When Excellence is a Single Standardized Measure

from here. 

When a nation standardizes its tests and then relies on that single measure as its primary definition of excellence, learning is doomed and with it freedom.  At a national level,  the standardized measurement coupled with the weight of its value limits what can be considered as important knowledge regardless of initial intention. To limit what is important knowledge especially at a time when information is no longer considered scarce is of course, ironic. But it is also very misdirected, as it is the suppression of  thought, voice, and agency that is most crippling to individuals and groups and will do the most harm.

Considered what Antoine Mas wrote decades ago about standardization (as quoted by Jacques Ellul in The Technological Society, pp. 11-12, 1954)

"Standardization means resolving in advance all the problems that might possibly impede the functioning of an organization. It is not a matter of leaving it to inspiration, ingenuity, nor even intelligence to find a solution at the moment some difficulty arises; it is rather in some way to anticipate both the difficulty and its resolution. from then on standardization creates impersonality, in the sense that organization relies more on methods and instruction than on individuals."

Is there nothing that lessens desire more than to live in a world that has been scripted?  We have known this for a long time and yet each 'new crisis' allows those with political and economic power to dictate bad practices and impose their will on the masses.

Tensions

Intersection (M.A. Reilly, 2012)

I am reading an article about Joi Ito and am taken by his four key principles that he shares during a meeting.

"Encourage rebellion instead of compliance"; "Practice instead of theory"; "Constant learning instead of education"; "Compass over map". 

"The key principles include disobedience -- no one ever won a Nobel prize by doing as they're told," he explains later. "And it's about resilience versus strength -- you don't try to resist failure, you allow failure and bounce back. And compass over map is important -- you need to know where you're going, but the cost of planning often exceeds the cost of actually trying. The maps you have are often wrong. These principles affect and apply to just about any organisation."

The principles strike me as being largely antithetical to the more current push for adherence to common standards, rubric-controlled unit planning, and common assessments that are present and privileged in public education.  The articulation of Ito's principles leaves me wondering what principles have informed and now govern the emphasis on standardization in public education?  What is driving that engine?

Curious what you think.

Moral Decision Making & Standardized Learning: A Reply to David Brooks

Today in David Brooks's column, If It Feels Right, he shared findings researchers (Christian Smith, Kari Christoffersen, Hilary Davidson, Patricia Snell Herzog) report about the capacity of 18- to 23-year-olds to think about moral dilemmas. The news isn't encouraging.

Brooks states:

Smith and company emphasize, they have not been given the resources — by schools, institutions and families — to cultivate their moral intuitions, to think more broadly about moral obligations, to check behaviors that may be degrading. In this way, the study says more about adult America than youthful America.

Marchers at SOS March (M.A. Reilly, Washington D.C. 2011)

Surprised?

Well not if you are a public school educator in the United States toiling beneath the push for greater and greater standardization. We have been raising our voices to say what the researchers found for  more than a decade.

Frankly, I find little surprising in what David Brooks reports and want to suggest that on the current course of standardization we can only expect diminished capacities for learners to think deeply about moral issues. Cultivating 'moral intuition' requires imagination and will always reflect the depth of thinking/feeling and the practices inherent in the institutions (schools, family, communities, religion, workplaces) in which our young people come of age.

Mr. Brooks, for nearly 30 years I have been an educator and have opposed the forced standardization of thinking that is clearly framing how learning occurs at public schools throughout our country.  Each time you feature in your column a superman-type school reformer, I cringe knowing the whiplash response will be to lessen what little remaining control I and others who actually reside in public schools will have to make local decisions.  It is ever so trendy to get on the reform bandwagon, but know this: learners' diminished moral thinking is one result of such trendiness.

It's difficult to occasion deeply thinking young people when schools are forced to become more and more standardized through common core curricula, commercialized curriculum products and programs that are forced into schools in receipt of grant monies, and mistaking scientifically proven programs for teachers. Thinking the teacher can be removed as thinker and replaced with "scientifically researched" programs and then ordered to teach from prescribed scripts written at another time in another place by someone else is faulty.  This epic construct kills children's aptness and will to think.

Moral dilemmas require flexibility of thought, the capacity and willingness to recognize other, and the practice of embracing ambiguities. None of these dispositions fit neatly in multiple choice tests or in a nation that overly privileges standardized lessons, programs, curricula (see Common Core) and believes that testing children 9 times a year in mathematics and reading and ignoring everything else is an evolved practice. Consider that we have rested in the hands of a few people (elites similar to the composition of the Committee of Ten) the decision as to what should be taught to150 million children annually and they have returned to us via the Common Core State Standards the edict that story, yes story Mr. Brooks, should be severely lessened in what young people read and compose.

Lind Darling-Hammond Speaking at SOS March (M.A. Reilly Washington D.C. 2011)

Only fools fail to understand that story is the means by which  all cultures, all people here on earth transmit and have transmitted values, beliefs, fears, theories, concerns, joys, sacrifices--all potential examples of moral decision making in action and rendered through written, visual, musical, movement or hybrid/remixed forms of text.

Story.

And the Common Core folks would order across all public high schools a reduction of story making so that at the high school level it represents only 20% of what young people compose. Similarly, high school learners will be limited to reading 8 full length literary works for their entire high school career. 8 works.

Mr. Brooks, we cannot occasion young citizens who think carefully about moral dilemmas and have participated in moral decision making when we routinely strip agency from teachers and students, story from schools, and decision making from all who actually reside at the school house and instead value business models, business leaders' ethos, market values, superheroes, and the very narrow and standardized curricula that is remaking American education into routinized factory experiences where one curricula fits 150 million learners and decision making is not allowed.

Moral decision making arises from local context. Remove the local and what are you left with? William Carlos Williams told us years ago that when we are controlled by vacuous laws we are left with "a corpse wrapped in a dirty mantle."

Winding Home (M.A. Reilly, South Dakota, 2010)

It is time for every learner to say no through the political process at the local, state, and national levels to the dehumanized practices associated with school reform. We must offer alternatives that rebuke the single idea of school as THE place of learning and our alternatives need to be local to their own ground--ones that value the funds of knowledge citizens bring and engender.

We must imagine alternatives that return agency to corpus, voice to the masses. In a few weeks  a publication will be released about disrupting the status quo of schooling.  I am pleased to have written the opening to that small book and will post a link for you here so that you can read the full text.

Mr. Brooks we need your voice. And we need it to be informed not by the trendy, but by the deep story--  that which you make your trade doing.  Please come visit schools and listen.

Workshop is Vapid When Standardization is Enforced

The finest teachers of writing and reading I know are ones who actually write, read, and are curious.  Simple, right?

In the perceived absence of actual reading, writing and curiosity, teachers are often sent to workshops with the hope that they will then return to school sites and 'run workshops'.  At best, when the workshop host is actually someone who reads and writes and doesn't have a lot of formulas or 'best practices' and instead engages all in the actual practice of reading and writing--rich rewards can often accompany.  When the participant continues to read and write and is suitably curious, the ideas learned and questioned via their own practice may make for interesting, if not provocative, work inside their own classroom.

There is an organicism in such practice.

In contrast, when the presenter is someone who has also learned 'workshop techniques' at a distance from actual practice and passes along a laundry list of dos and dont's (think chart after chart) that truly make little actual sense, the outcome is rather dubious. Even worse than this however is the 'turnkey' presenter sent to the latter workshop who then returns to tell everyone else how to "do" workshop.  The workshops enacted after such learning are often vapid and usually rely on standardized practices for all.

Some 'workshop' practices I would question:

1.Why must teachers level all of the books in the classroom library?
Why are reading materials in classrooms being organized exclusively by 'levels'?  I keep hearing more and more about this. Given the importance of prior knowledge and interest, it seems that leveling schema fail as readers age and the confluence of knowledge, interest, and motivation take on greater emphasis.  Why would anyone organize a library based on leveling schema that is imposed? Does it even make remote sense that we could ever actually say that a reader is a level T? I have been in classrooms when a teacher will lean in and say in a stage-whisper, "He's a level N." Could we not imagine easily how such a declaration would be faulty?

Underneath the leveling library is the more important question about how one selects a book to read and what prompts the desire to read.  The leveled system in some ways usurps the actual thinking that needs to be done when selecting a text and coming to name the desire to read.


2. Why must teachers refer to their students as readers and/or writers?
It seems a bit insipid to make teachers refer to their students as 'readers' and 'writers'--as if calling them by a name, somehow makes it "more" true.  It bothers me that naming isn't a privileged exchange between teacher and learner.  A former graduate student told me she was 'written up' by a supervisor for failing to address her 5-year-old students as writers. It's not the names that bother me, but rather that someone else determines address in a classroom apart from the teacher and the learners.  It feels like colonization. 


3. What's with all the sticky notes?
I read a lot. I write a fair amount too.  I do both well with nary a sticky in sight. I have been in classrooms where teachers explain that their students (or should I say readers) must used 3 to 5 sticky notes per chapter when reading a novel. When I ask why, I usually get two responses:

a. The reading workshop presenter said so.
b. We were told we must do this by an administrator (who probably attended the reading workshop).

A friend of mine tells the story of her son arriving home from fifth grade one day and declaring he was done with reading. When she inquired as to why he said he hated sticky notes and he wanted to just go back to reading a good story. "Why do they have to ruin it?" he asked his mom.

Underneath the sticky note practice, is the more important question about the needs of a reader and the reasons for reading.  Not all texts require analysis. Not all texts require writing alongside.  It seems important for students to figure out how to tell the difference and to determine some ways they actually wants to read. Forced sticky notes stops that thinking.

4. Why must all students record the title, author, etc. of every book they read?
There are times I like to keep lists of what I am reading or planning to read.  There are times I like to look at other people's lists as well. For example I often enjoy reading the Five Book Interviews. Recently Carol Gilligan offered five books she would recommend about gender and human nature. The offerings fascinated me.  But occasionally choosing to keep a list is quite different than being made to record every thing read for a school year. Why is knowing the total number of books important? Who benefits by having a child keep a list for a year of what s/he read?  When my son was 7 he had to record the title and author in a notebook of texts he read.  He loved to read and did so with great passion. That passion dimmed a bit when he realized how much writing his rather tired little hand would need to do.  Quite quickly he seized on the idea of limiting his book selection to brief titles.  

5. Why do students have to read a book that is classified as a different genre each month?
Let's just say it's hell that last month after students have been through nine genres (BTW I never actually got all the genre distinctions either) and the last one left is often something they never ever wanted to read. What exactly are students learning in such scenarios?  This practice obfuscates the more important work of developing and changing reading preferences and making decisions about what to read and when.  I also think it seems predictable that children will have great affinity for certain types of books and will desire to read these books in great number. Why do we want to disrupt that? Do we fear that a child hooked into Captain Underpants at 8 will find himself at 40 only reading Dav Pilkey's underpants adventures?


6. A phrase I hope never to hear again: "I have a self-to-text connection to make."
In the name of comprehension bad things have been done to reading and those who read. As a substitution for ambiguity, conjecture, humor, and not knowing (to name but a few)--the connection gambit (often marked with a post it, see image) is being played. Is there any other kind of connection one might have with a text?  If not connected to the reader, then to whom? Is there a reason such things even need to be anounced?  And what does it suggest when after such proclamation the connection is something like this: "I have a text to self connection. My dog drools." I did hear a child utter this after his teacher read a section from a Henry and Mudge story. He was congratulated for making a connection. A friend reminds me that rendering reading into such small bits of nothing, readies children for a career of testable 'reading' items.  I also wonder about such coding and what is missed as the mind is occupied by searching for already determined categories which in fact might not be well understood.

7. Why are students made to keep a writer's notebook and/or reader's notebook?
While visiting a middle school class, a friend of mine tells the story that at the midpoint in the class all of the students put away their writing notebooks and took out their reading notebooks.  She describes this shift from writing workshop to reading workshop as a strange changing of the guards.  I wondered then as I do now why this would be done.  How is it that a notebook, let alone separate notebooks, are needed? Why is it that everyone needed to attend to their writing and reading in the same manner? Imposing an order may constrain learning and in fact that may be interesting. Imposing an order that all must follow takes what might be thoughtful practices (choosing to keep a notebook) and reduces it to mindlessness.

8. Why is there a reliance on 'seed ideas' as the source of writing topics?
I was once told that students couldn't write if they didn't generate five seed ideas first  (one for each day of the school week) and specifically do so inside their writing notebooks which had all been organized as per their teacher's directions including the unique cover each student had to create.  The seed ideas were prompted: a time when you were happy, a time when you were hurt, a bad haircut, and so on.

To See Takes Time (2009)

Whereas I do understand that beginning ideas that are developed into more sustained work, might well be seeds of a sort, the mechanism of recording daily bits of this and that and then selecting one of these entries to develop into a longer work (especially in  a five day period) seems contrived.  It's hard to write at times.  It's a bit offsetting to not know what I want to say and equally it is rather exhilarating when I realize that I am on to something satisfying.  Learning ways to observe seems more important for many writers than responding to prompts and selecting one to write more about.




Invention is the work of teaching and learning. Remove invention and all that is left is a corpse.