Real Education Reform? In Alabama?!?

I'm going to write something that I never thought I'd ever write in the entire scope of my life and work: 

The state of Alabama might have the answer to education reform.

After you stop laughing, keep reading. Our new state superintendent, Dr. Tommy Bice, has developed quite a reputation in our state for thinking outside the box and, quite frankly, freaking people out. As a former special education teacher, school principal, and district superintendent, Dr. Bice knows what it's like to work in a school and deal with regulations, rules, and standards - and he knows that these things can be used for good and for evil. He's shaking things up at the State Department of Education, reorganizing offices and asking whether programs are truly worth the state's time and efforts. He's advocating some reforms that are making people uncomfortable, but that just might work. 

One reform that I'm a little geeked out about is Innovation Systems, in which schools can apply to waive or modify regulations in exchange for targeted accountability. Schools can waive certification regulations or modify expenditures. They can extend the school day or provide more flexible learning opportunities. In actuality, they can propose just about any change they want, as long as it benefits the students and teachers in their school or district. In return, the school must propose to track a minimum of two accountability measures - one dealing with student achievement (broadly defined) and another negotiated with the State Department. 

Two districts have taken the state up on their offer to be an Innovation System - Florence City Schools and Lawrence County Schools. In Florence, they have created a magnet school for fine arts, an industry-based program for at-risk students, and a project-based history/language arts program designed to increase success on AP Exams. In Lawrence County, they have developed a comprehensive, integrated agricultural curriculum that awards co-op credit for after-school agricultural work and integrates economics into agriscience and business courses. Both districts agreed to be held accountable to their own goals, which includes increasing overall and subject-specific graduation rates and scores on AP Exams and the ACT.

In essence, Innovation Systems are charter schools, without the charter.

These systems are publicly run and publicly funded. The schools are still run by the principals. The classes are still taught by the teachers. No federal or corporate money was spent. No parent triggers were pulled. Schools are simply being allowed to have the flexibility of a charter without having to give up all those things that make a school in the public domain. Dr. Bice believes that what's good for a charter should also be good for a public school. If charter schools are designed to do what's best for kids, why can't public schools be allowed to do what's best for kids? 

I think this program has two strong things going for it:

• Schools can do what's best for kids.
• Schools can determine how to measure what's best for kids.

I believe if we let schools out of their boxes, we will get ideas and innovations that meet students' needs and help students figure out what they want. I hope more school districts in Alabama take Dr. Bice up on his Innovation Systems idea. And I hope more states offer an Innovation System approach to their districts so they can see what educators can do if they are allowed to teach outside the box.

Innovation vs. Standardization or Why My Students are Different from my iPhone

America worships its capitalist ideals, holding fast to the notion that profit and stock market value are the ultimate measures of our collective success. Americans obsess over the numbers that measure our capitalist love affair, pouring over the GDP, the CPI, the unemployment numbers, and the Dow. Whole industries exist simply to analyze what these numbers mean to you and me. Businesses spend a great deal of money and time making sure their numbers show how much they are growing so their stock value can go up so they can borrow more money to spend on making sure their numbers are going up. This amazing cycle of business usually produces companies that create goods and services that meet the needs of the marketplace. Some companies try to compete, but fall short due to short-sightedness or bad management or poor execution of ideas. And other companies, in the mad rush to earn profits and stock value, falsify their numbers to avoid bankruptcy, public ridicule, or jail.

We are able to see just how effective businesses are by looking at their numbers. Stock market values are published in the news media, and people can see quickly how well one business is performing compared to another. Surely anyone can see that the company that makes iPhones is much more effective than the one that makes Blackberries. Both make smartphones, yet one is the biggest company in the world, and the other is struggling to remain relevant. Books are published and consultants are born that analyze how the successful company is different from the failing one in the hopes that entrepreneurs out there will adopt successful ideas and use them to meet the next great marketplace need, whatever that may be.

Today's education reformers want for schools to adopt business models, applying the principles of our much-beloved capitalism to educating our students. They believe schools should demonstrate "effectiveness" which can be easily determined by test scores and evaluation results. These scores get published in the news media, much like the stock numbers, so that all can see how "effective" their local school is compared to other local schools. Books are published and consultants are born to identify the qualities of successful schools so that superintendents and principals can adopt successful practices to make their school "effective." Many schools do well, earning effectiveness numbers that are the envy of everyone around. Others ride waves of effectiveness, earning good numbers some years but not others. And some, especially in today's climate of accountability, falsify their numbers to avoid state takeover, public ridicule, and loss of certification.

The problem here is not the business model of schooling - we can learn a lot from business to run good schools. I am a big fan of leadership books that rise from the business world (John Kotter and Peter Senge are two business-leadership gurus that come to mind whose ideas can be easily applied to schools). The problem here is that "effectiveness" in business and "effectiveness" in schools are two completely different monsters. Business effectiveness relies on the efficient production of goods or services. School effectiveness relies on the careful molding of people.

What we hope for a successful business should not be the same as what we hope for a successful school. I want my iPhone to be a consistent, reliable, nicely packaged, and user-friendly product that I can use every day. I want my iPhone to work just like everybody else's iPhone so I can use and share apps and make phone calls reliably. If my iPhone worked differently than my husband's iPhone, we might not be able to send and receive calls and texts or play Words with Friends as effortlessly as we do. The company that makes my iPhone must ensure that every single iPhone they produce is the same as the next. Derivations in any part of the manufacturing process will end up frustrating customers who expect consistency and reliability in their products. If customers get frustrated with a company's products (say, for instance, the service keeps going out randomly), the products are abandoned for those that do meet the customer's expectations.

I want my school to mold students to be independent thinkers and doers. I want my students to be knowledgable, innovative, critical thinkers who can use what we teach them to adapt to any situation, no matter how difficult. I want for each student to take what they learn from my school to become whatever they want to be - doctor, lawyer, teacher, artist. I don't want every student to be exactly like the next one next to them in class. I want all my students to learn the set of skills necessary to be successful - resilience, grit, perspective, critical thinking, cooperation, knowledge-seeking, intiative-taking - but I want them to use these skills in whatever future they choose for themselves. If my school does not help students learn these skills, then word will get out about how ineffective my school is, and people will move or avoid living in my school's community.

What I find most fascinating about corporate education reform is that they don't seem to have read the works of Kotter or Senge or even Steve Jobs. None of these acknowledged successes in business want cookie-cutter students. They want innovators, creators, intiative-takers. They want workers who can adapt to change and work together with others. They want workers who can read, write, compute, and ultimately think and adapt.

The next big thing in business does not come from standardization, but from innovation. So we should not expect the next big thing in schools to come from standardization. The standardized test scores do not tell you whether students are thinkers or doers. We can sit all day comparing one school's test scores to another, but all we will learn at the end of the day is the schools are different. We have to remember that we are not creating an efficiently produced good or service, we are molding people who can adapt and change and learn and grow. We should measure how well students think and how successful they are in the next phases of their lives.

Revolutionary innovation would be demonstrated by the person who can figure out how to measure that.

Slow and Steady wins the race, thank goodness!

My older son is a swimmer, and as I sit at at a regional swim meet, I'm struck by how important resilience is in sport. My son has been swimming since he was about six, and he's always been quite good (if I do say so myself). We've stuck with swimming because it was a sport that he did well with, for he seems to do better with individual sports than team ones. We've encouraged him to swim through thick and thin because we see that when he's successful, he feels good about himself and learns to set and meet goals. Both of these results are important to us as his parents because we know the effects will stick with him for a lifetime.

Yet, not all of his peers in swimming seem to be in it for the long haul. Many of the boys who have swum with him over the years are beginning to burn out and quit the sport. Some of these kids were amazing swimmers, blowing away the competition (including my son!) in both summer and year-round meets. When people watched them swim, they would be impressed by their swimming talent. But as these kids have aged, they have slowly faded from the scene for a variety of reasons. Some fade because they become involved in other sports (swimming is not the "cool" sport where we live that football is, imagine that). Others, though, have faded because their early talent for the sport is not as impressive as it was. Other kids, who have stuck it out and trained through the years, are catching up, at times matching or beating the young phenoms. Instead of taking that new competition as motivation to get better, these kids are breaking. They avoid big meets and cut back on their training. Whispers among parents at the meets and practices suggest that the kids are either disappointments to their parents or causes of concern as the kids battle depression or act defiantly due to their frustration over not being the best anymore.

These young swimmers are caught up in our culture's worship of talent. While we in the US say we value hard work, what we adore is talent, especially precocious talent. We love the kid who wins the piano competition at age five. We are amazed by the baby who reads or does math before kindergarten. Prodigies get to appear on the Today Show and have one million hits on YouTube. We have built a culture of fame for prodigies, but what happens when their peers catch up with their talent? Has the prodigy, who never had to work hard to be successful, learned the value of hard work? Will they push themselves in order to be better? Or will they give up because they are no longer as good as they were? Unfortunately, I'm seeing too many phenom swimmers giving up, burning out, and fading away.

I hope I'm teaching my son that he needs to be in it for the long haul. He's a pretty good swimmer now, but he's not the best of the bunch. With each year, though, he gets a little better, a little stronger, and a little more savvy in competition. At this rate, he'll hit his peak in late high school or perhaps early in college. He has potential to be a collegiate swimmer, and perhaps qualify to try out for the Olympics if he wants. But that potential does not depend on how talented he is today. It depends on how hard he works between now and then. To me, if he learns that hard work will get him from here to his dreams, then I've done a good job as a parent, whether he actually gets to swim in college or the Olympics or not.

My favorite Aesop's fable is "The Tortoise and the Hare." The talented Rabbit, so sure of his physical superiority in a race, fails to work hard and even slacks off, leaving room for the slower, but persistent Tortoise to beat him. I'm glad that "slow and steady wins the race." That way, more of us have the hope of winning, if we just stick to it. Resilience wins, every time.

What Do the Numbers Really Mean? Not Much, Really...

Recently, two articles from The Washington Post's blog The Answer Sheet got my attention. One detailed the adventures of a school board member who took a version of the Florida standardized, high-stakes test students must take in order to graduate and help their schools earn a "successful" label. The other outlined the "evidence" that shows how education majors come from the bottom third of college students. Both, I feel, tell an interesting story about what we've come to value in education and how we've let it corrupt our notions of learning.

I was very intrigued by the school board member who took it upon himself to take a version of the Florida high-stakes test. While he was not allowed to take an official version, he took one that was similar to what students must face each year. He took subtests in reading and math, and he failed miserably. This upstanding, community-servant, double-master's-degreed businessman could not complete one math question and only got a D on the reading section. His performance, though, was not what intrigued me. His motivation was. He wanted to take the test because the schools in his district were continually being labeled as failing with students not passing these tests, yet he personally knew teachers who were doing outstanding work and students who could read and do math. His experiences didn't match the reported scores.

The second article also intrigued me because I've heard reformers complain before that teaching would be a better profession if we could attract the "best and brightest" of our college students to pursue teaching. Groups such as Teach for America were founded on this premise. TFA began by recruiting Ivy League all-stars to work in schools for two years with the belief that their brief service would revolutionize schools. Being in the presence of a passionate, brilliant Harvard grad would surely make a sullen, inner-city, disaffected youth love learning again, right? But learning that my colleagues and I are believed to be underachieving, dispassionate, regular-college grads who have ruined kids' love of learning was not what intrigued me. My reality was. My experiences do not match this study's report or TFA's philosophy.

I have personally known thousands of students in my career. The vast majority of students I've worked with could read, do math, write, and speak well enough to be successful in college. Now, I'll admit that I have worked in communities that value education and support their schools. Even so, not all students in those schools came from families that supported the quest for education. I've worked with students who did not pass our state tests, but even those students could read, write, and do math. And most of those still went to college and were successful.

I have worked with hundreds of teachers. The vast majority of teachers I worked with love school and learning so much that they overachieve at schooling. They are bonafide nerds about school. They are conscientious about doing work and want to help students be successful at school. While I never sat around with my colleagues bragging about our high school test scores, I do know that most of my colleagues graduated with honors from high school, college, and graduate school. The teachers I know are not in the bottom third of anything, except maybe in salary.

Ultimately, our notions of learning have been corrupted by a system that values test scores over something more meaningful. The fact that I'm calling it "something more meaningful" and not giving it a more concrete name shows that we really actually don't know what we want students to have when they walk across our commencement stages. We want for our SAT/ACT scores and GPAs to mean something - that we've learned something valuable and important. But the more we assign that value to these scores, the less it seems that they actually signify anything important. The numbers have come to have more value than what they signify. And that has lead us to this ugly place where numbers bestow value onto people instead of people assigning value to the numbers.

Queen Bees or Aunt Bees - Women in Educational Leadership

Check out this blog entry I wrote for the Leading Edge Institute - a Birmingham, AL, non-profit dedicated to fostering women in leadership.

http://leadingedgeinst.org/blog/

The best leaders know that sharing power with others does not compromise their own power. Sharing power creates more efficient organizations that foster innovation, creativity, and resilience.

Repurposing "Readiness"

I work in a public high school, so we are all focused on "readiness." We want our students to be college "ready" and AP "ready" and "ready" for the real world. Valerie Strauss of the Washington Post's Answer Sheet blog recently posted a commentary by Monty Neill of Fair Test in which he describes a Race to the Top initiative that encourages states to create a "readiness" test of kindergarteners as part of a Comprehensive Assessment System for public schools. Neill argues that readiness tests for kindergarteners will affect them negatively, convincing these little ones that they are failures at a young age and persuading their teachers that their students are not capable of academic work. These tests would deprive our youngest learners of the type of experiential learning that they need.

As I read Neill's commentary, I thought about education's love-hate relationship with tests. We in education have always given tests. I'm not sure I know a teacher who doesn't assess her students on a regular basis. Whether it's a summative unit test or a question-and-answer session during class discussion, teachers constantly assess their students. Yet, we in education also bemoan tests as time-wasting, fun-sucking, cognition-draining adventures in futility. I'm not sure I know a teacher who jumps for joy when state testing time rolls around. All criticisms of the No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top initiatives blast their reliance on tests as the gold-standard of accountability. We find ourselves in a classic approach-avoidance conflict: we are compelled to assess our students so we know where they stand yet we hate judging them (and being judged ourselves) for where they stand.

I argue that we should stop fighting the tests. We won't win that battle anyway. The tests are here to stay, regardless of their quality or validity. What we need to do is repurpose the tests, educating the public and policy makers about what value these tests can provide. The problem with the current testing zeitgeist is that the test results are sold as a measure of how well we've prepared students. I'm not sure any educated person, or any person in education, really believes that's what tests really do. We've all taken tests that didn't really measure what we knew. These tests do not measure "readiness," so we should stop hoping that they will suddenly start measuring "readiness" because we use them as an accountability tool. So instead of using tests as measures of "readiness," we should use them as measures of "opportunity." 

I always told my students that testing days were the most important days in the course. The testing day was the moment of truth when they would discover whether they knew the material or not. Most students are very confident that they know the material going into the test. In fact, the overconfidence effect is a well documented phenomenon in psychology. People tend to be very confident that they will perform well on a task, but their performance generally does not equal their confidence. Because students don't know what they will be tested on, they assume that they will be tested on what they know. They don't anticipate that questions will come up about stuff they do not know. We don't expend a lot of energy studying information we already feel confident that we know. We do, however, expend great effort learning information that we do not know. So the testing day is when what they don't know is revealed. For students to recognize what they didn't know is the first step to learning.

I am interested in assessing our students, even in kindergarten, but I'm not interested in using the test results to punish parents, students, teachers, or schools for not getting these youngsters "ready" for school. I am interested in assessing our students so that we can know what we need to focus on in the classroom. Can our five-year-olds entering kindergarten read? Can they add or subtract? Can they name the current President of the United States? If so, I'm going to need to plan lessons that take students farther than what the Common Core or any other standardized curriculum would dictate for kindergarten. We waste tons of time in classrooms teaching students material they already know. Test results should point us in the directions we should go from this point forward. The "readiness" approach instead uses test results to scold us for not having the map that tells us where to go.

So, Mr. President and Mr. Secretary, rethink your interpretation of test results. The results will not tell you whether our students are "ready" for anything. But they will tell you how many resources we will need to meet the learning needs of our students. Use the scores as indicators of how much work needs to be done instead of indicators of how little work has been done. See the scores as opportunities to demonstrate just how far students can go instead of evidence that someone has failed. This simple repurposing may be the honey you need to get teachers on board with your reform efforts. Of course, by getting teachers on board, you may not need reform efforts after all.

AP Annual Conference Presentation 2011: Scope & Sequence Suggestions for AP Psychology

Here is a link to my powerpoint presentation for the session I lead at the AP Annual Conference in San Francisco, CA, in July 2011.

Teaching AP Psychology is incredibly fun, but can also be incredibly challenging. While I was fortunate to teach the course for an entire academic year, some folks must fit it all in during a semester. Some people also feel bound by the order of topics in the textbook. I present some options for how to design a fun, interactive, and interconnected course that will maximize interest and time. Feel free to comment with questions or innovative course ideas!