On Witnessing, Testing and Art: Want More

Tattoo of My Lover's Blood (M.A. Reilly, 2015)


“Every wall is a door."  - Ralph Waldo Emerson

I.

When I first read the headline in the Times Magazine, Why Afghan Women Risk Death to Write Poetry, I was drawn in--moth to flame.  It's an older article, from 2012 written by Eliza Griswold and chronicles women poets who belong/ed to Mirman Baheer, a women’s literary society based in Kabul.  Many of the women belong in secret and others who cannot attend the meetings in person, phone in and sometimes read their poetry.  Griswold tells the story of one young woman, Zarmina, and it is this bearing witness that catches in my throat and I know I'll be putting paintbrush to paper if for no other reason than to try to honor this young woman in some modest way.

Griswold writes:

Rahila was the name used by a young poet, Zarmina, who committed suicide two years ago. Zarmina was reading her love poems over the phone when her sister-in-law caught her. “How many lovers do you have?” she teased. Zarmina’s family assumed there was a boy on the other end of the line. As a punishment, her brothers beat her and ripped up her notebooks, Amail said. Two weeks later, Zarmina set herself on fire.

We all create--some more dangerously than others.

II.

Take away one's art and what is left?
A hollow shell?
A remembrance?
Stop one from creating and not even the shell remains.

There's an urgency to the telling--an urgency to express and poetry so often is a means unlike any other. These Afghan women, these sisters, risk life to put words to the page.  They create folk art by making Pahstoun poems.

I had not read, nor heard Pashtun poetry before reading the article.  Griswold explained:

Pashtun poetry has long been a form of rebellion for Afghan women, belying the notion that they are submissive or defeated. Landai means “short, poisonous snake” in Pashto, a language spoken on both sides of the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. The word also refers to two-line folk poems that can be just as lethal. Funny, sexy, raging, tragic, landai are safe because they are collective. No single person writes a landai; a woman repeats one, shares one. It is hers and not hers.

Is not all art part artist part not?

Later I found this video also about the women poets and Griswold & Murphy's work. Take a listen.




III.
   
Such risk these women make in their desire to compose art--in their felt necessity. There's something so elemental for us to learn here. Something we need to privilege in our education of learners.

One only needs to think of Albert Camus (1957) or Edwidge Danticat (2011) to conjure an image of the artist creating dangerously.  Each wrote about such necessity and in our chase of cheap national literacy standards and higher PARCC and SBAC scores we have failed to privilege this, failed--perhaps to even understand the artist creating dangerously and how such acts are caught up alongside freedom and liberty. 

Sacrifice the artist creating dangerously, sacrifice the child learning the value of creating dangerously and we sacrifice our selves, our country, our freedoms.

Camus (1957) in writing about the artist said:

...If liberty has become dangerous, then it may cease to be prostituted. And I cannot agree, for example, with those who complain today of the decline of wisdom. Apparently they are right. Yet, to tell the truth, wisdom has never declined so much as when it involved no risks...

Standards are all about efficiency and teaching only what can be measured and scored easily. Standards and the tests that always accompany them are apt expressions of closed boxes that can be replicated over and over and over again.

We need to want more.

Danticat (2011) advised the writer to "[c]reate dangerously, for people who read dangerously." She tells us:

This is what I’ve always thought it meant to be a writer. Writing, knowing in part that no matter how trivial your words may seem, someday, somewhere, someone may risk his or her life to read them. (Kindle Location, 181-182).

This is the gold these women in Afghan remind us is at stake.  Create something that someone would be willing to risk their life to read.

It's not the plethora of practice tests that the folks at Pearson and PARCC and Smarter Balance are hawking on their websites that are the apt measures of our creative selves. It's never been the single measure, corporate-produced, that tells such heart.

We need to want more.
We need to learn how to be hungry for the well said word and learn how to say no to the cheap fare we are offering to children daily.

Passion-Based Research in High School: Is This What It Means to be Career-College Ready?

I.

This is going to be messy.  It also is necessary.


II.

Earlier today I was thinking about the students who reside in states, like I do, where the PARCC assessment will be given in a few weeks. I was thinking about those children and teenagers who will be taking their assessments using machines they have never used prior to the test.

I tweeted this and the folks at PARCC responded:

The question wasn't about what they recommended, but rather it was about whether they had researched the reliability of test data when students take an assessment that requires them to interact with text on machines they have not used before.  I'm wondering if the absence of an answer means they don't know. Shouldn't they?

So, I was wondering how valid will these test results be when received next September from PARCC testing?  I was wondering what instructional, personnel, and system-wide decisions will be made based on these test results.  What will be missed/misused?  Who will be fired? Retained?  Which truths will be lies? Which lies will make for better truths?  How can we know anything about academic progress given such uncertainty?  

Why are we paying billions for this?

Give the public a bunch of numbers, add the passage of some time, and slippery half-truths become gospel.  We have seen this repeatedly. We have drunk deeply from that goblet.

Surely there are better ways to know how young people are progressing on agreed upon set of outcomes. Cue the science (or insert another discipline/maker) fair.

III.

Dev's Computer He Built for Science Fair

This past week my son completed research he presented at his high school's science fair. He built a computer, outfitted it with an energy efficient power supply unit and compared the efficiency savings generated by his top end power supply unit with mid-range and inexpensive units.  He found that if desktop computers in US households (based on 2009 figures) running only on average for 2 hours a day were kitted out with the power supply unit he used with his computer, even though the initial costs would be more than the less expensive models, the savings alone in the first year would near half one billion dollars in comparison with the least expensive power supply units. Of course those savings would increase with more usage. Further this energy efficiency would also positively impact our globe environmentally.

This is what he found:

Explanation of the Testing Results

For the last month he worked on his project and I watched as his interest in his hypothesis intensified and noticed he was working on different aspects of this project late into several evenings.  I know what it is like to catch fire with an idea and want to follow it.

Catching fire and following an idea is more about being career and college ready than answering multiple choice and open-ended questions on a test--regardless of the test's quality. The complexity inherent in designing and testing a hunch trumps the closed and largely predictable world of high stakes school tests.  I was pleased to see my son generate and follow a question to a conclusion.  I know this is an important thinking disposition.

This is what passion-based research looks like. This is worth our tax dollars.

IV.

My son's project was awarded first place at the fair.  He was proud of his work, as were we.  You need to know that prior to this year, my son has not done well at school since 3rd grade. His name is not one you would have found on any honor roll.  This is a boy who calculated how many miscues to make on the Developmental Reading Assessment (DRA) when he was 9 so that he could stop being tested and go back to reading.

Agency, known constraints, and deep interest aided the development of his project and his adult life. I recall a few months ago when he told me that he does not see his future as defined by a specific career.  He wants to solve problems.

On most assessments doing well, like scoring high or winning first place, often signals an end.  What is perhaps most significant is the aftermath of this project. The judges who evaluated the projects were external to the school.  The science teachers also engaged with each student during the fair and evaluated the work, including the presentation through dialogue.

But feedback did not end with the judges or the teachers. Because the fair was open to the public and students were present to discuss their thinking, newer ways to think about the project were possible. Some of the people (parents, teachers, fellow students) who stopped by my son's display helped him to rethink aspects of his work.  For example, he had not factored the energy use of servers into his calculations.  He also had used figures from 2009 for the total number of desktop computers in the United States as those were the only ones he could locate.  He realizes now that each of these weakened his findings.

He told us tonight that he would be interested in repeating his study, including a larger range of devices, such as servers, laptops, and  handheld devices. He is curious as to what the savings might actually be and how these savings might environmentally, economically, and politically impact our earth.

Towards the end of the evening, a statistician who stopped by his project told him that they pay a department do to the work he had done.  Sounds a bit like being career ready, yes?

V.

Imagine now if the billions in tax dollars we systematically feed to companies to provide test development, scoring, and the plethora of test prepping materials, as well as the personnel dedicated to test preparation were shifted to the development and critique of student-determined projects. Imagine how different learning and assessing might be. Yes, it would be messy--as it would make us rethink how time is valued and used at school, the shifting and unstable divisions between being at school and not at school, what types of learning supports are necessary and for whom, and how tacit ways of knowing could be valued and perhaps coded.

Such a shift, from assessing with tests to learning through projects, will be messy.  Undoubtedly though, such a shift is well beyond necessary.

This is What Education Reform Looks Like

I. Choice

The other day a 9-year old boy reminded why we do not need to provide children with a steady diet of writing prompts we create/pass out in lieu of teaching them how to generate potential topics of interest. The boy generated this point on his life map:

from a boy's life map.

The child selected to write about his remembrance of learning that his mom had breast cancer.  This is a text he is struggling to write. As I worked with him that first day he got teary-eyed, went for a drink of water and returned.  I told him that his work was brave writing and that he should know that he could quit it at will.

If it hurts too much to write this, you can step back from it as you need.
He sighed.

My comment to the child was challenged because 'allowing' a student to not complete the topic does not engender grit. Implied in the statement, I suspect, is a belief grit is somehow more important than kindness, agency, and wisdom.

Let me say here, I'm not sure I even know what grit means as it is so overly (mis)used.  I do understand, even appreciate, the necessity (at times) of persevering and goal setting. I've read Duckworth, know there's a Ted Talk, and well before either of these, I too had read Aristotle. So the idea of grit isn't lost on me. Nonetheless, children ought to maintain the right to choose which costs they bear while persevering and which costs may just be too dear. Is this not an essential life skill? Is this not the bedrock of a democracy?

Before I began this work a colleague at the school told me that an 'expert' from central office was skeptical of the co-teaching work I would be doing. Apparently, writing about the fear you lived with at 7 when you learn your mom might die isn't part of the Common Core.  I kid you not.

I'm told the expert said that there's no need to teach anything other than what is in the CCSS (as she understands it). Teach them to write responses to literature like the people in Vermont do (the only approved model of writing it seems). In her schema there's no need for notebooks, seed ideas, choice, topic creation, art making, technology use (not for testing), or unsanctioned genres. There's no need for expression.  Give the children a prompt a day and a formula they can memorize in order to answer "correctly'.

Correct.
Be correct.

Folks, this is what education reform really looks like, especially in places where the children are economically poor, and the schools toil under central office and/or state control. 

Fortunately for this class, their teacher, assistant principal and principal are brave. Kids need brave adults given the education reform foisted upon them and their communities.

Reservoir in January (M.A. Reilly, 2015)

II. Absence

Choice.

Agency.

The absence of choice for children, teachers, and some administrators, in lieu of others knowing best, may well be what plagues U.S. pubic education the most.




III. Only an Expert

Many of the teachers I work with are routinely subjected to 'unannounced' central office 'expert' visits.  These are often 'education experts' who have never actually taught with the constraints of the curriculum products that school districts procure and insist be used--often as written with no alterations. It doesn't matter if the products make sense or not.  It doesn't matter who the students are, or who the teacher is.

Schools are part of an epic world where the present has no influence for there is faith in products, not in learners or teachers. Physical reality is shunned, not valued.  For the work at hand is not to teach children, but rather to enact 'correctly' the products exactly as they have been rendered by other people who are neither present, nor have they ever even visited. This is what our tax dollars are purchasing.

If these situations weren't so serious one might see a similar absurdity to those old Monty Python skits that began with the high-pitched voice of Cardinal Ximénez (Michael Palin) yelling, "Nobody Expects the Spanish Inquisition."  But, alas, humor is not the outcome sought by such educational inquisitions. Rather, the goal to these visits is mostly about enacting correctness.  Cardinal Ximénez has nothing on the new ed experts.

IV. This is the New Teaching

Teaching is not a transaction made among people who learn as they create meaning.  Education reform insists upon a preferred and correct way to teach. For example, no lesson seems to be able to be conducted without stated learning targets that all students must repeat.  I can do this... I can do that...  Don't worry if children cannot actually decode the texts used each day from the program. Just "chunk it" and magically they will comprehend. The level of error is so high.

Education reform in the United states is a closed set of materials that are issued to schools for use every day.
There is no room for interpretation.
There is no room for thinking.
There is no room for positive deviance.

This is a colony.
And we are footing the bill.

I wish this was hyperbole, but I have seen this played out repeatedly and we are the worse for it.

Testing as a Silo/Solo Act: We Can Do So Much Better

A Chance of Crows (Reilly, 2011)

I. Life in the Silo

In the United States, we test each child ages 8 and higher as if he or she lived in a silo. And we say that the results of these siloed experiments will let us know if the child is career-ready, college-ready. 

Really? 

We seem to think that ideas are located in single minds, not in what gets made between and among people. Knowledge is composed among and between people.  James Gee (2008) expresses this well when he writes:

Our knowledge is not something sitting passively in our heads (although this is the common view of knowledge); rather what is in our heads is just one aspect of larger more public and historical coordinations that in reality constitute 'our' knowledge (p.220).

Yet, we insist on testing each child, separating him and her from all resources--human and technological, while thinking this process will yield an apt expression of the child's intellectual capacities in school-based reading, writing, and mathematics.  We posit knowledge as that which gets retrieved from our head through some prompting, such as test passages.

Could we be more wrong?

II. Crowd Sourcing Ebola Care

Last week, I received the email below from the National Science Foundation:

The call-out to researchers to submit proposals via the NSF's RAPID proposal process speaks to the idea of leveraging the many to address matters of urgency. This got me thinking about the use of crowdsourcing and video games to help solve world health problem. From serious games like Foldit to Nanocrafter, gamers are playing together in order to solve medical issues.

The Guardian reported:

In 2011, people playing Foldit, an online puzzle game about protein folding, resolved the structure of an enzyme that causes an Aids-like disease in monkeys. Researchers had been working on the problem for 13 years. The gamers solved it in three weeks.

My purpose in mentioning these games is not to promote them as much as it is to highlight that collaborative play is at the center of solving real word problems. Knowledge is made across players.  And yet we refuse to emulate this understanding of knowledge making at school and in fact spend billions of dollars annually to test children as if the possibility for collaboration in their adult learning and work was at best a ruse. 

Our myopic attention to testing children individually renders them less college and career ready. Our methods are antiquated. Our attention on the individual is at best, romantic. In 2014, we isolate each child and remove the full power of connectivity even as we make the child sit at a computer/tablet in order to read/view the test and record his/her answers. 

Could we be anymore 19th century like?

Being Tested

The Weight of Living (Reilly, 2011)

I.

My grandfather was a piano player.  I'm told he took great joy in sitting down to play and did so most days--sometimes for himself, most times for an audience. He died the summer before I was born.

He was a complicated man who drank too much and never studied piano. He just had an ear for it. As did his son and his four daughters.

"Pop could hear any tune and play it," my Da would tell us, a smile broadening across his face. I grew up listening to Art Tatum and stories.

When my Aunt Pat died, the family piano came to me. I had taken formal lessons until high school, as did my middle brother and earned some awards, but never really did feel the music.

Neither of us play these days, although now and then I sit at the piano and coax from the keys the opening to Bach's Two-Part Invention in D Minor--a piece I taught myself.

My husband and son would tell you that I don't play it well. Fortunately, I don't need to.


II.

And Full of Sleep (Reilly, 2012)

When I was no more than 8, I traveled with my mom to visit her friend who lived up the coast in Rhode Island.  We left my brothers in NJ. It was late June.

The friend's home I can't recall, but I'm thinking it was some sort of cottage--or perhaps hoping that was true. How we narrate events corresponds with who we see ourselves becoming.

What I do remember is that it was filled with canvases she had painted.  I had never met an artist, nor a woman who lived on the coast all on her own.  Most everyone I knew was connected to someone else and most certainly this was true for the women.

There was a lushness to her work and though I can't recall the subjects she painted, I feel the thickness and smell of the paint that permeated the rooms.  I can recall how primary the colors appeared and how sticky her homemade jam felt on my fingers as I painted a cat on a fence with a tree again and again on a large, round white plate. She took a look at these attempts and told me I was destined to be an artist and to lose no time starting.

When I arrived home I painted pictures on the back of the six-panel door to my bedroom. There was no hesitation. No need for permission. These panels were my canvases, save the painting I got to do at school,  until I moved from that house at 18 and married a painter just a few years later.

I stopped painting completely in my early 20s and didn't begin again until I crossed 40.  It's hard to predict a future. There are no school-based tests that can ready us to live a life.

III.

When I first met Rob, what I most recall was the cadence of his voice as he spoke about a Richard Powers' novel he had just read. His was a voice tipped in pleasure.  We were in graduate school. English majors. And whereas most of the other students waxed on about reading Dante or Woolf, here was this young guy from Brooklyn telling us about three farmers on their way to the market.  I talked about reading Kate Chopin's The Awakening and how it filled me with necessary courage.  I was 28.

During that semester I would come to know Rob's work as poet and novelist and years later I still hear the rhythm of his poet voice resound in the ordinary acts of ordering at a restaurant, talking to his mom on the phone on Sunday mornings.

There is no test that can predict the immense love triggered solely by the sound of your lover's voice. There is no readiness for this. It can't be taught although it will be tested.

Christmas in Harlem (M.A. Reilly, 2013)

IV.

None of things I most love to do are tested at school--well at least not the high stakes variety.

Perhaps this is true for you too, for there are far more critical things in our lives than our capacity to "do" school math and school reading.  Nor are good performances on these measures accurate indicators of a life well lived.

We know this in our bones.

We know this at the critical points in our lives when we are truly tested.  I need only recall the rattle in my own mother's chest as she died to know what is important and what is just folly. Watching the life slip from her body has tested me in ways little else has ever done.

When I think about schooling in 2014, I wonder how it is that our obsession with testable minutia could ever have gotten so far whacked that we now pay obscene amounts of money to testing corporations to give us information we have never needed while pretending that such bare offerings have some significance.

They do not.

In the name of certainty and testing, we are sacrificing spaces of permission and replacing these with spaces of compliance--both for teachers and children.

Let's forget getting kids ready for college and career.  That's not really our job.  Let's help them to live better. Here. Now. 

There is No Complex Text Without a Reader: Parsing the Common Core & Mass Testing

 I. Down the Rabbit Hole - What Is Complex Text?

In the Common Core's  40-page Appendix A, the word complex appears 153 times, the word complexity appears 109 times, and the phrase, complex text, appears 16 times. The idea of text being complex is a central tenet to the Standards and I argue here is foundational for the logic that says mass testing of every public school child in the nation every year is appropriate, doable, equitable, and necessary.  The CCSS authors assert that during the last 50 years the texts used in K-12 schooling are in decline with regard to 'complexity' and that it is necessary to read 'complex text' in order to become college and career ready. The subtext to this might well be: "Truly those managing schools cannot be trusted to get this right. Look what they've been doing for the last 50 years." They contend all of this without clearly defining the central phrase, complex text.  If it's so critical then why don't they define it clearly? Here's what they do say.

So, what exactly does the phrase, complex text, mean? What are the CCSS authors ascribing? They begin Appendix A by writing:

One of the key requirements of the Common Core State Standards for Reading is that all students must be able to comprehend texts of steadily increasing complexity as they progress through school. By the time they complete the core, students must be able to read and comprehend independently and proficiently the kinds of complex texts commonly found in college and careers... In brief, while reading demands in college, workforce training programs, and life in general have held steady or increased over the last half century, K–12 texts have actually declined in sophistication, and relatively little attention has been paid to students’ ability to read complex texts independently (p. 3).

Ok. So the writers conflate a few terms without actually defining the phrase and it is important to note that comprehending texts of steadily increasing complexity is not the same thing as complex texts.  The first references a reader--someone is comprehending while the latter does not. Saying that complex texts are like the ones adults read at college or in their careers is ambiguous.  For example, undergraduates studying with me read the opening chapter to Bakhtin's Art and Answerability. Certainly not common reading material for K-12--nor should it be.  Next is the reference to sophisticated texts.  Should we assume that these are the same thing as complex texts?  What is meant by sophisticated and by whose standard?  Why such obfuscation?

So without establishing a clear explanation of what is meant by the phrase, complex text, the focus shifts to citing a 2006 report from ACT, Inc. (Reading Between the Lines: What the ACT Reveals About College Readiness in Reading). ACT, Inc. is a nonprofit organization that generates revenue by selling tests and testing programs to students, schools, states and companies.

In the report, the authors write: 

Texts used in the ACT Reading Test reflect three degrees of complexity: uncomplicated, more challenging, and complex (p.14).

Act modifies the word complexity by stating that the texts used in their test can be arranged along a continuum.  They add (see chart below from page 14) and then follow up with an explanation:

As shown in Table 1, the three types of texts represent a continuum of increasing complexity with respect to the following six aspects (which can be abbreviated to “RSVP”):

• Relationships (interactions among ideas or characters)

• Richness (amount and sophistication of information conveyed through data or literary devices)

• Structure (how the text is organized and how it progresses)

• Style (author’s tone and use of language)

• Vocabulary (author’s word choice)

• Purpose (author’s intent in writing the text) (p. 15)

So how is the presentation of text analysis from ACT, Inc. different than labeling texts complex by CCSS? ACT references specific, known texts  for a specific audience: high school seniors taking the assessment. From a known field of selected test passages they sorted these into three different categories based on their RSVP method and named those categories: Uncomplicated, More Challenging, and Complex. This represents a method and establishes a context in which that method will be used. Further, there is an implied reader: the high school senior taking the test. They could and did make a case to say: Within the testing passages, these differences among the texts based on our six aspects (RSVP) could be applied and one could argue that these are examples of complex text can be seen. They also provide detailed annotation of two passages to illustrate their schema. The CCSS authors adapted the ACT work by removing the context (specific testing passages for high school seniors) and applied the result to K-12 education. 

Next the CCSS authors reference a quote from Marilyn Adams (2009) and offer it  as an explanation for what complex text (from this text). They write:

"As Adams (2009) puts it, 'There may one day be modes and methods of information delivery that are as efficient and powerful as text, but for now there is no contest. To grow, our students must read lots, and more specifically they must read lots of ‘complex’ texts—texts that offer them new language, new knowledge, and new modes of thought' (p. 182)" (p. 4).

Adams makes the connection between the reader and the text insomuch as the word, new signals a reader and a context.  Again, the idea of complexity is connected to human activity. In contrast, the CCSS authors tend to situate complex text as autonomous--something one could point to that is independent of reader or context.  Brian Street (2000) explains that the autonomous model of literacy "disguises the cultural and ideological assumptions that underpin it and that can then be presented as though they are neutral and universal"( p. 7). 

Autonomous text is situated as being ideologically-whole--something ready to be used alongside the logic of mass testing.  So if complex text exists independent of context, and being able to read such texts as measured by tests produced by PARCC, Smarter Balance, ACT, ETS, or Pearson (who know what complex text is because they say so) then validation of ELA performance becomes limited to those who sanction what's complex text and not.   The test measures the algorithm not the reader. The writers state:

Being able to read complex text independently and proficiently is essential for high achievement in college and the workplace and important in numerous life tasks (p.4).

How can we know if students can read complex text independently and proficiently?  That is left unanswered directly.  However, there's a logic here that says if schools could not select the right texts during the last 50 years--years in which the text selection got worse and worse, than can educators now be trusted to do so? Can we risk this?  How can we know children and young adults are proficient readers if this is left to local hands?  Enter mass testing at national levels. In a parent handout from NY State (EngageNY) they explain to parents when asked if the CCSS will mean more test by responding:

No. The Common Core State Standards do not mean more tests. But there will be different, and better, tests. 

If local educators cannot be trusted to select the right texts that are complex enough, can they be trusted to measure learner's reading? And so it is not surprising that alongside the CCSS, PARCC, and Smarter Balance is the rhetoric that supports the use of Automated Essay Scoring (AES) --a fancy phrase for machine-scored writing.  This too takes the measurement out of  imperfect human hands. (Note NCTE's objection here.)  Alongside the publishing of the CCSS, a joint paper by ETS, Pearson, and College Board heralding the use of AES was published.  The authors state:

One possible mechanism for scoring the CR items is with human graders. However, years of research and practical experience with human graders reveal a number of challenges. There is a substantial and expensive logistical effort in supporting human scoring through recruiting, training, monitoring, and paying human graders. The process also takes considerable time to accomplish and can make it difficult to report scores quickly. Finally, even under the best conditions, there can be limits to the objectivity and consistency of human scores, despite using multiple human graders for each response.  

Human scoring is not the only option for scoring CR items. Recent advances in artificial intelligence and computing technology, paired with research over several decades, have yielded a number of systems in which computers assign scores to CR items. Both the availability and acceptance of automated scoring systems have grown substantially in recent years, with year-over-year expansion of operational use in both high- and low-stakes assessments. 

Last, the CCSS writers situate static print as primary and privileged. They write:

"In particular, if students cannot read complex expository text to gain information, they will likely turn to text-free or text-light sources, such as video, podcasts, and tweets. These sources, while not without value, cannot capture the nuance, subtlety, depth, or breadth of ideas developed through complex text" (p. 4).

The underlying (and I would contend faulty) assumptions here are legion, but beyond the limited scope of the word, text, and the act of reading, it does offer us an understanding that the CCSS authors understand worthy-for-students-to-read-text as being static print. Further, we can see again the CCSS authors situate such worthy text as autonomous--ideologically-whole. 

I  want to contend that there are no complex texts without readers.  It is the relationships between reader and text that allows for definition of simple and complex to be applied.  In the world of text, sans reader, we'll find simple (one way through) and complicated literary works, such a hypertexts, as they offer a reader multiple pathways through.  Complexity occurs in the transactions made by a reader and a text.  

Let's delve a bit.


II. An Interlude. A Quick Experiment (for you)

Take a minute to look through these screen shots taken while I was reading Michael Joyce's Twelve Blue.  I chronicled my first opening reading moves in this hypertext novel below.

I read the word, BEGIN, and I felt a lot like Alice. I recalled a book I scribbled in as a young child and thought for a few seconds about the marks I made with crayon and then I clicked, BEGIN and tumbled into this next screen. 

I was captivated by the visual graph and then read the William Gass quote which had me thinking about what I've read by Gass. With a little help from a google search of Gass, I recall the story, "In the Heart of the Heart of the Country" and get sidetracked by a review of the book from 1968 in the NY Times. I read the review recalling the title story too. I'm not sure I read anything else. I check to see if there's a pdf of the text available and find mostly reviews and study guides. Amazon has the book and an ebook of it will be available October 7 of this year. Do I want to wait that long? Is this a book I want to hold and turn physical pages?  Hmm. I'll wait on this. Back to the story.

I'm scan the page and I'm feeling impulsive, thinking about the randomness of meaning and how things gather around lint and go with number 2, a favorite number, I think. I click on 2.

I'm immediately seduced by the opening words and pay scant attention to anything else. 

Each river flows two ways for at least an instant, whether a gasp at the source, the spring half lapsing before going on, or a watery wavering at the uncertain edge which joins her to sister or the sea. Nonetheless the long sigh of the estuary is something different, the Hudson easing swollen and recumbent upward halfway to Albany, plumping in her banks like the bluish flesh of an oyster, pregnant with pearl sheen even when no stone forms. 

Huh?  I love what I don't immediately grasp. I read on and finally latch on to a subject--a she, feeling like I'm no longer in that river moving two ways without aim.  A subject. I reread the paragraph.

Instead she gazes on the samples with a neutral eye, labwise and detached as a river in December. In the microscope there is no difference between the birth of an infant savior or the death of a crone at year's end. Life is a river that flows both ways, it doesn't do to get caught up in the threads the water weaves. So the men taught who tutored her in these alchemies. Even so she sees dreams in algae, lotus blossoms in saline solution, a sister in the oyster.

Who is she?
Why are these men who have tutored her?
What alchemies? Alchemies are more about magic and yet she sits at a microscope.  There's so much tension here (in the text and in me). I'm loving the uncertainty (well, sometimes). I'm forming tentative theories.  Okay back to reread and I tackle what I don't get:

The violet stain is like no color in nature. Alkali. Kali. Queen. 

I query Alkali. Kali. Queen and I find it is a reference is to the book The Queen's Printers' Aids to the Student of the Holy Bible and I'm piecing together that what she sees (as I now there is a she) is a violet stain on the slide that is unnatural and yet it has been taken from the river. Yes?  Here's what I find in that book on page 51:

This is unrelated but earlier this evening Rob and I mentioned Richard Powers' novel, Gain--a book we each have loved and taught.  And I'm connecting that novel to this screen and wondering about those lifeforms the girl/woman could spy on the slide.  Thinking about chemicals from factories and rivers that carry so much along its currents.

 I press on the hyperlink and am taken to this screen:

Hmm. Okay I can recall photographing shorelines of the Hudson River in summer. Up near Bear Mountain. One afternoon, I'd taken a bumpy road  on my way north to Newburgh, NY and found lots of places to stop and make images. This reminds me of what I recall seeing. I want to enlarge the image and press on it and I get taken to this screen:

I'm falling in. River. Text. Self. The language is so much more than I had imagined I would find.  It's a poem.  I say aloud:  "Yes, everything can be read." (and I say this in the voice I imagine to be like Molly Bloom's. (Think breathy for is this passage nothing less than a full declaration of living?) This is the written poem.  The image, a visual poem. There's cohesion to that I think quickly and I select a colored line to the left of the words and click it loving how the image reminds me of my mother's knitting bag and the loose yarn that collected there and I am anticipating there will be some explanation to what I've read.


*****************************************

III. Meaning Making is Complex, Physical Texts May be Complicated

I stop here for now I want to take a few minutes to parse together what complicated text might be. Joyce's hypertext offers us a concrete example of a complicated text as it is co-made by the reader's decisions, impulses and fancies as s/he reads.  A complicated text has multiple ways through. This is physically evident in the Joyce text. Even though there are multiple ways through the Joyce text, the pathway(s) a reader constructs can be physically traced, but the reading cannot be duplicated.

The meaning a reader composes while reading a physical text is complex.  The physical text is complicated.  These are not minor differences. If you or I were to follow the screens I read, the meaning made would be different from what happened a little while ago.  

Wolfgang Iser (1974) writes that the literary text “activates our own faculties, enabling us to recreate the world it presents. The product of this creative activity is what we might call the virtual dimension of the text, which endows it with its reality... The virtual dimension is not the text itself, nor is it the imagination of the reader: it is the coming together of text and imagination” (p. 279, emphasis mine). 

Complexity refuses to be confined to a traceable path.  It's inherently nomadic. It cannot be tested using paper and pencil or the computer version of paper and pencil. 

Immaturity. Arrogance. Profit.

from here. 

I. 

On the plane home from Wales, I was handed The Independent, and read a brief article that summarized findings from an editorial in the British Medical Journal claiming schools in England are neglecting children by their singular focus on academic achievement.  When I arrived home, I read the actual editorial published in the British Medical Journal that states that schools in England and the US are neglecting and may be actively harming, the physical and mental health of children by overemphasizing academics, and underemphasizing health.  

Chris Bonall, Neil Humphrey, Adam Fletcher,  Laurence Moore, Rob Anderson and Rona Campbell authors of the editorial, state:

Education policy in England increasingly encourages schools to maximise students’ academic attainment and ignore their broader wellbeing, personal development, and health.

They report that:  

...in school systems that focus on narrow academic metrics, such as those in England and the United States, some schools respond by focusing on the more able students, and not engaging other students or recognising their efforts. This is associated with many students, especially those from disadvantaged backgrounds, disengaging from school and instead investing in “anti-school” peer groups and risk behaviours, such as smoking, taking drugs, and violence. Furthermore, research suggests that “teaching to the test,” which commonly occurs in school systems with a narrow focus on attainment, can harm students’ mental health. (citation: Kruger LJ, Wandle C, Struzziero J. Coping with the stress of high stakes testing. J Appl School Psychol2007;23:109-28)

Some fairly straight words from medical doctors about the potential outcomes for educational policy.  But is anyone listening? In The Independent (May 16, 2014) there was a follow up article in which a spokesperson for the Government said:

A DfE spokesperson said the Government refused to apologise for “encourag[ing] schools to maximise students’ academic attainment”.

Cover of Time. Rhee was sweeping out the trash.

Refuse to apologize.

This is the arrogance of the new educational reformers--charlatans with little to no actual education experience. They seem to be unable to listen to anything other than their own rhetoric. This is the same tone that Michelle Rhee's infamous Time cover in which she posed with a broom signaling that the way to fix America's schools was to sweep out the trash.  This is the same woman who asked reporter John Merrow is he wanted to watch her fire a principal when she was Chancellor of Schools in Washington D.C.  

Is this really the type of person we want near children?

II.

Seated next to me on the airplane was a former primary grade teacher from England who had opted for early retirement as she could not condone the immense amount of foolish testing that she was required to do to her 5-year-old pupils.  She explained that teaching assistants who at one time worked alongside her and the children were now charged with making ticks on pieces of paper in order to record everything each child did or said so that data would be plentiful. 

When I was first teaching, she told me, we would stop class if a butterfly entered  our room. That new moment would become a lesson. We could seize upon the now. 

She lamented the singular focus on a narrow interpretation of school academics and how sand and water tables, paints and singing had been replaced with worksheets and textbooks.  As I listened to her I thought about the outrage from some parents in New York when their children's kindergarten teachers and acting principal cancelled the school show so that the children could become more career and college ready. There is an absence of imagination on the part of the teachers and the principal who cannot connect performance with important learning.

As experienced teachers, like the woman who sat next to me on the plane, leave the profession who remains to mentor beginning educators?  One of the mythologies promulgated by the new ed reformers is that experience doesn't matter--I wonder if this is because so many of them have little actual education experience to claim and it shows in how they fail to work well with others.  

III. 

In Chicago the teachers' union unanimously voted last week to not support the Common Core State Standards. Michelle Gunderson in a blog post for CTU explains why. 

The authors of the Common Core view the purpose of education as college and career readiness. We view the purpose of public education as a means for educating a populace of critical thinkers who are capable of shaping a just and equitable society in order to lead good and purpose-filled lives.

With our philosophical underpinning so drastically divergent from that of the Common Core we did not see any room for common ground. 

That is why we say no to Common Core. 

Some union locals have asked for a longer roll out of Common Core implementation. Others ask for the standards to be re-written. We say no. We are not asking the Bill Gates and Rahm Emanuels of our world to do a better job controlling the curriculum of our schools. We want them gone from the process. 

from here.

IV.

A rallying cry of the new ed reformers is that "Children should not be the victims of the ZIP code they live in when their education is at stake."  It's interesting that the only way to reduce that victim status is through education.  I never hear any of these same pundits arguing for income equality, for universal health care, for universal access to public housing. We won't find them supporting job creation bills. 

It is an unjust society that creates the zip code differences, not the public schools where the children land. 

I have wanted to believe that even these new ed reformers with their little experience in leadership and education still have in mind (if not heart) the very children they wax so eloquently about when provided with a media minute. It's challenging to hold on to that belief in light of the profit making that has and continues to occur. I'm reading Mercedes Schneider's A Chronicle of Echoes . She outlines the profits made and the connections forged among these new ed reformers.  It's hard to hold on to hope in light of the scheming that has happened.  

When Adults Test Young Children...Common Core Map for Primary Grade

Years ago when my son was a toddler, I was asked to review an online phonological awareness test for 4 year-olds that would have been used in a city as a screening instrument.  I was skeptical of such tests, especially when used with young children, but decided to take a look at the assessment and to do so with my son.

Seated on my lap in front of the computer we took the test together.  At one point in the test-- a letter identification task was introduced.  I knew that my son could identify all the letters and so I was really curious when he selected an incorrect letter choice. The task asked the child to identify a particular letter from a field of four letters.

"Why did you select the letter J?" I asked.
"The J was lonely.  He wanted to have a friend so I picked him. It's important to be nice," my son told me.

In the adult world that is attuned to testing and right answers, the test makers had not anticipated the child who might be more interested in the possibility of story than in correctness.  At three, my son had never taken any type of formal test.  He attended a play-based preschool and we did not have any type of formal tests at home.  The first time he ever saw a test was on that day while sitting on my lap.  For him, this was about play and making sense of the emerging story that the screens provided.  He was not schooled yet to seek the correct answer.  He had not been rewaded for such behavior. Rather, he was applying the lessons he had been learning at school and at home (be friendly, look out for others) to the tasks on the screen.  It seemed obvious to him that he could pick out the letter when asked.  So instead, he invented a new context--one in which he could apply the lesson he was more interested in thinking about, testing.

I am reminded of this story about testing and young children when I sat down to review this online primary test review.  The screen shot below is from the Common Core Map for Primary Grade (MPG). This MPG task reminded so much of the type of assessment that caused my son to select the "incorrect" answer for reasons that were more compelling than the test maker had intended.

Screen Shot from MPG

When I reviewed the online MPG assessment and I thought about the K-2 children I know well, I was surprised at how incredibly slow and mundane the test directions are and how frustrating the absence of being able to interrupt these long-winded and at times confusing directions might be.  For children who have been reared on iPads and their like, the wait time for each question to be asked and explained would likely prove a  frustration. I can imagine many children losing interest in the tasks by the forced slowness of the technology.

But beyond the technological and development issues, the concept of naming the right answer as a positive and singular outcome may not be the mindset of the 5 and under crowd.  Children may find other interests that are more compelling than the simple identification of the how many apples have been drawn on two images of plates, etc.  They may be telling themselves other stories as they make sense of what is before them on a screen.  Without asking, what caused you to do x, we may be drawing unreliable and inaccurate conclusions and sorting children into groups that in fact do not match their emerging needs and strengths.

It is not surprising then that NAEYC's  guidelines about curriculum for birth to 8 year olds states:

14. Curriculum values children’s constructive errors and does not prematurely limit exploration and experimentation for sake of ensuring “right” answers.

Multiple choice tests, by their design, limit exploration and experimentation for the sake of ensuring correct answers. It worries me to see the use of online multi choice tasks as a way to screen and diagnose literacy strengths and needs of primary grade children.