This recent speech was posted on ED’s web site.  In it, Secretary Duncan criticizes teacher preparation programs.  He spoke:

In a speech last fall at the Teachers College at Columbia, I noted that education schools have long been treated as the Rodney Dangerfield of higher education. Colleges of education have traditionally been the institution that got no respect—yet still they are described as cash cows for other, more academically-prestigious departments of the university.

Once teachers finish their preparation program, they enter a profession that continues to treat them as something less than highly-skilled professionals. Smart induction policies and well-designed mentoring for new teachers is the exception, rather than the rule. Professional development is generally of poor quality. Pay is based not on your performance in the classroom or your impact on student learning but rather on your credentials and time spent in the job. Performance evaluations of teachers are largely a sham.

So, how do we explain this paradox of on the one hand revering teachers, yet on the other hand, failing to elevate the teaching profession?

In the context of the current political climate, it seems like these questions fit conveniently with hot topics like of teacher tenure, teacher training, and the use of online courses and blended learning models to broaden the school day.  The iZone work I am a part of in NYC is one example of a major city trying to better understand how new approaches to teaching and learning might be used in over 1500 schools.

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I was in the hospital with my new son one night a few weeks when I saw that one of the authors of Disrupting Class, Michael Horn, replied to my previous blog posting.  My son is three weeks today; his father finally has a chance to reply to Horn.  Horn wrote a comment to my posting that begins:

While I appreciated the kudos, a “good catch” does not adequately respond to my point.  Even Horn’s later series of rebuttals do nothing more than dodge the core of the critique.  At the heart of the posting is the concern that the authors of Disrupting Class knowingly misrepresent and dismiss research and scholarship in the field of education.  As a result, the Disruption Theory they create is inherently groundless.  Though it is compelling–no one would argue that the book has had great effects on education policy and reform–it neglects to seriously consider what is going on in actual schools with actual students, and it doesn’t consider what experts in education have to say about those realities.

I agree with Horn that much of educational research doesn’t prove causal relationships (if you do X students will ace their exams).  But that doesn’t mean you disregard it completely.  The weakness of Disrupting Class’s stance toward educational research is that it finds value only in the answers to questions, not the questions themselves.  What questions would have been raised in their book if the authors had seriously considered educational research? What questions, then, would policy-makers and educational leadership have asked?  Questions, after all, are far more disruptive. 

Here’s an example.  One of the gaps I point out is that the authors make “the hasty assumption that adolescents’ use of technology means they can simply learn from it.”  Horn replied to this critique (which was the third in a list) that “we pointedly don’t rely on point #3 that you cite. Others write about this, but we ourselves don’t hinge our argument on this point.”  I’m sorry, but Horn and his colleagues pointedly do rely on students’ use of technology to learn.  If you remove students-using-technology-to-learn from Disrupting Class there is no book.  Who uses the online courses they speak of?  How do the authors imagine students sharing content they create?  And let’s not ignore the fact that not all students learn well in online courses; not all students have any interest or natural skill in posting materials for classmates to learn from. 

If the authors had consulted–just as one example–Donald Leu’s study in which he compares students’ offline and online literacy skills they might have disclaimed that research shows students’ offline and online literacy abilities have no direct relationship.  Great online readers might be shoddy offline readers.  And vice versa.  If they had considered even just studies that compare students online and offline lives, they might have explored certain realities of applying their theory to a school system: not all students are digitally literate; students’ social digital literacies don’t simply apply to online schoolwork; not all traditionally successful students’ talents translate to the online world; not all students even have equitable access to online worlds and therefore to those crucial online skills. 

The above response, I might add, says nothing about the authors’ disregard for the roles of teachers in student-learning.  While they do compliment educators for their hard work, they don’t seriously consider what it means, for instance, to disrupt teacher education using their framework.  Nor do they consider the setbacks and advances being made in the professional development of educators.  Their solution is to take a master teacher like Jaime Escalante and broadcast him to as many students as possible.  I wonder what kind of relationship Escalante would form with his students in such a scenario.  After all, wasn’t it his ability to connect with his classes that made his success possible? 

In sum, we need a real series of exchanges in which the educational research community dialogues with the authors of Disrupting Class.  Ideally, there would be a think tank in which some organization (a university, consulting group, a city) would invite the book’s authors and an array of educational scholars to the same table to talk about ways to ground so influential a book.  The authors of the book might dismiss educational research, but researchers are also quick to categorically dismiss the book.  Disrupting Class has been incredibly influential and is shaping education reform around the world.  Scholars who ignore that simple truth are too tangled in their own academic robes to see that real principals, teachers, students, and parents are and will be affected by this book.  Time to disrobe, if need be, and to seriously consider what it means to disrupt.

NB: There are other critiques of the book as well. One especially thoughtful review is by John Sener.

Secretary of Education Arne Duncan held a town meeting in which he demonstrates the problems with words like “creative” and “innovation” in conversations about policy.  It always seems to stumble:

“We need to be much more creative and innovative in how we do things,” Duncan said. For instance, students today use cell phones and PDAs on a regular basis, he said, so coming up with creative ways to deliver content and curriculum involving technologies that students like to use is one way to grab students’ attention.

With all due respect to Secretary Duncan and eSchool News, is there not some incongruity between the ideas of creativity and innovation when used to talk about delivering content.  What about the notion of learning as something more than content to be delivered, banked, deposited, dropped off, absorbed, etc.? What about the idea of students constructing knowledge together?  which, is something new technologies lend themselves to quite well.

The New York State Board of Regents has proposed that they improve schools in the state by lifting the cap on charter schools.  They also suggest a serious effort to tie teacher pay to achievement. 

It’s not unfair to liken these proposals to a dance–a choreographed one set to the tune of the USDOE’s Race to the Top parameters.  Edweek notes,

The proposal seeks to lift the cap on the number of charter schools, now set at 200. State officials note New York could get the most “points” toward the competitive federal grants if the cap was doubled to 400 charter schools.

The proposal would revise state standardized tests so they more closely track student performance on national tests, and offer a uniform curriculum and tests in the arts, economics and multimedia computer technology.

The plan would link a teacher’s job evaluation to student performance under improved tests and as part of a variety of factors. It would also improve teacher training by colleges and mentors.

I get very nervous with the use of test scores as a weighty measure of educational effectiveness.  That having been said, I do think the work of charter schools deserves more credit than teaching unionists often give.  Though I have seen some eerily scripted charter schools, I’ve also seen some eerily scripted public school programs (“You will teach this mini-lesson to your level two blue readers at 11:25″).  At the same time, I find the idealists’ cry that schooling must be a public service hard to swallow when our classrooms look like so many of them do. 

Do I think we should privatize education? Not completely.  Do I think public schools can learn from private schools and charters?  Absolutely.   

On May 15, 2009, the New York City Chancellor of Education announced the launch of NYC21C (now called iZone), which is a research and development initiative intended to strategize a city-wide plan to make 21^st century teaching and learning a reality in the city’s fourteen-hundred plus schools.  Several NYC Department of Education offices are collaborating for this initiative, including the Office of New School Development, the Division of Instructional and Informational Technology, and the Office of Strategy and Innovation.

The vision for iZone comes from various sources, including consultation with business leaders worldwide.  In addition, one noteworthy book called Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation will Change the Way the World Learns, by Clayton Christensen et al., of the Harvard Business School, has also been consulted to guide the iZone initiative.  Chancellor Klein provides a public blurb for the book.  Klein writes:

Provocatively titled, Disrupting Class is just what America’s K-12 education system needs–a well thought-through proposal for using technology to better serve students and bring our schools into the 21st Century. Unlike so many education ‘reforms,’ this is not small-bore stuff. For that reason alone, it’s likely to be resisted by defenders of the status quo, even though it’s necessary and right for our kids.  We owe it to them to make sure this book isn’t merely a terrific read; it must become a blueprint for educational transformation (np).

What’s more, the chancellor has cited the book as one of the main works influencing his own approach to urban education reform (Green, 2008).  In addition, the book’s concepts and language pepper the iZone literature. Innovation is a key concept and word to the authors of Disrupting Class, the subtitle of which places much emphasis on “disruptive innovation” (np).

It is more than reasonable to say that Disrupting Class, along with other sources, influences the way in which initiatives like iZone are enacted all over the country.  It is a book written from a business/administrative vantage point.  In the upper left-hand corner of the book’s back cover is the word “business”, clearly directing the bookseller where to shelve it.  The book does indeed raise important questions for educators.  However, the book also has a blind spot which must be identified and addressed so that the efforts of education reformers consulting the book can adjust their own systemic course of action.  The blind spot I speak of is most evident in the seventh chapter called “Improving Education Research”.  Next, I suggest that this circumvention of educational research leaves in its wake major gaps in Disrupting Class.  These gaps suggest three hasty assumptions underlying the book: 1) the hasty assumption that teachers can’t be taught to integrate technology into their classrooms; 2) the hasty assumption that innovative teaching and learning is simply a matter of outsourcing academic content to distance learning companies; 3) the hasty assumption that adolescents’ use of technology means they can simply learn from it.  Finally, I offer suggestions for New York City’s iZone initiative to address the gaps in these authors’ argument.

Gaps in Class

“So many talented, committed people,” the authors begin, “work so hard to improve public schools and yet get disappointing results because the research they follow is preliminary and incomplete” (161).  The short seventh chapter of Disrupting Class builds a case that educational research is well-intentioned but less than useful.  They argue that much of education research doesn’t go far enough in its work because it emphasizes description, not prescription.  It fails to show causality.  The same kinds of causal relationships that exist in the observable world—like gravity’s effects or the breaking point of metals (both are analogies used in the book)—should be observable in educational settings if the research is done properly.  The goal is to achieve a quality of educational research that allows administrators and teachers to reliably predict what will and won’t work in school reform.

To be clear, the book’s general idea that some educational research is strong and some is weak is hardly contestable.  More contestable, however, is the casualness with which they dismiss educational research as a whole.  For instance, in support of their claim that educational research is simply limp, the authors include a footnote at the end of the chapter’s opening paragraph.  The footnote seeks to show support from scholars outside the paradigm of business management and begins as follows:

There is a host of articles that criticize education research from vantage points different than ours.  One such study by the National Academy of Science evaluated educational research and found that it had “methodologically weak research, trivial studies, an infatuation with jargon, and a tendency toward fads with a consequent fragmentation of effort.”  Other scholars point out that these research studies are often too narrowly focused on pedagogical or curricular factors with no reference to the underlying culture and its effective (174).

But, in fact, the quotation above is taken completely out of context.  The full quotation (Atkinson & Jackson, 1992) tells a different story.  It’s worth quoting at length as it reveals an important gap in Disrupting Class with regard to its view of educational research.  I’ve italicized the quotation from the excerpt above to emphasize its intended context:

The undistinguished reputation of education research is also partly attributable to some of the work.  There has been some methodologically weak research, trivial studies, an infatuation with jargon, and a tendency toward fads with a consequent fragmentation of effort. The committee, however, does not share the widespread negative judgments about the contributions of research to the reform of education.  Our review of research-based programs to improve teaching, strengthen curricula, restructure institutions of learning, and assess and monitor the progress in US schools has convinced us not only that research can improve education, but also that it has been demonstrably useful (20).

As is plain to see, the quotation that Christensen et al. use omits crucial words like “partly” and “some”.  They start the quotation right after a pivotal qualifier and stop the quotation right before the authors’ admission that they don’t “share the widespread negative judgments about the contributions of research to the reform of education.”   The paragraph says the opposite of the authors’ contention: it says that there are some who say educational research is weak, but they themselves don’t agree. The authors of Disrupting Class fail to take seriously and treat rigorously educational research that might support or contradict their own ideas.  When one looks at the educational research they do cite in footnotes, it represents only a cursory glimpse of some educational specialties.  The studies aren’t scrutinized and don’t appear to deeply inform the authors’ ideas and recommendations.

continue reading "Disrupting Gaps (a draft for peer review)"

Rigor is a tragic word in education.  On the one hand, it has gravitas–it conveys a history of academic excellence and challenge.  On the other hand, it gets volleyed around in educational politics with the whim and witlessness of a group of school children playing hackysak during lunch. 

This is the word that is being hacked and sacked in education now.  Some policy makers have hesitations about the Race to the Top initiative, especially as it concerns the relationship between the state and the fed.  Ed Week writes,

Some House lawmakers suggested the initiative could help address the frequent criticism that the 8-year-old No Child Left Behind Act, the latest reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, allows states to set their own academic standards.

That policy inadvertently encourages states to reduce rigor so that they can clear achievement targets, said Rep. George Miller, D-Calif., the chairman of the education committee and an author of the NCLB law.

As a result, “the quality of education a student may receive is left up to their ZIP code. It’s a matter of geographical luck,” he said. “Having 50 different standards in 50 different states undermines America’s education system.”

I smell a rigor argument afoot.  The “quality”, they say.  Such a simple word that means precisely nothing.  The worry is that we are embarking on a national standards campaign with accompanying exams.  I’m not completely convinced it would be such a bad thing; certainly not as bad as what post-NCLB has been.  It behooves schools, collectively, to have some common language or point of assessment.  But the language must be precise. And precise language takes time.  That’s my own worry: I don’t object to national standards on any principle; I don’t even object to national exams if they are created smartly and if they are prevented from dominating instruction.  What I object to is dodgy rigor–the word without the vigor.

Pearson Evaluation Systems has created a totally computer-based test to license teachers. 

I’m all for experimentation in new ways of teaching and learning.  I have a hard time buying the idea that Pearson “developed the NES program to help states make sure the educators they certify are prepared to teach effectively in 21-st century classrooms.”  That’s an absurd notion–that because someone sits at a computer to take a series of content-heavy lessons and exams that they are then ready to be in a room with live students.  It’s especially strange when much research–and the Secretary of Education–calls for pre-service teachers to spend more time in classrooms with students working on craft.  An Ed Week article adds that NCATE is taking Pearson’s work very seriously:

James Cibulka, president of the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE), agreed that NES, as well as other teacher-certification tests, should be aligned with rigorous standards. But he also said it should be just one of multiple measures of a candidate’s effectiveness.

“NCATE welcomes innovative approaches to assessing teaching candidates in pre-service programs, those seeking licensure, and recently licensed teachers, such as NEC is developing,” he said. “Raising the bar for those entering the teaching profession is one important strategy if America is to succeed in raising K-12 student achievement and closing the achievement gap.”

I am befuddled and bewildered.  But I’m also open to learning more.  So, Pearson, let’s hear it.

Is this what it comes down to: more time in school = better learning?  No, it isn’t.  Though supporters of longer school days and years would like to argue the prior, it is more accurate to say this: more time in school (preparing for exams) = better learning (preparing for exams).

I’m not saying I don’t favor longer school days and years.  I might be very much in favor of it.  What I am not in favor of is the way in which learning has been equated with test scores.  It is most troublesome when I read an article like this one in Ed Week, in which

The first national database of schools that have added learning time to their schedules, which was set for release this week, suggests that the extra time might play a role in boosting middle and high school achievement.

The National Center on Time & Learning, which assembled and analyzed the database, found a moderate association between increased time and how well students did on their states’ standardized English and mathematics tests compared with their peers in nearby schools on regular schedules.

On the one hand, aren’t the success of exams like the ones discussed here predicated on their uniqueness.  Isn’t teaching directly to the test the kind of thing that makes the measurement of such assessments bogus?  On the other hand, is this what learning has neatly become: filling in bubbles and scoring high on tests?

The article calls attention to charter schools in particular, whose success with student achievement is being well documented (Harlem Children Zone was in the spotlight on 60 minutes just last night).  But, if the context of success is limited to learning out-of-context, what good is it?  Edublogger Richard Bryne writes the following about the 60 Minute segment:

One part of the segment that I didn’t agree with was the focus at the end on trying to figure out which one thing is making [founder Geoffery] Canada’s school successful in closing achievement gaps. As they said in the segment, “trying to boil it down to pill form.” If people are serious about closing achievement gaps and want to use Canada’s model, they’ll need to adopt all of his strategies, not just the “boiled down” version. The full segment is embedded below.

I’m inclined to agree.  At the same time, test scores have such weighty status because the education world isn’t presenting any other quasi-convincing form of measurement. Talk about a tough pill to swallow.

The Times reported on recent flair ups between public school advocates and charter school supporters.  Jenifer Medina writes:

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg has made charter schools one of his third-term priorities, and that means that in New York, battles and resentment over space — already a way of life — will become even more common. He and his schools chancellor, Joel I. Klein, have allowed nearly two-thirds of the city’s 99 charter schools to move into public school buildings, officials expect two dozen charter schools to open next fall, and the mayor has said he will push the Legislature to allow him to add 100 more in the next four years.

It’s fairly well known how charter-friendly NYC is.  What I find problematic about Medina’s article is the way she sets the stage.  She describes a librarian who took pains to redecorate and renovate her own library for her public school students.  Then, her principal agreed to give the library space to a charter school in the building. 

This isn’t a fair anecdote to introduce a discussion on charter schools.  It might begin a conversation about shoddy leadership–a principal who doesn’t involve invested members of staff in decision-making–but has little to do with the greater tension between charters and publics.