Back to School

Writing in his TIME Magazine column, Andy “Eduwonk” Rotherham offers up a largely exculpatory take on Pineapplegate.  The media jumped all over a bowdlerized version of the test passage, he notes.  New York state officials should have been clearer in explaining that nothing makes its way onto standardized tests by accident.  And in the end, Andy writes, what is needed is a more substantive conversation rather than a firestorm over testing.

Very well, lets have one.

In the unlikely event you haven’t heard, a minor media frenzy was ignited a few weeks back when the New York Daily News got hold of a surreal fable, loosely modeled on the familiar tale of the Tortoise and the Hare, which appeared on the just-administered New York State 8th grade reading test.  In the test passage, a talking pineapple challenges a hare to a foot race in front of a group of woodland creatures, loses the race (the pineapples lack of legs proving to be a fatal competitive disadvantage)  and gets eaten by the other animals.

Rotherham points out that the passage picked up by the paper was not the actual test passage, but a second-hand version plucked from an anti-testing website. “The passage the paper ran was so poorly written that it would indeed have been inexcusable,” he wrote.  Perhaps, but the correct passage wasn’t exactly a model of clarity and coherence either.  Indeed, the fable’s author mocked the decision by the testing company, Pearson, to create multiple choice questions about his story on a state test.  “As far as I am able to ascertain from my own work, there isn’t necessarily a specifically assigned meaning in anything,” Daniel Pinkwater told the Wall Street Journal. “That really is why it’s hilarious on the face of it that anybody creating a test would use a passage of mine, because I’m an advocate of nonsense. I believe that things mean things but they don’t have assigned meanings.”

Ultimately the real version of the test passage was released by the state to quiet the controversy.  But it did little to reverse the impression that this was a questionable measure of students’ ability.  Rotherham’s big “get” in Time is a memo from Pearson to New York State officials detailing the question’s review process as well as its use on other states’ tests as far back as 2004.  The message:  nothing to see here, folks.  Show’s over.  Go on back to your schools, sharpen those No. 2 pencils and get ready for more tests.

“Standardized tests are neither as bad as their critics make them out to be nor as good as they should be,” Rotherham concludes.  Perhaps, but they’re bad enough.  The principal problem, which Pineapplegate underscores vividly, is that we continue to insist on drawing conclusions about students’ reading ability based on a random, incoherent collection of largely meaningless passages concocted by test-makers utterly disconnected from what kids actually learn in school all day.  This actively incentivizes a form of educational malpractice, since reading tests reinforce the mistaken notion that reading comprehension is a transferable skill and that the subject matter is disconnected from comprehension.   But we know this is not the case as E.D. Hirsch and Dan Willingham have pointed out time and again, and as we have discussed on this blog repeatedly.

So this is not a simple case of an uproar based on bad information and sloppy damage control.  What Rotherham misses in a somewhat strident defense of standardized tests and testing is that we are suffering generally from a case of test fatigue. The entire edifice of reform rests on testing, and while the principle of accountability remains sound, the effects of testing on schools has proven to be deleterious, to be charitable. Thus the conditions were ripe for people to overreact to perceived absurdity in the tests. And that’s exactly what happened here.

Was the story was blown out of proportion by some people playing fast and loose with the facts?  Perhaps.  But the facts, once they became clear, were more than bad enough.

“Discernment and the Public Sphere”

In her new book, Republic of Noise, long-time Core Knowledge Blog contributor Diana Senechal confronts a culture that has come to depend on instant updates and communication at the expense of solitude.  “Schools emphasize rapid group work and fragmented activity, not the thoughtful study of complex subjects,” she writes.  “The Internet offers contact with others throughout the day and night; we lose the ability to be apart, even in our minds. Yet solitude does not vanish; it is part of every life. It plays an essential role in literature, education, democracy, relationships, and matters of conscience,” says Senechal.

At age ten, in 1974, I traveled with my family to the Netherlands, where we were to spend a year (my parents were on sabbatical). We crossed the Atlantic on the Mikhail Lermontov, a Soviet cruise ship that had recently been converted from an ocean liner. It was my first time at sea, and the first moments were thrilling: pulling out of the New York harbor at sunset, with passengers cheering from the deck and others waving from land; watching the Statue of Liberty recede into the distance; feeling the rumble of the motor; and soon seeing nothing but waves upon waves.

I shared a cabin with my sister, Jenna. We had the run of the ship; no one worried about our whereabouts. There was a swimming pool, a lounge and dining area with a stage, an exercise room, a slot machine room, a gift shop with balalaikas and Matryoshka dolls, and a few canteens and bars. At night, the deck was aglow with lights; by day we could sometimes see dolphins leaping. At sunset, we would watch the changing colors over the sea and taste the salty chill; even the sounds grew darker as night fell.

On the second day of our voyage, when we were out on the deck, my parents struck up a conversation with the parents of a British family. There were five children: Anne, seventeen years old, John (fifteen), Ginny (ten), Diana (three), and David (eighteen months). Ginny and I became friends for the duration of the trip. We took lessons in Russian language, song, and dance—the crew kept us quite busy—and spent the rest of the time romping around. But I jump ahead.

While our parents were talking, I saw Anne walk away to the edge of the deck and lean over the railing. No one said anything about it for a few minutes, but then she started to lean farther. Her mother called her, and she ambled back in their direction, with a vague look in her eyes. As the trip progressed, I saw more hints of something unusual and precarious. She would walk away in the middle of conversation or give befuddling answers to questions. During the dance lessons, she would sometimes go in the wrong direction or leave the stage and wander around the hall. But while aloof and of her own world, she was never unkind. There was something captivating about her ways, so different from other people’s.

As our Russian song and dance performance approached, we all chose partners for the show. Anne was left without a partner; either she was the odd one out, or someone finagled her way out of dancing with her. Her distress was visible; she would walk around repeating mournfully, “Who will be my partner? Who will be my partner?” Ginny and I were already dance partners and didn’t want to change that, but we did want to find a partner for Anne. So we knocked on the cabin door of a woman in our class. The door opened; she stood tall before us, her long hair in a hurried bun with some wisps falling out. We explained the situation to her and asked whether she would be Anne’s partner, just for this occasion.

This woman (I’ll call her Mrs. Barrow) told us flat out that she wouldn’t do it and there was no point in pushing her. We stood in the hallway, pleading, telling her how much it would mean and how hard it was for Anne not to have a partner, but none of this moved her. “This is a free country,” she said, “and I have to consider my reputation.” In fact, we were on Soviet territory, by maritime law, so it may not have been the country she thought it was. I doubt, moreover, that her reputation would have been harmed if she had agreed to dance with Anne. Dancing with someone of the same sex was not the issue; most of the people in the dance class were female. Nor would anyone have thought badly of her for dancing with Anne in particular. Her response says something about how she perceived her country and her life. Americans often use the expression “free country”; it rolls off the tongue like a chocolate ball. Sometimes it has specific meaning; at other times it is a way of saying no. At other times it is a way of explaining things that would be difficult to explain otherwise.

In the end, it worked out somehow; Anne ended up with several dance partners (including Mrs. Barrow, if I am not mistaken). The performance was a great occasion; I had never imagined, before the trip, that I would one day be performing Russian dances and singing Russian songs out at sea. The crew gave us ample stage time; in addition to the singing and dancing, we had a talent show and costume contest. Anne, Ginny, Diana, Jenna, and I dressed up as Matryoshka dolls, with kerchiefs and rouged cheeks. Ginny’s father dressed up as a someone who had gotten seasick; he carried a giant blue pill, provoking a roar of laughter from the adults, who had been seasick for a great deal of the voyage. We sang “Kalinka” and another Russian song; for the talent show, we got to take turns at the microphone. Anne sang some songs and rattled off jokes, charming the audience.

I have often thought back on this experience—not with indignation at the woman who said no (she was within her rights, as she said), but with sorrow, bemusement, gratitude for the experience, and thoughts of the English family and how they are now. I recently made contact with Ginny, through the Internet; both parents have passed away, and Anne is doing well, living in sheltered accommodation and enjoying life. Ginny works in education management, as an advocate for arts education. The Mikhail Lermontov no longer crosses the seas; it hit rocks and sank near New Zealand in 1986.

If Mrs. Barrow was at fault, it is because she lacked discernment. For whatever reason, she mistook us and the very ground on which she stood. She responded to us as one might respond to aggressive political canvassers or missionaries, not as one might to two girls trying to help someone. While relying on the concept (or cliché) of a “free country,” she did not consider what that meant or where she actually was.

Of course, as the details of this event grow fuzzy over time, its symbolic significance increases—so it is possible that I would see it quite differently if I could replay it exactly. Yet, even with the distortions of memory, there is something monumental about that moment in the hallway of the Soviet ship, far out at sea. It ended happily, but there was a speck of tragedy in it all the same.

Discernment is the practice of distinguishing two similar things or recognizing something for what it is. It is not easily taught, nor does it necessarily transfer from one area to another. Someone with good character judgment may be unable to tell a good poem from a bad one, or a solid historical analysis from a shaky one. Someone with excellent business sense may fall for a medical fad or political ploy. Nonetheless, if one learns to make fine distinctions in one field, one becomes alert to the possibility of such distinctions elsewhere. Through ear-training of the mind, one may learn to guard against hasty judgments and false generalizations. In discernment there is also an element of courage: the willingness to look at something or someone, even when the thing or person causes discomfort. To look someone in the eye is to let down one’s own guard, to let one’s own flaws show.

To the extent that it can be taught, discernment relies on a degree of common ground. For example, students are much more likely to recognize the allegory in George Orwell’s Animal Farm if they have studied something of Russian and Soviet history; they are in a better position to distinguish Johann Sebastian Bach from Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach if they have studied the works of both. Common knowledge provides a common language; when people are reasonably confident that they are talking about the same thing, they understand or can at least ask for clarification of each other’s terms. At the same time, an individual’s particular knowledge can light up the discussion; one student may have read Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language”; another might have advanced knowledge of harmony and counterpoint.

Thus, to teach discernment, schools should foster both common knowledge and individual interests. Finding the right proportion is a tricky matter. Many Americans are wary of a common curriculum, which they equate with homogeneous, “cookie-cutter” instruction and the imposition of a set of views. But diverse views and interests can thrive only when people have something to differ over.

In his 1902 essay “How the School Strengthens the Individuality of the Pupils,” educator William Torrey Harris wrote that recitations foster and develop individual thought. “All of the pupils,” he wrote, “concentrate their attention on the statements of the pupil who is reciting and on the cross-questioning of the teacher. It is a dialectic which calls for alertness and versatility of mind in the pupils who take part in it.” In an earlier essay, he wrote that “the pupil can, through the properly conducted recitation, seize the subject of his lesson through many minds. He learns to add to his power of insight the various insights of his fellow pupils.” The very idea of a recitation would be derided today as a form of “rote learning,” but his description makes it seem anything but rote. Harris assumed optimistically—perhaps too optimistically—that the students would all be concentrating intensely and trying to refine their understanding. Without such focus and desire, a recitation could easily turn dreary. But that is the case no matter what the approach. In a recitation, class discussion, or other format, the principle remains the same: through coming together over a subject, through straining to understand it better, students may find their individuality, even eccentricity.

It is not that American public schools lack any sort of common study; we have textbooks and the usually vague specifications of state standards. These half-measures have grown out of a longstanding resistance to common curriculum, yet they have come to define curriculum. Except where such textbooks and standards are of high quality, this bears little resemblance to a curriculum as it should be. A curriculum is an outline and sequence of the works, concepts, and skills that students should learn, along with a rationale. It should be flexible enough to allow the mind to play, yet specific enough to provide rich working material. Whether it exists at the school, district, or state level, it should do justice to the word. From there, one can determine the proper balance of common and individual learning.

Diana Senechal is the 2011 winner of the Hiett Prize in the Humanities, awarded by the Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture. This excerpt appears in her new book, Republic of Noise: The Loss of Solitude in Schools and Culture, published by Rowman & Littlefield Education.

Seven school buses pulled into the Botzum railroad station in the Cuyahoga Valley National Park on Thursday morning.

Then 229 first-, second- and third-graders from Romig Road Community School climbed aboard the Cuyahoga Valley Scenic Railroad train to learn about animals that live in the park.

Once the train pulled out of the station, ranger Kerry Muhl talked about the park, told American Indian stories with talking animals and passed around shells, a deer pelt, antlers and replica skulls of a deer and a coyote.

Romig Roads fourth-, fifth- and sixth-graders will ride the train today and learn about transportation.

Grant money from the Sisler McFawn Foundation paid for the train tickets (about $3,000) and, more importantly, the bus transportation.

The Cuyahoga Valley Scenic Railroad has received money from Sisler McFawn and the Kenneth Calhoun Charitable Trust to host field trips for inner-city schools and expects 2,400 riders this spring, mostly from Akron Public Schools. Romig Road is the only Akron charter school to receive grant money this spring, though other charter schools from Cleveland have participated in recent years.

Thats how weve been able to reach out to these schools and offer them a field trip that they wouldnt normally have the budget to do, said Kelly Steele-Moore, the railroads marketing director.

The grant money has enabled many more schools to participate this year, Muhl said.

The schools are so strapped for money, Muhl said. Last year, we were really low as far as our attendance.

Paying for the buses is key.

In talking with teachers and principals, there are schools that can actually pay for field trips; its the buses that always get them, Muhl said. So as a result, if theres a grant that can actually pay for the busing, too, they jump on it.

The first train car of third-graders Muhl addressed hushed up quickly when she promised to tell a story.

You just saw that beaver marsh that is over there and you know, its a really beautiful place, but it didnt start out so beautiful and Im going to tell you the story of the beaver marsh, Muhl said.

She explained that in the 1960s and 1970s, the marsh was a junkyard filled with old cars, appliances and tires. But as the land was becoming a national park, people got to work clearing out the trash.

All of a sudden, beaver came back into this area, after being extinct in this area since the 1830s, she said. They came back and they dammed up a portion of what was called the Ohio & Erie Canal and it made that beautiful beaver marsh.

She said thats an example of what makes the Cuyahoga Valley National Park special.

So when you think about things around maybe where you are or in other places around the country that may not look so nice, you always have a chance to clean things up, she said.

She told an American Indian story about how a talkative turtle tried to hitch a ride south for the winter with migrating birds and got dropped on his back when he couldnt keep his mouth shut. Thats why he sleeps in the mud at the bottom of the pond each winter and has a shell that looks cracked.

Zakiya Littlepage, 8, liked that story.

Ive got a pet turtle, she said.

She also enjoyed documenting her first trip on a train, which journeyed as far north as the Boston Mills station by the ski resort before returning.

I took pictures of the trees and stuff and I took pictures of houses, she said. I just love riding around.

Latarien Davis, who is 9, was thrilled to see a creature that wasnt on the agenda gliding along the surface of a pond beside the tracks.

I saw a snake swimming, he said.

Damariontae Brightwell, also 8, enjoyed hearing about the beaver marsh.

When asked what he had learned on the train, he replied with a comedians sense of timing: That animals could talk.

That got a big belly laugh from Jerome Love, who accompanied his 9-year-old nephew Malachi Watson on the trip.

Im like him, Love said. I didnt know turtles could talk, either.

Love was one of 68 adults who came on the trip, which thrilled Janice Ickes, the Romig Road Community School special education coach who organized the trip. She said she hoped the experience would lead to more opportunities for parents and children to spend time together learning.

We had so many more adults and even extended family members who wanted to come, that we had to hire two more buses at the last minute, she said. This is an experience that will make a memory to last a lifetime.

My colleague Jim Mitchell wrote this Opinion blog entry last week about the Lancaster school district’s partnership with Texas Instruments and Educate Texas to create a district-wide focus on science, technology, engineering and math. Jim does a good job explaining the STEM initiative in his entry and in this recent editorial from the Morning News.

What interests me about this experiment is that if it can be done in Lancaster it can be done anywhere. The demographics of the Lancaster district reflect the changing demographics of Texas: the kids are largely minority and low-income. If the effort to bake more science and math into the curriculum succeeds there, it shows that spreading a STEM focus across a district can happen in the many other districts that reflect Lancaster’s student demographics.

As I blogged here recently, the Hidalgo and San Juan/Pharr/Alamo districts already have introduced something similar in the Rio Grande Valley. So, Lancaster isn’t the first to experiment with this concept. But Lancaster’s attempt to rigorously focus on the subjects that are increasingly linked to good-paying jobs bears watching. If the model works there, it offers a way forward for many other districts.

Note:  This piece also appears on the Washington Posts education blog, The Answer Sheet.

For several years, I taught 5^th grade in the lowest performing elementary school in New York City’s lowest performing school district.   Four out of five of my students scored below grade level—often far below grade level—on their state tests.  You could easily look at the test scores of my students and conclude, “these kids can’t read.”

In fact, I never had a single student who couldn’t “read.”  Put a piece of text in front of them and they could all (some with greater fluency than others certainly) verbalize the words in front of them, or “decode.”  What they couldn’t seem to do consistently and competently was to discuss or answer questions about their reading.  They “read it” but they didn’t “get it.”  They could decode, but not comprehend.

Separating decoding and comprehension is critical to any discussion of reading.  Decoding is a skill that canand mustbe taught in the early grades.  Students taught with an explicit, systematic phonics approach in the early grades should be able to master all the decoding skills they need.  Decoding is a prerequisite skill but it’s not reading.   We’re readers only when we understand the words we decode, and comprehension is not a skill, despite our persistent attempts to teach and test it like one.  “We tend to teach comprehension as a series of ‘reading strategies’ that can be practiced and mastered. Unfortunately it really doesn’t work that way,” University of Virginia cognitive scientist Dan Willingham has written on this blog. “The mainspring of comprehension is prior knowledge—the stuff readers already know that enables them to create understanding as they read.”

This week, the Core Knowledge Foundation, where I work, announced the results of an intriguing pilot program that sees reading for the complicated, cumulative process it is.  Children in ten New York City schools learned to read with the Core Knowledge Language Arts (CKLA) program, a comprehensive literacy curriculum emphasizing phonics, coherent content knowledge, and oral and written language development across a wide range of subjects.  CKLA has two distinct instructional components: a “skills” strand that teaches decoding; and a “listening and learning” strand that builds background knowledge and vocabulary, primarily through readalouds. Students in ten demographically similar control schools received more traditional reading instruction—the kind of balanced literacy, content-agnostic, comprehension skills-and-strategies approach I was trained to use with my South Bronx 5^th graders.  The CKLA students from kindergarten to 2^nd grade than the control group in nearly all measures.

Gratifying stuff, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves.  The primary takeaway from the research, tailored for our 140-character age, was “new study finds nonfiction curriculum enhances reading comprehension skills.”  That’s part of the story.  Yes, there is more nonfiction in Core Knowledge than is typically taught in the early grades, but fiction and poetry are equally represented.  If there’s a secret sauce in the curriculum, it probably has as much to do with its emphasis on building background knowledge orally.

Oral language precedes written language; we learn to speak and listen long before we can read and write.  Freed from the cognitive work of decoding, children can more readily understand a story with sophisticated vocabulary when it’s read out loud than if they had read it on their own. This oral language advantage persists for years. A child’s ability to take in information through reading typically doesn’t catch up to his or her ability to do so by listening until the 8^th grade.  Teachers generally understand this, which is why class readalouds are a staple of elementary school classrooms.  But this oral comprehension advantage can also be used to build background knowledge in a systematic, coherent way over many years. Readalouds are more than just an opportunity for a class to enjoy a great story together.  Content-rich, nonfiction readalouds, often in narrative form, are a central feature of the CKLA program and a powerful way to build a child’s store of vocabulary and knowledgecritical components of mature reading comprehension.

This is critical for children from low-income homes and especially those where English is a second language.  They usually come to school on Day One with smaller vocabularies and less background knowledge of the world than more advantaged kids, who tend to hear more rich and complex language at home and enjoy more opportunities for language and knowledge enrichment.  If this gap remains unaddressed in school, then demographics becomes, if not destiny, then a self-fulfilling prophecy.  If we wait until a child can read independently to build background knowledge and vocabulary, we are almost certainly cementing their knowledge and language deficits permanently in place.  If you’re not building background knowledge, you’re not teaching reading.

Finally, another important issue to keep in mind is time.  The greatest casualty of the education reform era has been patience.  We expect two to three years language growth per year to catch disadvantaged children up.  The inevitable result is quick fixes that overpromise and underdeliver.  Today’s miracle becomes tomorrow’s scandal with depressing regularity.  To understand the nature of language growth and the critical role of knowledge to is to understand that there can be no quick fixes.  The only way to raise achievement and to narrow gaps is through a slow and steady investment in the vocabulary and knowledge that are the prerequisites of language growth and competence.

This patient, coherent investment in background knowledge—so critical to success yet so often missing from language arts instruction—needs to be nurtured and grown for the entirety of a child’s time in school.  It can work.  It is working.  The New York City pilot study is an encouraging first step.  We’re getting kids in the game.  With care and patience, we can keep them there.

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