Dangerously Irrelevant

From Gerald Bracey (via Joe Bower), here's a great list of things that AREN'T on the bubble tests our kids are taking:

• creativity
• critical thinking
• resilience
• motivation
• persistence
• curiosity
• endurance
• reliability
• enthusiasm
• empathy
• self-awareness
• self-discipline
• leadership
• civic-mindedness
• courage
• compassion
• resourcefulness
• sense of beauty
• sense of wonder
• honesty
• integrity

Anyone want to argue that students who possess these will be less successful in life than those that don't?
Anyone want to argue that these are less important than regurgitating decontextualized fact nuggets on a standardized assessment?
Anyone want to argue that schools shouldn't be teaching these?
Anyone want to argue that these are not being crowded out in favor of increased emphases on fact nugget regurgitation?

No? No? No? No? Then why, again, are we doing what we're doing?

Image credit: Taking a test

Over the past month I've been reading and thinking about the new Education Blueprint proposed by the Iowa Governor and the Iowa Department of Education (DE) as well as various reactions to that document. If you haven't yet read Trace Pickering's insightful (and also lengthy) response to the Blueprint, be sure to do so. Another important read is school change guru Michael Fullan's recent paper, Choosing the Wrong Drivers for Whole System Reform.

Here are some additional thoughts of my own. These are not all-encompassing - I have additional questions and concerns - but they do constitute a few important issues that caught my attention. I'm also intentionally not commenting on topics for which I'm fairly ambivalent (e.g., charter schools) or don't know enough (e.g., teacher salary schedules and compensation tiers) and instead will leave those to others who care or know more than I do.

Failing 3rd graders fails our 3rd graders

I'll pick the low-hanging fruit first. Failing 3rd graders who can't pass some reading assessment is a really, really bad idea. It doesn't matter how many safeguards and second chances there are and I understand why the policy is being proposed (both educationally and politically). The bottom line is that, regardless of the 'social promotion' rhetoric and whatever gut intuition parents or policymakers may have, the research evidence is overwhelmingly unidirectional that in-grade retention does far more harm than good. Desired test score increases often never materialize and, even if they do, they usually don't persist past a few years. One of the stronger and consistent findings in educational research is that, in the long run, in-grade retention is at best a long-term wash score-wise and the resultant negative impact on students' psyches and their likelihood to graduate is horrific. The Governor and DE don't get to advocate for research-driven practices in other parts of the Blueprint but ignore that requirement here.

Input-Process-Output

We can visualize a box that represents the day-to-day occurrences within a classroom or other learning environment. That box is the most important aspect of schooling: if what students and teachers do on a daily basis in their learning-teaching interactions doesn't change substantially, all hope of achieving 'world class schools' in Iowa vanishes. WE LEARN WHAT WE DO. There are a variety of inputs (e.g., standards, curricula, teacher quality, funding and resources, school structures, technology infrastructure, laws and policies) that hopefully impact what occurs inside the box. We also look at what comes out of the box (e.g., student knowledge, skills, and dispositions) to see if what we wanted to happen actually did happen. This is a classic Input-Process-Output systems model (that hopefully is accompanied by a recursive feedback loop that informs the system).

There are 85 main bullet points, or action ideas, in the Blueprint. As you can see in my annotated version of the Blueprint, I tried to place each action idea into one of three categories: Input, Process, or Output (coded I, P, & O in the document). You are welcome to disagree with my categorizations (and I admit I struggled with some of them), but the evidence is quite stark that the Blueprint is overwhelmingly focused on inputs and outputs and gives very little attention to the day-to-day learning and teaching processes that occur between students and teachers.

This is unsurprising. This is traditional school reform stuff:

We'll change some inputs; let's try better teachers and higher standards. Oh, and we'll also change some structures around. How about reallocating some monies, reorganizing traditional schools a bit, and allowing for charter and online schools? On the back end, we'll assess like crazy by changing our tests or using new and/or additional ones.

In the end, we change only a little and, if we're lucky, we see a little change in results. This is the way most states do it, but it's neither the only way nor the required way. Where in the Blueprint is the recognition that we need to do something DIFFERENT in our classrooms? Where's the acknowledgment, for example, that we need to invest heavily in teachers' ability to facilitate learning environments that foster higher-order thinking skills (an increasing necessity these days)? Where's extensive language about better facilitating student engagement in their courses? There's virtually nothing about students' interest in what they're supposedly learning. There's nary a bullet point about student hands-on or applied or problem-based learning or authentic intellectual work (a great program already being piloted by DE, by the way). To the extent that PBL and AIW and similar issues are addressed at all, the Blueprint does so indirectly; all hopes lie with effective implementation of the Iowa/Common Core and the Smarter Balanced assessments. Instead of just holding educators 'accountable' on the front and back ends of the process, how about directly investing in them so that they actually can be successful? The overwhelming emphasis of the Blueprint is on accountability rather than capacity-building. Go ahead and do a search in the Blueprint for the terms training or professional development or capacity; you won't find anything. If DE and the Governor are truly serious about 'world class schooling' in Iowa, they should be focusing heavily on the Process box - the day-to-day learning and teaching processes occurring in classrooms all across the state - and right now they're not.

Low-level testing

Much of the Governor's education concerns appear to be driven by NAEP scores and proficiency levels, despite the fact that most of the items are predominantly factual recall and low-level procedural knowledge AND despite the fact that the designers of NAEP freely admit that the level designations are arbitrary AND despite the fact that the American Institutes of Research notes that most of the nations to which we are comparing Iowa also wouldn't score well on NAEP. If we want our students to be gaining higher- rather than lower-order thinking skills, end-of-course assessments appear to offer us nothing better. So there's a lot of new and/or additional testing in the Blueprint that's focused on stuff you can easily find using Google - or that can be done cheaper by people elsewhere in the world - instead of on the skills and capacities necessary to really foster a world-class citizenry and workforce. We're not talking about assessments like the College and Work Readiness Assessment or what they do in Singapore. Again, when it comes to higher-order thinking skills, there's virtually no proposed investment in the Blueprint for the instructional side and all of our hopes rest on the Smarter Balanced assessments, for which right now we have no idea what they will look like and no idea how they will operate. The Blueprint essentially validates and tweaks and expands current testing schemes, despite significant warnings to the contrary from our very own National Research Council.

Digital, global world. Analog, local schools.

It's a globally-connected world out there, but the Blueprint primarily focuses on globalization as an economic force to which we must respond, not a societal / learning / citizenship issue to which we should attend for mutual benefit and empowerment. The Blueprint also says that Iowa students and graduates need to be internationally competitive but most of what it proposes is vastly different from what other countries are doing to achieve better results. The Blueprint contains no significant investment in teacher capacity-building, no emphasis on early childhood education, no amelioration of the impacts of family and neighborhood poverty on learning, and no recognition of the importance of strategic foreign language learning (particularly at younger ages), just to name a few.

It's also a digital world out there, but you wouldn't know it given the lack of emphasis placed on technology in the Blueprint. For example, only nominal attention is paid to online learning, despite the fact that it's booming nationwide and despite Iowa's meager offerings compared to other states. Even though Iowa ranks abysmally low when it comes to Internet speed and access, there's nothing regarding the importance of universal statewide broadband Internet access for both educational and economic development purposes. Most damning, there's absolutely no recognition of the power and potential of digital technologies to transform learning, teaching, and schooling, despite the rapid and radical reshaping of every other information-oriented societal sector by digital tools and the Web. In the world of the Blueprint, it's as if computers and the Internet essentially didn't exist. Go ahead and do a search in the Blueprint for the terms Internet or digital or technology; the omissions are quite alarming, actually. There's one meager shout-out to the rapid growth in 1:1 laptop initiatives across the state, but no support for giving every Iowa child a powerful digital learning device, for providing technology integration assistance for educators, for upgrading woeful infrastructures, for rethinking policies, or for anything else of substance when it comes to educational technology. It's 2011. Personal computers have been around for three decades and the Internet has been around for at least a dozen years for most of us. Digital technologies are transforming how Iowans and the world connect, collaborate, and LEARN; this omission is both sad and shameful.

A lost opportunity

There are a few things that I'm glad the Blueprint included. Although there is only a single bullet point referencing competency-based (rather than age-based) student progression, if done well that one thing alone has the potential to significantly and positively reshape much of how we do education in Iowa. I also like the willingness to invest in district-level innovation and to give districts some flexibility. The proof of most of this, like everything else, will depend on the legislative language and the resources committed.

As I think about the Blueprint as a whole (and we are encouraged by the document to treat it as 'a set of changes designed to work together'), it feels like a lost opportunity. The Governor and DE had the chance to dream big and swing for the fences. They had the chance to propose impactful, sweeping changes to the current system. They had the chance to create learning and teaching environments that prepare students for the next 50 years rather than the last 50 and to educate the public as to why those changes are necessary. The Blueprint rhetoric is right but the action items fall far short. I don't know if it's a lack of knowledge or vision or courage that's holding them back, and of course there are political considerations with all of this. But the result is a a tweak of the current system, a tinkering at the edges rather than a rethinking of the core. Perhaps it's foolish of me to wish for more.

I welcome all feedback. Thanks.

In a critique of the latest PISA results, Walt Gardner said:

Shanghai is hardly representative of China because it is an industrialized center with scores of modern universities. In contrast, the U.S. selected students from both public and private schools across the nation.

photo © 2007 Thierry | more info (via: Wylio)I wonder what American cities would compare to Shanghai. It’s a little difficult because Shanghai is so large. New York? Boston? Chicago? San Francisco? Los Angeles?

Can we think of one or more similar metro areas? If so, how would those students' PISA scores compare to those from Shanghai? Given the relatively-woeful test performance of most urban school systems, I'm guessing that even if we included test scores of surrounding suburban students, it wouldn't be enough to bring the metro area up to the performance level of Shanghai.

For that matter, do many / most of our best school districts perform at a comparable level to Shanghai? As you can see, I've got lots of questions...

Last week was another phenomenal week of guest blogging here at Dangerously Irrelevant. I had invited guests to reflect on how to reconcile standards- and data-driven accountability with so-called ‘21st century skills.’ Some of the best posts of the week were when my guests all but ignored the assignment!

Here are all of the posts from last week:

1. An Apple (Inc.) in 21st century classrooms
2. How to teach for jobs that don’t exist
3. Ignore the test
4. Teach wisely, teach well
5. Can we just skip the whole “data-driven” part if the technology is free?
6. Collaboration: The lost skill?
7. The death of subjective values
8. 26 centuries of skills
9. Writing – The elephant in the class room
10. Reclaiming the language
11. To whom are we accountable?
12. It’s all about building culture
13. Can states assess creativity?
14. Sharing reconciliation with the people formerly known as the audience

Thank you Shawn, Aaron, Jason, Karen, Kyle, Tony, Carl, Dave, Joe, Dan, Matt, Tyler, Richard, and Andrew for an incredible week of writing, thinking, and reflecting. I am humbled by the thoughtfulness (and excellence) of your work and your willingness to share your perspectives with me and my readers.

Happy reading, everyone. I strongly encourage you to click through at each post and see my guests’ other writing. Also, feel free to forward this wrap-up post on to your local school administrators and/or university educational leadership professors; there’s lots of good stuff here for them and/or their students!

by Richard Kassissieh

A student gazes at a mystery solution. Its contents are unknown. The student reaches into her toolkit, a set of known solutions, and one by one, combines them with a small portion of the mystery solution. One test changes the color to bright yellow. Another produces a milky, solid substance. Gradually, the student pieces together the clues that allow her to identify the unknown solution.

This qualitative analysis laboratory required the student to recall properties of different solutions, understand reaction processes, and synthesize the results of different experimental tests while under pressure. To practice, the student had worked together with classmates to identify a series of mystery solutions and shared their findings with their classmates.

Did this performance assessment play out in the classroom of an innovative, 21st-century educator? No, the qualitative analysis laboratory has been part of British national chemistry examinations for decades.

It is tempting to rail against high-stakes state tests in the United States. They emphasize basic skills and fact recall, pressuring school districts to strip programs to the basics and eliminate or reduce "non-core" subjects such as art and history. For example, many school districts "double dose" language arts and mathematics classes in order to improve students' performances on state tests (see this EdWeek article).

Are large-scale, standardized assessments bound to forever measure a narrow range of skills and knowledge?

Summative work has to insist on standards of uniformity and reliability in collection and recording of data, which are not needed in formative work, and which inhibit the freedom and attention to individual needs that formative work requires.

External tests which are economical are bound to only take a short time. Therefore, their reliability and validity are bound to be severely constrained: they can only use a limited range of methods and must be limited in respect to their sampling of relevant domains.

Paul Black, Testing: Friend or Foe?

On a brighter note, some national assessments include hands-on performance assessments. Not only do we have the IGCSE national examination described above, but the U.S. Advanced Placement examinations test higher-order thinking skills through essays in many subjects and the submission of a portfolio of work in art.

The International Baccalaureate program, originally from Switzerland and growing in popularity in the U.S., includes summative assessments that measure creative problem solving, analysis and presentation of information, and argumentation (IB Diploma Programme Assessment Philosophy).

The Partnership for 21st Century Skills reports on work in progress in several states to develop "demonstrations of 21st century skills graded based on a common rubric" (p21.org).

The U.S. college admission process represents another effort to assess higher-order thinking skills fairly across a broad pool of candidates. Most selective colleges use multiple measures to evaluate students: essays, standardized test scores, lists of accomplishments, interviews, the reputation of one's high school, and letters of recommendation.

It may well be possible to develop standardized assessments that measure 21st century skills. Cost is the main obstacle. How much would it cost to systematically test problem-solving, collaboration, and presentation skills across all U.S. schools?

Though we may see inconsistencies between standardized assessments and 21st century skills, we can advocate for an increased role of performance assessment and the assessment of higher-order thinking skills in these high-stakes tests.

Richard Kassissieh is director of information technology at Catlin Gabel School (Portland, Oregon, U.S.A.) You may find him at http://kassblog.com and @kassissieh.

Photo credit: judybaxter on Flickr

I have been mulling over the theme "reconciling standards with 21st century learning" for a few weeks now, or to be honest, for the last sixteen years or so (I have been in education for seventeen years).  The first year of teaching, there was no mulling or reflecting, just surviving.

Since I an relatively new to the world of blogging and tweeting, I thought I would first tell a brief bit about myself and so you could put my thoughts into some sort of context.  I began my teaching career in a very large, urban elementary school in the early nineties as a Teach for America teacher.  I absolutely loved it, became a certified teacher, and stayed for a total of five years at my placement school, three years beyond the two year commitment most TFA members serve.  I served at my school during an interesting time period because I taught there before there were any sort of state standards and while I served standards were put into place by the state of Maryland.  I have to be honest, I am not anti-standards in any way, shape, or form.  Before standards were instituted, my school was the education version of the wild west.  Everybody just did their own thing and there certainly was no sheriff in town to keep things orderly.  I survived on some old textbooks, an educator's library card from Baltimore County that allowed me to check out vast amounts of books, and my wits.  My colleagues, once they saw I was not a quitter (which was well into my second year of teaching) started to help me too. 

Toward the end of my tenure in Baltimore, standards were put into place.  I felt a certain a sense of relief that I did not have to come up with everything myself.  I also liked that I had some sort of measure to strive for with my students.  I also knew our school, with new leadership along with the state standards, began to take the education of poor, minority children much more seriously than they had before.

Fast forward ten years and I am now an elementary principal in Albemarle County, Virginia in  a school that is a majority minority school with two thirds of our students qualifying or free/reduced lunch.  I was placed in the school, my second as principal, to "turn it around".  Turning a school around, in case you have not been reading anything for the past five years or so essentially means getting those test scores up.  My first year at the school in 2007, I was confident I could raise those test scores from I guess my sheer presence.  That first spring, the test scores actually went down.

That began the major "aha" moment that has carried me through the last three years of leading my school.  With the scores going down that year, we qualified for a school improvement grant from the state and used some of the money on some powerful staff development the folks from Responsive Classroom and Expeditionary Learning.  What I started to learn that year from this professional development that I experienced with our staff was that it was all about building our culture and it was not just about test scores.  Sure, we went on to significantly raise our scores two years ago (with a dip in reading this past year) but we started to make some intentional changes in our community of learners, adults and children, that have allowed us to attempt the reconciliation between 21st century learning and the standards movement (for the purposes of this post, 21st century learning standards equals our work with expeditionary learning, hands on learning, authentic products, public audience etc.)

So now, a few years later, our school is on a continual path of working deeply and thoughtfully with state standards in a way to make them meaningful to 21st century learners, our students.  We have a long way to go in the process, but I have learned some things along the way as a leader that I think, helps support teachers in public schools to deal with the tests and also make learning engaging and meaningful.

• All learners in the building must have social and emotional needs attended to through respect and basic human kindness.  Our work through Responsive Classroom has been powerful and transformative and has taught us that adult learners have a need for support and connection as much as kids do.  Most of our meetings have some sort of connective time that allows to value each other or just plain have fun.
• To borrow a phrase from Bob Sutton, the principal must serve as a "human shield" from this awful world of punishment and corrective action that we experience with NCLB.  A true leader never uses threat and "if we don't get the scores up bad stuff is going to happen" kind of language with a staff.  Of course, I have probably resorted to this a time or two over the years, I am human and have been in a high stress position.  But as soon as a staff is threatened, innovation and change end.  And I have not done it in a long time.
• The leader must model not only good quality instructional practice, but also be completely honest when things go wrong.  When you ask a staff to innovate, mistakes will happen all of the time.  They are wonderful mistakes, and they will happen a lot, but mistakes must be seen as reflective opportunities and we must model that constantly.  People will want to take more risks when they see a leader or colleague to the same.  When I lesson plan a meeting, and the lesson does not go according to plan or was just plain bad, I admit it.  That can be a powerful thing.
• Leadership must be distributed throughout the school.  I am lucky to work with a very powerful group of people.  I used to try and make all or most of the decisions, and I did it poorly.  Now, we are creating structures to tap into the real leadership that is evident throughout our building and are helping us to build a culture of honesty and collaboration at a level that I have never experienced before.  In a committee meeting just two days ago, teachers were having a lively and spirited discussion about what true achievement in math really means in an elementary school.  If that comes from me in a meeting, it is about a tiny fraction as powerful as it is when it happens among colleagues. 
• A leader needs to set in place feedback loops from both parents and staff that help keep us on course and also help us realize where we are not communicating very well.  Everything always makes perfect sense in my head.  My first year at my current school, everything was in my head and no one had any sense of what was wanted.  Beginning this fourth year, I am trying relentlessly to see if people are understanding all of the goals and trying to get feedback about where we are in terms of that communication.

A good leader of a public school in this country is in constant reconciliation mode between standards and 21st century learning.  If you put supportive, honest, and strong structures in place to help everyone in the building learn and take risks, I firmly believe that we can live well with the standards without losing engagement and deep understanding.  It is a long hard journey, but in my mind, the only one worth taking.

Matt Landahl

Greer Elementary School, Charlottesville, Virginia

For more about our school's journey, check out my personal blog: http://elementaryleadershipmattlandahl.blogspot.com/

Twitter: @mlandahl

Have you ever taken part in a conversation about progressive education or school reform and left the dialogue wondering if you were even talking about the same topic? Often I'm left wondering how this can happen. How can two people talk about the same topic with very similar vocabulary, and yet be having two separate conversations at once?

It would be convenient if we could simply differentiate the discussion via politics; however, it would also be inaccurate. There's a reason why Rep. John Kline (R-MN) recently remarked with chilling accuracy that the Obama-Duncan education game plan is "straight from the traditional Republican playbook." The larger point to be taken here is that it doesn't matter whether you are speaking with a liberal, a conservative, a Democrat, a Republican, reading the Washington Post or Newsweek - when it comes to education, most of them are indistinguishable from Fox News.

So how do we differentiate between the authentic and the rhetoric? In his article The Case Against 'Tougher Standards', Alfie Kohn states, "Today, it is almost impossible to distinguish Democrats from Republicans on this set of issues -- only those with some understanding of how children learn from those who haven't a clue." So who has a clue?

Joe Bower teaches in Red Deer, Alberta, Canada and is the author of for the love of learning.

In the 35 years since I got my first job  teaching writing, a few new tools that make writing easier have been invented. I used a retractable fountain pen, one of the green marble ones, when I was in 3rd grade to write those 'important papers' - really messy.  I thought mechanical pencils were cool -I think the ones I used worked better than the cheap ones floating around my class these days.  Copiers were a big improvement over mimeographs; computers are way better than IBM Selectrics which were way better than Remington 'portables.'  

For the last three years, the 21st Century tool, Moodle,  has enabled me to make writing fun for 8 and 9 year olds, the ones who start welling up with tears when you tell them that all of the words they just managed to get on a piece of paper with a pencil should be reordered or changed. A word processor and the Moodle software make editing, all that adding and subtracting of words, peer comments, and teacher comments easier and doable for the young minds and fingers that are still wrestling with this puzzle called written language. (I share Donald Murray's notion that writers never really quit wrestling with language.)

Moodle was designed in the early days of this century as a distance learning tool.  It's rapidly becoming an invaluable tool for teaching in all kinds of classrooms.  There are over a million teachers in over 200 countries using it, so far.  Last spring on Earth Day, my class was paperless for the day. We took a learning walk and explored the history and science rich neighborhood near our school.  I posted this and and a few other photos when we got back from our walk.  In less than an hour my students had posted over a hundred comments on the pictures. (With a click or two, I can show them to you, too.) 

Moodle also enables me to post pictures from our sessions with the U of Mn Teaching Smart scientists that then serve as prompts for my students to go deeper into their understanding of the activities they do with the scientists by writing and sharing their writing with each other and me. 

         U of Mn  biologist, Brandon Breen, showed the students how to identify scavengers.

Some of those scientists who can't get away from their labs at the University use Moodle to act as online tutors for my 3rd and 4th graders in their science writing- a real win-win-win.  It's real time authentic assessment, and it's engaging students with their wider learning community, connecting them with real doctors of science who know about insects and worms and skulls and rocks and butterflies, the kind of things that excite 8 and 9 year old kids.

Already this year, my students have taken to using our new Google Apps like ducks to water. Google docs adds some nice new capabilities for formatting, printing and sharing that weren't as easily available with Moodle. Google Apps and Moodle work very nicely together.

The 'standards' based curriculum being prescribed by the data-driven accountability that put my school on AYP hardly mentions computers or 21st Century communication tools of any kind (and I don't think that's atypical of most curricula in K-12.)  The guest speaker at our summer elementary science professional development session spent a whole day talking about how important writing is to scientific inquiry, but never said a word about the tools that almost every scientist uses these days to record and write up their data and reports - computers. The irony is that these new writing and reading standards based curricula that ignore computers like the Taliban ignores razors are based on the process theory of writing fathered by Donald Murray who noted way back in 1985 how computers significantly improved the writing process (his observations are listed down the page in this post.) Murray said in his last days, "Click the computer on and I am 17 again, wanting to write and not knowing if I can."[1]

Our students need instruction and practice using the tools that the world is now using and will be using in the future for writing of all kinds.  21st Century tools like Moodle, Google docs, and e-Portfolios can replace data-driven accountability with knowledge and skill driven accountability. The National Education Technology Plan 2010 does a good job laying out the way to get where we need to go; we just need to start working the plan. 

Dan McGuire is the 1976 recipient of the Archer B. Gilfillan Prize for Poetry.  He lives with his wife and children in Minneapolis in the vortex of the Hiawatha, Minnehaha, Nokomis, and Keywadin neighborhoods. He's on Twitter as @sabier

This summer I have been conducting an experiment. Rather, I have been engaged in a personal project. I call it Twitter Book Club. Twitter Book Club is rather simple, it has one member--me. The goal of Twitter Book Club was three-fold: 1. To see if social construction can be simulated in a solitary activity; 2. to place into the Twitter stream voices of others who would not otherwise post their words in that space on their own; and 3. To provide personal motivation to read, or re-read through slow digestion of text, books that I had not read but feel I should have, books that I read a long time ago and feel a need to revisit, and books I read or were exposed to in graduate school but had not taken time for slow digestion. The day following each chapter I archive the tweeted quotes and their resulting conversations on my blog and add my own personal reflections and commentary.

The result of this project has been profound for me. Nearly every night when I sit down to read I end up engaged in conversations with others on the topics brought up in the book(s). These conversations sometimes continue on throughout the next day. I also have noticed a lot of related talk on other people's blogs and in the nature of the conversations among educators I have been following. I don't know if this is due to Twitter Book Club or if Twitter Book Club has placed me on alert to these topics and themes and thus I am more apt to find them. Either way it has benefited my own personal learning. I have also found that through the conversations I have had with others around these books I have brought upon myself an obligation to continue night after night. This obligation becomes a powerful motivation to keep reading and keep the Tweets coming.

Additionally, the books I have read for Twitter Book Club have given me the words to express many things that I have long felt but lacked the language to articulate. This is especially true for issues related to the nature of learning, standards, accountability, equity, and oppression. The books which, I feel, have contributed the most to my clarification of thought on this matter are John Dewey's Experience & Education, Ivan Illich's Deschooling Society, Seymour Papert's The Children's Machine, and Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed.

I Am An Art Teacher in Exile.

Before I explain the thinking that these four authors helped me to clarify I believe it is important to briefly relate to you my own story. I began my teaching career in the year 2000 as an art teacher. Time and time again, despite repeatedly receiving high marks and awards for my performance I found myself in the position of looking for a new job. With one exception where I chose to leave to move closer to family every art position I ever held was eliminated. In the course of seven years I held five different art teacher positions in five different school districts. When I left these jobs I was the last to fill them and no one would be hired to take my place. I would take this personally were it not for other art teachers in these and neighboring districts also loosing their jobs or forced to work for reduced FTEs. Naturally, I began to wonder why this is happening when it seems the arts embody so many of our culturally shared values. No one will openly tell you that the arts are not important yet what is happening in our schools in this past decade seem to contradict this value.

Especially difficult for me was the loss of an art teaching position at an alternative school serving "at-risk" students who did not find success in the traditional school system. When a student at a school is not finding that environment suits their educational needs schools will do what they can to place them in another setting. Often this ends up being alternative schools. Our school was special. It was small, only nine teachers and three educational assistants. We had a part-time principal but her time had to be split in such a way between her other jobs that she was not able to handle many of the daily operations of our school. She entrusted the day to day operations and decision making to the teachers. We grew to be a tightly-knit family of nontraditional educators. We shared a common workspace by choice and regarded instructional spaces in the school to be shared resources. We were responsive to the unique needs of the students we had and over the course of a year developed a program that tended to collect and keep the kinds of kids who typically get passed around the system. We found our work worthwhile and felt like were were making a real difference for the students we served.

Our program grew fast and by the end of the year our superintendent told us he needed to bring on a full-time administrator to help us run the school. Within a year most of the authentic organizational structures our team had built were disassembled. Our shared spaces were subdivided and assigned to us as "our own" spaces, our common workspace was broken up and we were officed in our own classrooms. Bringing on this administrator meant that we had a projected budget deficit. We were told that we would have to further increase our enrollment or we would be forced to make cuts. Of course, those cuts would not involve the newly hired full-time principal, they would be program cuts. Additionally, we were all asked to make the case for how our programs added value and should be kept. Of course, this pitted us against each other and led our family into a state of dysfunction. The end result was that kids left. Some dropped out and others transferred schools. In fact, our enrollment dropped so drastically that nearly half the staff was forced to be let go in the end, including myself.

So, having been burned so many times trying to support my family as an art teacher I decided to make a career change. Now, as an art teacher in exile, I serve schools a technology integration specialist. In that role I have witnessed both the loss of fine arts FTEs in schools continue and the continued passing around of the children left behind by our current education system. Why is that? The answer to that question is what Freire, Illich, Dewey, and Papert clarified for me.

Objective Versus Subjective Assessment

"The appeal [of back to basics education] may be temporarily successful in a period when general insecurity, emotional and intellectual as well as economic, is rife. For under these conditions the desire to lean on fixed authority is active. Nevertheless, it is so out of touch with all the conditions of modern life that I believe it is folly to seek salvation in this direction." John Dewey (1938)

Dewey wrote this statement in 1938 (or at least it was published in that year). In that time the world was well into the Great Depression and as far as general insecurity goes, the general public likely looked a lot like the general public today. Dewey characterizes traditional education, of which standards, subject matter, and textbook curriculum are all paraphernalia, as an education of the past. In changing times, in times of instability and insecurity, it is natural for many people to want to hold on to the past and a good way to do that is with scripted standardized curriculum.

The problem is, standards require a world view that is fixed and objective, a world view that can be measured and assessed objectively. It is hard, if not impossible, to create standards based on subjective reality. For this reason, state standards in content areas with stronger subjectively added value and areas that are best assessed via subjective means are pushed aside for they pose a problem. How do you objectively assess the value of a painting, song, dance, poem, or play without killing that which we find value in it? Paulo Freire (1970) tells us that this kind of denial of subjectivity is naive and simplistic. He takes it one step further by saying,

"The separation of objectivity from subjectivity, the denial of the latter when analyzing reality or acting upon it, is objectivism." Paulo Freire (1970)

This is exactly what is happening in education today. By denying the value in subjectivity and placing all value on what are perceived as objectively defined standards and assessments we have objectified the subjects we teach.

The Objectification of Subjects

"The notion that some subjects and methods and that acquaintance with certain facts and truths possess educational value in and of themselves is the reason why traditional education reduced the material of education so largely to a diet of predigested materials." John Dewey (1938)

We are living in a time of heightened accountability. The world is changing and people want to know who to hold accountable when things fail. This is easier done objectively than subjectively so when we need to know if our kids are learning what they should be learning in school we give them standardized tests to objectively measure their progress. Of course this is easier to do for subjects like math, science, and reading than it is for the fine arts, social studies, or anything else that requires subjective reasoning. A Scantron machine cannot tell you if your painting is good or how beautifully you played a melody. When students fail to meet adequate yearly progress on these objectively measured assessments schools prescriptively move resources to those areas that are being measured. An addition in one place requires a subtraction in another. Therefore, the subjects that offer subjective value are cut.

In an attempt to justify their existence and fit them within the framework of standardized curriculum all school subjects are necessarily objectified. This objectification kills the subject, a point Seymour Papert (1993) addresses, "The learning of a dead subject requires a technical act of carving the knowledge into teachable bites so that they can be fed to the students one at a time by a teacher, and this leads straight into the traditional paraphernalia of curriculum, hierarchy, and control." The standards movement also narrows the curriculum immensely and in its comprehensive inclusion of benchmarks that need to be taught eliminates an infinite number of types of learning to occur or subjects to be examined.

"The extreme conservative side is to follow what is already in the school curriculum: There is already more there than children seem to be able to learn; reformers will do better to improve teaching what is there than aggravating the situation by quixotically proposing new subjects. But on my reckoning, the fraction of human knowledge that is in the curriculum is well under a millionth and diminishing fast. I simply cannot escape the question: Why that millionth in particular?" Seymour Papert (1993)

Ivan Illich (1970) furthers this argument and declares that since the portion of the world for which school learning examines is so narrowly defined it, "becomes unworldly and the world becomes uneducational." He then takes a stance which echoes Dewey on the nature of the relationship between learner and their environment by saying,

"The planning of new educational systems...must not start with the question, 'What should someone learn,' but the question, 'What kind of things and people might learners want to be in contact with in order to learn?'" Ivan Illich (1970)

The objectification of subjects into standards to be assessed objectively leads to a reinforcement of what Dewey calls "Traditional Education" and pedagogy which Freire calls the "banking method." This banking method of traditional education requires a teacher to be prescriptive in their methods which Freire categorizes as one of the basic elements of an oppressive relationship and one which pacifies the students and hinders their creative and critical capacity.

"The capability of banking education to minimize or annul the students' creative power and to stimulate their credulity serves the interests of the oppressors, who care neither to have the world revealed nor to see it transformed." Paulo Freire (1970)

The Objectification of People

"Plato once defined a slave as the person who executes the purposes of another, and, as has just been said, a person is also a slave who is enslaved to his own blind desires." John Dewey (1938)

By eliminating subjectivity from our assessment of student and teacher performance on standardized assessments we thus objectify the people we measure. I believe this is what lies at the heart of the teacher accountability debate. It is where John Merrow and Grant Wiggins get it wrong on this post and why the LA Times article listing "ineffective" teachers based solely on objective measures is wrong. According to Freire this kind of action constitutes an objectification of teachers and their students. He also says that objectification is an act of oppression and violence.

"being less human leads the oppressed to struggle against those who made them so...for this struggle to have meaning, the oppressed must not...become in turn oppressors of the oppressors" Paulo Freire (1970)

As I read Paulo Freire I can't help but put his words in the context of the current debate regarding standards, P21, and teacher accountability. It seems as though P21 folks and curriculum standards folks are pitted against each other in this debate in a polarizing way. If the standards movement and high stakes testing represent the pedagogical strong arm of the dominant class then the P21 movement is a counter movement that threatens the cultural heritage embedded in the standards-based structure. However, P21 looks as though it has set itself up to be equally oppressive, it has all the trappings of the standards movement including a "core curriculum," strictly segmented subject areas, predefined skills, etc.

"[The oppressed] are at one and the same time themselves and the oppressor whose consciousness they have internalized." Paulo Freire (1970)

This is a profound thought for me and a key point for Freire's book. That the oppressed are simultaneously oppressed and their own oppressors is a fascinating concept and, I think, a difficult realization for many.  The truth is we have internalized this struggle between subjective values and objective assessment. It is why many arts advocates fail in their efforts to save programs from being dissolved and their funding reallocated. In this case we are our own worst enemies. Our own fear of liberation prevents us from renouncing this internal oppressor. So, under this oppressive system we are forced to live with a decrease in the capacity for inquiry and the elimination of subjectively measured subjects, subjects which best help students develop critical thinking skills and creative capacity.

Critical Thinking

Subjective assessment involves critique. It is in the areas of study that require personal and group critique in their assessment where the ability to think critically is developed. To critique a painting, a piece of music, a dance, or poem requires one to observe, analyze, interpret, and evaluate in ways that require higher order thinking. A math equation requires these steps too but only in an objective capacity. The type of knowledge our standardized tests measure in this capacity is rather shallow. It is only in the study of subjectively measured learning that this capacity can be deepened.

This critical capacity is not self-serving though, it carries through to the solving of problems in all areas of life. I am a better technology integration specialist because I have spent a lot of time in the creative arts. Because of my creative capacity I am able to see solutions to problems other "technologists" cannot. The reduction of the sorts of programs in schools that allowed me to develop this capacity means that fewer people will be given the same opportunity to develop this capacity in themselves for the future. Thus, we will end up with a deficit in critical capacity. I will let Paulo Freire finish this line of thought for me in these four quotes

• "they react instinctively against any experiment in education which stimulates the critical faculties"
• "dialogue cannot exist unless the dialoguers engage in critical thinking"
• "Without dialogue there is no communication, & without communication there can be no true education."
• "In their political activity, the dominant elites utilize the banking concept to encourage passivity in the oppressed, corresponding with the latter's 'submerged' state of consciousness, & take advantage of that passivity to 'fill' that consciousness with slogans which create even more fear of freedom."

Alienation & Lost Histories

"Schools by their very structure resist the concentration of privilege on those otherwise disadvantaged." Ivan Illich (1970)

Through extended loss and reduction of the fine arts from our schools we are alienating not only those subjects but the people who most closely value them. If we continue to allow the arts to be repressed in the name of standards and accountability over time their history and tradition will be lost.

I know for a fact that many of the students at the alternative school I worked at stayed with us and stayed in school because of my art program. I know many of these students were deemed undesirable by the system. Yet, though they may not perform well on a standardized test they were particularly gifted at drawing, painting, sculpture, poetry, creative writing, dance, music, etc. When my position was eliminated from our school these were the first kids to go. I still hear about many of my former students who left our school when we were divided and crushed. Many of them dropped back out of school. Every once in a while I see in the paper that one of them has been arrested or has been sentenced to time in prison. I worry about the ones most who I have not heard from or about. Did they find another school? How many more times did they get passed around the system? So much for leaving no child behind.

"People who have been schooled down to size let unmeasured experience slip out of their hands." Ivan Illich (1970)

Carl Anderson is an art and technology teacher, technology integration specialist, and adjunct instructor for Hamline University's School of Education. He writes the Techno Constructivist blog and is @anderscj on Twitter.