blending learning is accurate. https://larrycuban.wordpress.com/2016/06/10/proof-points-selling-and-marketing-blended-learning-to-educators-and-parents/
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Davis, O. (2013, Aug 2). Teach for America Apostates: A Primer of Alumni Resistance. http://www.truth-out.org/articles/item/17750-teach-for-america-apostates-a-primer-of-alumni-resistance See also Brewer, J., & Matsui, S. (2015, Aug 3). Teach for America Counter-Narratives: Two Alumni Books Frame the Discourse. http://www.livingindialogue.com/teach-for-america-counter-narratives-two-alumni-books-reframe-the-discourse/ and Brewer, T. J., & deMarrais, K. (eds.). (2015). Teach for America Counter-Narratives: Black Studies and Critical Thinking. New York: Peter Lang Publishing; and Schaefer, P. (2015, Sept 11). After 25 Years, Teach for America Results Are Consistently Underwhelming. http://nonprofitquarterly.org/2015/09/11/after-25-years-teach-for-america-results-are-consistently-underwhelming/
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Veltri, B. (2015, Jun 3). Inside Information and Reflections from a Former TFA Instructor. http://cloakinginequity.com/2015/06/03/inside-information-and-reflections-from-a-former-tfa-trainer/
Osgood, K. (2016, Feb 10). The Dangers of Teach for America Indoctrination. http://mskatiesramblings.blogspot.com/2016/02/the-dangers-of-teach-for-america.html
Ravitch, D. (2016, Apr 23). Truth for America Podcast Episode 5. https://dianeravitch.net/2016/04/23/truth-for-america-podcast-episode-5/
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Moran, M. (2010, Sep 21). Teacher Performance Pay Alone Does Not Raise Test Scores. Vanderbilt News. http://news.vanderbilt.edu/2010/09/teacher-performance-pay/ See also Lavigne, A. L., & Good, T. L. (2014). Teacher and Student Evaluation: Moving Beyond the Failure of School Reform. New York: Routledge.
Tucker, M. (2016, Apr 14). How to Get a First-Rate Teacher in Front of Every Student. http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/top_performers/2016/04/how_to_get_a_first-rate_teacher_in_front_of_every_student.html?utm_source=feedblitz&utm_medium=FeedBlitzRss&utm_campaign=top_performers
Natale, C., Gaddis, L., Bassett, K., & McKnight, K. (2013). Creating Sustainable Teacher Career Pathways: A 21st Century Imperative. National Network of State Teachers of the Year and Center for Educator Learning and Effectiveness at Pearson http://researchnetwork.pearson.com/educator-effectiveness/personal-perspective-creating-sustainable-teacher-career-pathways-21st-century-imperative
The Center for Media and Democracy. Alec Exposed. http://www.alecexposed.org/wiki/ALEC_Exposed See also Berger, E. 2016, Jan 25). Arizona: Strangled by an Organized Minority. http://edwardfberger.com/arizona-strangled-by-an-organized-minority/
Xia, N., & Glennie, E. (January 2005). Grade Retention: A Flawed Education Strategy. Center for Child and Family Policy at Duke University. http://childandfamilypolicy.duke.edu/pdfs/pubpres/FlawedStrategy_PartOne.pdf See also Stipek, D., & Lombardo, M. (2014, May 20). Holding Kids Back Doesn't Help Them. Education Week. http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2014/05/21/32stipek.h33.html
Berliner, D., & Glass, G., et. al. (2014). 50 Myths & Lies That Threaten America's Public Schools. New York: Teachers College Press.
Sparks, S. D. (2015, May 13). Should 3rd Grade Be the Pivot Point for Early Reading? Education Week. http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2015/05/13/should-3rd-grade-be-the-pivot-point.html?cmp=ENL-EU-NEWS1
Heitin, L. (2015, Jun 12). Can Most Kindergarteners Really Tackle 'Emergent-Reader' Texts? Most Coaches Say Yes. http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/curriculum/2015/06/can_kindergartners_tackle_emer.html?utm_source=feedblitz&utm_medium=FeedBlitzRss&utm_campaign=curriculummatters
Yopp, H. (2015). Resource Guide to the Foundational Skills of the California Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts and Literacy in History/Social Studies, Science, and Technical Subjects. California Department of Education. http://www.cde.ca.gov/search/searchresults.asp?cx=001779225245372747843:gpfwm5rhxiw&output=xml_no_dtd&filter=1&num=20&start=0&q=Yopp%202015%20Resource%20guide
Ehri, L. C. (2013, Sep 26). Orthographic Mapping in the Reading of Sight Word Reading, Spelling Memory, and Vocabulary Learning. Scientific Studies of Reading 18 (1). http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10888438.2013.819356#.VXr1tOsqvzI
Chiles, N. (2015, May 28). As Mississippi Delivers Bad News to 5,600 Third Graders, Stressed-Out Parents Say There Must Be a Better Way. http://hechingerreport.org/as-mississippi-delivers-bad-news-to-5600-third-graders-stressed-out-parents-say-there-must-be-a-better-way/
Strauss, V. (2015, Oct 31). Study on Online Charter Schools: "It Is Literally as if the Kid Did Not Go to School for an Entire Year." The Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2015/10/31/study-on-online-charter-schools-it-is-literally-as-if-the-kid-did-not-go-to-school-for-an-entire-year/
Moe, M. T., Hanson, M. P., Jiang, L., & Pampoulov, L. (2012, Jul 4). American Revolution 2.0: How Education Innovation Is Going to Revitalize America and Transform the U.S. Economy. GSV Asset Management. http://gsvadvisors.com/wordpress/wp-content/themes/gsvadvisors/American%20Revolution%202.0.pdf
Lepore, J. (2014, Jun 23). The Disruption Machine: What the Gospel of Innovation Gets Wrong. The New Yorker. http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/06/23/the-disruption-machine
Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education. http://www.iskme.org/
Ellison, K. (2015, Oct 15). Free Online Content Helps Teachers Meet Common Core Demands. http://edsource.org/2015/free-online-content-helps-teachers-meet-common-core-demands/88916
Common Sense Media. https://www.commonsensemedia.org/
Blackboard. http://www.blackboard.com/k12/index.aspx
CAST. (2011, Feb 1). Universal Design for Learning Guidelines–Version 2.0. Universal Design for Living. http://www.udlcenter.org/aboutudl/udlguidelines See also CAST. (2011). Universal Design for Learning Guidelines–Version 2.0: Research Evidence. Universal Design for Living. http://www.udlcenter.org/research/researchevidence/checkpoint5_1
Gupta, P. (2015, Dec 31). 100 Popular (from 2015) Web 2.0 Tools for Teachers and Educators to Explore. EdTech Review. http://edtechreview.in/research/2256-web-2-0-tools-for-teachers-educators?utm_source=EdTechReview%E2%84%A2+Weekly+Newsletter&utm_campaign=cb71fd3b7a-Top_11_Complementary_Guides_2_1_2016&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_94aed71205-cb71fd3b7a-105652173
Gooru. http://www.gooru.org/#home
The Joan Ganz Cooney Center. http://www.joanganzcooneycenter.org/
Play to Learn: 100 Great Sites on Gamification. http://top5onlinecolleges.org/gamification/
Toppo, G. (2015). The Game Believes in You: How Digital Play Can Make Our Kids Smarter. New York: St. Martin's Press.
Herold, B. (2015, May 6). Frontiers of Digital Learning Probed by Researchers. Education Week. http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2015/05/06/frontiers-of-digital-learning-probed-by-researchers.html?cmp=ENL-CM-NEWS2-RM
Thompson, J. (2015, Sep 1). Can Digital Games Improve Our Schools? http://www.livingindialogue.com/can-digital-games-improve-our-schools/
Clark, R. E., Yates, K., Early, S., & Moulton, K. (2009). An Analysis of the Failure of Electronic Media and Discovery-based learning: Evidence for the Performance Benefits of Guided Training Methods. In Silber, K. H., & Foshay, R. (eds.) Handbook of Training and Improving Workplace Performance, Volume I: Instructional Design and Training Delivery. New York: John Wiley and Sons. http://www.cogtech.usc.edu/recent_publications.php See also Kirschner, P. A., Sweller, J., & Clark, R. E. (2006). Why Minimal Guidance During Instruction Does Not Work: An Analysis of the Failure of Constructivist, Discovery, Problem-Based, Experiential, and Inquiry-Based Teaching. Educational Psychologist. http://www.cogtech.usc.edu/recent_publications.php
Strauss, V. (2015, Jun 21). Blended Learning: The Great New Thing or the Great New Hype. The Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2015/06/21/blended-learning-the-great-new-thing-or-the-great-new-hype/ See also Corcoran, B. & Madda, M. J. (2015, Aug 8). Blended Learning and Flipping the Classroom: You're Doing It Wrong. https://www.edsurge.com/n/2015-08-08-blended-learning-and-flipping-the-classroom-you-re-doing-it-wrong and Dobo, N. (2015, Feb 10). What Mistakes Did They Make? Lessons from Blended Learning's Early Adopters. http://hechingerreport.org/what-mistakes-did-they-make-learning-from-blended-learnings-early-adopters/ and Zhao, Y. (2015, Dec 6). "Never Send a Human to Do a Machine's Job": Five Big Mistakes in Education Technology and How to Fix Them. https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2015/10/06/never-send-a-human-to-do-a-machines-job-five-big-mistakes-in-education-technology-and-how-to-fix-them/
OECD. (2015). Students, Computers and Learning: Making the Connection. PISA, OECD Publishing. http://www.oecd.org/publications/students-computers-and-learning-9789264239555-en.htm For an erudite discussion of this dilemma, see Cuban, L. (2016, Jan 19). Technology Integration in Districts and Schools: Next Project (Part 1). https://larrycuban.wordpress.com/2016/01/19/technology-integration-in-districts-and-schools-next-project-part-1/ and Cuban, L. (2016, Jan 22). New Project in Technology Integration in Schools and Classrooms (Part 2). https://larrycuban.wordpress.com/2016/01/22/new-project-in-technology-integration-in-schools-and-classrooms-part-2/
Glass, G. V. (2015, Oct 14). Outrageous "Class" Sizes at a Virtual Charter School. http://ed2worlds.blogspot.com/2015/10/outrageous-class-sizes-at-virtual.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+EducationInTwoWorlds+%28Education+in+Two+Worlds%29 See also Miron, G., & Urschel, J. L. (2012, Jul). Understanding and Improving Full-Time Virtual Schools. nepc.colorado.edu/files/nepcrbk12miron.pdf
Pazhouh, R., Lake, R., & Miller, L. (2015, Oct). The Policy Framework for Online Charter Schools. The Center on Reinventing Public Education. http://www.crpe.org/publications/policy-framework-online-charter-schools
Samuelsohn, D. (2015, Sep 23). Virtual Schools Are Booming: Who's Paying Attention? http://www.politico.com/agenda/story/2015/09/virtual-schools-education-000227;
Stober, D. (2015, Oct 16). Massive Open Online Courses Haven't Lived Up to the Hopes and the Hype, Professors Say. http://phys.org/news/2015-10-massive-online-courses-havent-hype.html
Ravitch, D. (2012, May 25). What Is Campbell's Law? http://dianeravitch.net/2012/05/25/what-is-campbells-law/
American Federation of Teachers. (2015, May 13). Survey Shows Need for National Focus on Workplace Stress. http://www.aft.org/news/survey-shows-need-national-focus-workplace-stress
Bryant, B. (2015, Jul 30). We Won't Get Great Teachers by Treating Them Badly. http://educationopportunitynetwork.org/we-wont-get-better-teachers-by-treating-them-badly/
Phillips, O. (2015, Mar 30). Revolving Door of Teachers Costs Schools Billions Every Year. http://www.npr.org/blogs/ed/2015/03/30/395322012/the-hidden-costs-of-teacher-turnover
Bangert, D. (2015, Aug 3). Ed Reform's Next Trick? Teacher Shortage. http://www.jconline.com/story/opinion/columnists/dave-bangert/2015/08/01/bangert-ed-reforms-next-trick-teacher-shortage/30981611/
Klein, R. (2015, Aug 8). A Memo to States: This Is How You Create a Teacher Shortage. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/kansas-teacher-shortage-recipe_55c28ce6e4b0f1cbf1e3a2d7
Gilbert, F. (2016, Mar 1). Here's the Real Reason Teachers Are Quitting (It's Not Just the Money). http://theconversation.com/heres-the-real-reason-teachers-are-quitting-its-not-just-the-money-55468
Harris, G., & Rich, M. (2016, Oct 3). Arne Duncan, Education Secretary, to Step Down in December. The New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/03/us/politics/arne-duncan.html
Amrein-Beardsley, A. (2015, Oct 3). U.S. Secretary Arne Duncan Resigning in December. http://vamboozled.com/u-s-secretary-arne-duncan-resigning-in-december/
This entry was posted in Charter Schools, Common Core, Conventional School Reforms, High--Stakes Testing, Teacher Evaluation, Test-and-Punish and tagged Accountability, Charter Schools, Common Core, Continuous Improvement, High-Stakes Testing, Merit Pay, Standardized Tests, Teach for America, Technology, Test-Based Accountability, Test-Based Retention on April 26, 2016 by BillHonig.