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Mandates to Close Achievement Gaps May Show Gap in Reasoning

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It’s like a math story problem that plagues every sixth grader. “If Student A’s achievement at the end of third grade is more than a full school year ahead of Student B’s achievement and Student B’s learning is expanding by .75 years each school year, how many years of instruction will be needed before Student B’s achievement equals Student A’s achievement?”

This is not a trick question. It is the very question that parents, local taxpayers and state legislators are asking all the time. Why can’t Student B’s achievement be improved rapidly to equal the achievement of Student A? Teachers are mandated by legislative statute to close the gaps in learning that exist between disaggregated groups of children. When the learning trends of one group resembles Student A and the learning trends of another group resembles Student B, how long will it take before the achievement of each group is equal? Three years is the correct statutorial answer. If the gaps in student achievement in a given school are not closed in three years, teacher and principals will be fired. It really is like the sixth grade math problem that we all remember; the one that nobody got right.

Interestingly, no, sadly, the problem and description of the problem above are all too real.

Coupled with the problem of achievement gaps is the tenacity of many critics of public education, too many of these critics being politicians with legislative solutions, to believe that the differences in pre-academic backgrounds that children bring to Kindergarten doesn’t exist or should be ignored. To put this into a sixth grade albeit a difficult sixth grade problem, it would read like this.

“Student A is a young athlete who has enjoyed good nutrition, a progressive training schedule and supportive coaching. Student B is a young athlete who seldom enjoys three meals a day, has not be trained, and, in place of supportive adults, lacks the consistent support of any adult. On September 1, Student A and Student B will begin a long endurance race. Student A will begin with a running start and Student B will begin seated on the ground and 100 yards back. During the race, Student A will enjoy continuing and increasing nutrition, coaching and support. Student B will enjoy a differing mount of nutrition, coaching and support, and some years there may not be any at all. Your task is to create an argument that will convince observers of this race that Student A and Student B are running a fair and reasonable race.”

It would seem that the argument is self-evident, yet the mandates for closing achievement gaps fly in the face of the evidence. If teachers really do high quality work, the mandates tell us, Student B will rise from the ground and quickly catch Student A. The argument will in favor of Student B is totally based upon the power of mandated accountability.

Let’s begin from a different premise. The differences between Student A and Student B are givens, yet the challenge of causing all children to become educated young adults prepared for adult life remains. The new problem reads thusly.

Student A and Student B are two different and unique children. Each child begins public education with truly personalized pre-education backgrounds and idiosyncratic learning traits. The teachers for Student A and the teachers for Student B may use any and all available resources to achieve this end: Every child will be college and/or career ready at the completion of their thirteenth year of schooling. Your task is to create an argument that will explain that this strategy and goal is unfair and unreasonable.”

You may begin now.  We’re listening.

Teach Children What “Done” Means

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After 30 minutes of practice at her piano my granddaughter asks, “Can I be done?” After ten minutes with a reading assignment I hear the same question, “Can I be done?” Later, when she is completing her math homework I hear her pencil hit the table top and “There, I’m done!” What does “done” mean to children today and what do we want them to think “done” should mean?

If it was late November, I would give Izzy a smart-mouth response. “If you are a turkey and the red button has popped out, you may be done. If you are not a turkey, you may not be done, yet.” My less of a smart-mouth response, the retort of a retired educator, sounds more like this. “And, tell me why you think you are done?” What an interesting lesson this poses. In the age of increased academic rigor and mandates for improved school performances, how does a child’s concept of “done” fit into educational accountability?

It would be easy to give my father’s answer to the question of done. “You are done when I say you are done,” left his sons sitting at the table looking at a pile of cold lima beans or liver or bowl of pea soup fearful that they may never be “done. It also kept them on the school yard fielding ground balls and catching fly balls until they could so without error. There are many times and situations when “You are done when I say so” works well. But, too often the mystery of “What will satisfy Dad today?” is not very instructive and certainly not transferrable to other tasks.

Without being too Pavlovian, I favor a criterioned and educational definition of “done.” A criterioned “done” would tell Izzy that her piano practice will be completed after she has satisfied the directions provided by her piano teacher. At the beginning of the practice, Izzy should be able to tell me what those directions were or read them to me from her lesson book. Then after her independent practice, she should be able to say “Listen (or watch) this, Gramps” and demonstrate what she practiced.

A criterioned reading assignment would consummate in her telling me what she understood from her reading, interesting turns in the story, the “big” points of the information article, and what she thinks or feels about what she read. If not a “tell Gramps” moment, she should be able to write these in her class book as a signal of “did this” to her teacher.

“Done” is seldom a quantitative moment; it almost always is and needs to be qualitative. Teaching children to understand their teachers’ qualitative interests is an essential school obligation. Teaching children to understand their parents’ qualitative interests is an essential parenting obligation. Finally, teaching children to create their own qualitative standards for when something might be considered “done” is an essential task for both teachers and parents.

Life experience has taught me that when a person is their own judge of “done” and has been taught that “done” is a quality of performance about which someone else may say “show me”, then “done” is a task completion that really means something – something more than time spent.

Of course, when asked how I like my beef or tuna, I always will say “Very rare, please. Not well done.”

The Era of Struggling Productively

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Children forever hear slogans and sayings about the virtue of hard work and perseverance. These are just three.

“It’s hard to beat a person who never gives up.” Babe Ruth

“The three great essentials to achieve anything worthwhile are, first, hard work; second, stick-to-itiveness; third, common sense.” Thomas Edison

“There are no shortcuts to any place worth going.” Beverly Sills

Most of these, once we get past who is being quoted, serve as an aspirin to relieve the real-world anxiety and frustration children, and adults, feel when faced continuously with tasks that are difficult to complete successfully. School children today face an increasing array of difficult-to-complete tasks as educators are mandated to ramp up the pace and level of difficulty of rigorous academic content and skill sets.

The pace and level of difficulty of tasks laid before teachers is just as daunting as the challenges their students face. Everything about education is becoming more difficult. The issue for student and teacher alike is this – how can difficult problems be solved when there are no short cuts and hard work, perseverance and applications of common sense run thin?

“When the going gets tough, the tough get going,” doesn’t help and may only increase the angst.

Although it may sound like denying water to a person dying of thirst, best instructional practice is denying a learning child access to easy answers. Best practice reads like this.

• Provide children with difficult academic problems.

• Teach children the skills needed to solve similar problems. This step takes the most time and the most instructional diligence. Perseverance here pays dividends later.

• Point children to the resources needed to solve this type of problem. Part of problem solving is their experimentation with various resources not all of which will prove successful.

• Let children struggle with the application of their skills, their understanding of the academic context of a problem, and the solution to the problem at hand. Stand back and let them experiment. Ask only, “And, how did that work out?”

• Allow children to struggle productively, providing questions only, no answers, to help them progress through the problem solution. Good questions are more important than easy cues and clues.

• Debrief children after they have solved a problem. Talk just as much about what did not work as what did work. Debrief children on the struggle and what they learned from their persistence.

http://blogs.edweek.org/teachers/coach_gs_teaching_tips/2015/02/do_more_for_students_by_doing_less_for_students.html?cmp=ENL-TU-NEWS2

Too often adults intervene, swooping in like rescuers, to relieve children of the hardship of struggle. We see parents putting themselves between their child and impending failure all the time. It seems easier to give a child the release from a problem than it is to explain to the child why you let them “suffer.” Weepy little eyes beg for intervention. Many adults and parents perceive the lack of immediate success as a failure and want to buffer a child from failure. This flies in the face of what we know about resilience training. Perseverance is not a trait that can be pulled out of a backpack on demand, used, and then returned to a backpack for another day. Perseverance is a consistent exercise of grittiness that a person applies to every aspect of life, not just school work. A child’s failure to build perseverance and grit may be more significant to adult success than their failure to develop good reading and comprehension or computation skills.

Additionally, “When something comes easy, you usually let it go the same way” – Nora Roberts. The speed of life is very fast for children and challenges that are solved easily are like commercials on TV, interruptions in the main story. Tough sledding is what they will think and talk about long after the lesson.

“Struggling productively” may well be how someone in a few years will label this era of complex and rigorous academic standards, performance-based assessments and educational accountability.

School Success Requires Planning for A Bipolar Spring

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Two quotes should be taped to the front entrance of every school house on the first school day in March.

“It ain’t over til it’s over.” (Yogi Berra)

“Somewhere there’s a score being kept …” (Bill Murray)

This and the next several blogs will discuss how these two messages can assure a successful close of a quality school year.

School climate in the spring is bipolar. While all faces turn to the vernal promise of sunshine and warmer weather, the underlying tone within the school is academically frenetic and pressure-packed. A big picture-school leader must manage this climatic paradox.

In 2015 a school planner still considers a school year to be approximately 180 days in length, although many states have modified that number to accommodate weather and politics, two inconstant variables in an educator’s world. Seeing the big picture of 180 days means seeing the biggest of the big pictures. If there are 180 school days, the number of prime instructional days is actually closer to 120 days. In the biggest picture view, school principals must manage 180 days while focusing on 120. This means getting more instruction and learning completed successfully in less time.

While the seasons of the year differ in the weather they bring us, they also differ in the sense of school climate. In the fall a school climate begins with high anticipation and excitement for a fresh school year. The climatic pressure is low keyed. The last days of summer, brilliant fall colors outside the school doors, the traditions of Homecoming, and the knowledge that there are two seasons in the school year to go maintain a friendly and welcoming school climate in September and October.

The cool to cold weather of winter not only brings almost all school activities indoors, it also clarifies the school climate to a focus on measures of student learning. Children are disaggregated into cadres of learners with specific expectations for academic achievement growth. Winter is an industrial month of instruction, assessment, reteaching and extended instruction, assessment, and validation. The units of grade level and course instruction are pre-blocked on the calendar and crossed off one-by-one. The school climate in the winter is heavy with the grind of school work.

Everyone looks forward to spring. However, spring is the most difficult of school seasons and the climate of spring is bipolar. The months of March, April and May contain 92 days and of these 64 are week days and potential school days. This is when a principal takes a new red marker from the storeroom and begins to narrow the calendar of days.

Most schools calendar a spring break and the majority of these break for a week in March or April. Red-line five days for the break, and, red-circle one week on either side of the spring break week. The lined out days are not available for instruction and the circled days are not prime instructional days. Some families will extend their spring break and excuse their children for days on either side of the break week, and the children whose parents don’t excuse them will tell their parents that “nothing is happening at school because so many kids are absent.”

Red-line Good Friday and circle the Thursday before it and the Monday that follows. Also, red-line Memorial Day and circle the Friday before and the Tuesday that follows. These represent another six days that are either not available for instruction or are not prime days.

Now check your state Department of Public Instruction web site to identify the statewide testing calendar. Circle all of the days that are mandated by the DPI for testing. Then, circle the week prior to the testing days. It is not reasonable to think that children who are tested for several hours each day will also be at their prime for learning the rest of the day. And, it is not reasonable to think that the week prior to testing is prime for instruction, as many teachers who are considering their teacher effectiveness ranking will use this time to review major skill sets that may be assessed on the tests.

March, April and May have 64 week days or potential school days for instruction. The principal has just red-lined or circled 31 days. Now there are 33 days for instruction during the spring season. But the job of seeing the calendar is not done, yet. If this is a high school or a middle school with spring sports, draw a red line under every date when a team will be excused from school early to travel to an away game or meet. How many children are engaged in track, baseball and softball, soccer, lacrosse, and golf? A date with a red line under it is day that is not a prime instructional day for some children, and will be seen by some teachers as instructional time that must be repeated around these school-approved absences.

Yogi Berra comes to mind now, because a school year isn’t over until it is over. Getting 64 days of potential instruction successfully learned by children in 33 days parallels Yogi’s 1973 New York Mets who trailed the Chicago Cubs by 9 1/2 games in July but won the pennant on the last day of the season. Big-picture principals know that every instructional day is important including the very last day.

And, Bill Murray comes to mind now, because student attendance, student academic achievement and the equity of measured achievement growth, and student promotion and graduation rates are scores that are being kept and these scores reflect upon the Educator Effectiveness ratings of all teachers and principals.

Consequently, these principals always are focused on using all possible school hours to achieve the greatest school “scores” by –

• Providing parents with “essential school dates” at least a year in advance. Help families that are compelled to excuse their children from school beyond vacation and holiday dates to use non-prime instructional days. Parents understand messages that say “this instructional time is important to your child”; parents respond well when self-interest may be present.

• Minimizing the distracting access of non-essential people and events during all 180 days of the school year. Time given to non-essential distraction in the fall places stress on the limited instructional time in the spring.

• Sharing with teachers the school’s need to discern between activities that are essential to strengthening learning for all children and activities that are “fun to do” or “wouldn’t it be nice to do.” There always is a need to inject “fun and interesting” into school life, but not every fun thing has its place. Sharing the need and ability to discern among these with teachers helps everyone to understand the relationship of the total school calendar to the scores that are being kept.

• Protecting teacher-child contact time. For example, professional development is essential for all educators. Big picture-thinking principals and teachers will schedule PD on school days that are not prime instructional days. Also, teacher leaves that are discretionary, such as medical and personal, can be scheduled for days that are not prime instructional days.

• Distributing necessary school assemblies and required safety drills across the school day to diminish their instructional distraction.

• Scheduling school sports and activity events on Saturdays. Non-school activities have liked Saturday schedules because many school coaches and directors used Saturdays as days off for themselves and their students. Now that academic scores command the attention of teachers and principals, scheduling away events on Saturday rather than a school day preserves more prime instructional time for learning.

• Minimizing the non-essential distractors on the 33 prime instructional days in March, April and May. Say “no” to anyone who wants to schedule a non-instructional event in a prime day. Say “no” to field trips that are not essential to academic instruction.

• Without causing too much anxiety, helping children to understand the importance of best performances on statewide assessments. Eliminate any school performances and games from the test week. Rehearsals and practices are okay; but no stress-building events. Structure test days so that the tests are the focus of the day by padding “relaxed” time around the test sessions.

Because “it’s over” is a definite date on the calendar, a big picture principal helps parents, teachers and children to optimize prime instructional and learning days across the entire calendar. And, because a score really is being kept and everyone in the school is a part of the scoring, a big picture principal helps parents, teachers and children to optimize their respective work that is scored.

Accountability Using Visual Contracting With Sub-Groups

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Educational accountability places a premium on a teacher’s ability to close achievement gaps. For a myriad of reasons, the academic achievement data of children in your class are scattered on the score sheet. An effective teacher will take this scattergram and teach so that every child’s next achievement score will cluster at or beyond the measure for a full-year’s growth in learning, and, there will be a diminished difference between the clustered scores of each disaggregated sub-group of students. In order to be an “effective” teacher, this is what must be done.

BA, or Before Accountability, I would commonly observe a teacher analyzing their students’ achievement data and resting their eyes upon the names of children whose data was significantly below that of the class norms. Usually this would be one to two children and they would become the teacher’s “special project.” These children would need “special” and very personalized instruction in order to cause their next achievement data to be more like their classmates. Teachers routinely picked their “projects” and did whatever was necessary for the achievement scores of those children to “jump.” That was BA.

Today’s educational expectation reads well but is very amorphous when a teacher stands in front of the class and scans two dozen or more faces. How can every child be a “project?” The theory of closing such gaps says, “Disaggregate the data, look at each face as a weighted score, pick out the faces with the lowest weighted scores and those students are your special projects while your quality teaching advances the learning of all other children.” The reality of projects today is in the faces.

Every face in a classroom represents a child who is looking back at their teacher wondering “Am I your project? Are you thinking that my achievement will provide the leap in numbers that will show you to be an effective teacher?” They are waiting for you to recognize them, understand how their needs mesh with your needs, and make them your project.

So, point your mental finger and to yourself say, “You, you and you. We need to grow you by almost a year and a half. This next group needs to grow at least a full year. You over there and you and you and you need to move your scores by eight months. You scan a large group, knowing they need to grow by several months. And, you and you, not many are you, are already at this year’s target – let’s see how much we can grow you.”

The pressure is on. The administrators know the scores and they also have seen the faces that must experience the greatest growth. At the same time, the administration has been pressured by parents of the two children who already have achieved more than your grade level. They want assurance that you will continue the wonderful achievement of their children so that they will be two years or more beyond their classmates.

So you scan the faces once again to make visual contacts that would sound a lot like this.

“We have a lot to do. I will be seem like a second skin to my first group because we have things to unlearn as well as learn. As your second skin, I will sit with you to make certain you understand what to do, how to do, and check that you always do it right. You may squirm but you will not escape my hard attention and in June you will be at grade level.

Now, I am looking at my groups that need to grow at least a grade level this year. I will be your shadow because shadowing is the way I cause children who are learning on schedule to stay on schedule. Although I will allow you to wander a bit, I will check your understanding every day. We will find what you need to know and do and ways of doing it together.

You kiddos who are within months of our grade level targets will also make a full year’s growth. I will hover above you to steer your learning but you will organize and conduct most of it. There are many ways to learn and you will experience these through our work.

Finally, my pair who are already a grade level ahead of the class, you will be more than that when we reach June. Together, we will talk about how you will achieve your goals and I will stand to the side to non-directively push your learning. We will assess your understanding of this grade level curricula to assure your foundations, but move on to new learning independent of your classmates.”

Visual contracting says “I see you and you see me. This is what I am going to do and I know what you are going to do. When I nod, you will know that the game is on.”

Nodding is a unique educational recognition. No one in a court of law would claim that shared nods represent a legal contract. Yet, in the classroom, when an effective teacher looks a student in the eye and nods, there is an understanding and there will be a reckoning.