Editor’s note: This commentary is by Peter Berger, an English teacher at Weathersfield School, who writes “Poor Elijah’s Almanack.” The column appears in several publications, including the Times Argus, the Rutland Herald and the Stowe Reporter.
Every movie and TV show posts a notice that no animals were harmed during its production. American children enjoy no such protection. Any expert with a grant, special interest with an agenda, administrator with a desk, or corporation with a bottom line gets easy entrée into our schools and classrooms. From whole language to the endless parade of “new” maths, from canned discipline methods that don’t discipline to anti-bullying programs that rely on the charitable inclinations of bullies, from recycled 1970s notions that have already failed at least once to mushrooming, untested standardized tests, American students are treated more cavalierly than lab rats.
You’ve probably noticed that every so often your child gets to stay home on what ordinarily would be a school day. Welcome to the world of teacher professional development. Administrators and policymakers assure us these inservice sessions are essential for improving public education.
Generally, professional development is planned in one of three ways. Sometimes, despite their loud insistence that these “PD” days are indispensable, and that we need more of them, local administrators forget to plan anything until somebody suddenly recalls, “Hey, we have an inservice next week.” The result is usually a bouquet of workshops, led by local administrators, on whatever jargon topics are currently in fashion. Other times your tax dollars are used to hire a traveling expert, who typically isn’t a teacher, to teach your school’s teachers the latest patented teaching method. Please check the website for software, CD, and book prices.
Occasionally, an invited speaker actually says something that makes sense, which local officials promptly ignore. Last spring we were treated to one such guest who articulately detailed the disadvantages and hazards of centralizing control of local schools, following which the official who invited him confirmed his plan to continue centralizing control of our local schools.
Now, thanks to a report published in Educational Researcher, teachers can finally understand why so many of us have this nagging feeling that most PD is a waste of time. Several studies have recently concluded that the teacher professional development we’re subjected to typically has “minimal to no effects on boosting student achievement,” even when it involves “a lot of hours of training and follow-up.”
As a remedy insightful experts recommend “evidence-based” evaluations of professional development. Instead of deciding whether a PD program is any good after it’s been implemented wholesale in schools, researchers now suggest that it be evaluated “at the early stages of program development.”
I have an alternate plan and a single criterion by which to judge any proposed professional development: Will missing that day of school benefit students more than having their teacher there with them in class. If it would, cancel school for the day. If it wouldn’t, cancel the inservice training.
In the 30 years I’ve been teaching, my students wouldn’t have missed many days.
Achievement doesn’t improve when superintendents remain in their positions, and it also doesn’t improve when they leave and their district hires a new superintendent. Consider this verdict of “irrelevant” as more and more districts, including maybe yours, transfer even more power from teachers and principals to superintendents and their central office minions.
Speaking of school administration and centralized control, a recent Brookings Institution study investigated whether or not “superintendents improve outcomes for students.” According to the report, titled “School Superintendents: Vital or Irrelevant,” the answer is “not.” Achievement doesn’t improve when superintendents remain in their positions, and it also doesn’t improve when they leave and their district hires a new superintendent. Consider this verdict of “irrelevant” as more and more districts, including maybe yours, transfer even more power from teachers and principals to superintendents and their central office minions.
Standardized assessments continue to reproduce exponentially, even as they demonstrate their embarrassing inability to assess anything. This year is the deadline for No Child Left Behind’s impossible requirement that every student be proficient in reading and math. Since predictably every student isn’t proficient, almost every school in the country is now officially a “failure,” even those that have shown marked improvement or where the vast majority of students are proficient. Being identified as a failure subjects students, schools, and teachers to “corrective action” administered by distant bureaucrats who don’t deal with real students and classrooms but who do generate reams of paperwork that distract teachers and principals from dealing with those real students and classrooms.
The new crop of assessments “aligned with the Common Core” continue to be judged “ambiguous,” “confusing, developmentally inappropriate, and not well-aligned with the Common Core.” Owing to current education fashions, the influence of technology-oriented Common Core boosters like Bill Gates, and the profit motives of assessment software publishers, these tests are typically administered via computer.
This appears, however, to be causing problems for elementary students. A National Center for Education Statistics analysis found that even students with regular access to home and school computers “had trouble with writing tools (copy, paste, highlighter) and reading the general directions” as they appear on computerized tests. In addition, a study of 13,000 fourth-graders found they wrote “on average 159 words per response” on a NAEP “pencil and paper” test compared to 110 words on an equivalent computerized test, even when given extra time.
I’ve stood behind my eighth-grade students as they’ve taken several publishers’ Common Core era tests. The directions were convoluted, the questions frequently did “focus on small details” and isolated, obscure bits of literary terminology, rather than on “overall comprehension,” and the questions often were ambiguous. Many were actually indecipherable, with words missing and incorrectly arranged so that students were left asking me what the question meant, and I was left to fill in the syntactical blanks and guess what they were being asked to do.
The myth that these assessments are scientifically designed to generate meaningful data is insupportable. Any such guarantee is a fraud. Last week’s test was accompanied by a notice that the assessment contractor had added five questions to the test this year, for a total of 20 questions, in order to “provide more accurate test scores and less fluctuation in scores between test windows.” In other words, students, teachers, and schools that failed last time, and suffered interventions and sanctions as a result, maybe didn’t fail. Of course, students, teachers, and schools that appeared to succeed maybe didn’t succeed.
Oh, well.
Fortunately, we can fix all this by adding five more badly worded questions.
What will the notice say next year?
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