by Jane Sandbank | Apr 21, 2015 | Policy and Practice, Standardized Testing, Uncategorized
Editorial: New York leaders misread opt-out message
The Journal News
Let reason prevail. The April 17, 2015 Journal News editorial, “New York leaders misread opt-out message,” presents a good regional and national perspective on Common Core, testing and teacher evaluation. NYSED, Board of Regents, Arne Duncan, President Obama, school boards, presidential candidates, legislators and Governors should:
- Value and trust parents, teachers and administrators.
- Look at the opt-out data (from 20 – 40% in many of the Lower Hudson Region of New York according to the Journal News article); it is significant and a game changer. If state and Washington education departments, governors and legislators are making decisions based on data, than they should realize the significance of the high numbers of parents who object to the weight given to standardized testing and its negative impact on their children and teachers. We are told that we must make critical decisions about deploying precious fiscal and human resources based on data. The story the data tells is clear.
- Change course now.
It will not benefit any let alone all students to pursue a failed reform movement. Current research points to the importance of recruiting, retaining and training, highly qualified teachers and administrators as well as aligning certification programs and professional development to the real world skills educators need to ensure that their students will be college and career ready. This pedagogy for the 21st century involves educating the whole child; it involves understanding the challenges of technology and the emotional complexity of growing up in today’s uncertain and rapidly changing world. This does not mean spending precious days, weeks and dollars on test prep. Moreover, controversy abounds not only about the validity and reliability of the tests, but also about the curriculum on which these tests are based. Is it a curriculum for today and tomorrow or for yesterday?
- Collect data on what educators think is best in Common Core and what else constitutes curriculum.
- Improve teacher and administrative certification programs to better align with 21st century research on how kids learn.
- Co-create with all players a teacher evaluation system that creates a true 360 model.
And stop wasting time and creating a highly stressed generation of children aged 9 – 14 who hate school.
by Jane Sandbank | Jan 7, 2015 | Educational Leadership, Policy and Practice
If you’re like us you read some of the lists of the best of 2014; the best dressed, the best athletes, the best TV shows, the best photos and even the best news stories. ED WEEK compiled their Top Education Commentaries of 2014: Education Week’s Most-Viewed. They capture the topics and controversies that not only define the important ideas of the past year, but also suggest how we might move ahead in 2015 and create schools that will better serve our students. You’ll recognize the buzz words from our field: grit, bullying, the marshmallow test, social emotional intelligence, diversity, equity, reform and of course standards and common core. Here are quotes from three of these articles. You will recognize the names. Collectively, they make compelling cases for what we must do:
“Neglecting the emotional education of children and adults risks leaving children at the mercy of every emotion they feel and every aggressor who comes along.” – Marc Brackett
“Focus less on ‘fixing kids’ and more on improving what and how they’re taught.” – Alfie Kohn
“The transition to simple, priority-driven school improvement might require a kind of civil disobedience: a refusal, by a critical mass of educators, to implement anything unless it has been adequately piloted, amply proven, and then made clear and simple enough for educators to learn and implement successfully.” – Mike Schmoker
The NY Times editorial The Central Crisis in New York Education addresses the schism among Governor Cuomo, the Regents and the NYS Teachers concerning the $2 billion it will take to ensure educational equity for New York’s students.
You can also read the Campaign for Educational Equity blog: New York Times Challenges Governor Cuomo to Face Educational Reality in State of State.
For additional postings, check out our Ed Trends page. We update it regularly and are sure it will stimulate conversation among your colleagues.
We thank you all for the work you do each and every day on behalf of this nation’s children and wish you all the best in 2015.
Warmly,
Jane Sandbank Group
by Jane Sandbank | Nov 1, 2014 | Policy and Practice
We can remember the reading wars and sadly they are still going on. Now we have the data wars too: What data is important? How do we help teachers access and use data to guide instruction? What data is dangerous and hurting student outcomes?
Carol Black’s blog, “A Thousand Rivers,” describes diverse global learning environments to critique our attention to data and programs such as phonics in our schools. I don’t agree with everything she writes in this extensive article, however, one quote about data stands out:
“Collecting data on human learning based on children’s behavior in school is like collecting data on killer whales based on their behavior in Sea World.”
In workshops with administrators and teachers on matters as diverse as how to use student test data; choose, implement and evaluate a reading program; or implement system-wide inclusion, I ask folks to write about and then talk about how they learned to read. Everyone remembers. Learning to read is a big deal! My father taught me how to read by reading the Sunday Daily News comics to me every week. He’d make a special breakfast, lox and eggs and onions with a bialy and read ‘Nancy” and “Brenda Starr Reporter” to me. These were my faves. My dad was orphaned and abandoned at birth. He had no formal schooling. In fact, he had no language until he was 10 and emigrated to the U.S. Even after that his English was spotty. We lived in a one bedroom tenement in the South Bronx (aka Fort Apache); he, my mom and my sister who was 8 years older than I. She was a terrific and prolific reader and insisted that I trade the Bobbsy Twins for Thomas Mann. The storefront library on Southern Blvd. saved the two of us. Anyway, my dad would read the comics to me, pointing to every word and now and then ask me to read the word. Soon I was reading the comics to him and the Golden Books to my mom. When I entered kindergarten at 5 by today’s standards I would be a proficient 4th grade reader. My teachers always gave me more “advanced” books; I loved Mark Twain, Edgar Allen Poe and all poetry. They helped me with the hard words or explained stuff to me that I was unsure of. They somehow knew how to do this without formal testing, data reviews or rubrics. They knew what I loved to read and what I found boring. There were at least 45 kids in the class in my elementary school. Maybe some were even repeating the grade. They all could read, albeit at different levels and that was okay. We cheered when they read Dick and Jane out loud or recited “Paul Revere’s Ride.”
Somehow children learned to read well, add or even how to solve complex problems before we formalized data collection and analysis. Could we do more now to advance student learning? Sure. Does the Reform Movement, Common Core, Standardized tests and Pearson help? How many dots on the head of a pin? There are more caring and expert teachers in every school across America than there has ever been. These same teachers however have to spend precious hours on data teams, data analysis, data reporting, testing, grading, retesting and their own evaluations are based on this same questionable data. Third graders instead of reading about favorite topics or heroes have to sit still and struggle through boring reading passages and then answer unclear questions that their teachers are unsure of. This leads to frustration, reading as a stressful and often punitive activity, especially for weaker students. Perhaps this is why boys score lower than girls. Maybe it’s more about sitting still than reading level. Perhaps teachers have not been given ample time and professional development to relearn and learn to teach math conceptually yet “It’s on the test!” Applying mathematical concepts to solve complex real world problems is much different from learning the mechanics of subtraction.
Data is important, but not just test data. Does the teacher know each and every day how every child is feeling? Data collection strategy: “Jane, how are you feeling?” Critical data with no cost. What interests the student, engages the student, excites the student? Are they hungry or did they have a fight before coming to school? It is pretty well documented by now that the reliability and validity of the tests are questionable at best. We’ve left the essence of the child and of the teacher behind. Perhaps if we rethink how we learned, we can help our teachers and students more.
Carol Black asks about how we somehow all learned to use computers; especially those of us who went to school before there was a smart board in every classroom. How did you learn to use a computer? I bet we all learned in different ways, but somewhere along the line we became proficient.
School leadership can build whole school capacity and ensure teachers have a broad range of skills and materials to not only teach reading, but also all subject matter more successfully. Acknowledge and celebrate the many small moments of success. Learning and indeed school can and should be joyful. There is essentially no need for reading wars or data wars or math wars to continue. Phonics may be helpful to some students and not others. With appropriate professional development teachers can gain the requisite skills to know what data they need and how to find and use it. They need to ask the right questions, including how they and their students are feeling.
Recent Comments