Schools of Thought

The state of public education can perhaps be best summarized by an 8-year-old we'll call Ashley, a third grader in my morning class who piped up sweetly during a presentation by an American Indian:

"Do you know Pocahontas?"

P.S. I've been too tired to write lately, but I'll try to get a long summary of my week down sometime soon.

So I started teaching my Intersession course today. Intersession is the three-week breaks that year-round schools get in leiu of one long summer vacation, and many kids attend two-week courses taught mostly by outside individuals. I'm doing a course on early colonization, the bulk of which is a simulation in which the kids pretend to be colonists and govern their colony. I have a morning class of ten 3rd and four 4th graders and an afternoon class of four 4th graders, ten 5th graders and four 6th graders.

The morning went great. The afternoon, not so much.

Part of the issue is that not all the 5th and 6th graders signed up for my class (some got put in because another class got cancelled), so they weren't really all that interested to begin with; also, I think the older kids i think have slightly less of an easy imagination, and they realize that they're pretty much being forced to do school during their break, so they're generally resistant to the idea of working hard.

I've got some strategies in mind for addressing the problem, and tomorrow's going to get a lot more interactive and up-and-moving, so I expect improvement in behavior, but I'd like to share this little anecdote:

The class was slightly out of control, just a lot of talking out of turn and talking over other people. Now, I have a laid-back style that definitely isn't authoritarian, so my first instinct is to try to request and reason rather than raise my voice. At some point, one of the 6th graders turns to me and says:

"Mr. H, you gotta be strict! Like Rosa Parks!"

Yes, in fact, the kids were asking me to yell at them. Explicitly. I'd never experienced anything like it. What a bizarre psychology! I understand that they were testing me and seeing how far I'd go, but they had managed to set up a scenario in which if I did raise my voice to regain control, they were in essence getting what they wanted. It was a surreal moment (I did, for the record, have to finally raise my voice and give a stern threat, which did quiet them for a while).

I hate the idea that I have to raise my voice to maintain control of the class; I definitely don't yet have the instincts and anticipation to walk the line between structure and independence. But, hey, that's why I chose to gain this experience before I hit the real classroom full-time.

Teaching -- it's always an adventure.

The big news coming out of Florida is that the Sunshine State is about to become the first the institutionalize a state-wide performance pay program. As reported in the Washington Post:

HIALEAH, Fla. -- A new pay-for-performance program for Florida's teachers will tie raises and bonuses directly to pupils' standardized-test scores beginning next year, marking the first time a state has so closely linked the wages of individual school personnel to their students' exam results.

The effort, now being adopted by local districts, is viewed as a landmark in the movement to restructure American schools by having them face the same kind of competitive pressures placed on private enterprise, and advocates say it could serve as a national model to replace traditional teacher pay plans that award raises based largely on academic degrees and years of experience.

I'm not viscerally opposed to performance pay for teachers, but I'm incredibly wary -- not because I fear the concept, but because I fear the consequence. It's simple psychology that when there's a monetary incentive, people are going to be far more motivated to do what's necessary to achieve that incentive. That's the idea, presumably; teachers will strive harder to teach their students better and have them learn more.

Except that's not quite what this pay-for-performance economic system encourages. Rather, there's a subtle but serious difference -- it motivates teachers to strive harder to get their students to have higher test scores. Those are far, far, far from being the same thing. Current standardized, mostly multiple-choice tests are usually, as I hope I've reiterated enough times over the past year, low-level assessments which don't require higher-order thinking skills (Thomas Toch makes this case succinctly in this report). Florida's FCAT is particularly ridiculous (also here and here), but when 15 states have completely MC tests, we're not talking about rigor across the board.

If the tests are not lined up to assess what we want our kids to be learning -- for one monumental thing, critical thinking skills -- then tying pay to performance on those exams is pure folly. There's already too much pressure on teachers to focus purely on the low-level skills in preparation for high-stakes exams (not that such focus does much good, ironically), but now the proposition is to de facto make those low-level skills the singular goal of teachers.

If there was a legitimate method for assessing teachers -- whether via an authentic assessment which requires the full slate of skills we want our students to have, or some other avenue -- then performance-linked pay would make a lot more sense. That's what I mean when I say that I'm not conceptually opposed to the idea. But right now, given the states' relatively primitive data systems and absurdly inadaquate assessments, it seems like an idea who's time has only begun to glimmer on the horizon. Chasing after its mirage is only going to land us with a mouthful of sand.

Today, not so much fun. 8th grade science the subject. Teacher was there for the first few minutes.

First warning sign: "Oh, I didn't really have a lesson plan for you."
Second warning sign: "We're just going through this study guide that comes with the textbook. I like to pause for a few seconds to see if someone knows the answer, then I'll, well, not so much give them the answer, more agree with them."

[Elliot's thought: "uh-oh."]

But I had no idea how far down the rabbit hole I was going this particular morning.

I was about halfway through the first class, asking the questions and expecting the kids to come up with an answer or, if they didn't remember, review it in the book, when it occured to me I had to ask the following question:

"You guys have read these chapters, right?"

Nope. Not at all. In fact, filling out the study guide was the teacher's only way of conveying information. They've been doing this throughout the entire year. The kids have no idea what the answers to the questions are, so they just stay silent or guess until the teacher tells them!

I mean it, my friends, when I say that these 13-year-olds knew no science. Even the honors kids. The honors kids didn't know what "absorbtion" meant! They told me that they "did pretty badly on the 8th-grade-wide unit tests when the other science teachers made them up," but "everyone was passing," because "their teacher graded really easily," and they had "devised a sophisicated system for copying off each other during labs."

It was and is honestly offensive to me how negligent this teacher was. There was no learning occuring. None. Not even that most basic, fact memorization-and-recall! These kids would have been better off just reading all period -- at least there would have been some modicum of mental stimulation!

There would be times when I would have a student read the paragraph with the answer, read the paragraph with the answer myself, then ask the question which directly referenced the paragraph with the answer, and be met by a classful of blank stares. Usually followed by the delightful incantation:

"This is whack! Can't you just give us the answer like our teacher always does?"

I'm distressed, I'm disappointed, and I'm angry. I've never experienced educational deprivation like that, never dreamed it could possibly exist to that degree in this day and age. You want to talk about accountability? Any accountability system which doesn't instantly peg this classroom as deficient isn't worth its weight in mud. Yet I have a desparately sad idea that when all is said and done, the school will find some way to herd the kids through the SOLs, or else the state will find some way to hide them away.

I have every reason to believe that this one classroom is not an isolated case.

No one -- no one -- can tell me our educational system isn't broken.

In doing some prepatory reading for Teach For America, I came across a chapter from the 2002 book Educating Culturally Responsive Teachers: A Content Approach by Ana Maria Villegas and Tamara Lucas. Villegas and Lucas note an underlying truth that I think is often ignored:

From childhood, we have been socialized to believe that schools are the great equalizers in American society. We are told that chools "level the playing field," providing opportunity for all, regardless of social background, by serving as the impartial grounds on which individuals freely prove their merit. One function of schools, then, is to sort students according to merit -- which is equated with "talent" and "effort." Those deemed meritorious are promised access to the higher-status positions, while those found lacking in merit are told they must be content with the lower-status positions since that is all they have earned.

Two key assumptions undergird this function of schools: first, that individual merit can be identified and measured on the basis of objective criteria, and, second, that schools are fair in their practices [...] [h]owever, schools ... are far from being the impartial settings they are professed to be.

Indeed, the cut-and-dry assumption that student learning -- an incredibly complex milieu which includes personality, mood, experiences, cultural exposure, awareness of surroundings and factors associated with home and community life -- can be diluted into a percentile or scale score is perhaps why the reliance on testing grates on me so heavily. We are not dealing with automotons; these are children, individuals, human beings. It is folly to remove them from their necessarily human context and try instead to essentialize them through the lens of a system which is hardly focused in universal fashion. It leads to inequities, it leads to students being pushed out, and, worst of all, it leads to a loss of purpose.

Schools are the great equalizers, but in order for them to fulfill that superbly important role, we must understand that no two students are coming into the system equally.

I've never for an instant believed that poverty is an unbreakable shackle for students, merely a heady, thorny challenge to be overcome. While there are many districts one might point to as proof, here's yet another one:

As high poverty and high minority schools continue to struggle to close the achievement gap, one Title I district in Pueblo , Colorado has achieved unprecedented results. Over the past eight years, Pueblo School District 60 (PSD60) and Lindamood-Bell Learning Processes have proven that low socio-economic status is not a social liability. PSD60 is a 65 percent free and reduced lunch and minority district. Findings from a new study published in the spring issue of the prestigious American Education Research Journal confirm that PSD60's district-wide literacy reform model has significantly closed the student achievement gap. In 1998, results on the state achievement test ranked near the bottom in Colorado . Representative of this effort from 1998 to 2005, PSD60's third-grade students have improved 16 percentage points, to 83 percent proficient or above reading proficiently, while the state (35 percent free and reduced lunch and 37 percent minority) has only improved 5 percentage points, to 71 percentage proficient or above.

I'm naturally suspicious of using standardized test scores as finely tuned metrics, but a jump of that magnitude is significant by any measure. It just goes to show, never underestimate the power of schools. If you want to find plenty of similar examples, check out EdTrust's Dispelling the Myth databank.

I understand that as a substitute, I'm probably going to be giving the students busy work. That's fine; there are often even opportunities for real teaching within that context. But today part of the teacher's lesson plan instructed me that when the low and average 8th grade English students finished their worksheets, they were to color in a picture of a sneaker.

Low expectations, anyone?

Let's just say that I accidentally misplaced the folder with the pictures and was sadly forced to have the kids do additional amounts of substantive work.

Sigh.

I've added The Reflective Teacher to my blogroll. Written by a first-year teacher, the author provides an amazingly insightful first-hand look into the day-by-day life of a disadvantaged middle school. Very, very much worth a read.

One distressing archetype of student I've run across while subbing middle school is the one who refuses to do work and doesn't care about the consequences. A typical one-on-one conversation with this student will go as follows:

Me: "I'd like you to open your book and start the assignment, please."
Student: "No."
Me: "Well, I am going to collect this at the end, and I don't want to have to leave a note for your teacher that you refused to do the work."
Student: *Shrug* "I don't care. I'm already failing this class."

Now, I know there are various motivational strategies to take with a student like this, and it's especially a case where being a sub is particularly different from being a regular teacher, but it doesn't change the fact that grades only take us so far. Grades, and to an increasing degree test scores, have long been the primary tool of external motivation. Even if an assignment is deemed dumb by a student, he or she will usually suck it up and do an adaquate job to avoid the F. Bad grades are linked with all sorts of irritations, not the least of which are usually irate parents and the threat of being held back.

But what about when grades falter as a structural means? What about the students who for any number of reasons have reached their breaking point and are willing to suck up not the work but the negative consequences of noncompliance? None of the options are sound, as I've touched on before -- social promotion rewards apathy and sends along students who haven't learned anything; allowing students to stagnate and be held back is similarly fruitless, and most studies suggest holding back has few positive benefits; and giving up on the student is simply, in my book, an anathema to the entire idea of education and opportunity. But (always the buts) then there's the counter which says a teacher is responsible for two dozen students and at some point, isn't it unfair and unjust to focus so much energy on a problem case and deprive the others who appear to want to actually learn?

I'm not sure where the solution lies. My contemplations say that no student should be reaching middle school with such an attitude towards his or her education and that prevention, rather than treatment, is where the end game is hiding. I think that's true, but I also think that sounds like an abstract platitude. To dig below the surface, we have to know precisely what is creating and causing the profile of the student who has, for all intents are purposes, given up. For the moment, I'm going to focus only on the school, though I don't doubt that home and community must be engaged as part of both the problem and answer.

One of the best sources of information on this subject comes from the recently released Civic Enterprises survey of high school dropouts (PDF) themselves, sponsored by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Presumably, the students who are failing and don't really care are those who are most suspectible to drop out. While surprisingly few high school dropouts in the survey had cripplingly poor grades (only about a third dropped out because they were failing), this is the profile that begins to emerge:

Nearly half (47 percent) said a major reason for dropping out was that classes were not interesting. These young people reported being bored and disengaged from high school. Almost as many (42 percent) spent time with people who were not interested in school. These were among the top reasons selected by those with high GPAs and by those who said they were motivated to work hard.

Nearly 7 in 10 respondents (69 percent) said they were not motivated or inspired to work hard, 80 percent did one hour or less of homework each day in high school, two-thirds would have worked harder if more was demanded of them (higher academic standards and more studying and homework), and 70 percent were confident they could have graduated if they had tried. Even a majority of those with low GPAs thought they could have graduated.

Forty-five percent said they started high school poorly prepared by their earlier schooling. Many of these students likely fell behind in elementary and middle school and could not make up the necessary ground. They reported that additional supports in high school that would have made a difference (such as tutoring or after school help) were not there.

Another common theme is the lack of seeing any real-world use of education (a finding completely backed up by the High School Survey of Student Engagement, where half of all high schoolers didn't see a strong connection between their schooling and their lives).

Poor academic preparation, uninteresting classes and a lack of motivation -- what you would expect as the three major academic prongs of failing students, but also perhaps the beginnings of a roadmap. I would argue that all three of those threads are inextricably interwoven: Classes are a lot less interesting if you don't really understand what's going on, and if you're lost you're much less likely to be motivated. But there are individual issues within each domain also. The most prepared student might find a class that's completely lecture-and-memorization based utterly boring, and a student who finds classes esoterically interesting but can't for the life of him or her see the use might have faltering motivation.

By the way, we're not talking about small enclaves of students -- nearly 1 in 3 students nationally, and 1 in 2 minority students, don't graduate high school.

If you want to fix something, a good place to start is the part which is shaking violenty; that is, to focus on the system's worst failures and circumscribe your efforts around that end. Our dropouts -- our students who by age 12 or 13 have already given up in the most tragic fashion (and all the other students, for that matter) -- need an educational system which looks fundamentally and concretely different from the one that currently exists. If we truly stand for a democratic equality of opportunity, the mere fact that we're losing the most needy students should be enough to stir us to both anger and action.

Today I entered the world of the 8th graders, one which is markedly different from their peers' a mere year behind. 8th grade civics was the subject, and economics the busy-work topic. I'd like to note that the teacher (he was there the first few minutes), who seemed quite capable, decided on the textbook pages to cover with the comment, "There's a lot of good stuff in here [we're skipping], but they're not covered on the SOL. And," he added with a sigh, "what we care about is the SOL."

Part of the work involved defining vocabulary terms like recession and business cycle -- definitions which students copied straight out of the glossary, unsurprisingly. I decided to do one of the response questions with the whole class as a way of ascertaining if they were actually understanding the concepts or just scribbling definitions and committing them to short-term memory. The particular excercise involved matching problems during the Great Depression with FDR's New Deal solutions (as an aside, more than one 8th grader asked me, "Who was FDR?"). Here's the way the conversation went:

Me: "So, what was started to deal with the problem of bank failures?"
Class: *Scours the book for a bit* "The FDIC!"
Me: "Great, can you read the sentence where you found that?"
Class: *Reads aloud that the FDIC was created to insure bank transcations*
Me: "Ok, can anyone tell me what that actually means? Beyond just the textbook definition, what does the FDIC actually do?"
Class: *Silence*
Me: "Ok... let's start with this: can anyone tell me how a bank works?"
Class: *Silence*

Rinse and repeat that with the Security & Exchange Commission, Civilian Conservation Corps ("a dam? Why would you ever need to build a dam?") and social security. There was an utter absence of not only functional knowledge, but any sort of contextual knowledge. If I wanted to actually teach about the CCC in an economic sense, for example, I would have the students do some sort of project involving unemployment. Part of the assignment would be to research the history of the federal government's involvement in handling unemployment, which would require the students to reckon with the CCC, except in a meaningful and integrated fashion. Problem is, all that the SOL cares about is that kids can answer the question, "Which of FDR's New Deal policies was designed to fix the unemployment problem?"

I know the view I'm getting is slightly skewed because I'm only a substitute and the work is necessarily less intense, but my point is this: What I've been talking about on this blog for a year -- the lack of critical thinking skills in the classroom, the degree to which setting our assessments at low levels leads to teaching at low levels -- is not abstract. It's real, it exists, and, if only for a few hundred students at one middle school in central Virginia, I've lived it.

A report came out a few days ago which confirms, yet again, that high-level skills are frighteningly absent from our classrooms. The report, authored by ACT, leads with the fact that

Just over half of our students are able to meet the demands of college-level reading, based on ACT’s national readiness indicator. Only 51 percent of ACT-tested high school graduates met ACT’s College Readiness Benchmark for Reading, demonstrating their readiness to handle the reading requirements for typical credit-bearing first-year college coursework, based on the 2004–2005 results of the ACT.

This number is down from a high of 55% in 1999 and is actually one percentage point below what it was way back in 1994.

Lest you think the metric itself is flawed or overly rigorous, this is the ACT College Readiness Benchmark for Reading:

ACT’s College Readiness Benchmark for Reading represents the level of achievement required for students to have a high probability of success (a 75 percent chance of earning a course grade of C or better, a 50 percent chance of earning a B or better) in such credit-bearing college courses as Psychology and U.S. History -- first-year courses generally considered to be typically reading dependent. The benchmark corresponds to a score of 21 on the ACT Reading Test.

It's not that reading is important, it's that reading is everything. No student can reach a reasonable level fo proficiency, much less mastery, in any subject -- math, science, english, history or otherwise -- without being able to read capably. There are a litany of indicators showing that the reading skills are not being imparted adaquately, and those sit beside the report's similar offerings of international comparisons such as the PISA and statistics gathered by the Alliance for Excellent Education.

To get very specific, we're talking about:

(1) inadequate understanding of the words used in the text;
(2) inadequate background knowledge about the domains represented in the text;
(3) a lack of familiarity with the semantic and syntactic structures that can help to predict the relationships between words;
(4) a lack of knowledge about different writing conventions that are used to achieve different purposes via text (humor, explanation, dialogue, etc.);
(5) [limited] verbal reasoning ability which enables the reader to “read between the lines”; and
(6) the [in]ability to remember verbal information.

Although the ACT report largely targets high schools, I'm even more disturbed by the fact that only 62% of 8th graders are on track to be ready to meet that basic college reading comprehension level. The problem is everywhere in K-12. Again, it's not that every student needs to go to college -- it's that every student needs the opportunity to go to college.

There aren't many reasonable explanations for the overwhelming and ever-mounting body of evidence about the lack of high-order skills our students have than those which focus on the classroom. We're forging an inadaquate product out of the current crucible of assessments, standards and pedagogical thought. Though there have been some positive advances over the past several years, the fact is that in the most critical ways, we're losing ground. It's not going to take just better teaching, better assessments and better, more rigorous standards, it's going to take a commitment to ingraining thinking skills in every aspect of our curricula and shifting our system so that it revolves around that singular crux.

This won't mean that much to those of you who aren't sports fans, but this is from an ESPN interview with best-selling author (of The Tipping Point and Blink) and New Yorker writer Malcom Gladwell:

Gladwell: [The Contract Year phenomenon] is one of my favorite topics. Let's do Erick Dampier. In his contract year at Golden State, he essentially doubles his rebounds and increases his scoring by 50 percent. Then, after he signs with Dallas, he goes back to the player he was before. What can we conclude from this? The obvious answer is that effort plays a much larger role in athletic performance than we care to admit. When he tries, Dampier is one of the top centers in the league. When he doesn't try, he's mediocre. So a big part of talent is effort. The second obvious answer is that performance (at least in centers) is incredibly variable. The same person can be a mediocre center one year and a top 10 center the next just based on how motivated he is. So is Dampier a top 10 player or a mediocre player? There is no way to answer that. It depends. He's not inherently good or bad. He's both. The third obvious answer is that coaching matters. If you are a coach who can get Dampier to try, you can turn a mediocre center into a top 10 center. And you, the coach, will be enormously valuable. (This is why Phil Jackson is worth millions of dollars a year.) If you are a coach who can't get Dampier to try, then you're not that useful. (You may want to insert the name Doc Rivers at this point.)

In the context of sports, none of us have any problem with any of these conclusions. But now let's think about it in the context of education. An inner city high school student fails his classes and does abysmally on his SATs. No college will take him, and he's basically locked out of the best part of the job market. Why? Because we think that grades and SATs tell us something fundamental about that kid's talent and ability -- or, in this case, lack of it.

But wait: what are the lessons of the contract year? A big part of talent is effort. Maybe this kid is plenty smart enough, and he's just not trying. More to the point, how can we say he isn't smart. If talent doesn't really mean that much in the case of Dampier -- if basketball ability is incredibly variable -- why don't we think of ability in the case of this kid as being incredibly variable? And finally, what does the kid need? In the NBA, we'd say he needed Phil Jackson or Hubie Brown or maybe just a short-term contract. We'd think that we could play a really important role in getting Dampier to play harder. So why don't we think that in the case of the kid? I realize I'm being a bit of a sloppy liberal here. But one of the fascinating things about sports, it seems to me, is that when it comes the way we think about professional athletes, we're all liberals (without meaning to be, of course). We give people lots of chances. (Think Jeff George). We go to extraordinary lengths to help players reach their potential. We're forgiving of mistakes. When the big man needs help with his footwork, we ship him off to Pete Newell for the summer. We hold players accountable for their actions. But we also believe, as a matter of principle, that players need supportive environments in order to flourish. It would be nice if we were as generous and as patient with the rest of society's underachievers.

In a comment on my previous post, Chris Correa asks some great questions, and I think they deserve their own post by way of an answer. Chris wonders:

What would be an example of a test item/standard that would encourage teachers to teach about the "complexity that go into truly grasping the distinction between fact and opinion"?

Could a test be constructed so that teaching to the test would be a good thing (in terms of higher order thinking), or do you think it's impossible given realistic time/money constraints?

I firmly believe that such an assessment is feasible. The monatery constraints are ones of political will, not unreasonable numbers. For insance, the Maryland School Performance Assessment Program, a highly open-ended and high-level exam, cost approximately $35 per student in the last year of its existence (by way of comparison, the current multiple-choice dominated Maryland State Assessment costs about $15 per student).

Setting aside design costs for a moment, if you're testing at grades 3, 5 and 8 and we assume that's about 10 million kids, that's only $350 million nationwide per year. We spent about $450 billion on education annually. Even if you test grades 3-12 (~30 million), you're only talking a bit over $1 billion a year. Of course, this is the crudest of thought experiments and there are significant development and grading costs, but my point is this: Money is not what's preventing us from having rigorous, high-level assessments.

The single most important characteristic of thinking-oriented assessments is getting underneath the surface of what a student says or answers to what a student knows, and if he or she can utilize that knowledge fruitfully. In my opinion, there should never be a test item unaccompanied in some fashion by the question, "why do you think that is the answer?" There are various types of assessments that provide this depth, so we're not talking about reinventing the wheel, either; for instance, standardized assessments like the MSPAP and New Standards exam, and the numerous performance assessments.

I'm not a psychometrician, so I don't want to presume to talk yet about the minute nuts and bolts of what my ideal assessment would look like. I don't entirely know yet. But I do know the skeletal features I need to see, and they are ideas that are barely a whisper in today's assessment environment.

UPDATE 3/7: A Government Accountability Office report (PDF) from 2003 found that it would cost all the states approximately $5.3 billion over 6 fiscal years to design, proctor and grade tests with a mixture of multiple-choice and numerous open-ended questions. In other words, somewhere around $900 million a year. Again, money isn't what's stopping us.

I'd heard of test prep, but I'd never experienced test prep before. Yesterday, I subbed for 7th grade English at a middle school and the kids were to work out of one Virginia Standards of Learning prep book followed by, once that was complete, working out of a second SOL prep book. Some of the kids were telling me this is something they do quite often ("we spent six weeks on metaphors and similes," said one of the honors students) and the digust, disinterest and frustration was evident.

If you're curious, the topic in question was the difference between a statement of fact (defined as any statement that can be proven or disproven) vs. a statement of opinion. The students were doing entire assignments just so they could answer the SOL questions on that subject, but it was quickly apparent that they many of them lacked functional knowledge about it. Here's what I mean: even the honors students asked me, "what does subjective and objective mean?" All the students were learning were the definitions of factual statement and opinion statement; there seemed to be little transfer to the broader question of why the distinction matters and how it should affect the way one reads a piece.

This is a case study in the educational system's deep, fundamental flaws, because given what's in place, this style of test prep is understandable. The standard in question is this:

7.6 The student will read and demonstrate comprehension of a variety of informational texts.
c) Distinguish fact from opinion in newspapers, magazines, and other print media.

And some examples of 8th grade SOL questions on the subject are:

5. Which statement is a fact expressed in the flyer?

A “Taking good pictures isn’t as simple as it seems . . .”
B “It’s everything you’d expect a camp to be and then some.”
C “Camp begins on June 22 and runs through July 24.”
D “. . . Camp Chippenstock is more affordable than many other camps.”

and

14. Which statement is an opinion expressed in the story?

F “A minor accident a couple of days before had left the car crippled . . .”
G “. . . get some chewing gum and seal up the leaks . . .”
H “He takes pride in the jobs he performs.”
J “. . . we don’t encourage her to chew gum. In fact, we discourage her.”

You don't need a deep understanding of the difference between facts and opinions to answer those questions. In truth, you barely need any understanding whatsoever. So long as you can identify the difference -- one is provable, one isn't -- you're good to go. The schools have no incentive to go beyond that simplistic benchmark, and, judging by the nationwide lack of high-level thinking skills, I think it's fair to say most of them don't.

Now, this is where I think the virulent anti-NCLB arguments (like the paranoid hysterics offered at blogs such as SchoolsMatter) go off the tracks: I don't have a problem with requiring, and holding our schools accountable for ensuring, that all students are able to distinguish between fact and opinion. That's a crucial skill for a productive citizen and it provides the opportunities afforded by far greater depth of discernment. However, there's a core disconnect between that ideal and the particular manifestations of NCLB and other policies currently at work in our schools. There are layers upon layers of complexity that go into truly grasping the distinction between fact and opinion -- an understanding of motivation, persuasion, rhetoric, argumentation, media, sourcing and skepticism, just to name a few, and that's all on top of the underlying literary and writing devices.

And, to those who would respond that students need to understand the basic definitional difference between fact and opinion: Of course! You can't achieve a single one of the comprehensions I just talked about without knowing that distinction. But it should take about 45 minutes to make sure 90% of 7th graders get it, and it's going to be constantly referred to as they are learning about the complexities and critical applicability of the topics. Instead, it's currently demotivating, agonizing drill and test prep, and then, once the definition is soundly grasped, it's on to the next topic, because there's still standard 7.6(d) to cover.

This is a problem that has seeped into the marrow of our system, and it's long past time we stopped treating it like a rash.

I had my first day in the classroom as an educator today as a substitute, and I can say this: Teaching is hard! Of course I've always known teaching is an incredibly difficult and intensive job, but the first time you stand in front of twenty students, expected to take charge of them and be productive with them... it's quite a feeling (nothing new to all of you who are teachers, no doubt). I made an enormous amount of mistakes, learned a tremendous amount, and left feeling both daunted and excited for my upcoming years as a classroom teacher.

The issue of paramount difficulty was, unsurprisingly, classroom management/discipline. One thing that I noticed was the seismic difference having another adult in the room made -- it causes a fundamental shift in the power structure of the class. While experienced teachers have undoubtedly built strategies and contingencies for misbehavior over many years, I was left wondering if every first-year teacher shouldn't have an Instructional Assistant. Considering the shockingly high teacher turnover rates and the fact that the #1 reason departing teachers give is not the salary but instead the work conditions, there could be any number of positive externalities. I'm not sure about the practicality (~130,000 new teachers a year is a lot of IAs) but does anyone know of isolated districts which engage in similar programs? I'd be interested in seeing the effects.

It's quite an experience, shifting from policy debates to the direct work. I'm looking forward to immersing myself in the latter over the next few years.