So, 56% of my students are “approaching grade level” in reading (according to the Teachers College Readers Assessment Project), 5 are at grade level, and 5 are considered “in need of support”.  As most readers know, I teach a self-contained ESL classroom, so while there are grade-level benchmarks, my students also have personalized goals called AYPs (A Year’s Progress). For ELLs, the goals is for them to make a year and a half’s worth of progress because, typically, they are that far behind and then some. So, while we can say that 61% are still “below grade level”, the majority have made and even surpassed their AYP.

The first column is their reading levels when they entered third grade. For those who don’t know, A-I is generally first grade. I-L is second grade. M-Q is third grade.  The ones who met or exceeded their AYP are in green (as I recall anyway – I don’t have the sheet in front of me to reference). As you can see, many of my students moved from first grade level to third grade in half a year.

I hate to say it, but I have no idea if these kinds of leaps are normal (anyone know?), but I’m told that the percentages in my class are “practically that of the general ed” classes at my school. I put that in quotes since basically all our classes are majority ELLs, just that the general ed ones tend to have more advanced ELLs. The majority of my students are Intermediate and Beginner. I’m very proud of their progress and excited to see how much further they go. ELLs tend to “stall” at level M at our school, and more broadly at level N because the language tends to get more idiomatic and difficult for them — they get the gist, but not the deeper meaning. So, we’ll see where they end up in June. Of course, thanks to the way Teachers College assesses students, the major leaps they made don’t matter when it comes to their report card. Only the benchmarks used to assess native speakers matter.

In the hallway, she muttered about teachers who spend too much time cutting out elaborate bulletin-board decorations or chitchatting at “morning meetings” with their third-graders before the real work begins.

This is the problem with so many articles on education for the general public. Most everyday-readers do not know what morning meetings are, and here their purpose is compared to bulletin boards and chitchatting. Yes, it’s a throw-away quote in a sense, used to introduce the person being written about, but it invites the unknowing reader to think, “Oh, yeah, she must be a no-nonsense woman who has some good, controversial ideas I might like – that call for ‘real work’.”

The “she” in that quote is Michelle Rhee, the Chancellor of Education, and the quote is from a brief piece Time magazine published on her last month, making me aware of her name and existence for the first time. And I must say, the article left me uneasy. Not simply because of Rhee’s beliefs and approaches but more so because of the article itself. Rhee is portrayed as a rebel, and her ideas are constantly pitted against teachers in an oversimplified “heroic” way.

There’s always this morality play that unfolds in articles like this – the veteran teachers who just want to love the kids and let them do arts and crafts because she instinctively knows what’s better, and the ambitious, research-focused and data-driven authority who is trying to save students from a “touchy-feely” education.

In my first read of the article, I drew the conclusion that it is the kind of philosophy she espouses that has landed so many of our public schools in this factory-producing-the-best-products approach to education that is deadening and sickening. A philosophy that demands teachers differentiate but then re-mold the students through undifferentiated standards and standardized tests that insist on and reinforce inequality and setting students up for failure. And then giving raises or pink slips to teachers based on those same test scores.

Back to the quote above. I agree that there are teachers who spend too much time on maintaining appearances and not enough time on creating challenging lessons (which requires a lot of time and effort, in my opinion), and Rhee probably agrees the problem does not rest solely on the teachers but on principals who put things like bulletin boards as a major priority on already over-taxed teachers.

However, then I began to think about students like ELLs or Non-ELL Special Ed students who have language delay issues and need exposure to oral language use. Who need the morning meeting time as a way to settle into the class that day and readjust to the classroom community they’re trying to create. Who decides how much time those kids deserve? The teacher who knows them or some outside force like Rhee that knows those kids more as numbers than individuals?

Are there unengaging teachers who are always watering things down and consciously simplifying complex material for students she/he thinks won’t “get it”? YES. But Rhee’s approach* to solving this problem is inadequate and only hurting the children – largely because the principle problem has been misidentified.

The problem is not simply bad educators. The problem is that we have seen a large shift in who makes up the student body, and their needs are very different from student bodies of the past. We are not solely teaching content anymore – we are all teaching academic language to students who are either new to the country, or who lack exposure to academic language at home.

As Rhee points out, the concept of a data-driven education is new, but how it’s being implemented is pitting teachers against research – again because teachers in and of themselves are being identified as the problem. I get the sense that, from the point of view of some veteran teachers, there always seems to be new data changing what was insisted upon before (which was based on other data or accepted ideologies), and there are teachers who are resistant to what, to them, feels like arbitrary changes. I am a new teacher and right now there are new philosophies coming into my school, changing the way our ELLs are taught. Personally, I revel in this – in learning something new and expanding my tool set because I do believe what is taught in classrooms should not be decided by one person. But I can imagine being a veteran teacher who has witnessed so many ideological shifts that it becomes to feel like a joke.

I blame this largely on the dogmatic way the research is given to teacher – it’s an approach that says, “Here – I have the new solution based on new data. Don’t think about it. Just implement it.” In some schools, like mine, this is translated into cookie-cutter lessons with cookie-cutter Teaching Points that are so far removed from what most of our students need it is comical (and bloggable ha!). Not only is the data seen as for administrators to analyze (or even people above them), and no one else (unless, of course, you have been part of an Inquiry Team – I imagine that is different), but it’s as if there is only ONE kind of data based on ONE kind of research. There is plenty of research that challenges the whole notion of standardized tests as culturally-biased, for example – which doesn’t mean, “Awww, it’s too hard for those ELLs, so we should make it easier” — NO, culturally-biased means it’s an inaccurate measure of students from other cultures (including right within our own borders). So much more can be said on this.

This is partly why, in my opinion, teaching gets reduced to a pretend-science. The practitioners are themselves not enough doing the research. Or being asked to think about the new data and techniques as researchers would. Of course, I know plenty of teachers who would say, “Don’t give me the data. Don’t lecture me. Just tell me what you want me to do and I’ll do it.” In my opinion, that reinforces the dogmatism but *shrug*. It reminds me of the kinds of activist organizations I used to volunteer with.

Here are some other choice quotes from the article:

“The thing that kills me about education is that it’s so touchy-feely,” she tells me one afternoon in her office. [...] “People say, ‘Well, you know, test scores don’t take into account creativity and the love of learning,’” she says with a drippy, grating voice, lowering her eyelids halfway. Then she snaps back to herself. “I’m like, ‘You know what? I don’t give a crap.’ Don’t get me wrong. Creativity is good and whatever. But if the children don’t know how to read, I don’t care how creative you are. You’re not doing your job.” [emphasis mine]

(This really pissed me off because it insinuates the opposition to test scores is solely based on an artsy, unchallenging approach to education and NOT based on OTHER actual research and data, which it can be.)

“Rhee is convinced that the answer to the U.S.’s education catastrophe is talent, in the form of outstanding teachers and principals.”

The ability to improve test scores is clearly not the only sign of a good teacher. But it is a relatively objective measure in an industry with precious few.

I’d like to know the reporter’s analysis of these tests’ “objectivity”.

The article then goes on to other controversial subjects like tenure, (which I will blog about later) etc. It’s really worth reading and then mentally-exploding over, as I have in this post.

*I know this may be blasphemous to many, but I am not totally against the idea of “getting rid of weak teachers”. However the definition of “weak” is often too subjective – including when “objective” data is used for witch hunts. As long as education is driven by sweeping ideological shifts, teachers deserve some kind of security in their decision-making. But they also deserve better training.

*****

In the interest of upholding research and such, here are articles that have influenced my thinking in this post:

“Meeting the Needs of English Language Learners“
-by David Freeman and Yvonne Freeman

“English Learners Reading English: What We Know, What We Need to Know“
-by Suzanne F. Peregoy and Owen F. Peregoy (Theory Into Practice, Autumn 2000)

“Necessary and Irreconcilable Differences: Paradigms within the Field of Reading“
-by Sharon Ruth Gill (Language Arts, Vol. 82, No. 3, January 2005)

“Focus On Research: Talking the Talk and Walking the Walk: Researching Oral Language in the Classroom“
- by Karen Gallas, et al (Lanuage Arts, Vol. 73, December 1996)

“Teacher-Researchers Study the Process of Synthesizing in Six Primary Classrooms“
-by Stephanie Harvey, et al (Lanuage Arts, Vol. 73, December 1996)

“Barriers to Meaningful Instruction for English Learners”
-by Lois M Meyer (Theory Into Practice, Vol. 39, Number 4, Autumn 2000)

“Who Is Given Tests in What Language by Whom, When, and Where? The Need for Probabilistic Views of Language in the Testing of English Language Learners”
-by Guillermo Solano-Flores (Educational Researcher, Vol. 37, No.4, pp. 189-199)

“Preparing Mainstream Teachers for English-Language Learners: Is Being a Good Teacher Good Enough?”
-by Ester J. de Jong and Candace A. Harper ( Teacher Education Quarterly, Mar. 2005)

And too many articles by Lilly Wong Fillmore to list

Today my class had a great moment talking about the elections. Developing specific time for learning and experimenting with oral language is so key for ELLs and today I wanted them to discuss and develop questions for the presidential candidates. We have been talking about the elections and, as a project, they are polling other classes during lunch with a few questions we will later put in tables and bar graphs, etc.

Anyway, I gave them some sentence starters such as “do you think…” and “what will you do about…” and “why…” we came up with a few together, and it gave me a sense that there has been some real conversations during their polling. For example, here are some of their questions (the way they worded them):

Senator McCain, why don’t you like Obama?
… what will you do about the environment?
… will people from other countries have to leave if you are president?
… why do you want to be President?

Why do some people not like Obama because he is brown?
Why do some people care about the color (of Obama’s skin)?
Why do people have to vote for President?

Senator Obama, what will you do if the people vote for a tie?
… what will you do about the environment?
… do you like to ride bicycles?
… who will you vote for?
… why do you want more war?
… where are you from?

And then, as they were finishing writing down their own questions that we will later post on a “town hall wall”, some kids started raising their hands and asking each other questions saying, “I would like to ask Jennifer, who do you want to vote for AND WHY?” I put the last but in caps because I was really impressed that 1. They thought to ask a two-part question and 2. They seemed genuinely interested in the answer.

Remember, some of these students have a lot of difficulty getting their thoughts formed in English and using auxiliary verbs like “do” can be tricky. Only one student said she liked McCain and at first it was because she felt Obama was too “brown and gross”. The kids quickly started saying “the color shouldn’t care” and asking each other if they “care about the color”. This allowed me to teach them the phrase “shouldn’t matter” and “skin color”.

I was really pleased how they got into it.

Finally, one student started to ask kids who they would vote for and if it mattered who wins. Most kids were really adamant that they wanted Obama to win but one girl said it didn’t matter because nothing would really change from how they have been. Pretty heavy cynicism from an 8-year-old!

“Eight-year-old children have a radically different learning strategy from twelve-year-olds and adults. Eight-year-olds learn primarily from positive feedback (‘Well done!’), whereas negative feedback (‘Got it wrong this time’) scarcely causes any alarm bells to ring.”

Learning From Mistakes Only Works After Age 12, Study Suggests.

I just knew I should be using positive reinforcement more! Argh!

What’s funny (or sad), is that plenty of people don’t learn from mistakes after age 12 either!!

My mentor recommended giving more jobs and encouraging more independence among the students as a way of gaining greater control. So, I implemented a Homework Monitor who has to check and see if everyone at their table (they sit in groups of 4 and 5) have done their homework. Then, I come and check who did it all and they get a check on a chart on their desk. It worked remarkably smoothly this morning.

One new detail to the Table Monitor job did not work so well. I told them it was now also their job to keep everyone working either in silence or using their library voices. This did not seem to help much. Maybe tomorrow.