Readicide by Kelly Gallagher

Books written about research in education tend to follow the pattern of describing a major issue that everyone is already talking about, presenting some statistics that make the problem seem worse, and then describing ways that teachers can, in the classroom, deal with said problem.  Gallagher does not stray from this pattern in even the slightest way.

I like that he presents clear classroom practices that promise to increase students' frequency and quality of independent reading.  I also like that these methods are all things that used to be more common in public schools and that he explains why we have gotten away from them and why we need to go back to them.  I've been talking to teachers in my school about the research Gallagher presents, and will be trying many of his suggestions in the coming school year.

Unfortunately the world needs more than that.

I do not like that this book is written for an audience of only teachers.  If we believe that there are problems in education in America that we can effectively address, we have to also recognize that teachers are no longer the decision makers in education.  We failed to hold on to that power decades ago.  Gallagher briefly describes some ways of talking administrators into supporting more pro-reading policies on a classroom level, but no place does he adress those administrators directly.  We do not need more books written to help teachers manage the shitty reality of our profession.  We need books written to empower teachers to improve the state of education outside of the confines of our classrooms and help policy makers (who are not teachers and do not read education research) and politicians understand what they are doing that is hurting the learning of our children in this country.  Your governor, your local legislature, and probably even your school board does not understand why the policies that they mandate do nothing to improve anything, and this book will not help them in any way.

Preach it, cousin!

My awesome wife just found a blog called Adulting that gets at what I'm trying to get at, only better.  I am now a fan of the words that this person types!

In particular, I recommend this post, which sums up everything of substance that I have ever uttered in front of any student of mine. It is also the lesson that I may never fully learn myself, no matter how hard I try.  I'm getting there, though.

I Guess I'm Supposed to Do This Yearly

I'm now sitting on a small backlog of books that I'd like to review and some topics I'd like to discuss on this here blog thing.  Today will probably not be the day that I get to them.  I have many times resolved to pay more attention to my blog (not because I believe that I have many avid readers, but just as a journalling exercise) and it, like most New Year's resolutions, has never quite panned out.

This year I'm not resolving to blog more.  I'll work on that gradually and create better habits as I go.  With sustained effort and intrinsic motivation I'll make better writing practices a more constant part of my life.

Back to resolutions, this year I'm resolving to let the water run while I brush my teeth and leave the lights on when I leave the room.  When the resolution practice fails to encourage me to do these things, I will have kicked two bad habits and made the world a slightly more energy-efficient place to be.

Happy living, folks.

I Don't Like Back to Basics

As always, Philly's The Notebook is the greatest newspaper to report on public schools ever. Really ever.

Here is an article covering the recent transformation of West Philly High from a regular public to a Promise Academy. For those of you who don't know and did not follow the link, West Philly High has had a really rough decade. Over the past few years, however, teachers, students, administrators, and community members at the school began implementing a progressive, long-term-thinking pedagogy/school-culture that focussed on the real world needs of the students. They worked hard to build connections between the school and the surrounding city and mutual investment. This is tough to do and takes generations to realize. After their test scores stayed low for a year, they were taken over as a Promise Academy.

The school now runs on a rigid, back-to-basics curriculum that stresses nationally tested skills only and specifically does not work with higher order critical thinking skills. Proponents of the plan say that in future years, once the students start performing better, the school will begin to reintroduce critical thinking in the curriculum. I know this is bull pucky. You know this is bull pucky. They know this is bull pucky.

I used to work in a middle school that used a Back to Basics model (similar to the one used at the Promise Academies). After I moved to a different school (this time a high school), I had a student who had graduated from my old middle school with all kinds of academic honors. In the few years between the 8th and 11th grades, she had retained very few of these "basics" skills and had had to overcome huge gaps in her critical thinking ability. But, boy could she pick multiple-choice answers!

The amount of time it takes to teach a child to pick multiple-choice answers makes it nearly impossible to address critical thinking (please read "meaningful to the real world") skills in her education. Had the school backed off even a little, her scores would not have been as high. Within that logic set, teaching critical thinking equals failure.

Students who leave school with very few useful academic schools, and memories of their education being horribly boring and unrelated to their real lives outside of school will not pass on anything academic to their children. That means future generations to pass through West Philly High will come with the same lack of reading and math. To do well on tests, they will have to receive intensive training in picking multiple-choice answers. This will keep them from being able to get any time working on critical thinking questions. Anyone else see the pattern?

Education reform takes generations worth of work. It is hard to help people value education. Those involved don't see much progress within one cycle of students. The progress is realized when the children and grandchildren of the students who began the effort show up to school already loving books, already using basic logic, already playing a sport, and already producing independent art. The first step is building a trust and a love of education.

You can't do that by "taking over" schools and stuffing students into disconnected test-taking programs that do very little to help their chances of seeing any benefit from their schooling.

I want to believe that the goal of all people involved in education is to improve the state of all of our communities, but education reform efforts will clearly fail at this, and those implementing them must see this. What the hell is their goal, and why are they doing this to us?

Dr. Ackerman leaves Philly district and takes a lot of useful money with her.

Here's the article.

I don't like to think about how long it will take me to earn $905K teaching in the Philly district. If Ackerman cared so much about the students she'd agree to sever her contract w/out legal action so we don't have to pay her for work she didn't do. Also I'm not into the "at least she'd gone" argument. We don't know who will be chosen to replace her. Philly's track record isn't great in that department.

Further Reporting on Standardized Tests and Cheating Rates

The New York Times published an article in reference to the article to which I made reference a few posts ago.

I am interested in seeing where this is headed. The pressure for schools to demonstrate continually higher scores on standardized tests from year to year from their students his done nothing but increase since NCLB became the law of the land. Yes, I agree that schools in general and teachers in particular should neither fix statistics, nor help their students cheat. Yes, I agree that accountability to the public helps to ensure a higher quality of service from a school. I just think that we are going about this the wrong way. In Pennsylvania the state standardized tests are created by a private company that is in no way held accountable to the public (yeah, yeah, I know the state government could not renew their contract but that does not happen in practice and they have a de facto monopoly anyway).

The tests do not necessarily reflect anything that is actually taught in any classroom in the state. They do not report on the amount of information learned by individual students as they progress (scores for each grade are compared to scores from the same grade from previos years, not the same students as they advance). The PA state standardized tests do not assess what their creators say they assess and public policy creates situations where cheating is easy, easy to get away with, and very beneficial. Going after "these teachers" who cheat will not fix this problem as they will simply be replaced by more teachers who will be similarly encouraged to become more of "these teachers." If the policy does not change, the problem will persist.

What if we trusted continually trained and licensed professionals to create assessments tailored to determine whether the students learned the presented material? What if we did this on a local level? What if we reported the outcome of these assessments on a bimonthly basis directly to the parents of the students? What if we set time aside for parents to come in and speak directly to these trained professionals? What if parents could contact these trained professionals via phone or email whenever they wanted? The system exists. We've had public schools, quizzes, report cards, parent/teacher conferences, and open sharing of teacher contact information for many decades. It would only require trusting us teachers to do the thing that the public already trusts us to do.

Why I am not teaching The Catcher in the Rye ever again

I have an important confession to make. I've seen others make this confession and it seems to have been a very cathartic experience for them. So I join the chorus: I hate The Catcher in the Rye. The book is (excuse my use of my students' slang) ass. I am aware that people find Salinger's description of the inner minds of children to be particularly compelling. I am aware that some folks relate to his characters. However, even at 16 when I first read Catcher, I wanted to punch Holden Caulfield in his whiny, over-privileged face.

It is easy to see why this book is so often taught. We can point it out as an example of a book that people have tried to censor (a topic that too many teachers spend too much time discussing). We can use it as a prime example of symbolism and motif. We can use it to let our hair down and have the word "fuck" spoken aloud within our otherwise well-ordered classroom. And since we remember kids liking it when we were younger, we can use it as a way to show our students that "literature isn't always boring."

But it just doesn't live up to its own hype.

Holden is a frustrated child in a relatively decent world. This does not resonate with today's youth. Kids today see plenty of reason to be pissed off and can direct their anger at real world issues. While it is nice for those who have lost a loved one to read a character who is also grieving, most of my students see much in the world that deserves their anger and frustration. Their angst is generally leveled at actual problems that may be solvable.

Even Holden's issues with connecting to his peers do not resonate well any more. Our students, no matter how boxed up they seem in school, are much better at finding like-minded peers than we were. Sure, there are still some that are totally disconnected from others their age, but these students are few and far between. For them, I will keep a few copies of Catcher in my classroom for them to stumble across. For everyone else, it is not the quality of their peers, or even the compatibility of their peers that is the issue. It is managing their image with their peers and trying to sustain meaningful interactions. These are not Holden's problems.

As a child in the early 1950's, Holden feels ignored by adults, and passed over by his culture. His worldview seems vastly different from those around him. In the real world, since the late 1960's youth culture has been central in the general popular American culture. Our students see their values and concerns expressed in media all the time. Even those outliers who do not completely agree with all of the tenants of American culture see people openly expressing disagreement. Our students already understand that they do not have to think like everyone else. This is not a point that we must make, and make, and make.

Perhaps Holden's biggest issue is his lack of a place to acceptably vent his frustration with the world. Thankfully, his bottled up frustration is totally incomprehensible to most of our students. Now we have the Internet, a place where people can and do go to complain. Children (and adults) have the opposite problem today. We complain so much to such like minded people that we don't have anyone left to tell us to clam up from time to time.

I fully respect teachers who wish to continue the mythology of The Catcher in the Rye. If you love it, read it. If you really love it, suggest it to your students. If you respect your students, please, please, please do not teach it. Please, please, please find a more contemporary bildungsroman that more directly addresses the issues actually experienced by our actual students. Find one that uses their language. The word "fuck" twice is not exciting any more. Even better, find many such books and let the students pick the one they want to read. Let them suggest some. Coming-of-age stories are the books that most of your students read a bit on their own anyway. Let's teach something better.

I feel better now.

Everyone and their moms link to this . . .

Okay, so this post is linked to from so many places it's hardly funny. So it's been months since I posted and all that I can muster is a link to someone else's post. But this stuff is golden! Orson Scott Card ranting about J. K. Rowling. He uses the phrases "shot her wad"! Brilliant! Brilliant! Pure poetry! Enjoy.

Ender could totally kick that Potter wimp's ass, anyway!

I'll post some of my own nonsense soon enough.

Collective Guilt is Scary

Here is an interesting article about Dr. Pou, who lived and worked in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina. You probably heard about this case already.

I am not going to pass any moral judgement on her handling of her patients in a time of extreme crisis (or maybe I am but I'm just going to couch it in sarcasm). I'm sure they were in horrible pain and probably would have died miserable deaths. I'm also sure that the patients and their families are grateful for Pou's treatment and the medical decisions that she made. I'm sure that I would want her to do the same for me if I were elderly, terminally sick, and stuck in a powered down hospital during a natural disaster while the government sat around patting each other on the backs. I'm sure that I am completely OK with the decision to not prosecute her or the handful of nurses who worked under her.

That said, I'm also sure that she, according to medical law, is guilty of four counts of homicide.

As a country we feel incredibly guilty about Hurricane Katrina. We are angry at the government (particularly FEMA) for not doing more to help the people of Louisiana both before and after the disaster. We are saddened by the destruction of a large and romanticized city. We are horrified at the continued conditions of New Orleans and the surrounding areas.
The disaster highlights disparities in our treatment of people based on race and class. We north-easterners get to face our ugly regional prejudices. You know this already.

You also know about our good buddy Dr. Kevorkian who has become a medical pariah for doing what Dr. Pou did (though under much less duress) and the case of Terri Schiavo who had all sorts of people who never even met her alternatively crying and breathing fire over her assisted suicide (or pick your favorite term). Why do we hate the doctors of these two cases and want to love and protect a "Katrina Doctor"? The law isn't supposed to take situation into nearly that much consideration. All three are cases of doctors killing patients (or helping patients die with dignity, or pick your favorite phrase).

We can't have it both ways because we feel guilty as a country. If the medical community wants to say that Pou was acting responsibly in the best interest of her patients and the American public wants to look on her as a martyr for the cause of human compassion, maybe we should rethink our medical laws. Maybe many of us think that doctor assisted suicide isn't a crime. Maybe the law should reflect public opinion. If the law is supposed to be consistently applied to all cases it should be a law that can be consistently applied to all cases, even when we feel guilty (Pou) or the doctor is creepy and funny looking (Kevorkian), or we saw our favorite talk show host get all blubbery and emotional (Schiavo).

We either need to look past our guilty consciences or change the law. Just pick one.