Active Learning

So … a weird thing happened. My Talkwalker alert pointed me to an online article that described me, along with Michelle Rhee’s StudentsFirst, as a supporter of the Common Core State Standards. Well, knock me over with a feather. I’m pretty sure StudentsFirst and I have very little in common, and I’m pretty sure the blog post they quote from — and the quote itself — show me advocating for deep learning (which is technically what CCSS is going for) and pointing out that CCSS has flaws.

So do I support CCSS? I certainly understand why its architects articulated what they did, and I recognize a lot of their goals as being similar to those we had as independent schoolteachers in the 1990s. Do I see flaws? Yes. I see flaws. Do I worry that this is the just-right solution for every American kid? You bet. I am unconvinced that the troubles facing schoolchildren in Detroit or Flint will likely be solved by telling them they suddenly need to read a year better than they currently do. I’m not certain that adding Euclid or Winston Churchill or readings about insulation R-ratings is going to solve what’s holding those kids back.

Struggling kids don’t achieve if you merely move the goal post further away. I stink at basketball. Will I improve if you raise the net? Doubtful. More likely, I’ll give up on the sport.

How did I feel that CCSS went unfunded in the budget passed by the Michigan legislature and signed by its governor? Annoyed. Was I despondent because CCSS wasn’t supported? No. More, I’m kinda ticked off that Michigan teachers and students are now in a kind of limbo. Should my teacher colleagues be spending their summer prepping their kids for Common Core or for a reverting to MEAP? If they make the wrong decision, the consequences could be dire. And, of course, there’s a time provision built into the budget measure — teachers could choose to abandon CCSS prep only to find, come October, that it’s game on again. Stock up on neck braces folks. It’s cloudy with a chance of whiplash.

There are further consequences of the current Michigan budget. If not funding CCSS translates into non-implementation of CCSS (and it is murky whether we’re supposed to keep implementing if there’s no money; after all, states adopted CCSS, but it’s up to districts to upgrade their equipment on their own dime), then we potentially auto-revert to having to follow the more draconian NCLB measures. Those inflexible guidelines could mean the decimation of public educators — and possibly public education — in my state.

And it bothers me that we’re playing games instead of really thinking of a 360-degree wraparound for improving education and pulling children out of poverty. (Our Republican governor, it must be said by this liberal writer, is investing in early childhood interventions, which is one of those wraparound pieces of the puzzle, even as he was convening secret meetings to figure out how to educate students on a shoestring, which, by definition, isn’t wraparoundian. Or democratic.)

I don’t like districts being forced into finding money they don’t have so they can upgrade computer equipment for testing. I don’t like standardized tests much at all and don’t feel they tell competent teachers much that they didn’t already know. I don’t like how standardized testing takes time away from learning, focuses instruction only on testable bits, and turns student achievement from a diagnostic temperature reading (so we can allocate more resources to the kids who need them most) into a teacher witch hunt. I don’t like new tests that are intentionally designed to have low scores so everybody feels bad and villifies teachers. I don’t like that politics, money, and privatization are crowding out conversations about holistic child development, socioemotional growth, and academic achievement. I don’t like that education is a battlefield and not a garden right now. Nobody feels safe in a battlefield, and some teachers feel like they’re in an endless loop of the Battle of Bastogne episode of Band of Brothers. And I don’t like being called a supporter of CCSS when means being seen as a supporter of all its peripheral nonsense.

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I want teachers to feel emboldened and empowered by what CCSS intended to give them, but that’s so hard for them when they could lose their job (house, car, custody) if the accompanying test scores tank (and they always tank when we have a new test).

Teachers are the “last half-milers” of political decisions. They have to figure out how to translate these confusing messages into day-to-day actions in their classrooms. I want tomorrow’s citizens to be wonderfully well-informed, to be able to solve problems, think civically, appreciate difference, be civic-minded, and have jobs that supercede minimum wage. I want to help kids and teachers get there. I want to use my privileged and lucky position in academia to help create information-rich, satisfaction-rich learning environments. So that’s the horse I’m going to back. I see how pieces of CCSS can help us do that, and those are the pieces I support. (For example, when I saw this conversation in Education Week about teachers finding joy in deep learning activities like Socratic Seminars, and they’re doing that because they were spurred on by CCSS, great! Socratic Seminars are wonderful, and if CCSS was the inspiration, I’ll say thanks.) I see where the pitfalls of CCSS can be, and I try to make educators and citizens aware of them so we don’t fall on our faces. Yeah, call me a cherry-picker if you like. But all of this is hard when all that people seem to value is the test … and when the test is flawed, there can be no winners anyway.

So please don’t call me a supporter of CCSS or even a critic. Call me a supporter of robust, active learning.

Education Week is reporting on the network and test administration issues experienced by schools and districts who piloted digital assessments for the Common Core State Standards. Over a million students have engaged in the pilot testing.

The good?

…many educators say test-driving the assessments helped them better understand how they need to prepare for the time when all their students in grades 3-12 take the new tests, starting in 2014-15 …

“I was pleasantly surprised that these third graders were able to maneuver from problem to problem much better than I had anticipated,” says Kent Henson, the assistant superintendent for instructional services for the West Ottawa public schools in Holland, Mich. About 240 students in the 7,200-student district took tests in the Smarter Balanced pilot this spring.

Henson says: “They had to drag and drop, to highlight, and they had to compare and contrast. They had to write a letter. They had to watch a video, which meant putting on headphones. They had to fill in boxes on a table. There were a lot of different mouse-manipulation tasks.”

While the statement above identifies the technology skills students needed to employ, it does not measure the accuracy with which they completed the tasks. I remain concerned about deep reading being feasible on digital screens. The not so good:
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Some students who were comfortable with the technology itself struggled with the actual content of the test, according to some district officials.

“They loved doing math on the computer, and they are very quick with the mouse,” Loughrey, the assessment manager in Albuquerque, says. But after observing a 6th grade class taking the test, he asked the teacher about how she felt her students handled the material.

“She said that while they may say that they did fine, her sense was that a lot of them struggled with the material,” he says. “The problems were rigorous. They pushed the kids.”

And the worrisome:

About 1,300 students in the 90,000-student Albuquerque public schools in New Mexico took part in a PARCC prototype pilot last year. Out of the 20 schools in the pilot, 14 had connectivity problems, says Michael Loughrey, the district’s assessment manager. In a high school class of 34 students taking the test in a computer lab, almost all the participants kept getting bounced off the system one after the other…

All in all, the article, “Schools Test Drive Common Core,” is a good read and a cautionary tale about the complexities — human, informational, and technological — that are wrapped into this shift.