One of the common debates in education theory circles today concerns the kind of environment that teachers should be attempting to foster in classrooms. Liberal educators bemoan what they see as an increased focus on grades, class rankings, and other forms of competition. They allege that this competition reinforces learning for the wrong reasons and punishes the losing students without just cause. Typical of this argument, a recent article from one such liberal education theorist suggests that competition among students in schools and classrooms--for better grades, teacher praise, honor roll, or any other similar recognition--is a destructive force in our schools today. The author of the article, Dr. Marshall, writes in his tagline, "competition increases performance, but collaboration increases learning."

While I certainly appreciate Dr. Marshall's sincere interest in the emotional and developmental well-being of all children, I see two problems with Dr. Marshall's line or argument from the perspective of my 8th grade students in Saint Louis. The first problem is that he has set up a straw-man argument. There are very few classrooms in America today where teachers set out to create perfect competition for every grade, every bit of praise, every recognition. To the degree that giving children grades shows them how they are progressing and to the degree that this is an important educational process, I would suggest that the purpose of these grades is to get a student to compete against themself and not against others.

In fact, that there are really two kinds of praise and recognition that students should be receiving, either in grade form or in teacher-verbalized form: praise for improvement over past performance, and praise for objectively good actions. The kind of praise and recognition that many liberal educators decry is one that doesn't actually happen much in school: that which tells one student that they are doing a great job (i.e. they are the "winner" or the "best" in a classroom), but which indirectly tells other students that they are not the best or not winners. In other words, Marshall is right on that teachers should not be fostering competition where one student wins and the others lose, but he might be just as perceptive to argue that there should be less corporal punishment in schools too.

My second complaint with the anti-competition in schools theme is that it misses out on one of the most important things we have learned about human nature in the past century: competition is a crucial way to increase the quality of outcomes in virtually every enterprise we see fit to undertake. Again, I'm not referring to the kind of competition that says one kid is the best and all the rest are worthless--I'm referring to the kind of competition where student should be seeking to better their own grades, do as well as possible on assignments and tests, and earn the respect and praise of their teachers and peers. I just don't see this as being incompatible with a collaborative environment; indeed, the teacher's job should be to create a classroom where students want to help each other succeed. Put another way, bell curves are bad, but grades are good.

When liberal educators suggest things like, "competition increases performance, but collaboration increases learning," they assume that there is some fundamental difference between performance and learning. I fail to recognize this distinction. I could create a classroom where every thing we do is done in small groups or as an entire class, and where we only go as fast as the lowest performing student will allow so as to avoid leaving anyone behind as a "loser". The students might love this since it would make my class less challenging and lower-pressured. But would it actually increase "learning" (and decrease "performance", as Marshall submits)? I don't see how that is possible. Much better would be to provide challenging curriculum to all the students, and reward students not just for their snapshot performance but for their effort and their personal growth. I'm pretty sure that this (challenging lessons, regular assessments, praise when a good job is done and stern encouragement when more effort is needed) is the way to icrease my students' abilities to think critically about the causes of the Revolutionary War and to explain why our treatment of women, blacks, and Native Americans was so unfair. If anyone can explain to me how this would be good for performance but bad for learning, I'd love to hear it.

Posted by Aaron Tang at 07:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

One of the biggest challenges I face in the classroom every day is the challenge of conflict resolution. At least ten times each day, one of my students will invariably do something to another student that the second student does not approve. Sometimes it's an inappropriate comment or a cruel insult, other times it's the stealing of a pencil or maybe some other practical joke that is not appreciated. Occasionally it's physical violence like a slap, a push, or the throwing of an object at someone.

If I wrote up every kid who did this and sent them down to the office, there would be no kids left in class -- and the office would be flooded and incapable of doing anything about it. So my job as a teacher is to stop any of these minor incidents from turning into a major argument or fight. Usually I'm able to do so (after much practice), but sometimes things escalate out of control. But through it all, I have one common question that I ask to my students who have had something bad done to them by another: do you want to do the right thing, or the easy thing?

The implication, of course, is that the easy thing for them to do would be to hit the person who hit them in return, throw something back at them, or get in a shouting match by insulting the other person's hairstyle or family background. On the other hand, the right thing would be to ignore the other person, concentrate on your work, and be the better person for it. It's character education, and it's extremely difficult to teach to an 8th grader unless you're teaching by example (which means I've taken on more than my fair share of insults without responding in kind). But it is one of the most important lessons I can try to teach the students, so I reinforce it every day with different allusions to historical events.

The problem is, it's awfully difficult to teach the students about doing the right thing over the easy thing when there are so many instances of adults doing the opposite themselves. Notwithstanding all of the things that go on in my school, take this story out of Oregon as an example. 25 schools in Oregon have taken the easy road over the right road, to the decided detriment of their students--more than 20,000 in total. These 25 schools have been identified by state tests as being in need of improvement since their students have not made adequate progress towards state proficiency goals. To help them reach those goals, the federal government--as part of the dollars-for-accountability bargain made by the No Child Left Behind Act--provides each school with additional Title I funding, approximately $200,000 per year in each school. This additional funding is supposed to be used on tutoring services for the students, teacher training, additional staffing, and other programs. All that the federal government asks in exchange is that the schools improve student achievement each year and notify parents how well they are doing towards those goals. If they fail to meet these goals for five years, the federal government does reserve the right to demand that the school be reconstructed with new staff to try and provide the kids with better opportunities.

But these 25 schools in Oregon (along with other schools across the country) have made the easy decision, not the right one. Rather than play by the rules, accept the money from the federal government, and work to improve student achievement, the schools have chosen to reject the extra money altogether so as to be able to avoid being put on a list of "failing schools". In other words, the schools have decided that the best way to get off of the failing schools list is not to teach their students better, but rather to turn down the money designed to help the students.

As adults, we try to tell our kids to do the right thing, even if it is hard. But what is a teacher to do in one of these schools when the school district itself has decided to do the easy thing and shortchange the kids instead? If my students know one thing, they know when adults are being hypocrites. And in this case, hypocrisy is teaching thousands of Oregon students a very destructive lesson.

Posted by Aaron Tang at 06:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Next month, No Child Left Behind will enter into its sixth year as the federal government's chief K-12 education law. Amidst all of the debate, criticism, and occasional outright rancor over the law it may be useful to take a big picture look at the law, what it has and has not accomplished, and where best to go from here.

George Will, a leading conservative columnist offers an attempt at this big picture perspective in Sunday's Washington Post. The title of his article, "Getting Past 'No Child'" suggest his predictable position: the federal law is over-intrusive, cumbersome, and a negative impact on local and state governments who, if they could only rid themselves of that pesky federal government, would be well on their way to providing every child with an excellent quality education.

If conservative thinkers like Will and liberal education elites like Jonathon Kozol both oppose the law (for completely different reasons, of course), it begs the question: who exactly is in support of the law? And how is it that most observers in D.C. expect the law to be reauthorized as a matter of inevitability? Could this be yet another instance of inside-the-beltway obstinacy in the face of overwhelming public scrutiny, or might it be the case that House and Senate leaders are somehow exercising strong leadership in the face of public pressure?

The answer to the latter question is, of course, a matter of opinion that depends on whether you are for or against the law. But here is list and a rebuttal of common conservative criticisms, since those will be the most talked about ones in the coming week in light of Mr. Will's column.

Conservative criticisms of NCLB stem from the argument that the federal government should have never obtained a role in education policy in the first place. Will provides this standard thesis when he writes that federal involvement in education policy back in 1965 was wrong for three reasons: "First, most new ideas are dubious, so the federalization of policy increases the probability of continentwide mistakes. Second, education is susceptible to pedagogic fads and social engineering fantasies -- schools of education incubate them -- so it is prone to producing continental regrets. Third, America always is more likely to have a few wise state governments than a wise federal government."

The first problem with this argument is that they are similar arguments that were used 150 years ago to support states rights to allow slavery in the south, and just 50 years ago to fight back the progress of the Civil Rights Movement. The idea of African-Americans being equal to whites was once "dubious", and the notion of equal treatment and equal rights regardless of skin-color was also seen as a "social engineering fantasy". The state governments that Mr. Will holds to be so wise include the government of Arkansas, which in 1958, faced with federal pressure to integrate its schools, chose to shut down the entire school year for three high schools in Little Rock rather than let black kids join white kids in classrooms. More recently, it is the state governments (aided, I will admit, by a weakness in the federal law that needs to be fixed during re-authorization) that have chosen to lower the bar for students to be judged as "proficient" rather than keep high standards and raise up the kids to meet them.

Secondly, Will seems to be conflating the "federalization of policy" with the "federalization of schools". No one, not even the most ardent supporters of NCLB, wants schools to follow lock-step federally-imposed schedules from day one, minute one of a school year. What NCLB supporters do want is for policy makers and educators in every state to have one goal in mind: increasing student achievement as much as possible. Insofar as inequality in education along state and local lines has forever been an American problem even before federal invovlement in education, I wonder what year Will would point to as the golden period in American education?

Lastly, Will seems to miss the point altogether. His main empricial argument against NCLB is that the federal law has allowed states to game the system by making "proficiency" a meaningless term through watered down tests, low cut scores, and other loop-holes. Ignoring the fact that he is putting the blame squarely at the feet of the very folks (states) that he suggests can do a better job than the feds, the solution here is not to let the states do even more to get out of accountability, but rather to shore up the weaknesses in the law in the first place.

Posted by Aaron Tang at 05:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

New York City's "Teacher Performance Unit" has gotten a lot of play in the past month among education reform news and blog circles. Part of the reason is that it is in New York City, where any innovation has the potential to affect 1.1 million students. Another part of the reason is that the Teacher Performance Unit--a group of five lawyers and a former prosecutor whose sole purpose is to help the district identify and remove chronically failing teachers--represents one of the nation's most public and aggresive approaches to getting rid of ineffective teachers in public school classrooms.

While it is predictable that groups like the Teachers Unions would be opposed to the policy since the unions' primary purpose is to protect the jobs of their members, some of the rhetoric that has been used to argue against the program has been straight-up surprising. Take for instance the comments made by Tom Carroll, president of the National Commission on Teaching and America's Future, a pro-union research and advocacy group based in DC. He criticized the New York City plan as "adversarial," and "not too constructive in terms of forward progress or improving schools."

Problem is, it's one thing to criticize an idea like the Teacher Performance Unit, it's another thing to offer up a better idea. If Mr. Carroll and the unions don't like the idea of a group of lawyers who research and document persistent incompetence and negligence on the part of a small fraction of the district's teaching staff, what would they prefer? Seems to me there are only two options:

Option A) - The unions and union defenders don't actually believe that there are any incompetent teachers (or teachers who simply don't care about their students) in the city's schools, or,
Option B) - They recognize that far more than 10 out of 88,000 teachers in the district need to be removed for reasons of incompetence each year (just as would be the case in any big company), but they envision a different kind of process to identify and remove those completely ineffectual teachers.

If anyone believes option A, they are either deluded or they don't have a particularly high regard for the importance of educating our children. Schools are just like any other business: some employees are exceptional, some do a solid job, and some are downright wrong for the job. But teaching is one of the few professions in America where you can have tremendous job security regardless of where you fall in the quality spectrum. There is little question to me that a fundamental part of the solution to improving education in America is to improve the quality of our teaching force, which means both getting rid of as many low-performers as possible AND rewarding, recruiting, and retaining as many high performers as possible.

If option B is what folks like Mr. Carroll are suggesting, I wonder what kind of approach they'd suggest to get rid of teachers like the one I wrote about two weeks ago. Should principals, lawyers, and bad teachers sit around a camp-fire, sing Kumbaya, and agree amicably to part ways? I don't know of a firing process that has ever been systematically non-adversarial. Firing people is, by nature, a difficult thing. But it has to be done, because sometimes the only way for a school to move forward and improve is to bring in people who are actually interested in helping kids learn.

Posted by Aaron Tang at 07:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

My school got back our beginning of the year diagnostic tests this week and the results were not pretty. On average, our 8th graders read at a 4.6 grade level, they do math at a 5.5 grade level, and their science and social studies is at a 4.8 grade level. In other words, at the young age of only 13 and 14, they are already about three grades behind the national average in core subjects. But the numbers get worse: turns out that almost half of this achievement gap has developed in just the past two years!!

What exactly does that mean? It means that when our kids were in 6th grade, there were only about one and a half grade levels behind the national average. Our diagnostic tests for the 6th grade show the average reading level at 3.7, math at 4.8 and social studies and science at 4.0. In other words, in the past two years, the kids in our school have improved their core subject knowledge by less than a full grade.

These numbers are mirrored by national assessments and even international comparisons. US 4th graders are actually fairly proficient in reading and math, usually achieving in the top half of developed countries. But by the time they hit 8th and 10th grade, our average acheivement staggers. A 2004 international assessment had American students falling to 24 out of 29 countries in math and science by age 15.

One can interpret this dramatic worsening of our students performance over the middle and early high school years in a couple different ways. The most obvious way would be to attribute the achievement lag to poor school structures and systems. Perhaps our elementary schools do a good job with our kids, but something about the way middle and high schools operate fails to keep their achievement on track. I would volunteer my own school here in St. Louis City as an example for how this might be the case--we simply do not have the skilled teachers or expert leadership needed to serve our children in the way they need. After all, should it really come as a surprise that our 8th graders are statistically no better at reading than our 7th graders when one of our 8th grade language arts teachers doesn't know half of the students' names yet and has absolutely no classroom management ability?

A second explanation for why our students might lose so much traction by age 15 is to say that maybe we have more kids still in school at age 15 than other countries. For instance, many countries have expansive vocational education programs for students who are not cut out for an academic track in high school - in which case perhaps our lower scores are simply because we try to get more kids to succeed. This may be true in part, but the evidence seems to discount the power of this explanation. Just as we are not highly ranked internationally for achievement, we are no longer highly ranked in terms of high school completion either. One study found that we rank 11th of all countries in the percentage of our 25-34 year olds who have a high school diploma.

For as much as the solution to these problems may be difficult to come up with, this much is clear: the numbers don't lie. We have a big hill in front of us. I'm willing to wager that most of the reason why we are falling further and further behind our international counterparts in achievement and school completion is not because our schools are worse, but rather because other countries schools are getting better over time. Economic growth and the benefits of globalization have paid dividends to children in other countries--and I think that, for the children at least, is a good thing. But it means what was once good enough for America's children may no longer be good enough today. And if that's the case, serious change is needed in our schools.

Posted by Aaron Tang at 09:29 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)